The Flipside of Gaming
Pringus McDingus’ recent video “Kirb” makes me hope he’s okay. It’s a more realistic take on Kirby, but not in the sense of showing us their skeleton, figuring out their digestive system works or giving them human feet. You’ll see.
Kirb (Youtube, 1 minute) – On Newgrounds
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Usually Sundry Sunday is for things related to games, not games themselves, but this is fun and random so why not?
The WarioWare people have made some weird games. Nowadays they seem to be focused on realizing the software products of Mario’s moneygrubbing alter ego and his disreputable gang of sorta-friends, but they have another series, Rhythm Tengoku, known in (some) English speaking territories as Rhythm Heaven.
Every single Rhythm Heaven game is a joy, from Karate Man to the Final Remix, but my favorite is probably Packing Pests, a.k.a. Pest Protectors.
Your onscreen surrogate is Employee 333-4-591032, working for the suspiciously-named Spider-Free Candy Company. And, well, see for yourself (three minutes):
No Rhythm Heaven mini game is much explained beyond its directions, but all of them tell a story by their details. Your character is a new hire. We know he works for Spider-Free Candy by the poster on his wall when the Wii version is played in widescreen. We know he’s creeped out by spiders by what happens if you accidentally clutch one or let one by your guard. And going by their faces we know the spiders try to leap into the box out of a manic kind of joy. They aren’t hostile! They just live to give you a hug, and to leap into boxes so as to give random other people hugs! Sadly, the demands of capitalism, and by that those of your paycheck, are to deny them in their life’s purpose.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A few weeks back we posted a fun stop-motion animation of Louie, the hunger-driven sidekick and alternate leader character from the game Pikmin 2, hosting a cooking show in which he tried to prepare a Bulbear for eating. It didn’t go well, because Bulbears in Pikmin 2 spontaneously come back to life if not harvested quickly. Oops!
Well sponsors Hocotate Freight didn’t learn their lesson, and there’s now a second episode of Cooking With Louie. Word of advice: it’s best not to use live alien lifeforms as your method of roasting the dish.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We linked a couple of weeks back to the Pirhana Plants on Parade music in an early level of Super Mario Wonder. Here are well-written and executed fan-made lyrics for the song, presented along with the level. It reads and sounds like something Nintendo’s own localizers might have made! Please enjoy:
Pirhana Plants on Parade With Lyrics (Youtube, one minute)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We haven’t covered anything of the exquisitely-made Youtube animation series A Fox In Space yet. Probably someday. But as it was just released and it’s really timely, here is Wolf O’Donnell reacting to Fox and crew’s costumes. CW: bleeped profanity.
Peppy is Beetlejuice? What?
A Fox In Space: Are You Guys Trick or Treating? (Youtube, 36 seconds)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s been a while since we checked in with Eggpo, from “Two More Eggs,” that series the Brothers Chaps (creators of Homestar Runner) made for Disney XD or sommin like that. In case you forgot, Eggpo is the species of these eggplant people, whose job it is to attack the “good guy,” a.k.a. Dooble, who features in other TME videos.
Here, two Eggpos engage in the basic repetitive patterns entailed by their employment, without much success.
Eggpo: Waiting (Youtube, one minute)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’m going to be honest, I vary in my appreciation for TerminalMontage’s gaming-related Youtube animations. Sometimes I think they’re brilliant, other times I think they really try too hard to be edgy. At their best they use the purposely-janky animation to make a point about the subject. Previously I’ve linked to their Breath of the Wild “speedrun” animation, where some of the things that would ordinarily be kind of lolrandom inclusions were actually, amazingly, references to things players do in actual speedruns.
I think the pinnacle of their output has to be their depiction of the events of The Typing of the Dead, Sega’s side-sequel to The House of the Dead 2, which took that lightgun zombie-shooting arcade game and grafted a typing trainer onto it. It was one of the most memorable game experiences I’ve ever seen, not just for the crazy premise that entirely works, not for the ludicrous power of its word list, but because the boss fights were each reworked to fit into the style, and forced players to answer questions with the keyboard, or type ludicrous sentences to try to mess them up.
There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead takes the game’s premise and reworks it as if villain Goldman was a 4chan-style vomiter of memes, right down to having an Anonymous mask, and as such makes for a more effective villain than the actual game had. The computer-synthesized voices for the characters are on a par with the terrible voice acting in the game. Most of all, I’m pleased for the unexpected use of Whomst’d’ve at the end.
Now that I’ve finally managed to squeeze this video into Sundry Sunday, I look forward to never mentioning memes here ever ever again.
Something About the Typing of the Dead [Loud Sound Warning] (Youtube, 4 1/2 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This is a very short animation with a couple of Pizza Tower characters. It’s a mere triffle, and the joke’s pretty silly,but it’s spot on, of the game’s style, and in the appearance of an early 90s cartoon show, of the type that the game’s animation itself seeks to emulate. It’s gotten an absurd number of views, like nearly half a million, in six days. Now, maybe it will get a few more.
Pizza Tower Cartoon (Youtube, 25 seconds)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Under the category of lushly-produced silly game-related things, from four years ago, there’s Snailchan’s Adventure. It’s not very serious at all, but it’s a fun use of four minutes of your time. The comments mention that there was an actual game based on this animation planned, but I’m not aware of anything having ever come of it. Still, this is nice in and of and by and through itself. I don’t know if it actually was on Newgrounds at some point, but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that would have been featured there at some point, and it was right after a bit of exploration there that Youtube’s recommendation algorithm decided to show it to me, so it probably had been there, in the past-past.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Newgrounds, that hotbed of gaming stuff for twenty-eight years now, which suggests to me that it might be better called Oldgrounds by now, but that is not here, there, nor anywhere. This video, from user PoultrygeistGame (I have not checked if that is on their driver’s license, if they have one), is about Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, and how difficult it is to properly deduce the general opinion of that fandom of its series just from the content. Here is the video, for which I have to try using a new form of embed in order to present here, since Newgrounds embedding isn’t as automated as is with the Tube of You. Note: contains profanity, if that is of concern. Also alludes to certain unhealthy aspects of online culture. You’ll see.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Over on Newgrounds, Yespeace1 remade the opening to the classic 3D Lucasarts adventure game Grim Fandango in Blender. They adhered to nearly everything about the original, so don’t expect a tremendous amount of improvement, but when the first version was so great anyway that hardly matters. The Youtube version is linked below, since it’ll embed here cleanly.
Grim Fandango Resurrected, on Youtube and Newgrounds (3 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Pikmin 2 introduced Olimar’s disreputable underling Louie. (Their names are an in-joke: “Olimar” is mostly the syllables in “Mario” in reverse order, and Louie thus references Luigi.)
Whereas Olimar is mostly trying to get home, or else earn money to pay off his company’s debts, Louie is mostly along because he’s a working stiff, or else perhaps because he loves the taste of planet PNF-404’s native wildlife. Olimar’s entries on the creatures in Pikmin 2’s Piklopedia take a naturalistic, even scientific, style, Louie’s mostly concern the best way to prepare each beast for the dinner table. It a humorous little detail, and one of Pikmin 2’s most charming elements.
Wooden Turtle on Youtube has made a stop motion animation of a new cooking show on Hokotate television featuring the starfaring chef, titled Cooking With Louie. But sadly it doesn’t go that well, due to the regenerative properties of one of the critters being prepared. And someone should get those camerapikmin unionized immediately.
An extra: from Napkins X, a line of Pikmin dancing to everyone’s favorite decade-old dance hit.