That’s the title on the video. Here’s a link to it. (4 minutes) It’s played by “The 8-Bit Big Band,” and it’s pretty snazzy. Even if you haven’t heard the Mii Channel theme since your Wii left service, it’s a pretty popular piece of game music even now. The channel doesn’t post often, but they have a lot of bangers, relatively speaking.
Their video just before this one was a Klezmer version of Bonetrousle, Papyrus’s theme song from Undertale (5 minutes), with animation to boot, and that description is intriguing enough that I’m going to embed it here too.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
There are few websites that have blown themselves up as often as The Escapist. They were once a respected market for insightful games writing, but between going all-in on Gamergate and alienating their video content creation arm, I’m surprised their domain name doesn’t 404 by this point. I don’t mean this as speaking ill of anyone currently working there, as someone who’s almost never had what I’d call a steady job in games media I know you get the work where you can find it.
One of the casualties of The Escapists’ multiple destructions was a terrific series from Graham and Paul, two of the scrappy minds behind Loading Ready Run, who I’m shocked I haven’t mentioned more often in these electronic pages. The Escapist was a long-lived sequence that riffed, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style, the richly deserving category of video game cutscenes, especially those at the starts of games. As cutscenes are video intended to be consumed by an extremely broad audience of young, internet-saturated males, it contains some of the most bizarrely ridiculous animation ever stuffed into MP4 files, and during its time Unskippable mocked over 300 examples of it.
For a while Unskippable was only available in The Escapist’s archives. Then those disappeared, and they vanished from the internet, a victim of bitrot. But lately many (all?) of them have been uploaded to Youtube via the channel LRR Videogames, and a welcome revival it is!
Here are three selections from the list, just a taste of what you can find there.
The Darkness (Unskippable #7, 5 minutes) is an early classic from their work, a game I’ve never heard of (it doesn’t seem to be my kind of thing), but apparently got a sequel, which has also been riffed on Unskippable. It’s the source of a long-running in-joke in the series, “and that was the nth time I died,” of which all of the instances have been categorized here by some obsessive worthy.
X-Blades (Unskippable #14, 6 minutes) is the story of an extremely underdressed and annoying young lady, a treasure hunter who runs afoul of a magical artifact. But instead of being turned into a frog or killed outright she gets to have an adventure fighting monsters and stuff. On the cover of the game box she basically moons the observer, which should indicate the game’s intended audience. The game is named after her weapons, which are knives that are also guns. I guess that was enough to title a game after in that distant misty year of 2007.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Unskippable #133, 5½ minuites) is not the Genesis/Mega Drive classic 2D platformer, but one of Sega’s many attempts to present its trademark super fast gameplay in 3D. It was presented as a reboot of the series, with a backstory involving some kingdom and its princess, but it didn’t work out too well. Our hosts remark more than once that it seems to want to be a Final Fantasy game. This observer wonders why they haven’t tried making a 3D game with the kind of abstractified geometric terrain that makes the 2D games so much fun to watch. Maybe they have and I haven’t noticed. I also wonder why the movies have done so well. The world is full of mystery.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Tay Zonday was the Chocolate Rain guy (5 minutes, over 143 million views!), and his voice is still as deep as ever. He’s made a new song, (5½ minutes) with Dave Days and Gary Brolsmo, reminding us all about the long and strange journey the internet has carried us through. It’s only had 19 thousand views so far, but maybe we can do something about that?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of nonsense that Sundry Sunday was intended to showcase. I’m telling you, quality randomness like this don’t come down the intertubes that often. From TheIridiumic138, it’s just a bunch of clips from NBC television, that’s the National Broadcasting Company, but presented in the form of a WarioWare video game collection (3 minutes). It’s exactly as simple, as stupid, and as brilliant as that. It’s even filled with deep cuts like the old animated NBC peacock segments, which were before even my time! And it ends with a perfect Conan O’Brien bit to cap it off. You really have to see it to believe it, so why not watch/realize now:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
anothermartz made a couple of Parappa the Rapper videos that look and sound very close to the original, albeit in its remastered Playstation 4 incarnation. Listen these!
Note: anothermartz admits to the use of “AI” to match the texture of his voice to the originals. Even though they say it was an open source model and locally-hosted, this is usually a strike against an item for inclusion here, but I learned about it late. I considered scrapping the whole thing and starting over, but at 2:30 AM one wants to just conclude matters and get to bed.
The first one is more timeless and generally better, it stars the vaguely disreputable flea market denizen Prince Fleaswallow, teaching the young Parappa a bunch of questionable facts, as well as one that is, sadly, true. (2 minutes).
The other, also by anothermartz, is a lot more timely, replacing the put-upon Inspector Mooselini with Nigel Farage (2 minutes), the UK MP being investigated on corruption charges who’s so disliked and disrespected now that he called an election with mere months left to go in his term to stall that investigation, but as a result had to defend his office from a surprisingly credible threat from Count Binface, a joke candidate space overlord who would have been a much better MP than he has been. We only rarely touch upon political topics here, not for lack of interest but because they’re usually a distraction for us, with the whole retro/niche/indie thing, but this nicely aligns with gaming, so here you are.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Wario and Waluigi should need no introduction. (Wario shouldn’t anyway; Waluigi has not gotten most attention since the early 2000s.) After establishing them as the Nintendo-flavored version of “Bizarro,” we are informed by Michael McWhertor of Polygon that Camelot, the originator of Waluigi, had brainstormed up a wa-version of Peach too, which was rejected by Nintendo because they hate awesomeness.
Concept art of Wapeach, from Camelot originally, image from the Polygon article linked above.
It’s been two years since that article came out, and soon after fan material regarding this quasi-evil apparition began to appear. On DeviantArt (that place), user Niko–Neko has made to date 95 images of the princeless-waif, some just artwork, some comics, often involving her partners-in-wa, Wario and Waluigi. (Note: some images slightly NSFW, nothing explicit, but there’s at least one image where she’s wearing her cape and little else.)
I’ll leave you to explore Niko–Neko’s renditions of her hapless adventures on your own, as they’re not the actual point of this post, not directly at least. Instead, I invite you to partake in gawking at GabaLeth’s playlist of eight of those comics with voice-acting. (Total length about 4½ minutes)
I now leave you to dream about lovably incompetent dark princesses and the things they might do to you if they got you in their clutches. “Yow, it hurts so good! How may I serve you, oh Mistress of Darkness….”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This video’s from Dorkly (3 minutes), which isn’t a source I often link from, but what I can say I’m a sucker for mockery of all this “AI” awfulness being foisted upon all us by every large tech company. Also its pretty well-written, and hey, Dr. Eggman has a terrific Bluesky account too (not related to Dorkly as far as I know, also I think I linked to it before but I’m looking for an excuse to mention it again).
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This week it’s simple. It’s easy. I won’t say it’s pure, I won’t insult your intelligence by going that far, but I will insult your intelligence with a video game music done in the Seinfeld theme song style round up. Let’s go.
Note that these are game music compositions done in the style of the Seinfeld theme. A different category would be the Seinfeld theme done in the style of different games. That I will leave for some other time.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Porky Draws gives us (by which I mean, gives the world, not us particularly, we’re just pointing to it as usual)an epilogue to the Banjo-Kazooie games (2 minutes) where persistent enemy Gruntilda (who is active and alive and everything) casts spells on Banjo and Kazooie’s internet connections. It’s pretty short, but I feel the effort should be recognized for the excellent Gruntilda voice and keeping her words in rhyme. (The worst thing about Banjo-Tooie, other than it being way too big and convoluted as well was that they dropped Gruntilda’s rhyming dialogue.)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s another Legend of Zelda related video. The subtitle (in Japanese) of the Famicom game was “The Hyrule Fantasy,” and so is the title of this two minute animation from OUSM.C. (2 minutes)
Fantasy is a devalued currency these days. Light and beauty have given way to swords and fighting monsters. It’s hard not to blame Dungeons & Dragons for at least part of this, but The Lord of the Rings series put a heavy weight on war and battles over wonder, and the many other things people have appreciated about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades.
I appreciate this video for being focusing on the small moments of the Zelda series, even though, as a video game, it’s mostly been about slaying monsters and collecting items than taking a moment out to enjoy an alternate world, at least until Breath of the Wild came out.
