Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Waverly Films used to be one of the foremost sketch comedy groups on Youtube, when sketch comedy was pretty common there, along with other groups like Barats & Bereta.
Link Gets Bullied was from MTV’s “Gaming Week,” a long-forgotten (much like MTV itself) feature where they pandered to game players for seven excruciating days. It’s just a minute long, and demonstrates why you shouldn’t take mythical, evil-destroying weapons lightly.
To think that people once cared about MTV! Is there anything about it now that isn’t just like any other channel? Like how The Discovery Channel is now mostly about fakey reality series? Remember MTV News? Remember when they had a decently respectable website?
Years after Nintendo announced that Animal Crossing New Horizons wouldn’t get any updates following the 2.0 one that also introduced the Happy Home Paradise DLC, and underlined it by not even releasing any New Years arches after 2021, they’ve gone back on that statement, announcing that in January there’ll be a Nintendo Switch 2 paid upgrade (only $5 this time), as well as a free 3.0 feature update. As they tend to do now, they announced it in a video, not a Nintendo Direct video, but still (12½m).
There was a time when I would have been thrilled to hear about this. I did, after all, write a guidebook to AC:NH, the “Black Book of Animal Crossing New Horizons,” which I still sell at itch.io. It contains an absurd amount of material. I suppose now I’ll have to update it again, but I’m feeling ambivalent about going back to the island paradise, despite the fully-upgraded house and tens of millions of bells I’ve left there.
Animal Crossing New Horizons holds a special place, not just in the series history, but in video gaming history. Incredibly, it’s the second best selling game on the Switch, at over 48 million copies, and it has the pandemic and the concomitant lockdown to blame for it. It outsold all of the other Animal Crossing games put together, going all the way back to Gamecube (and, in Japan, the N64) because a lot of people, for a time, used AC:NH as a replacement social scene, a kind of mini-MMORPG, focused not on fighting fake monsters in a bullshit fantasy world, but on decorating fake houses and islands, in a different kind of bullshit fantasy world.
And I think that’s okay, despite my use of profanity! Of course video game worlds are bullshit; that’s what they are made of. They’re all fake, they’re mere bits and bytes, but if you have a group of friends who pretend they’re real, then they gain reality from it, substance granted from their shared experience.
Well, the people are gone. I can’t expect that even a small fraction of the players it had back then are still invested in it. A few will return for this, surely, but without another lockdown it’s impossible to expect it’ll come anywhere close to it.
And even if they did… I think I’m done with Animal Crossing. Not just New Horizons, but Animal Crossing in general, even with the idea of Animal Crossing. The grandmothers who famously played the various versions, who the media happily reported on as a kind of uplifting story, they’re gone now. What happened to their memory cards, I wonder? Do their descendants load them up from time to time, pretending to be their grandmum, to falsely reassure the animals they still love them? Do they keep it as a kind of museum? Do they put it in the attic, maybe for future generations to discover, assuming their consoles still work, or sell them?
These are all troubling thoughts for me. Recent events have reminded me that life is finite. I still play video games, for my own reasons, but I don’t think I can appreciate, that I can afford, another huge timesink game like Animal Crossing, whether it be New Horizons or anything else . If I knew many other people who still played then maybe I could muster the will. I was on a Discord of Metafilter members who all played, but I left it over a year ago, before I knew they’d revive it, to clean up my server list. (Discord limits the number you can be a member of, you know. It’s higher if you play for their much-loathed “Nitro” feature, but I condemn that to extra hell.)
If this changes, I’ll let you know. The book could still use updating. But the joy in it has left me. Sorry critters; it was fun for a while.
From “Kin no Tori,” or “The Golden Bird,” an anime movie. This alchemist witch character and her cat-bat minions are so much fun!
It’s Halloween today! Boo! I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it enthusiastically! Boo, I say!
Growing up I was never a big fan of Halloween, other than the opportunity to get candy. I never wore a costume out. This has changed a bit in recent years, I still don’t dress up but I do try to observe the season. Today I’m running a video marathon of various things over on cytu.be. If you know me, you might know where to look to find it, if you’re interested in such things, but this isn’t really the place for it.
While waiting for trick or treaters, here’s a few vids to help you pass the time.
MrMatthews reviews all the Gameboy Castlevania titles (29m), a collection that rates from pretty good to abysmal. But that’s not what he says, he pretty much likes them all, even Adventure and Legends.
If your tastes run a bit more academic, Jeremy Parish has some dives into the Castlevania games: the original (16m) II: Simon’s Quest (15½m), Super IV (17m) and Circle of the Moon (23m). He hasn’t done III yet it seems. His old design discussions of the NES Castlevania games at anatomyofgames.com are still up, marred a bit by the fact that the site’s been hacked to host links to casino sites. Earlier this month Jeremy appeared on the Still Loading podcast to talk about the ‘Vainia, which you can listen to on the site, or on Youtube (1h33m). The embeds below are of the original and the podcast:
To finish off, an early Sundry item, TerminalMontage’s “Something About Castlevania” animation (4m). This is basically Simon Belmont’s whole personality: violence.
Another arcade classic strategy rundown, and again c0ncerning Donkey Kong. As the video rightly notes, the Springs board, a.k.a. Elevators, is most devoted players’ greatest barrier to playing to the kill screen, and even pros mess it up sometimes. I think it’s the worst part of the game, personally. Donkey Kong is great, says I, because it’s open to multiple strategies, while the later Elevators boards have to be finished a specific way, all because of those springs. That way is what this video (4m) is about.
Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.
Image from donkeykongforums.net.
Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.
The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.
So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:
I’ll be honest, I got caught off-guard by the need to make today’s post, so it’s pretty simple today. But it’s still pretty cool.
There’s this Korean person who goes by Sanago on Youtube who used 3D pens to make models of various pop culture characters, and some of them are of video game characters. Here’s Sonic (11 minutes):
The indie showcases highlight the many games we check out each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my (Josh Bycer’s) 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”
It’s been a couple of years, I believe since we reported on what we’re currently playing. This doesn’t fill in any blanks for the time since we last reported, but maybe it’ll be a useful snapshot for the current moment. Maybe we’ll return to doing these, maybe once a month?
rodneylives(John Harris): I’ve been playing a lot of Once Upon A Katamari, a new release as of this moment. Last night I played a bit of Shovel Knight for the first time, yes the very first. (I can’t play everything! And a bundle of the first game and all its DLC is currently on sale on the Switch shop.)
While mine’s not translucent purple, but white and with cool Apple II pixel art on it, the device pictures is similar to mine. I can vouch that it runs PSP games pretty well!
There’s also been some Final Fantasy VI and I, UFO 50 (Party House, Rakshasa, Mini & Max and Valbrace) and Power Wash Simulator (2nd playthrough). On Nintendo Switch Online, I’ve been playing Mr. Driller 2 for the GBA. Oh, and training amiibo players in Smash Bros. Ultimate. I also picked up a “Game Dad,” as Dan Fixes Coin-Ops calls them, at VCFMW 2025, specifically a R36S, and on it I’ve been playing a few favored things, particularly arcade games like Robotron 2084 and Cadash. What I’m really looking forward to, as you might guess from recent posts, is Kirby Air Riders on Switch 2, which isn’t here yet but is rapidly approaching.
Keith Burgun: He recently ordered a much more capable device than mine, an AYN Thor, powerful enough, so he tells me, to run Switch games. It’s still on its way, so he’s been playing the PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics on his Retroid Pocket 5. He’s enjoyed it, but deep into the game thinks he may be getting a bit bored with it.
An AYN Thor. While prices seem to be around $250, it’s a very capable device, with two screens in a DS-like form factor. The clamshell design helps protect the screens while in one’s pocket.
GWBycer (Josh “Game Wisdom” Bycer) plays lots of indie games for his Game Wisdom Youtube channel, and as contributor many of his videos end up linked from here, so you’ll see those roughly as they happen. He does mention that, for his own enjoyment, he’s been playing Silent Hill f. Apparently, the ‘f’ is officially lowercase.
