Soon after release hopes were high for Bubsy. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog and… well… Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had the world convinced that edgy animal mascot platformers were golden, and characters like Aero the Acrobat and Awesome Possum invested our consoles like wisecracking vermin. Bubsy was just one of them.
This video seems to imply the two versions of pretentious penguin King Dedede have different designs, but honestly all I see is one of them has bigger irises than the other? (2 minutes)
Thirteen seconds about the dangers of being a pedestrian in Sky City Place Location Zone:
Finally, this isn’t an animation, but something that can actually happen in game. This is a major spoiler, so some space….
For the solid of mind and stout of body who has braved this far down….
There’s a new legendary machine that relates to events near the end of Road Trip, KARs’ story mode, called Gigantes, with stress on the middle syllable: Gigántes. Imagine saying it like SoulCalibur’s narrator says Cervantes. It’s an incredibly huge thing that takes up almost half the city! Immediately the remaining time becomes about defeating it, sort of how like, in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, certain games get randomly chosen to be Mission Games, where in addition to turning a profit you have to save the universe.
If Gigantes is still active when time expires, then the Stadium automatically becomes Vs. Gigantes, the Gigantes player against all the others in a big dire battle. Like this (3 minutes):
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Presenting Wigglewood here is kind of a cheat, I suppose. It has the aesthetic of an old VGA MS-DOS game, with voice acting supplied on CD-ROM, but it’s really more of an animated fantasy cartoon. Its DOSness is more of a stylistic choice than something that really connects it with the world of interactive eclectic electronic entertainment (with the slightly fitting acronym IEEE).
But they’re fun anyway, and if I’m breaking the rules I was the one who set them to begin with. Here is The Quest, which finally advances whatever flimsy plot this series could be said to have. (2 minutes)
So the villain the barbarian and wizard are chasing is Wormdahl after all. Funny, although he hangs out with a succubus he doesn’t really seem that evil, even, as this video shows us, he has a vampire friend. He probably should find better friends. (also 2 minutes)
When these two groups finally meet up they’ll probably get into a slap fight, or maybe stub each others toes. I can’t wait.
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?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A few years ago, former long-time voice of Mario, Luigi and Wario, and current Nintendo “brand ambassador,” Charles Martinet posted some amusing videos on Instagram, of him playing around with some figures of the plumbers and improvising their voices during his vacation in Chile. At the time I found them charming! I don’t know about others? The posts have been preserved here (10 minutes), but they aren’t the point of this post.
SuperStaticPro made some Source Filmmaker animations that repurposed the audio into little vignettes. I also like them, and they are the point of this post.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This week’s subject: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
The first LoZ didn’t have much ROM space for whimsy, but every Zelda game afterward made sure to spare some space, and time, for goofy characters.
Zelda II had Error and Bagu (a.k.a. “Bug”). Link to the Past had that bat that “cursed” you with a doubled magic meter. Link’s Awakening, basically, had everyone. And so forth.
One of the darkest Zeldas is Twilight Princess, the story of a lost race of Hyrule that was sealed away in a parallel dimension by its oh-so-helpful goddesses. But it’s also the game with Agatha the Insect Princess. And it’s the game with Malo.
After an unfortunate fate happens to Kakariko’s shopkeeper, the town’s shop stands empty. Around that time Link rescues three children from Moblins, and the youngest is the surly Malo, whose baby-like appearance and stern expression contrast hilariously with each other.
As it turns out, Malo has plans for that empty shop, for when Link visits at a later time, it has turned into… Malo Mart (31 seconds):
Malo Mart is where Link can buy the Hylian Shield, but also the Magic Armor, a hugely powerful piece of protective equipment that converts damage Link received into rupee costs. As long as your money holds out, even the final boss can’t scratch Link, and, somehow, it’s all thanks to Malo.
In the half-minute video above from Patrick Alfred, Malo himself doesn’t actually appear, although that is his face is plastered all over the outside. The shopkeeper is an employee; Malo himself can’t see over the counter. I assure you though, the music in the video is directly from the game, in all its dubious glory.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I have a bit of fondness for the Chaotix, the oddly-named Sonic side characters, just because they’re so bizarre. They’ve never headlined a game themselves, and actually haven’t been playable that often, but they keep turning up.
They started out as helpers in Knuckles Chaotix, that bizarre 32X game that kind of played like Sonic, except instead of Sonic you had Knuckles, instead of Tails you had one of a randomly-selected number of weirdos including Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleion, Charmy the Bee, and also Mighty the Armadillo, and robotic challenge characters Heavy and Bomb. And also, you were connected by a chain, that made playing something like having your fingernails pried off.
The Chaotix Detective Agency. What idiot decided these loonies should have a private investigator’s license? Espio (purple) tries so hard to be cool, with his anime poses and his spiked wrist and ankle bands; Vector (green) looks tough but is really friendly; and Charmy (yellow) is a goofball.
The nebulous word “Chaotix” was declared in Sonic Heroes, the other major game where Vector, Espio and Charmy are playable, to be the “Chaotix Detective Agency,” where they presumably make their anthropomorphic animal living hunting down child support evaders and doing miscellaneous disreputable work. After that, they’ve stuck around as bit players in the Sonic saga, always on the sidelines but frequently present. After all, the Sega All-Stars Racing games need bunches of characters to match Mario’s populous cast, and the Chaotix help to do that.
So, there’s these two reptiles and an insect that hang out with Sonic and pals for some reason. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and i guess a third unspecified person) are a crocodile, chameleon and bee.
Early concept art of Sonic in a band, with a bunch of forgotten animal friends, and what may be Vector’s first appearance. Look out for that guitar-playing chicken Sonic, he wishes you ill!
Yet, I like them! They’re nuts! If your world is gonna have anthropomorphs in it, that no one questions the existence of, then there should be more than just the heroes. That’s who the Chaotix are: True Neutral hangers-on in the Sonicverse. If they make a Sonic 4 movie they rightfully should be in it, although I wouldn’t put any money on it in any way at all. Also, I like that, addition to wearing headphones constantly, when tall and thin Vector jumps and spins, he becomes a loop.
I don’t care what you say, that’s just cool.
So we move on to the videos. In this animatic (1½ minutes, by sideofmeggs, audio by Jehtt) they ponder their existence in a way they’re never allowed to do in the games.
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).
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
(grumble grumble… stupid WordPress…)
PES is an acclaimed and Oscar-nominated stop motion animator. They’ve done terrific work. One of their videos is game-related, and additionally references classic-era arcade games. Have a look (1½ minutes):
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.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So, Deltarune Chapter 4. After the mostly-comical adventures of Kris, Susie and Ralsei through three alternate-world dreamscapes, the fourth got a lot darker with the revelation that there’s an entity trying to revive Titans, huge evil monsters that could rip up the world.
During the battle with a Titan near the end of the chapter, a point is reached in the fight where none of your attacks can get through its defenses. That is where Susie, the bruiser of the group, has her idea.
You aren’t told what the idea is, it just shows up in the menu as Susie’s Idea and a little graphic of her face. Selecting it is necessary to win the battle; it causes Susie to grab Kris and jump directly into the Titan, reckless behavior sure, but that’s just who Susie is. And it works!
