Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Internet Funeral was (is) a subreddit dedicated to surreal images with text within them. Reddit is currently in a Muskian implosion, but fortunately lemmy.world has its own version of Internet Funeral, which is where these images come from.
Every time Homestar Runner releases something new, it’s cause for celebration. They’ve been doing this for 23 years, and that’s not counting the original Mario Paint thing with the characters they made, long ago, that kicked off their merry legacy. Even though the days of them updating weekly and Strong Bad popping off sarcastic answers to emails left, right and center are long gone, every few months another new thing comes out of the Brothers Chaps’ content grinder, and we love that kind of sausage.
Of course making free stuff doesn’t pay the bills, and Adobe Creative Cloud is hella expensive these days, so much of their more recent stüf takes the form of little paid projects, like the Trogdor board game. So it is with this, a quite nifty collection of three point-and-click adventures. One of them came from their website long ago, but it’s now remade in that Unity thingy. it’s joined by two completely new games, and the three of them have better animation and full voice acting now! All are full of the wit and fun that Homestar Runner-branded contentTM has long been known for.
I managed to finish it in a night, but it was a very entertaining night! This thing is packed full of more jokes and character even than the Telltale series they did back in the Wii days. It’s amazing how many obscure interactions have unique voice lines, so be sure to try everything, and using everything on everything else.
Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate, on Steam and itch.io (Windows and Mac, $8)
Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth is a Famicom/NES title with a lot of ambition, perhaps too much. Over on his self-named blog Kid Fenris posted a long article on it back in March. It makes it seem a lot more interesting than it otherwise would! We at Set Side B love experiments, successful or failed, and Wurm certainly was one, with shooter, side-scrolling platformer, first-person boss fights and even some visual novel elements. And protagonist lady named “Moby” is searching for her boyfriend named “Ziggy.”
Green-haired Moby wears the kind of outfit you could only find in something inspired by 80s anime.
The post mentions that designer Shouichi Yoshikawa, a.k.a. “Angela,” has an interview up at GDRI. It also mentions that Angela used to have a site devoted to their game, which while gone now has a backup on the Wayback Machine! Sadly the promised English version of the site never materialized.
Also–Kid Fenris mentions he once wrote about Wurm on GameSetWatch. My old stomping grounds!
If there’s two constants here at SSB, it’s that we post a lot of Nintendo content, and a lot of Youtube video stuff.
Nintendo, because they’re the most interesting of the major console manufacturers, and one of the most consistently great developers around today. I still think that Atari’s coin-op division, later split off as Atari Games, was more ingenious in their classic era, because they made such a wide variety of games and rarely did sequels, but Nintendo would definitely be second place, and has the advantage of still being alive as a company. (Atari Games has been gone for 18 years now, and that number isn’t getting lower. That makes me really sad.)
One of Nintendo’s biggest series is, of course, Super Smash Bros. It wasn’t always so. Smash on Nintendo 64, the first in the series, was a great little game, and the first time that they crossed over between basically all their properties, but it wasn’t until Melee, the second game, that it really became huge, despite being on the relatively low-selling Gamecube hardware.
Super Smash Bros. Melee was the game that really established the pattern for the rest of the Smash series: offer a ton of content, give everyone unprecedented amounts of fanservice, and offer a super fast-paced game with an eye towards the esports scene.
On that last point they succeeded: Melee is a very popular esports game. I don’t know if it’s more popular than Ultimate, the current Smash game released for Switch, although I don’t follow that scene generally so I really have no idea. All of the Smash games have some esports interest, but Melee’s the most popular previous title, I think.
Melee had a 13 month development time, fairly short, and resulted in a fair number of bugs, and that’s where AsumSaus’s videos are most interesting. Few games have had their internals splunked as deeply as Melee’s has, and they dredge up the most interesting facts from all that data.
I’ll just present one of their videos this time out, from three years ago, but I leave the door open to spotlighting others in the future. They’re just that interesting. So, here’s their 37-minute video asking, in considerable depth: outside the specific and highly particular subset of Super Smash Bros Melee that is tournament-level competitive play, taken as a whole: is the game actually good? He obviously enjoys that one tiny bit of it a great deal, but, what about all the rest? Watch the video to find out.
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”
There are a number of NES games that feel like they’re held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N’ Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).
A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.
If you’re only familiar with Strider from the beautiful arcade version, you might wonder what even NES Strider has to do with it. It’s not proper to say Famicom Strider, because Capcom never released it in their home territory, perhaps because they were too embarrassed to.
Other than the first stage being set in generally the same fictional location in Russia (even if it doesn’t look at all the same), its story has absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeremy Parish looked at it (and remarked on its glitchiness) in an episode of Metroidvania Works from a couple of weeks ago. Some people, like Kid Fenris of the self-titled blog, actually likes it, although acknowledges its many issues.
Behind the Code, one of the best game internals series on Youtube, had a look at the implementation of NES Strider. It’s an interesting 15 minutes to my taste, but if you want a tl;dr, NES Strider often doesn’t make its framerate target, and instead of slowing the game down as most games do, it plows ahead forward into the next frame, leaving the incomplete data in its update buffer to be copied into the PPU. This causes the individual hardware sprites that compose enemy characters to sometimes have only one of their coordinates updated, or even causing data remaining from previous frames to be copied over.
Why does it does this instead of just slowing the game down? Possibly the coding was so crappy that it would have caused excessive slowdown; the scene chosen as an example in the video has the problem occur when there’s only two basic enemies on the screen in the game’s first area! Not the best engine on the system there Capcom.
It’s just a pointer to a useful site today. OpenGameArt has been around since at least 2009, a place where people can upload game assets they’ve created and make them available to developers, with a variety of licenses. Back in 2013 I used music from it for my own Gamemaker game Octropolis, properly credited of course.
Games made with freely-available resources sometimes get a bad rep, but they can be invaluable for small-team and single developer projects, or anyone trying to get their project off the ground.
