Year: 2023

Sundry Sunday: Hour-long Youtube Videos of Silence With Various Noises

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Sometimes on Sunday we find very old things that survive down to us through years. But sometimes we find some fairly new memes, and this is one of those.

I don’t know when or where this started, but there’s this collection of videos on Youtube that are just silence, but with, very once in a while, maybe every two or three minutes, a sound effect to break the repose. Fortunately, most of these videos lead off with the sound effect, so you’ll know kind of what the result will be.

Why load up a video like this? Well as far as I can tell, the idea is to have it playing in the background while you do other things, such as watch a movie. Once in a while, the sound will happen to play around the time something significant in the other thing happens, and the unexpected juxtaposition is humorous, or at least interesting. Basically, humor through randomness. I’ve long had an idea for a mobile app that would do something like this, with randomized noises, but in the end figured it was too niche to bother with. Maybe I should try it after all?

While this idea extends beyond just video game sounds, several prominent examples have to do with games, keeping us within our site’s roomy theme. For best results, whatever those might be, it’s probably best to have on an ad blocker, or else some of the random noises will be commercials for terrible mobile games or Old Spice deodorant.

Here’s Lego Yoda screaming sporadically:

Mario, doing something similar:

Now the interruption is by the first four notes of Megalovania from Undertale:

A Minecraft Villager peppers your the next hour with infrequent noises:

Or here, just Minecraft sounds in general. The sounds in this one are fairly frequent, two or three a minute. There has got to be a Creeper noise in there somewhere to cause sudden jolts, I’m sure:

Angry Bird game noises:

The Mario 64 Thwomp sound effect:

Waluigi:

And, a duck quacking. It’s not a video game duck. I just like ducks.

If you watch more than one of these, expect your Youtube suggestions to get weird for a while. Now that your day has been enlivened and enriched I take my leave of you until the morrow. Ta!

High Speed Action With OTXO Developer Interview

For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Nathan Haddock from Lateralis Heavy Industries who developed the game OTXO. We spoke about the kind of action design Nathan wanted to focus on and balancing the high-speed play with the roguelike elements.

M.U.L.E. Turns 40

Dani Bunten’s classic economic simulation M.U.L.E. is one of the all-time greats, still fairly obscure even among people who know and talk about video and computer games, but hugely influential. Wikipedia tells us that Shigeru Miyamoto considers it an influence on the Pikmin games (although other than in theme I really don’t see it).

There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.

Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.

One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:

M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.

Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!

Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.

World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.

Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.

Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)

M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)

M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)

World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)

M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)

Quick Browser-Based Multiplayer Emulation

NES Party and SNES Party are sites that do a think that would have seemed like magic 10 years ago: they make it easy to pick out NES and SNES games, load them into the browser from the Internet Archive, and not only let you play them yourself but share a room link with another person and enable internet-based multiplayer. It’s all as simple as that.

Well, mostly. When I tried using it, emulation was much faster than normal. The game load screen suggests, if this happen, that you reduce the refresh rate of your display, which seems like kind of a kludgy solution. But on the plus side, snes.party has Rampart!

NES Party and SNES Party

Preserving Monkey Ball Flash Games

Adobe (formerly Shockwave) Flash had a good long reign on the web as the premier means of presenting snappy interactive content without requiring repeated trips to the server. For ages, Javascript wouldn’t cut it for many purposes. Being tied to a full authoring environment helped it gain in popularity. Whole careers were built off of creating Flash content for the web.

Flash was easy enough to work in that many companies would produce Flash applets, even games, merely as promotional content, intended to be cheap and quick to make and ultimately disposable. Many of these games were lost when the websites they were a part of were taken down.

The Flashpoint Archive project, headed (I think) by BlueMaxima, has as its mission the preservation of these ephemeral creations. A post on Flashpoint will be coming eventually, but in the meantime I’d like to point out a 2021 Youtube video by (adjusts glasses) “Goober13md,” although I suspect that he may not actually be a medical doctor.

Goober13md’s beat is all things Monkey Ball. He made a video about the search for, and ultimate rediscovery, of three Flash games commissioned by Sega to promote the first Super Monkey Ball titles, as well as one for Super Monkey Ball Adventure (which Goober13md is understandably reluctant to mention by name). It’s an informative story about the difficulty of content preservation in a time, which is still ongoing might I add, where companies don’t see their web presences as anything more than transitory. Look look, see see!

The Super Monkey Ball Flash Games That Were Lost For Over a Decade (Youtube, 29 minutes)

When Shooters Became RPGs

For this podcast I did, we took a look at the Shooter genre focusing on the 2010’s, when more RPGs elements were added to shooters and the rise of the “Role Playing Shooter”.