Year: 2024

Sundry Sunday: Supper Mario Broth’s Mario Compilation Video

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

The maintainer of awesome Mario obscurity site Supper Mario Broth has had a hard time of things lately. Their mother died and send them into a spiral of emotional and economic uncertainty, which the community helped out by generously contributing to their Patreon.

As part of their thanks, they posted a Youtube video to answer the question, “What is Supper Mario Broth?” and it’s, well…

It’s great! And very, deeply weird! And it’s only 2 1/2 minutes long! Every image comes from some point in Supper Mario Broth’s rich and aromatic history, and it’s a masterpiece of meme imagery. It’s here:

Every rapid-fire clip in the video is worthy of pausing on and zooming into. It’s incredibly dense! Please enjoy, perhaps with the benefit of the mind-altering substance of your choice. And here’s only a few images from the video:

Chip Tanaka’s Fourth Album: Desatar

Chip Tanaka is the most recent pseudonym of one of the best, certainly one of the most influential, game composers of all time, Hirokazu Tanaka, a.k.a. Hip Tanaka, who made contributions to many NES-era games. His most distinctive soundtracks are probably Metroid and Kid Icarus, but he also worked on Dr. Mario, Super Mario Land, Tetris, Mother and Earthbound. After those he helmed Pokemon co-producer Creatures Inc. for 22 years, until just last year. His most recognizable contributions from an outside perspective, though, are probably still his musical works.

We’ve linked to at least one of his songs before, the Hammerhead Shark Song from his second album Domingo. Its video was animated by Toby Fox, the Undertale/Deltarune maker, and it does a good job of combining the charms both of Tanaka’s music and Fox’s art.

The new album Desatar combines chiptune waveforms with real-world instruments to produce a distinctive mixture. There’s a sampler up on Youtube (3 minutes, embedded below), and the whole thing can be heard on Spotify (though it requires making an account).

The End of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games

He mentions that it’s possible that he might dust off the channel from time to time, but that he feels it has accomplished its mission. Here it is (46 minutes):

To remind everyone: Sakurai is the famed creator of Kirby, Meteos and Smash Bros. In the video, he relates the surprising fact that no only did he write out nearly every script, 256 in all, before the first episode even aired, but he also filmed them all in advance too! That’s why he looks older in this video: it’s the first time he’s been before the camera, with just three exceptions, since it started. The video, in fact, is mostly about how the series itself was made, which as it turns out was done without a camera crew, and in a residence of his too, outside of a recording studio and without soundproofing, so production had to pause if am ambulance drove by outside, and couldn’t happen at all if it was raining.

I have no doubt that these videos will be an important document in the coming years, not just as a guide to making video games, but also preserving the processes of current-day game development, and the words and thoughts off one of the foremost game designers of our age. BTW, note the split second of Rogue at 18:58!

The video has always had a feel like maybe Nintendo was helping out with it, but as it turns out, other than approving the use of their game footage, they weren’t greatly involved. The similar feel may be due to the use to HIKE, a.k.a. QBIST, a production company that Nintendo also uses for some of their videos.

To close this out, I’ll link a short bit from earlier on, at a mere 2 1/2 minutes, the video about Sakurai’s cat, Fukurashi. Meow, or perhaps, nya!

Video Games 101

We’ve linked the Youtube channel U Can Beat Video Games a number of times here previously. Their posting rate has fallen off a bit lately, likely because they’ve been tackling longer fare. It isn’t a simple matter to construct comprehensive video strategy guides and walkthroughs to lengthy JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV or Dragon Quest II.

While we wait for their next effort-intensive guide, we can watch episodes off Video Games 101, courtesy of Brigands and his other channel Let’s Play With Brigands. It’s been going for a couple of years now, and has tackled some formidable games, including The Adventures of Bayou Billy, Castlevania III and the infamous Battletoads. A particular one to check out is the bizarre Dr. Chaos (1h,7m), a game that’s half janky platforming, half haunted house exploration.

VG101 has a very different vibe from UCBVG. It doesn’t try to be nearly as comprehensive, mostly showing a typical playthough. It doesn’t provide maps or many secrets. But it does have some strategy callouts, mostly provided by their whimsical “TAs,” three side characters who wear silly costumes. The best of these is undoubtedly Fluff, a fairly realistic cat puppet, who lives in a lavish study and smokes a bubble pipe, and who provides interesting trivia about the games being played. It’s worth checking into if you have the time and inclination!

Fluff could hold down a channel all by themself!

UFO 50 Showcase

For this supersized indie showcase, I took a look at all 50 games from UFO 50.

Editor’s note: This was filed last month, but I didn’t notice it! Please enjoy, presuming you haven’t heard too much UFO 50 yet.

My Talk on Mystery Dungeon for Roguelike Celebration

They haven’t broken the talks apart into individual videos yet, but in the meantime you can see my presentation overview of the 31, give or take a couple depending on precise definition, games in the Mystery Dungeon series here, queued up to the proper starting point in the 8+ hour video. The talk portion is about half an hour long (with a couple of interruptions due to the router I was on being a bit flaky).

Here’s an embed, but note that WordPress doesn’t seem to accept the link for embedding with the time code linking directly to my talk, so you’ll have to skip ahead yourself to 6:10:18 to get to it. Or you could watch some of the other very interesting talks on the way there! Either way!

Gamefinds: Dungeon of Hank

It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?

Who indeed!

Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)