Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
There’s a lot of game parody videos out there. Here in the Sundry Sunday department, we realize we could just throw anything up onto the page, and fill the requirement of the form. But we don’t want to do that.
A parody should ideally be something more than just, here’s a thing, floating around the culture, and we put game characters in it. The DragonCon T-shirt school of parody: “What if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but Aliens?” A quote from The Office, but in the Star Wars title font. We are a never-ending font of contempt for that kind of crap.
This video, “Sonic Gump,” escapes that lowly category by the shared theme of its two characters: running. It starts with that, and then builds on it, casting the other Sonic regulars into expected (and unexpected) roles from the movie, and by the end it’s pretty effective. It’s on Newgrounds, but the embed here is to the Youtube version (1¾ minutes).
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
We posted to the long-lived FFVI site (which a handful of old people may still think of as Final Fantasy III) Caves of Narshe a few days ago. In looking up stuff about it I ran across a few other sites too that I figured I might call out. Because while humans may read this site, Google reads it too, and if I can help those other sites somehow rank above the evil and exploitive Fandom sites, then I think I can devote a day’s post to that cause.
I am being hyperbolic when I say that video game sites used to be 10% of the internet by weight, but it doesn’t feel like it. And that used to be a good thing. Nowadays it seems like many of the people who were enthusiastic about both games and the internet also have strong opinions about Ethics In Game Journalism and 8chan. I don’t know if that’s true about the people I’m linking to now; I can only hope that it isn’t.
There’s Imzogelmo’s Final Fantasy III, who wrote game patches for the ROM, tools for examining it and investigations of how it works.
Hey, did you know you can BUILD A FREE WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN ON ANGELFIRE? Did you know thqt Angelfire still exists, and still uses 90s-era Geocities-style boxes on member sites to advertise their service?
Djibriel’s page Collapse of Heaven and Earth is hosted by Caves of Narshe, and bears information on FFVI, FFV and a couple of other games.
Also hosted on CoN is Master ZED’s list of FFVI (III) patches. These patches are useless to people playing the remakes of course: the ones for Playstation, Gameboy Advance, mobile (which I hear are gone now, good job SquareEnix), Steam, Switch and probably other platforms. There are some guides here too. One entertaining one, if you are entertained by the kinds of things that I’m entertained by, is SharkESP’s Low Level FAQ, a monument to breaking the game.
Not to repeat the title unnecessarily, but Time Extension reports that Rebecca Heineman has been diagnosed with cancer. This is a huge deal, her history in gaming goes back to the days of Electronic Games magazine! She was one of the founders of Interplay, programmed London Blitz for Avalon Hill’s nearly-forgotten computer game division, also programmed Wasteland and The Bard’s Tale (the original version), designed The Bard’s Tale III and (the greatly underrated) Dragon Wars, and a bevy of other accomplishments.
Time is awful, and the end comes for all of us eventually, but it’d be nice if this could be pushed back as far as it can be. Because she lives in the United States, and this bullshit excuse for a country believes that people should just die who can’t afford care, she’s setting up a GoFundMe for contributions. That’s what my recently-deceased brother did to try to pay for the medical care that could have saved his life. I think he got one contribution. Hopefully Rebecca Heineman will get a lot more than that. Please consider it if you can afford it.
Famicom Galaxian, never released in the US until Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1, is a tiny program, even by Famicom/NES standards. It may be the smallest Famicom game; the ROM is only 16K large, taking up just half of the addressable cartridge space.
But even such a little program can hide secrets. Adrian found a multicart with an alternate version of Famicom Galaxian with rapid autofire, and that he preferred to play that than the official one.
And I don’t blame him! Galaxian nowadays, whether a port of the arcade original, is a slow and clunky thing to suffer through, but even back then there were some people who scratched their heads at its popularity. One of them was Craig Kubey, author of the classic-era arcade book The Winner’s Guide to Video Games, who called it the Worst Popular Game. But these problems evaporate if you can just hold down the button and annihilate the aliens, like you were playing Centipede.
Namco must have realized how much better the game would play with more shots, as they made your ship in Galaxian’s successor Galaga fire faster, and can have two shots on-screen at once. four with the double ship. Maybe as a result, Galaga is a lot more fun to play, even today.
Adrian got to wondering about that alternate version, called “Galaxians” in the pirate cart’s menu. He found a ROM image of it online and had a look at its code in Mesen’s code analysis tools and found the first thing the “classic” version of the game on the cart does is write a zero to a specific address in zero page. This, as it turns out, is to ensure a secret cheat is disabled. If a one is written there instead, it produces behavior exactly like the rapid-fire version, which in addition to being able to fire much more quickly recolors the logo on the title screen red.
Is this a disabled cheat function on the original cartridge? Maybe, but maybe not. Adrian found another version of the Galaxian ROM online that doesn’t have the cheat function, disabled or no. It’s unknown if this is an alternate official release, or the only official release. Maybe the version on the pirate cart was hacked to put the code in, or maybe it’s an obscure unreleased version, or else maybe it’s the Famicom Disk System version?
Geez, the mysteries abound concerning this sucky little game! Find out about it yourself here:
Kid Fenris is an underrated little classic game review blog. Many of their posts deserve to be linked to, but we try to keep up a variety of sources, so I try to pick out when they have particularly interesting subject matter. So it is when they posted about McDonald’s Treasure Island for the Genesis/MegaDrive, which also turns out to be the first game Treasure developed as a company.
Image from the linked article. It may be a licensed game, but it looks so vibrant!
As the article reminds us, it wasn’t the first Treasure game released, that would be the game that in many ways announced to the world that they meant business: Gunstar Heroes, as brimming with ideas as it was.
Treasure seems largely to be in preservation mode these days, and their last title was released 11 years ago. Not all of their games have been as critically acclaimed as Gunstar Heroes, but they all have something interesting about them, and McDonald’s Treasure (heh) Island has it too.
The weekly indie game showcases cover the many games we (Josh Bycer and friends) play each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my own collection.
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”
We love oldschool websites around here, and unlike Final Fantasy Kingdom, whose images are all broken and likely isn’t long for this world, Caves of Narshe has been kept up-to-date, its images and links all work, it’s got a good design, and is full of interesting info on Final Fantasies 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, plus Final Fantasy Tactics and Chrono Trigger. It’s loaded with good information, and best of all, it isn’t Fandom.com! I can’t even rightly give it the oldweb tag, because it’s modernized! May it last a thousand years.
What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?
