Category: sundaysundry

Sunday Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episode 4

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

Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.

I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.

Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.

Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.

Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?

Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!

Sundry Sunday: Microcomputers: An Introduction

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

From Periscope Films, a video preservation group that rescues niche short subjects from destruction and obscurity to be enjoyed by all. Many of their videos are of old army training videos or newsreels or the like, but there’s a deeper variety of subject there, waiting to be found. And one of them was a cartoon fro 1982, to introduce kids to the idea of microcomputers.

A microcomputer is an old name for small (compared to mainframes, and desktop-size minicomputers) computing devices made for home use in the 70s and 80s. You still see it once in a while, but it’s given way to just the term “computer,” especially since even some gigantic information companies mostly use clusters of consumer-class PCs, or else pay Amazon to use simulated computing power of that type. The word “microcomputer” was most often applied to machines like the Apple II, the Commodore PET or the like.

In this cartoon (17m), Jennifer is a girl living on a farm and has a gigantic chunk of microcomputer sitting on her desk, and introduces its use to her technologically-clueless visiting city cousin Jack.

It’s amazingly cringey, and perfect to show to friends and acquaintances, both students of what the Subgeniuses call badfilm, and more normal types who have been suitably psychologically altered.

Jack has bigger problems than scoffing at technology, like getting his eyes to focus.
Jack would grow up to become Jon Arbuckle
“Keep looking! It’s back there somewhere!” Jennifer then sneaks off to smoke weed.

In addition to Jennifer helping Jack learn how to use a computer that has 64K of RAM, tops, they also use it to catch a bank robber, by trapping her in their completely automated dairy barn (that contains no cows).

Sundry Sunday: The Animations of WiggleWood

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

WiggleWood is a Youtube channel that produces humorous short videos with an old-school computer vibe. They could be cutscenes from an old Sierra adventure. None are very long (the longest us under two minutes), but are entertaining enough to have a look at. Here are all five to date:

The Wizard’s Gummy (43s), what is the nature of his system of divination?

Magician’s Brick (31s), who is “Wormdal?” Later videos imply that he’s a wizard too.

The Dark Summoning (45s), here’s Wormdal. He doesn’t seem to be exceptionally evil though, just lonely.

The Magic Lamp (1m43s): The barbarian and the wizard again. It’s best to watch your tongue in matters concerning genies.

And the last one currently, The Cursed Throne (1m47s). Wormdal and the demon lady seem to have reached an accord of sorts. It’s nice to see old enchanters making new friends.

Sundry Sunday: Moving In

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

In Breath of the Wild, Link can buy and furnish a house on the edge of Hateno Village. In Tears of the Kingdom, it’s revealed that in the interim between games Zelda’s moved into that house in the absence of Hyrule Castle. But it doesn’t seem that Link lives there anymore (he can construct a new house outside of Tarry Town). How did that happen? What went down between the two games?

ColaBear, who makes fun Zelda videos generally, speculates on this event in a 2 1/2 minute video:

Moving In (Youtube, 2 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: The Offspring’s 8-bit Styled Music Video

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

The Offspring are a punk band best known to our readers as contributing, along with Bad Religion, some of the iconic soundtrack to Sega’s Crazy Taxi. This game-themed music video from them, to their song The Kids Aren’t Alright, is very short at only a minute an a half, but it’s not a bad use of that short period of time. Here:

Looking up The Offspring reveals they got their start way back in 1984. Wow! I had assumed they were founded a lot more recently than that! They’ve also had a fair bit of member churn over the years, with one member who was ejected during COVID for refusing to get vaccinated. The song in the video is a remix of one of their older hits, and actually predates Crazy Taxi.

The Offspring – The Kids Aren’t Alright (8-bit video version, Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: DK Rap Remixed by Kirkhope and Substantial

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

People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).

We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:

Sundry Sunday: Ganon Complains About People Spelling His Name With Two ‘N’s

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

BitFinity, aka Matthew Taranto, the guy who made the long-running webcomic Brawl in the Family, has kept busy since with making Youtube songs. In addition a number featuring Waluigi, and one with Aeris from Final Fantasy VI, most recently he’s made one starring Ganondorf complaining about people who spell his name wrong, and who also takes the opportunity to dress down peoples’ issues with game language and pronunciation more generally. (3 minute)

Sundry Sunday: Supper Mario Broth’s Mario Compilation Video

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

The maintainer of awesome Mario obscurity site Supper Mario Broth has had a hard time of things lately. Their mother died and send them into a spiral of emotional and economic uncertainty, which the community helped out by generously contributing to their Patreon.

As part of their thanks, they posted a Youtube video to answer the question, “What is Supper Mario Broth?” and it’s, well…

It’s great! And very, deeply weird! And it’s only 2 1/2 minutes long! Every image comes from some point in Supper Mario Broth’s rich and aromatic history, and it’s a masterpiece of meme imagery. It’s here:

Every rapid-fire clip in the video is worthy of pausing on and zooming into. It’s incredibly dense! Please enjoy, perhaps with the benefit of the mind-altering substance of your choice. And here’s only a few images from the video:

Sundry Sunday: Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney

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

Chessete‘s video series Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney is a series of dumb statements made by lawyers animated in the style of the Ace Attorney Games. Many of them are even stupider than the statement I just made. Here are just the first two.

The first (3 1/2 minutes):

The second (4 minutes):

The rest can be found in this playlist (9 videos)!

Sundry Sunday: Foolish Phoenix Wright

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

A scene from the career of Phoenix Wright: an encounter with the brilliant, although linguistically-challenged, Franziska Von Karma. It’s from Mornal, and voiced, and Franziska animated, by Paula Peroff. One minute.

Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episodes 1-3

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

We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.

(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)

I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.

Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.

At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.

The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.

So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.

The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:

Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:

Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger: