Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Nathorz is an animator who has made several videos that took game character noises and put them into humorous contexts. To date he’s made videos with the sounds of Luigi, Kirby, Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong. The longest of any of these videos is 1½ minutes, so they’re not going to eat up your day.
Most recently he made a video, again just a minute and a half long, with noises from various incarnations of Link and Zelda. Warning: this includes the old Zelda cartoon from the Super Mario Bros Super Show. Additional warning: includes a cameo from “Suaveamente Ganondorf” at the very end.
Finding this one was a real treat for me. I’m so pleased that there are still people who care deeply about these weird arcade/console hack & slash games from a twice-defunct publisher. While in its final years it got renamed to “Midway Games West,” it’ll always be Atari Games in my mind, and that’s what it rightfully should be called, it having had a direct lineage to the first successful arcade video game manufacturer of all.
Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the last of the “real” Gauntlet games (it’s best not to talk about Seven Sorrows), and is especially notable to have received something of a redesign when it came out on consoles. I don’t think the changes were all for the better; the make work of collecting crystals and stuff does not substantively add to the game, but there are some nice additions, like extra class magic effects, poisonable food and destructable items (they’re nice in game design terms, that doesn’t have to mean nice to the player).
The Youtube account Jess & Zac arguably likes the Gauntlet games even more than I do. In a 27-minute video, they give 100 little-known facts about G:DL. Just knowing someone else cares so deeply about the games was enough for me; the information that fans have made updates for the game to fix bugs is even better. I should seek that patch out! I’m entitled, or should be: I own a copy of the game on Gamecube! Also, the N64 and Dreamcast versions of Legends! Me and friends in college played so much of N64 Gauntlet Legends….
That video’s pretty short. They also have a much longer video (1 hour 27 minutes) that rates all 60 maps of Gauntlet Dark Legacy. That one’s rather more obsessive, but it’s not like I’m any strange to video game obsession (Rampart), and it’s a game that isn’t talked about nearly enough these days, at least within my hearing. They’re in order from worst to best, so maybe skip through to the end? Up to you.
I personally think Dark Legacy is a little too long. Gauntlet Legends, its predecessor, is thematically tighter, DL’s extra characters aren’t differentiated enough from the originals, and in the arcade it took many more quarters to get through DL. But I’ve played through both games, and I’d do it again. They’re a little mindless, but less mindless than they seem at first.
I wish Atari Games had stayed in business and allowed to keep iterating and improving on the Gauntlet games, and not closed by stupid corporate cost-cutting. The United States relies on corporations for so much of its creative presence, but regularly destroys huge portions of its culture due to being judged by clueless moneypeople who are way to sure of themselves. It’s a problem that other countries suffer from too, but no where else is it so bad. The US just decided that the skill and thought that all of Atari’s people, who had worked much of their lives making games, didn’t matter. It’s a damn crying shame, and it’s far from the only time it’s happened.
I like filling the posts on Set Side B with a wide-ranging field of material, but I realize this is pretty far out even for us. We’re about electronic entertainment, right? Cooking is entertaining, or can be! And websites of recipes are electronic!
I told you about Loadstar, the long-lived Commodore 64 disk magazine that I am involved in preserving. Well I was thinking about things I could draw out of the issues, that people to use. And I noticed the recipes.
Someone named James T. Jones submitted, and had published, over 280 recipes on Loadstar’s disks, over a period of nearly six years. I came to realize that I’ve written scripts to export and convert Commodore 64 text files from out of disk images. And everyone hates recipe sites on the internet, right? They’re all SEO-infected ad-soaked pages, and more and more AI slop is moving into that field. James Jones’ recipes don’t have any of that, and if I don’t care about improving their traffic or exploiting them for ad revenue I can make this resource available to everyone for free!
So I’ve added a subsite to my Neocities site, linking all the recipes that appeared in the disks of Loadstar 64. (I think there’s a few extras on Loadstar 128, I might add those later.)
Here is the intro page to the recipe site. Whether people will find it useful or not, who knows. These are the kinds of recipes that will casually use ingredients like Doritos, or ginger ale. I haven’t made any of these. A few of them look a bit suspect: the recipe for ice cream is surprisingly brief, one of the steps being to “follow the manufacturer’s instructions,” assuming you have an ice cream maker. But there seem to be a lot of other good recipes in there, if you explore a bit.
I’m still tinkering with the layout and text, but all of the content is there now. Bon Appétit!
This is kind of self-promotion, but it’s not just self-promotion as you can get tons of books by other people this way, including 10 volumes of Game Dev Stories from David Craddock, twelve books from Hardcore Gaming 101, four from Andrea Contato, and a couple from Dean Takahashi, as well as several other people, including, well, moi. It’s $35 for 66 books! I even threw in the two volumes of Someone Set Up Us The Rom as an extra, even though I don’t get anything out of it. I care that much about this bundle’s success.
No one gets rich from these bundles. The days when you could offer a ton of content at a steep discount and get thousands of purchases are long gone. But cash-strapped readers looking for a lot of info, if they can scrape up just $35, can get an amazing deal that will keep them occupied for a long time. I really think you’ll want to jump on this one, if you’re able.
I’ve been involved with these bundles for around a decade now. Some of the books I’ve contributed I’ve put up for sale on itch.io, but some I haven’t. The original version of We Love Mystery Dungeon is in it, which I’ve just taken down from itch.io due to its forthcoming expanded print edition through Limited Run, which is one of those sad but necessary things that has to be done when you sign a publishing contract, so this will probably be the last place you can buy the original version. By the way, I hope you’ll consider the new edition: it’s got added material on last year’s Shiren 6, a.k.a. The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, and a whole lot on the whole Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.
I know I’ve made a few of these self-promotional posts lately, mostly over the Loadstar collection and related topics. I’ve always been anxious about spreading the word about my projects, paid or otherwise. I’ve seen so many people who seem shameless about tooting their respective horns, but it’s kind of necessary, I guess, to be seen through the crowd.
Well there it is. There’s 15 days left in the bundle, so you have a bit of time left to make your decision. Please have a look.
Nintendo’s announced that Mario Paint has been released on Switch Online, a movie that I modestly point out that I called some time ago, although I hoped they’d offer an export option that would let you make easy use of your creations, although one can use the Screenshot button to save your creation probably. It’s not the subject of today’s post, but their announcement’s pretty entertaining, so here it is (4 minutes):
The announcement mentions that one can use the restore states built into the emulator to save your work, which is at least better than the single save file available in the cartridge, or “saving” your work to VHS tape as the manual suggested. Another thing mentioned in the announcement is that, not only can people use the Switch 2’s Joycons as mice to replicate the function of the SNES Mouse that came with Mario Paint and required it, but in an uncharacteristic bit of generosity, it also supports USB mice when used on the original Switch models.
Mario Party is an interesting piece of gaming history. Without it, Homestar Runner probably would never have happened. Five years ago H*R posted bits of Mario Paint work to social media on Thursdays, which they compiled in this video (4 minutes, sadly not able to be embedded).
That’s two videos already and neither are the focus of this post, so what is? This digitization of an official Japanese Mario Paint tape was uploaded by Jeremy Parish, it’s 31 minutes, and shows off some frankly amazing creations that were made in the days where you had to actually use the mouse to make Mario Paint creations, without resorting to outside tools or memory manipulation. Surprisingly, it also bears the logo of APE Inc. Shigesato’s company that made Earthbound! Here here, it is this this:
One more note about the announcement video! It mentions that Mario Paint songs have been added to the Nintendo Music cellphone app. It also shows off “Title Theme 2,” which actually isn’t in the app, but is revealed to be Totaka’s Song! Maybe it’ll be added at a later date?
I’ve had a number of ideas for big posts lately, but those all take substantial time to make and finish. But I want to post something, so here are the directions my explorations have taken me lately.
Loadstar has a number of interesting things in it, including a trove of Print Shop clip art and (surprisingly) over 200 recipes. It’s full of those kinds of thing.
Action Retro just posted a new video on using the Apple Lisa (15 minutes), including browsing the internet on one, although on a text-based browser. A text-based web browser, on the first commercially-sold GUI OS, how about that!
Been back playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom demake on Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on the Switch 2. It’s not really what I’d call a demake though, because it’s really good, in fact it might secretly be the best Pac-Man CE game, which isn’t meant to slight the others. It occurs me that I’ve learned a huge amount about all the games in the series, and I should try to get that information out onto the internet. I’ve got a WIP document about that, and I’m sure I’ve got some previous attempts at writing one in the archives somewhere.
Continuing on that thread, I’ve also learned that “Shadow Labyrinth,” that Metroidvania Bandai-Namco’s made with a truckload of classic Namco references including a spherical robot character called Puck, has a mini-game in it that is heavily inspired by the Pac-Man CE games, down to using some of its music. It isn’t scored the same though, and doesn’t seem properly set up for score attack play. It seems to follow along with some of the ideas they used in Pac-Man CE 2+’s two player mode, which I thought didn’t work very well.
Been wanting to investigate some C64 BBSes, but to do it proper you need a terminal that supports PETSCII. I have one, but I really want to get it working through C64 emulation.
There’s also the matter of getting the custom version of Kirby Air Ride set up with their bespoke version of Dolphin for netplay. I’ve already posted multiple times about KAR lately so I’m reluctant to make a full post about it again until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself.
Jeff Gerstmann got sent a message that suggests something you’ve probably never considered, that Mr Do! is real:
People say that you should turn off notifications and live your life and all that, but if I did that I wouldn't occasionally get a buzz on my wrist and see that some maniac has sent the phrase MR. DO! IS REAL to me.
Waverly Films has been at the Youtube funny video business for a long time, and although it’s been five years since their last output, every once in a while their members put out something new, so we haven’t yet lost hope that we’ll see something new from them, someday.
Displaced Gamers takes a lot of time to make their videos, but I always know their videos will be worth watching, and usually also worth posting about. Their newest video (36 minutes) is a typically deep dive into Metroid’s game engine, and why the game inexplicably drops frames. It’s only a first part so far, but they do an excellent job of breaking down Metroid’s game loop. As far as it goes to this point, a big part of the issue has to do with the main game loop being called to prepare game screens being scrolled into, which are kept in a big memory buffer (so big the game requires extra RAM on the cartridge to store it) and copied into the PPU’s VRAM when needed.
Here’s the video. If you enjoy this sort of thing, we’d probably get along very well in person!
The player can switch their switch themselves by pressing L and R, but only by pressing in, not out. Doing so both changes the state of all the switch blocks, and makes the switch itself much shorter. In play terms, this is equivalent of Super Mario shinking and becoming Regular Mario, and in fact getting hit by an enemy has the same effect, resulting in being switched prematurely, and all the blocks changing state too. To switch back, you collect a P Switch item, which is essentially a Super Mushroom, restoring both the player’s state and reswitching all the blocks.
Balatro is still a thing, and a major update with lots of new jokers is due soon, but until then you might tide yourself over with an online multiplayer mod, available here for PC players.
Each player plays their own independent game of Balatro with the same seed, but when you reach a boss blind after the first one, you don’t play against one of Balatro’s many built-in bosses, but instead you try to beat the other player’s score at that same round. You’re told what their score is in the boss battle (if they’re playing it or have already finished it), but aren’t given other information like which jokers they have or their deck composition. Instead of the usual instant-lose scenario you get a limited number of lives. If you lose but still have a life left, you get some consolation money and get to keep playing. The last player remaining wins.
There are a few other changes, such as a handful of removed jokers, but also some new ones that take special advantage of the format. One unique aspect to multiplayer is, if you’re both in the Boss Blind and your opponent finishes their round and you already have a higher score, you immediately win the round at that point and don’t play your remaining hands. This can be bad (you might not get to use some money-earning jokers, scaling jokers don’t trigger and seals don’t get the chance to work) or good (you get all the money from the hands that round, and you might save glass cards from being broken).
PannenKoek, Youtube’s foremost expert on Super Mario 64 esoterica, has made another video (35 minutes). This one’s about how they managed to get all the way up the tower in Whomp’s Fortress without pressing the A button at all.
To remind: not pressing the A is troublesome to build a challenge around (that being what makes it interesting) because it’s Mario’s most fundamental verb: the jump button. On the Gamecube, it was physically the biggest button! I loved that about its controller: these days I always get the buttons mixed up, as a result of some games making the left button the main one, and some making the bottom one. On the Gamecube, there was no question. But the A Button Challenge asks that you use it as little as possible.
The issue with Whomp’s Tower is that it’s a tower, a vertical structure itself atop a mountain. To find out how they did it, I refer you back to the video.
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.
