Year: 2026

Sundry Sunday: The Chaotix Case Files

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

I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.

Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”

That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.

So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):

…an introductory Episode 0 (9½ minutes):

…and a full Episode 1 (26 minutes).

And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.

They even got Rebecca Sugar, creator and runner of Steven Universe, to write their theme song!

Everyone Is Normal About Princess Daisy

The subject of this post is Elie D’s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo’s Mario universe thing. Here:

I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.

But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)

Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.

WAIT I DIDNT MEAN

Recovered Games and Data from the Sega Channel

I’m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it’s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was kind of like a terrestrial version of Nintendo’s Satellaview service, but also one that wasn’t locked to Japan.

Some of these games were never released outside of the Sega Channel, and the VGHF also has unreleased prototypes for public perusal through their own archived collection and an association with Gaming Alexandria. Two particular finds are a hitherto undiscovered variant of a Garfield game and a Genesis Flintstones game that, at a glance, seems to be based off of the John Goodman movie. An abandoned project also in the collection is a Sega Genesis web browser, which would have been quite a thing to see back then. Notably, Gaming Alexandria’s torrent of the complete data is only 147 megabytes, which isn’t such a large download all told.

Image from the VGHF’s site. This would have seen release probably around 1999. For reference, the Sega Saturn and Playstation were released in 1994, and the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996.

The VGCF prepared a 58-minute promo video for their project here, with commercials and other content that are, ah, very nineties in style.

As an aside, I was shocked to see the company General Instrument come up early in this video. Weren’t those the people who made chips for pre-VCS dedicated game consoles back in the 70s? As it turns out, yes they were (PDF link)!

All the 3-Up Moons in Super Mario World

Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables.

MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:

The Frantic Fisherman from Compute’s Gazette

There was once a time when Compute’s Gazette, the Commodore 64 type-in magazine, was nearly the center of the computing world.

An important source of low-cost computer software from the age before the internet, Compute’s Gazette distributed a variety of software, including a couple of games each issue. They also distributed Speedscript, an important early word processor, which was one of their biggest hits. But for kids, the games were the most important thing.

The C64 Appreciation Society recently typed in the early CG game The Frantic Fisherman, and made a fifteen minute video demonstrating the process and the game. Remember, while you could order a 5¼” disk with all of an issues programs on it, most people who wanted to use them had to sit down in front of their machine and type on line after line of code. It often took hours, and even with error checking software like The Automatic Proofreader and MLX to help, the danger of typos was great.

The Frantic Fisherman is not a terrific game. It’s really simple, just a matter of moving your fisherperson to the right place and either swinging your club or raising your umbrella. You can select the speed, but it doesn’t get faster naturally as you play. But it’s a good demonstration of what magazine type-in games from the time were like. Take a look, and travel back in time.

About Arcade Game Startup Displays

I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.

Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:

I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”

It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.

Indie Game Showcase For 1/26/26

The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Dobbel Dungeon
1:58 Entanglement
3:43 Parry Nightmare
5:07 Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity
6:46 Ultros
9:09 Sniper Killer