Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
As I type this it’s about an hour and a half until my presentation on the history of Loadstar at Vintage Computing Festival Midwest 2025. I think I’m ready for it, but yeah, am I really? That’s the kind of question that sends me into a panic attack.
Since I’m so busy panicking, and because I’ve been on my feet for most of the day, I’m going to post something more random than I usually like. Sundry Sunday is themed around randomness, yes, but this is even more. This week I’m posting NATRAPS X FINAL (5½ minutes).
It’s one of those oh-so-very memeish videos where video game characters do various violent things to each other. I think I grew out of these videos… hm, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to into them. But it’s 16 years old, and both the internet and myself were a lot younger then. Maybe I would have liked it when it was new.
“NATRAPS,” if you haven’t noticed yet, is SPARTAN spelled backward. SPARTAN X was the title of the game that was released in the US as Kung Fu. Despite the name, it was absolutely not the last of these videos posted to the account of Bash4208. If you can bear it, look for more of them here.
It’s a pretty good run-down of the various weird timing issues of the Commodore 64. Machines at that time had to do all kinds of weird things to keep up the overriding priority of microcomputers of the time: building a consistent video signal that could be displayed on a television. Nearly all machines needed special hardware to do the job of keeping up the display, to give the CPU time to run user programs, or anything at all.
Circuit diagram from the linked article
The C64’s VIC-II video chip is a product of many compromises. The C64 could contain so much memory affordably because it used dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshes, and one of the tasks of the VIC-II was to handle that. It also needed access to main memory in order to build the display image.
But both of these actions conflict with whatever the processor needs to do, so the computer is designed to actually put the 6510 to sleep when the VIC-II needs to access memory. This is why, when the screen is blanked, the machine runs a little faster and more consistently, and that’s why the screen is blanked when a connected Datasette is loading programs from cassette tape.
I think it’s pretty obvious that, while the game is excellent in many ways, Super Mario World has so many extra lives that they end up almost meaningless. There’s all the traditional ways to build up your horde of Marios waiting in the wings for their chance at platforming glory: getting 100 coins, hidden 1up blocks, knocking a bunch of enemies off with shells, stomping on many enemies without touching the ground, and defeating lots of enemies with a single Starman. Then there’s those specific to Super Mario World: getting 5 Dragon Coins, finding a 3up Moon, getting a lot of gray coins generated by a gray P-Switch, having a lot of enemies on-screen when hitting the Goal Tape, and earning several in one of the bonus games.
But there’s one source of extra lives that few know about, or at least, I didn’t know about it. There are invisible triggers in some levels that, if you cross over their activation points in order, will generate a single 1up Mushroom. Looygi Bros shows off all 15 of these spots in the game here (8 minutes):
Why Nintendo decided to include these spots in a game where players will usually be walking around with double-digit life counts, I couldn’t tell you. Super Mario World is one of those Mario games where it doesn’t save progress after every level, so running out of lives is a real setback. But they could have just designed it so that it saved more often? I guess they just saw that it’s fun to earn lots of extra lives.
The decades of video gaming history there has now been have had many companies, developers and studios that have went under, due to one thing or other. Many of those names are revered, and their vanishing have left lacks in the world of vidyagaems that are felt to this day. A few of those: Atari (the current one has improved greatly lately, but it’s still not the same), Midway, Bally, Williams, Lucasarts, Rare (in its non-Microsoft incarnation), Telltale, SSI, New World Computing, and many more if I cared to dredge them out of the muck of my mind. And that’s just Western companies, there were plenty more in Japan, I just wanted to narrow the field down a bit.
One of those companies probably isn’t Acclaim. They were one of the biggest third-party publishers in the NES era, and they lasted to around the N64 era, but although they did put out some Premium Quality Entertainment (thanks Murderbot), they also put out a lot of what in Yiddish is called drek. Towards the end it felt like the drek percentage was getting pretty high, and it didn’t help at all that they kept pulling some dodgy ad stunts. They ran a context where they offered to pay couples to name their kid Turok, another where they tried to put ads for Shadowman on tombstones in cemeteries, and the less said ab0ut BMX XXX, possibly the game that destroyed the company, the better.
Well nostalgia certainly sells, even for the less savory publishers, and so it is that some people have decided one of the brands we needed to once again be subjected to is Acclaim. They released a promo video yesterday that unveils their initial releases, here it is (relevant portion 13 minutes):
The games shown:
GridBeat! appears to be a hacking-themed maze/puzzle/rhythm game.
Basketball Classics is a stylish retro-themed sports game that’s refreshing for being a new game based off of real players that didn’t come from the corpulent corporate cube of EA Sports. I’m pretty impressed they’re making this, it’s probably the game here I’m most interested in.
Ground Zero Hero is a cartoony action shooter that seems to take inspiration from Vampire Survivors and Nuclear Throne.
Pixel Washer is a retro-themed cleaning game that reminds me a bit of Powerwash Simulator, but maybe that’s because I’ve been playing that again lately.
Talaka is a combat platformer with sketchy graphics.
Toss Down I couldn’t get a strong read on, it seems to be an isometric shooting game in urban environments, with tornadoes around, maybe with a bit of classic 2D GTA in it?
The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest appears to be a kaizo-style 2D retro platformer. I’m sensing a theme with some of these games. I don’t have anything against retro styling myself, mind you, it’s like one third of this site’s entire reason for being.
HyperYuki: Snowboard Syndicate is a snowboarding game, obviously. It’s 3D, but has stylish and colorful low-polygon, cell-shaded graphics. I might have to follow this.
Katanaut seems to be a dark pixel-art sci-fi combat game.
The question remains, why did they feel like they needed to resurrect the Acclaim brand and logo? Having a leg-up from obscurity is enough reason I guess, but none of the new games are based on and of Acclaim’s old IP. Maybe they could revive Extreme-G, Turok or Wizards & Warriors, but they haven’t yet.
It is true, but you do need some extra items. Not only the Gameboy Advance, but a Gamecube, a GBA controller cable, the Gamecube controller adaptor (the one made to support Smash Bros. games) and a Gameboy Player with boot disk. But if you have all of these items, none of them need to be modded. It’s all Nintendo code and hardware, baby!
The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!
If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.
Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.
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”
Primm made a number of high resolution images of the system cursors the Wii uses, for use as desktop cursors on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in four colors corresponding to the four player Wii remotes. You can get them here!
