The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Random Encounters fifteen years ago, it’s a four-minute musical starring people dressed up as Sonic the Hedgehog characters, though a full minute of it is credits. There is no guarantee that this will entertain you, but then there’s no guarantee that it won’t awaken something within you either.
Extra: Dr. Eggman has a hilarious Bluesky account (not for kids).
It’s one of those two times of year again. Games Done Quick, the bi-annual week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins at 12:30 PM (“Noon Thirty”) Eastern Time on Sunday, July 5th, that’s tomorrow. The day after today, the 250th occurrence of that particular US holiday some people make a fuss about.
This one is SGDQ, where the S stands for Summer. If my recollection is accurate, AGDQ, the one that happens in January, is the home of Awful Block, speedruns while SGDQ hosts Silly Block. You can keep track of them by the first letter: AGDQ for Awful, SGDQ for Silly. Even so though there’s a lot of leakage between the two, and many of the games in Silly Block this time would fit in well in its Awful relative, including the infamous Snoopy game on Commodore 64, Mega Man for DOS and The Legend of Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon.
The schedule is here. A few games of interest, I think, are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Kirby Air Riders (only Air Ride mode though), No More Heroes, a couple of games from UFO 50, the SNES version of Ogre Battle, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Vs. Super Mario Bros, Earthbound Beginnings, What The Golf?, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Randomizer, Gauntlet and Castlevania both for NES, and a naneinf run of Balatro, among many others.
Surprise! Today’s post is about a video from Periscope Films from sixty years ago on the fundamental building blocks of computers from way back then. Right off we’re told that computers no longer rely on primative things like electromechanical relays (gags) or vacuum tubes (wretches). NOW computers are made of TRANSITORS, and we truly are living in the future! (18 minutes)
The cool thing is, while they’re much faster now denser now, and faster, and we have much simpler ways of interacting with them, and storage, both chip and magnetic, hold much more data, and each of these things has improved by a factor of billions or even trillions, computers still basically operate on these same principles.
This video mostly concerns itself with explaining how basic computer circuts are made. It makes for fairly dry viewing if you don’t know anything about electronics or circuit diagrams, but maybe it’ll be interesting anyway, from a historical perspective.
It’s a bit light, maybe, to be a day’s sole post, so I’m throwing this in as an extra. I was looking through my saved post list on Bluesky and found a few entertaining images that speak to me. Largely they say, “@!#?@!“, just like Q*bert does. Please enjoy, if you are capable of that. I won’t hold it against you if you aren’t. Links are provided so that you can follow these fine arteests/screenshooters/shitpostors.
From Nick C:
From Ammnontet (this is just image 1 of 2):
From “Steeeve Duffy,” who has many great comics, but whose name has too many e’s:
And from Deltarune, “New Video Game Advisor“:
We still mourn the end of Blaseball, which sustained some people’s hunger for a sports-like communal experience during Covid lockdown, but can understand that without everyone staying at home it wasn’t possible to sustain it.
It’s not Blaseball, but kind of similar in a way, if you look at it sideways and with unfocused eyes, is Ribbie, which takes real baseball games, being played live, and presents them in a style not dissimilar to a video game. By its nature Ribbie is properly enjoyed while games are in progress, but there is a demo available that presents an archived match.
There’s no rogue umpires, black holes or resurrected players, but it is an entertaining presentation. There is sound too, though off by default, so if you don’t want to experience games in deathly silence be sure to turn it on.
Part 8 of my (Josh Bycer’s) coverage of Steam NextFest, October 2025 edition.
00:00 Intro
00:20 The Doppel
1:27 Terror Type Alchemy
3:09 The Spirit Lift
4:45 The People of Sea, Sun, and Salt
6:17 Terraformental
8:28 Heaven Does Not Respond
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Mine Bouy is a sporadically-posting Minesweeper enthusiast who posts interesting strategies sometimes, including one video about dealing with one of the most frustrating, yet sadly common, events in playing that game: “fifty-fifties,” or, situations where you have a choice of two spaces to reveal, and the chances that one will contain a mine losing you the game is ½ out of 1.
This situation may seem impossible to resolve, and it’s true that you have some chance of losing no matter how you deal with it. But there are sometimes ways to improve your odds and clear up the uncertainty without making a move that’s a 50% chance of losing. Mine Bouy calls this “breaking a 50/50.” (8 minutes)
Their strategy has to do with not picking one of the two questionable spots if you can help it. It relies on realizing that picking an adjacent spot with lower odds of failure may give you a chance to give you information that could reveal which spot has the mine. It trades even odds of exploding a mine with a greater chance that a spot is mine-free, and also revealing which of the 50/50 spots hides the boobytrap. Clever!
Two other helps linked from the video’s description are a browser-based Minesweeper analysis tool by MSCoach, which offers a no guessing mode that guarentees no 50/50s will be generated, and a Google Docs paper (by Scar) on the basics of 50/50s and the many forms they may take. You can play Minesweeper on the internet at Minesweeper Online, which also offers a no-guessing option.
All the OldWeb is NewWeb again. This is just to inform you of warppoint.games, a new directory and webring devoted to game-related content! Set Side B is listed there, and there’s a new link to it in our own sidebar.
There’s already a good number of links to explore, so take a look when you have a moment!
