Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Porky Draws gives us (by which I mean, gives the world, not us particularly, we’re just pointing to it as usual)an epilogue to the Banjo-Kazooie games (2 minutes) where persistent enemy Gruntilda (who is active and alive and everything) casts spells on Banjo and Kazooie’s internet connections. It’s pretty short, but I feel the effort should be recognized for the excellent Gruntilda voice and keeping her words in rhyme. (The worst thing about Banjo-Tooie, other than it being way too big and convoluted as well was that they dropped Gruntilda’s rhyming dialogue.)
I hope you’re ready for something pleasingly pointless. Let’s review.
In 2024 Kayinworks wrote an essay about games as models vs. toys. I’d describe the same dichotomy as simulationism vs gamism. Neither are necessarily bad, but their aims are different. Models, like model trains, take some real-world thing and try to give you its essence. Toys use a real-world thing to lend flavor to a friendlier, more accessible, but in some cases more pandering experience. That’s an oversimplification, it’s a great article, well-thought and full of nuance, but it gets across what you need for item 2. (It also mentions and links to the preposterous and awesome Ginormo Sword.)
Taking inspiration from that essay’s description of changing old games, modernizing their looks and in some cases changing game rules to be more acceptable to players, although sometimes in ways that miss the point of why those old games do things they way they do, plourples created a romhack for NES Donkey Kong that does away with such quaint notions like Mario having a jump that’s only his own height tall. “What’s that? This ruins the entire game? But it’s for Quality of Life!”
White Pointer Gaming is the Youtube channel that examines games and figures out how they pull off the graphical tricks they do, and we’ve linked them to those several times before because they almost always find some interesting tricks to explain, like when the Genesis/Mega Drive pulls off something which looks like scaling, which happens more often than you’d think.
It didn’t have as many different kinds of mappers as the NES did, since its processor had a much larger address space, but it still had a few helper chips included in cartridges through the system’s life. Most of these were essentially co-processors. The most famous one was, of course, the Super FX, which supplemented the unit’s relatively pokey 5A22, providing it enough extra muscle to rapidly draw polygons. But there were other chips, like the DSP line, and the SA-1, which was essentially another processor of the same kind as in the SNES, with its own memory and clocked at a much higher speed, and additional aids.
The use of these chips allowed the SNES to perform feats it was incapable of out of the box. Unlike the NES, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t intended to be used with mapper chips in its initial design, at least one SNES launch title, Pilotwings, used a DSP-1 chip. I have to wonder if Nintendo’s affection for including extra hardware in cartridges played a role in their ill-fated decision to go with cartridge media for the N64?
Kenji Eno (Wikipedia), the creator of horror games D and Enemy Zero, and other iconoclastic games like You, Me and the Cubes (Wikipedia). He passed away from a heart attack in 2013.
Shigeru Miyamoto (for form’s sake, Wikipedia) is of course the legendary game designer and producer at Nintendo, creator of Donkey Kong and Mario, and designer of Super Mario 64, among other titles. He’s still with us.
The interview happened shortly after the release of Mario 64, and is interesting because Eno is not unduly laudatory of it. He says it’s a good game, but feels it was missing something from its Space World presentation. Miyamoto agrees somewhat, that the free exploration of the prototype version was not as much in evidence, and thought it lost something by giving the player more direction, but that the demands of the marketplace, and the need for Nintendo to have a big hit to promote their new console, forced their hand. (Aside: the Space World version of SM64 has never turned up, not even in the infamous “Gigaleak” from 2020. shmuplations notes that The Preservation project (patch, github) is a fan attempt to recreate it.)
Screenshot from The Preservation Project (image from romhacking.com)
It’s an incredibly revealing interview, not the least reason being it discusses Nintendo’s hopes for the 64DD. I think you’ll find it very interesting, if you’re the kind of person I think you are.
The Cutting Room Floor’s article on Gameboy Tetris has an interesting fact. The first 25,000 copies sold in Japan, distributed as part of a bundle, had different music! Instead of the now-iconic Russian tune Korobeiniki, a different, somewhat calmer song was used. You can either follow that link and find it on the page, or go here.
Here’s an extra, one last piece of SDGQ 2026 content….
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”
We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.
SGDQ 2026 has concluded, having raised $2,400,000 this year for Doctors Without Borders.
Each event there are many runs of possible interest for people—and I must remind you, GDQ is far more than just AGDQ and SGDQ*.
I’ve collected a number of them in the list below. Of course I’ve picked and chosen those I found the most appealing, but they all can be found in their video archive on Youtube. Times gives are the video length, not the length of the run.
For the embedded video, which will become the video included in the social media posts, I choose DingoYabuki’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins arcade run, because it’s short and impressive:
When AGDQ 2027 comes around it’ll be in Atlanta, and I hope to be able to bring you coverage live, on the ground from the event itself! Let’s keep our fingers crossed and our expectations low!
* As an aside, just today GDQ was doing a stream with SNK, which they abruptly cancelled 30 minutes in, when they learned about SNK’s relationship with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. I’ve heard some people react bitterly that they were going to do the stream at all, but I have to say wow, calling it off while it’s in progress takes rather a lot of guts! I think cutting people like GDQ at the first iota of disapproval might be going too far, that people who realize their mistakes should be cut some slack, especially when it’s so rapid. I say, be prepared for positive action and reward it appropriately.
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