Year: 2023

Sundry Sunday: Zelda Animation Roundup

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

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a week now and the internet is still abuzz about it. (Can’t you hear it? The incessant buzzing?)

Recently I had the opportunity to do a roundup of a number of Zelda fan animation videos. A few of these may have been shown here before. (We’ve been at it for over a year, it’s possible!) I’m sure some haven’t.

Racing for Rupees (4 minutes) was made with Source Filmmaker and Sony Vegas, and is a standout. With 24 million views it’s hardly obscure, but it’s eight years old as of this writing:

Shield Bash (2 minutes) is a lot newer. What are either of these two doing stealing items off the wall of a library?

I’m sure I’ve linked Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Animated Speedrun (5 1/2 minutes) before, but it’s a highlight of the Something About series for how many of the seemingly random elements, this time, have actual antecedents in BotW speedrunning. But not the “Excuuuuuuuse me Princess” part. That’s from the old Zelda TV cartoon.

Terminal Montage’s How To Get To Goron City (1 1/2 minutes) is also BotW related, and is also hardly obscure at 14 million views.

Pringus McDingus’ Breath of the Lovers (3 minutes) is not really much related to the games, but is still funny and cute.

Chasing Rupees (2 1/2 minutes) has only a third of a million views, but was made in stop motion, and rather well animated for that.

Let’s finish for now with Anger Management (5 1/2), starring everyone’s favorite put-upon money-grubbing shopkeeper, Beedle:

There’s tons of Zelda animations on Youtube, so you can bet we’ll be returning to this well eventually….

Info on Unproduced Landstalker Sequel

Time Extension links to a Landstalker artbook found by VGDensetsu that has information on a planned sequel that never got made, laying out the futurer adventures of Link-ish adventurer Nigel and his devil-fairy (sorry, wood nymph) friend Friday.

Despite its visual similarities to Zelda (or rather they both were inspired by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan) Landstalker had lots of differences, and despite its sometimes infuriating 3D isometric perspective is commonly regarded as one of the leading lights of the Sega Genesis. Despite its popularity though, the game never got a direct sequel, despite several references, cross-overs and inspired-bys ranging from the infortunately-named Ladystalker to Time Stalkers, and a couple other games without “stalker” in the title.

Friday was a waifu long before there was a term for it. Sorry about the frugly watermark, eesh.

Landstalker managed to become a hit rather despite its isometric perspective, in which characters didn’t cast shadows when jumping or floating in the air, making it very difficult to figure out where things were spatially. Since it was an isometric jumping game with lots of tiny moving platforms, that made it quite difficult. There was even an entire area, the infamous Greenmaze, that leaned into the perspective puzzles and pseudo-optical illusions to give the player a hard time. Yet the fun and light anime-styled story and winning characters won many players hearts.

VGDensetsu’s tweet links to a Google Drive folder with complete scans, although with a hideous translucent watermark plastered over every page.

Here’s A Glimpse Of The Landstalker Sequel We Never Got To Play (timeextension.com)

Youtube Dev’s Experiences Making New Dual-Stick Shooter Roguelite

Helper Wesley on Youtube is making a Binding Of Isaac-style randomized twin stick shooter called Spent Shells, and published it on Newgrounds. It’s on itch.io too. It got about 35,000 plays and an award from the site, which is nice. It also got ripped off and put on a bunch of other sites, which wasn’t. But things seem to be going well with it.

Wesley put up a video with his experiences with its popularity and his attempts to monetize it. It’s only ten minutes, and it’s got a lot of useful information for things to do that might help out your own project, if that’s the kind of thing you do, or just an interesting look at an experience most of us won’t even have.

I Published My Roguelike Game – Dealing With The Aftermath (Youtube, 10 minutes)

Pac-Man 99 to Sunset

Because we not only can’t have nice things, but even the nice things we used to have must be taken from us, Polygon reports that Pac-Man 99, Bandai-Namco’s brilliant battle royale take on the classic arcade game, is shutting down online play October 8th, and the paid DLC and modes will stop being sold even earlier than that.

Pac-Man 99 is part of a trilogy of games with similar concepts on the Switch. Of its siblings, Tetris 99 continues to be playable and its online DLC still available, and Super Mario Bros. 35, Nintendo’s free SMB-based version of the concept, shut down years ago now.

All these games are great, and SMB35’s loss is still keenly felt. I particularly rue it because I was freakishly good at it; I have a screenshot somewhere of the records screen showing a streak of 11 1st place wins.

Pac-Man 99 is really good, and its online mode is free to people with a Switch Online subscription, so please enjoy it while you can.

World of Goo-ews

Word from Tomorrow Corporation, which isn’t exactly the producers of World of Goo but is like half of them, maybe two-thirds? Anyway, they announced that a Remastered Edition of the game, with greater resolution, is out on Steam, GoG, the Epic Store, and even directly from its maker 2D Boy. For mobile platforms, it’s also coming to Netflix’s games plan. Why is Netflix into games again? No matter, they are, and they’re covered in Goo!

But along with that, the bigger news is that, for now at least, this is the only way to play the Remastered version on mobile. It’s a Netflix exclusive! Even bigger, and sadder, news: the original World of Goo has been delisted from the mobile app stores, on May 11th. If you want to play with Goo on your phone and you don’t already own it, and don’t have Netflix, you can’t get it there now. People who already purchased it on those stores will still have access to it.

I wish I had found this news before it was removed; the notice was posted on May 5th. It’s sad that World of Goo is becoming less available now, it was an important early indie hit from way back, fifteen years ago, in 2008. The Wiiware version was particularly great and made excellent use of the Wii Remote’s pointer. It’s not only an important piece of gaming history, but it’s still a terrific game. The Sign Painter lives!

The Remastered Edition of World of Goo is coming to iOS and Android via Netflix

Tears of the Kingdom: More From The Dopiest Hero

Rök continues his adventures through Hyrule, as well as Hyrule and, eventually, Hyrule.

Being an alien, various aspects of the Zelda series escape him, but they love triangles, and they eagerly await seeing the first. They may have a while to wait yet.

Let’s join them where they left off, still on the Sky Islands, a.k.a. Tutorialia.

There are some spoilers here, but only for fairly early things.

For decades, since Ocarina of Time, Zelda fans have wondered what the hell was up with that Rauru guy who gave you the first medallion, without even having to do a dungeon for it. Turns out he was named, not just for a town in Zelda II, but after a goat. Unless… he’s a llama? No that can’t be true! ¡Y llama est un quadrupedo!
Lies. The main purpose of the Tips and Tricks screen is to tell you “Yo! Maybe develop some skillz!” after you DIE.
I’m sure many of you already know this, but this tool is a deep reference to Nintendo history, bearing the name of their first toy, an extendable grasping gadget released in 1966 and designed by Gunpei Yokoi himself.
All the grimdarkness of BotW and TotK is leavened nicely by the design of the gadget dispensers.
They spent two billion rupees to convince the Olympic Committee bring The Games to Hyrule, but don’t have anything to do with the stadium afterward.
After the encounter with that bird a few days ago, Link forswore all interactions with animals, vowing only to commune with plants from then on. See how well that went.

No real joke here, I just wanted to point out that Purah and Robbie are two of my favorite characters from all of Zeldadom, right up there, for me, with memorable characters like Midna, Linebeck and Groose. Robbie built an ancient equipment vending machine that continually calls Link [InsertNameHere], and Purah is Impa’s sister, and over a hundred years old, but due to a freak self-inflicted accident was turned into an 8-year-old in BotW. There are people who would kill to have that kind of accident in our world. Oh also, both characters are clearly, absolutely insane. Purah here subjects Link to one of those experiences that lots of Links have suffered throughout the series: being blown out of a cannon-like contraption to humorous effect without warning him.

Luke Plunkett: Stop closing forums for Discords

Image from Kotaku. It’s an old meme, granted.

The news section of the site is on hiatus for the time being, as I’m not sure if anyone reading this really cares about a weekly news roundup (if you’d like to see it return, let me know!), but a post on Kotaku from Luke Plunkett really struck a chord with me, about the awful trend of closing web forums in favor of Discords. I rarely agree with games writing so much.

The switching of game discussion, and even support, from publicly-visible, archivable, Googleable forums and bulletin boards to proprietary Discords is yet one more way that the internet is becoming objectively worse. Everything posted to a Discord will be locked off when the last active link to it dies. It’s a giant black hole to which future internet users won’t have access, and where the scroll rate rapidly makes past discussions into an impenetrable text wall that its search feature is not great at sifting through. It’s an information commode.

Not that there aren’t some advantages to the Discord format, but there are also advantages to Facebook and Twitter. As we’ve seen with both those sites, the disadvantages far outweigh them.

Truth be told, I’m a member of like 40 different Discords (I even started a couple of them), dedicated to a plethora of topics, by necessity, and it’s always a hassle to sort through them, seeing as the list isn’t even presented as a list of titles, just of at-times maddeningly obtuse icons. Discords have their place, ideally for small groups of members, maybe topping out at a couple dozen. If your group has hundreds of members, consider that there are probably better answers, ones that don’t require that a user install special software to their devices to communicate with you.

Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord. (Kotaku.)