Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)
That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!
Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!
Source: othatsraspberry’s comic archive page
An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)
Possibly
As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.
Some days I write explanations of Kirby Air Ride City Trial netplay. Some days I write guides to new web media sites. And some days, I found a silly shooter on Youtube that I feel you have to know about. Guess which today is, boing!
I honestly never got into Touhou-style games, even though I know they’re popular and influential. Maybe I’d like them if I gave them a shot, but there’s so many other things to explore out there, I just haven’t found the time.
That Touhou style, and their tremendous Japaneseness is part of what The Girl From Gunma Kai has going for it. According to its instruction screens, it’s a spinoff from a light novel from 2014, and a sequel to a short tie-in game to that novel. It’s on Steam for $10, which may seem a bit much for a relatively short game that purposely chases the MSX aesthetic, with backgrounds that don’t move smoothly but lurch along character block grid, and with large characters that overwrite the background they appear in front of. But that’s just the kind of thing it is.
It’s certainly got tons of personality. While you control a flying anime girl who blasts animals, daruma and steam locomotives(?), a large distracting version of that girl resides in the border, dancing to the music. The “dancing” mostly means being horizontally mirrored to the beat, meaning the feathers in her hair swap sides every frame. In the upper-right corner appear descriptions (and English translations) of the various enemies the girl attacks, giving you helpful information on them, like that this one is made of two different-colored sprites, and that one happens to be delicious to eat.
It’s still an entertaining game to watch. Here’s a one-credit playthrough, although it doesn’t earn all the letters in NEPTUNE (a reference to the Neptunia games) so doesn’t get to go on to the secret end stages. It’s 31 minutes long, but if you don’t have an affection for this kind of fare you probably won’t watch it all. A few minutes will give you the idea. (I did watch the whole thing, mind you.)
At the end of the instructions, it says: The game includes a strong homage to the MSX which (creator) HUGA dearly loves, particularly aiming for the cheap rough-around-the-edges vibe of CASIO-made games. Back in the day, there were tons of these unpolished games, and we think there’s room for at least one today. We hope this game sparks a wave of cheap, carefree and delightfully crude games flooding the world—games you can play without overthinking it.
HUGA, you and me both. I love both your style and your affection for that era. May The Girl From Gunma Kai take over the world!
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”
It’s a scary yet hopeful time for web media. As it must periodically, the hard fist of capitalism has let a number of very talented individuals slip out of its grip, and they’ve started their own little ramshackle internet presences to try to slice themselves out a sliver of the money pie.
Here I present six such groups. Some you’ve probably heard of, some you may not have. I am essentially on their side, but I also have to be on my own side, which is frankly impoverished. There is no way I can subscribe to all of them simultaneously. I figure, few of you can either. Maybe, by explaining their offerings and what they’re about, I can help you to come to a better decision. Maybe by doing so, I can help myself too.
Of course it doesn’t take much for a small group of hopefuls to stake out a tiny claim on the digital frontier, and I’m only covering the names I know of personally here. Hence the word “partial” in the title. If you know of some other small, worthy group that the world should know about, please leave a comment on this post! No spamming please. Speak personally and sincerely, and I may check them out and report back later. (No promises. My project list is long.)
Note 1: I try to report when these places have homepages, Youtube accounts, Patreon pages and Bluesky accounts. Many of them have Twitter accounts too. Will I tell you about them? NO.
Note 2: I performed a test with all these sites. I logged out, deleted site cookies, turned on a VPN, disabled my ad blocker and checked how obtrusive were a site’s paywall to a new user. The results are part of the notes below.
Note 3: I do complain about paywalls below. I have a very limited income, I can’t afford to subscribe to every place, and paywalls make sections of the web basically inaccessible to people like me. If I am to be honest about my perspective in my writing, I must complain about paywalls. I try to be as understanding as I can, and I do subscribe to some of these sites (currently Aftermath, Second Wind, and a trial for Defector). It used to be viewing ads could help out a person like me, but as ad partners have sought to extract more and more profit with autoplaying videos, maddening overlays, invasive user tracking, and sometimes outright introducing insecurities into page loads, blockers have become essential kit to the serious web user.
(There used to be a site, Project Wonderful, that was run by Dinosaur Comics creator Ryan North, and prided itself of serving useful, unobtrusive and safe ads. It was a personal project of his and eventually he had to shut it down. I think it’s still a niche that needs filling.)
DEFECTOR
When? – Founded September 2020 Who? – Webugees from Deadspin What? – Sports reporting and general culture. Cost for full basic access – $8/month, $79/year. $12/month or $119/year also gets you a daily newsletter with “exclusive content,” and access to extra episodes of the podcast Normal Gossip. There’s also a Richie Rich tier at $1,000/year. (Let’s band together and make calling silver spoon levels Richie Rich tiers. Well, I’m going to do it anyway.) Notes: The Defector is the oldest of the new indie media groups listed here, getting well ahead of the curve by getting fired from Deadspin in 2020.
I want to like Defector, a great deal. Wait I introduced this the wrong way: I do like them! They’re the ones on this list with the most buzz and good will behind them, from the virtue of their quality and their writing. Sadly, their main bailiwick is sports reporting, and I bounce hard off of that. They have other content too, and that content is one of the reasons they’re no longer with Deadspin. I still tend to subscribe to them if they have a free or low-cost trial going (which is the case at this moment). But it’s a plain fact that the major part of their output is sport-related.
Lots of people like sports, and a lot of sports people liked Deadspin before the exodus, so I think they won’t have trouble keeping the lights. Completely logged out and IP-masked, the paywall kicked in after the fourth article read, I assume in the month. That seems fair to me, although if I link a page from them on social media, it means some people won’t be able to read it.
Defector has a website, podcasts, a Bluesky account, and a great little addition, a weekly crossword puzzle, although I haven’t done any due to the fact that the worst clues in any crossword puzzle are those involving sport. Defector also has a Youtube channel, but it hasn’t had many posts in the past year. Maybe they’ve ceded that space to Secret Base (see below).
AFTERMATH
When? – Founded November 2023 Who? – Webugees from Kotaku What? – Culture and review, mostly of video games but other things too. Cost for full basic access (read all articles, all podcast episodes) – $7/month, $70/year. They have a $10/$100 tier for commenting privileges—a lot of these sites hide commenting or Discord access behind a higher-level tier. There’s a Richie Rich tier at $999. Notes: Aftermath has the star power of nearly everyone who used to be popular at Kotaku behind them, and seems to subsist on their name recognition. Those names are: Luke Plunkett, Nathan Grayson, Riley MacLeod, Gita Jackson and Chris Person. Aftermath has generally good gaming and related topic content, and harbors an affection for the oldweb, which endears them to me, despite the thing I’m about to mention. Ahem.
Aftermath appears to paywall all of their articles with no freebies, which is annoying, even to people who subscribe (like me!), because it makes sharing links from them hard. Aftermath has a website, podcasts, an RSS feed, and is on Bluesky.
SECOND WIND
When? – Founded November 2023 Who? – Webugees from The Escapist What? – Video game culture and review Cost for full basic access (all posts readable) – Through Patreon, $5/month or $54/year. This means all premium videos. Higher tiers are $25/month (gets you a digital artwork each month) and $50/month (hang out with the Second Wind folk in a monthly Discord meeting). Notes: A lot of these new wave pop media groups have a somewhat fuzzy focus, but Second Wind sticks pretty closely to video games. This is where Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw went, leaving his long-time series Zero Punctuation to make a close copy of it called Fully Ramblomatic.
The story of the internet is that it’s really hard for an independent content creator to make a go of it without a leg up from someone, somehow. Yahtzee’s was nominally from The Escapist, but truly he hit it big back in the days of Big Blog, from several high-profile links including from Boing Boing. Second Wind has, in turn, gotten a lot of juice from Crowshaw’s star power, but they have other things to offer too.
A weird thing about Second Wind is that they don’t have a website of their own, but they are on Youtube and Twitch, they have a Patreon, and they’re on Discord. That seems to be it; if they have other avenues of output, their lack of a home site makes it difficult to find them. Hey! SW people! It’s not hard to make a basic website! Consider it! RSS would also be good! They are on Bluesky at least. They have “podcasts,” but only distributed as part of their Youtube channel, which is not what a podcast is.
404 MEDIA
When? – Founded August 2023 Who? – Webugees from Motherboard What? – Reporting and commentary on technology and the internet in general Cost for full basic access (all posts readable) – $10/month, $100/year. That’s high, comparatively. There’s also a Richie Rich tier at $1,000/year. Notes: 404 Media lists their people at Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox. As purveyors of general tech writing, they have a pretty broad remit. Judging by their headlines they have been fervent crusaders against the “AI” slop industry.
404 Media engages in paywalling and modal subscription ad overlays, but doesn’t paywall as much as Aftermath does. If you go to their site to see what they’re about without a subscription, depending on the article, you might be allowed to read the whole thing, or you might be cut off after two paragraphs, or it might just be denied entirely. I never got ads, even with my ad blocker off, despite a tiny link marked “advertisement” in some empty spots on pages. (I’d consider adding an ad blocker exception for 404 Media, but it doesn’t seem to matter either way.) 404 has a website, an RSS feed for paid subscribers (info here), and an ad-supported podcast with a paid version with more content.
SECRET BASE
When? – The SB Nation Youtube channel was renamed to Secret Base in August 2020, but content that would be part of this was made as far back as 2017 and earlier. Who? – A portion of the people at SBNation, particularly Jon Bois What? – Articles and videos, 90% related to sports Cost for full basic access – Through Patreon, $5/month, that gets you early access to their wonderful videos. A $10/month tier gets you some unnecessary niceties. If you can’t afford it, their videos appear on Youtube eventually, months later. Notes: Secret Base is legendary* for making sports videos of interest to non-sport enthusiasts, a trick they picked up from probably their most prominent creator, Jon Bois. Secret Base has a Patreon and a Bluesky account. They take the monetization tack of releasing their videos on Patreon months before Youtube. I figure that’s not a bad strategy in this difficult era. Secret Base’s Youtube videos are highlights, not just of Secret Base but of all of Youtube, including Dorktown, Pretty Good, Weird Rules, Chart Party and Fumble Dimension. Secret Base doesn’t have a top-level domain site, but they do have a sizable subsite at SBNation and that terrific Youtube channel.
* What do I count as legendary? What I hear a lot about them from other places, notably social media and Metafilter.
DUMB INDUSTRIES
When? – Signs suggest that it began to offer content apart from the Maximum Fun network in 2020 Who? – Teevee-ugees from Mystery Science Theater 3000 and some others What? – Comedy videos and livestreams Cost for full basic access: They offer five memberships to different products. Three of them are free for basic access, but all have at least one paid tier. For the free products, throwing them $2/month gets you access to archives. The paid-only memberships are $5/month (Mary Jo Clubhouse) and $15/month (Jackey Neiman Jones’ Art Lessons). Subscribing their Twitch stream to remove ads is $7.99/month Canadian, which as of this writing is $5.83 US. (With an Amazon Prime subscription you get one free Twitch subscription; even though it’s part of “Prime Gaming,” Dumb Industries only streams games once in a while.) Notes: I’ve followed Dumb Industries for awhile and I think it’s worth including them. They show a number of comedic segments: movie and shorts riffing from Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu, 70s video streaming and commentary from Mary Jo Pehl, art lessons from Jackey Neyman Jones, a new riffing show, Movies Are Dumb, with Chris Gersbeck, and a variety of things under “Odds & Ends,” which are offered with any membership. They have a website, sell videos for stream and download from Vimeo, and have both a Twitch and a Youtube channel. Note that a portion of their gig is selling videos, which are not available on demand unless purchased.
A lot of your less tech-savvy people look upon computer chips as some kind of magic, at least judging by how Hollywood movies depict hacking. And aliens can take control of computer systems just by inserting part of themselves into some console and sort of glowing while ominous music plays on the soundtrack.
But everything that happens in a processor is the result of simple logical operations: ANDs, ORs, NOTs, XORs and memory, all connected in different ways. And there’s some redundancy in that list: some of those logic gates can be constructed out of the others. The whole point of computers is you can perform billions of simple operations in a second, and complex operations are made out of lots of simple ones. When you’re working with binary numbers, all you need are simple operations.
Because of this, computers can actually be built out of physical parts, without even electricty, they’ll just be much bigger, and slower, and less durable, and may need some motor attached to them. Mechanical calculators have existed since the 1700s, and in the 50s-70s were common sights in offices. Arguably the first general-purpose computers, Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines (Wikipedia), were made from mechanical parts, but they had the disadvantage of not being made out of colorful pieces of plastic.
Shadowman39, an artiste who works in the medium of K’nex, has made a number of devices out of those construction toys, but an ALU, an Arithmetic Logic Unit that can increment, add, AND and XOR two binary numbers, is probably his most “practical” creation. He shows it off in this 15 minute Youtube video:
I want to see an alien that can nebulously control that monstrosity.
This ALU is one part of a larger processor project that’s still being built. I hesitate to call it a “microprocessor,” maybe we should call it a macroprocessor. We wish Shadowman39 the best, and hope he has enough time, energy and parts to realize his wondrous, ludicrous dream.
Some time ago on Game Developer I did an interview with the creator of the classic Mac, Apple II and C64 programming game Chipwits, who were working on a modernized version. Well their efforts have been released to the public now: Chipwits 1.0 is now out on Steam!
You devise programs using a graphic interface to get a robot character through a maze-like grid world to do various things. The original Chipwits was written for the original Mac, in Forth, with ports for different machines of the time. The new game has a nice tutorial as well as new scenarios, in addition to the scenarios that came with the original game.
The thing I like about Chipwits is, it isn’t always about solving specific puzzles. Many of the maps are open-ended. The robots have a limited amount of fuel, which translates into machine cycles to run your programs. Additional fuel can be replenished by objects found in their exploration, as well as objects worth score, but the objects are frequently randomly placed. These scenarios aren’t about tailoring a program to a specific placement objects, but devising a more generalized exploration routine that can adapt to a variety of placements. There are online leaderboards so you can see how your coding skill compares with that of other players.
Chipwits usually goes for $15, but for launch is currently 10% off on Steam. (Disclaimer: I interviewed the Chipwits people for Game Developer previously, and did a little beta testing, but I bought my own copy of the game for these screenshots. They deserve the money!)
There is a whole developing competitive scene around Masahiro Sakurai’s hugely underrated racing/combat game starring colored blob-monsters, Kirby’s Air Ride. (Previously: about City Trial, Sakurai talks KAR, stats explainer video). It’s like F-Zero, but cuter, but also meaner. Its standout mode, City Trial, is possibly Sakurai’s greatest creation, yes more than Smash Bros., yes more than Kirby themself. If you’ve never tried it, it’ll be hard to picture. I linked to my previous explanation, but here’s a quick summary.
Up to four Kirbys (including possible computer Kirbys) roam around an open world map that’s not too big, but not too small either. They start out with weak star vehicles, but there are better/weirder/different replacement vehicles randomly scattered around the map. There’s also “patches,” each of which is a small but significant improvement to one stat, randomly placed too. For 3-7 minutes, everyone tries to get the vehicle most suited to their play style, and as many powerup patches as they can. But they can also attack each other, using powerups that are also, yes, randomly scattered around. There’s also random events that occur. And Legendary Machine parts to collect. After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a random contest. Surprise! You were collecting Glide powerups the whole time, but you’re in a race event! Or you got Top Speed powerups, but you’re in a battle event! You don’t know which event will happen. Everyone’s often given a strong clue, but it isn’t always accurate!
City Trial is a great spectator game. It’s fun watching human players zoom around building their machine’s power, and sometimes savagely tearing at each other with all the ferocity a cute blobular creature can muster. Each Trial is a little story to itself, its participants struggling to increase their power in the limited time. Which a single patch isn’t much, really good players can scoop up over 100 of them in the short period allowed, and machines rapidly advance from merely fast to pure manifestations of bewildering, near-uncontrollable speed. Then the contest is chosen, it’s over in less than a minute, and the next round begins, everyone back at square one. It’s so intense.
Kirby Air Ride was one of a very small number of games to use the Gamecube’s Network Adapter, meaning it supports LAN play, and through that function rabidly enthusiastic players have turned it into an internet-capable game. KAR, as it is amusingly called, has been further hacked to make it more suitable for competitive play.
The community has a homepage with details on how to get involved and downloads for their customized version and emulator, a Youtube channel with loads of great matchups, and a Discord. Here are a few matches to show you what I mean.
I post two complete matches below, here’s some things to watch for:
The star each Kirby starts with is the Compact Star, which has good default turning and acceleration but little else. Particularly, its Defense is the absolute worst, and no number of Defense patches will improve it!
Each stat except HP can get up to 18; HP tops out at 16.
Stats from patches are multiplied by the stats of the vehicle the player is riding. A high vehicle stat means each patch will make the effect even greater!
Players can hop off their star at any time. While not on a vehicle will point out the location of other stars within the field of view.
When a player is attacked, they usually drop a patch, which the attacking player may be able to snatch away.
If a player’s star gets destroyed, they drop a lot (although not all) of their patches onto the ground. Players can’t collect patches while not on a vehicle, so the attacker can scoop many of them up unchallenged!
If time runs out when a Kirby isn’t on a star, they’ll be given a Compact Star for the event, which usually means they’ll lose.
The Shadow Star (the purple glowing one) has the highest attack but low defense. The Wagon Star (like a pink cube) has very high health and defense, but can’t boost, so isn’t great for racing. Both tend to be strong choices.
Patches can generate out in the open, but blue boxes can drop from one to four of them when broken open.
Gray patches are power-downs.
Scattered around the map in some matches are Legendary Machine parts. If one player collects all three parts of a Legendary Machine, they get it immediately, and it replaces the machine they had before. There are two of these, the Hydra, a big green monster with extremely high attack but that needs charge boost power to even move, and the Dragoon, a red/white wing with very high maneuverability, flight and speed. Completing either one usually, but not always, spells victory in a match; Hydra particularly can be stunlocked before it can move during the end-of-game contest, and worn down before it has a chance to react. There are rules to how Legendary Machine parts can appear: they always generate from Red boxes, and appear in certain parts of the map, at certain times.
The patches also have patterns to how they appear. The probability of finding different patch types is a subtle clue for which contest will occur.
