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.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Submitted for your perusal: a version of classic game tune The Death That I Deservioli, the epic Lap 2 music from Pizza Tower that plays if you’re cocky enough to ignore the exit gate and be transported to the end of the level to escape again within the time remaining.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Two items this week. One is this simple yet charming video of someone who made a crank organ (festooned with plush parrots and a decorative octopus) and configured it to play the ending music, titled simply “Staff Roll,” to Super Mario 64. It’s very nice to listen to, and it’s only about three minutes long. Please enjoy!
The other thing? Oh, the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, which released to theaters a couple of weeks ago, finally hit Youtube. Everyone probably knows that already! It didn’t to badly in theaters (I saw it there myself for the first time), but now that it’s on Youtube the saga Pomni and her friends in their weirdly video game-like world is over. There’s laughs, quite a bit of sadness, and a hopeful tone at the end. I greatly enjoyed it! If you haven’t seen it yet here it is (58 minutes).
Will we ever see the Circus and its denizens again? Who knows? Creator Gooseworx has said she’s tired of working on it, but she seemed to leave open the possibility that production company Glitch could do something. The characters are interesting and unique, and we should be happy with what we have. But who knows?
One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.
It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Welcome to our establishment! The special for the day is this weird but fun 13-year-old stop motion video, by Legobuilder9000, reproducing a number of video games but Legofied. It’s not perfect (I noticed the Pac-Man ghosts behaving in an unghostlike manner), but an entertaining thing to glimpse through of a Sunday morning. (5 minutes)
For dessert, an even older but gooder 17-year-old stop motion animation, also recreating classic games, made by the legendary PES. (1½ minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Bandai Namco has yet another new Pac-Man cartoon series, I think this is the fourth? This one is a monthly series of short (not Short) Youtube videos called Snack Breaks.
Namco’s commissioned a bunch of sidelines based on their characters. Anyone else remember Shiftylook? None of them seem to last for long, and they seem to have no interest in preserving them. This one’s a series of Youtube videos, and while videos there are by no means guaranteed to last indefinitely, so long as they get even a trickle of views they seem to last.
I’m full of little observations of these cartoons, the result of an obsession with Pac-Man that began for me in third grade. Like, there’s no Ms. Pac-Man in these, due to B-N retconning her out of Pac-continuity due to GCC’s co-ownership of that game. However, in the trailer, we do see Professor Pac-Man, which is much further from Namco’s ownership since they didn’t make any of that game.
Then there’s the ghost’s personalities. The arcade game, of course, gave them different personalities from their programming (as delineated by the terrific Pac-Man Dossier), but different animated depictions of the ghosts (or “monsters,” in original parlance) tend to be inconsistent. The Saturday morning Pac-Man cartoon show made the Red monster Blinky, the most tenacious pursuer in the games, a coward, but the Orange ghost Clyde, the least threatening one, the leader of the group. While Snack Breaks matches the colors with the personalities a lot better, it makes the Pink monster (Pinky, of course) a girl. I have nothing against the chosen gender expression of a 16×16 pixel sprite, but I thought Sue was the girl ghost? Ah, but I guess Sue is also owned by GCC.
The animation’s pretty good, I’ll say that much. Pac-Man’s character design looks closer to Namco’s official art of the character. The telling details are the classic Mickey Mouse eyes and the orange gloves. (No Pac-Man animation has ever attempted to use Bally-Midway’s strange cabinet art as inspiration, see below.) There are a few nice jokes too (Pac’s cranky neighbor is great), but the pacing feels rushed in that way a lot of cartoons feel, like they’re trying to squeeze too much writing into too little time.
And so another attempt to cartoonify those evocative bits of 8-bit art has begun. Will they eventually be as neglected as Shiftylook became? Will future Pac-Man collections mine them for artwork, as Pac-Man Museum regrettably did for Ghostly Adventures? I can’t read the future, I’m not a Magic 8-Ball, but: signs point to yes.
A throwaway character in the first episode is Miru, from Pac-N-Pal! I hear that the official story from Namco is that she’s also one of the ghosts, but a friendly one, and who has with visible legs. (The standard ghosts have legs too! This fact is revealed in the intermissions of the original game!)
If you wish to compare it to Hanna-Barbera’s take, here’s an episode of the old SatAM show (11 minutes). And here’s some of Bally-Midway’s weird U.S. cabinet art for arcade Pac-Man, as referenced above. Try to imagine what an animation of this would be like:
Their newest pilot is heavily game-themed, so you can probably expect to see it return to Sunday Sunday eventually. Called “The Gameoververse,” it follows a team of hero-types that go out into the video game cosmos to prevent the good guys from winning, I think on the grounds that, if they win, their worlds cease to exist due to the player turning the game off or some such. Yeah, pretty much a similar premise to Reboot, if we’re honest, though there’s nothing wrong with that. (Wouldn’t the game world also cease to exist if it’s too hard and the player gives up? What about roguelike game worlds, that are generated anew whether the player wins or loses? Let’s see them make a Nethack episode, that would be something….)
Gameoververse (Wikipedia) was created by RubberRoss, and existed before as a web series from 2009, though with substantial differences. Notably the new version has music by former Rare musician Grant Kirkhope. We look forward to seeing, should the pilot be picked up, the continuation of its story.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
May 22nd is the launch date of the remarkably anticipated Bubsy 4D, the most looked-forward-to Bubsy game since, well, since Bubsy 1. The franchise has been on a steady downward slope since the SNES/Genesis original, so it’s nice to see the character do good for a change, unlike literally every other original take the character had.
The original Bubsy had instant deaths, leaps of faith and gameplay so frustrating that the nine lives Bubsy started with seemed insufficient. Its designers gave Bubsy Sonic-style speed but without his spin attack. Bubsy’s only means of attack was to jump on enemies but which were often off the screen when descending from jumps. I tried playing a bit of the original Bubsy a couple of weeks ago and it turns out the game was worse than I remembered.
Bubsy wasn’t entirely a failure in the marketplace so he got four sequels, not counting the one happening later this month. One was so terrible that it became a meme.
It was on the strength of that questionable success that Bubsy got a pilot for his own cartoon show. So let’s take a moment, or 28 minutes, to look back on it: the Bubsy that once was and could have been.
It was a time when lots of properties were getting one-episode days in the sun in the hopes of landing a series on Saturday mornings. They tried it with Battletoads and it failed a deserved failure. They tried it with Earthworm Jim and succeeded to the degree that it went to series, with an effort that many agree was pretty okay! Now it was Bubsy’s turn. What could possibly go wrong?
This, this is what could go wrong. With original commercials too.
I don’t want to heap too much scorn on the back of a 30-year-old pilot for a failed cartoon show. Its flaws now should be more than evident. Jokes are fired off much too quickly and have no room to breathe, and the sound design is confusing and hyperactive. Compare the Bubsy But lots of shows had problems like those. Earthworm Jim among them, but strong writing saved it. Compare either show to some classic Looney Tunes to get a sense of how far cartoons had fallen. No one expected SatMorn cartoons to measure up to the lushness of the Termite Terrace animators, but they could have slowed themselves down and had more faith in their gags.
By that point the writing was already on the wall for Saturday morning. A decades-long television tradition was on the way out, hurried on its way by cable channels that devoted themselves to showing cartoons all the time instead of just once a week. But at least it was allowed to linger a bit; a Saturday morning Bubsy show could have just killed it outright.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A comment says, Fludd was their favorite They Might Be Giants album, but that doesn’t quite work; Fludd’s from Super Mario Sunshine, the 3D Mario game after Super Mario 64.
Even so, Seanathan S has made quite the recreation. (3 minutes) No vocals, but if you know the song you can recognize the track that’s duplicating the syllables of the singing and sing along with the. Everything is intact, even down to Flansberg’s counterpoint chorus at the end.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Nintendo’s latest attempt to do something with their Mii characters just hit the Switch (and along with it, the Switch 2). The game is Tomodachi Life, and while, like its real-time counterpart game Animal Crossing, it’ll take time before we really know everything it has in store, whether it’ll blow all of its content on the first couple of days of play or if it has new scenes, conversations and items that it’ll unlock over time.
Miis originated on the Nintendo Wii game system, an extraordinarily popular game that, now, seems almost forgotten. Besides the odd Wii Sports sequel and Miis, it seems like there’s not a lot of the Wii’s innovations that have persisted into later systems. Maybe games with motion controls? We know the Switch and Switch 2 are capable of them, but not a lot of games are as enthusiastic about them as the Wii.
We can set aside the question of whether that’s a good thing or not, but to interject my own opinion, Miis, one of the defining features of the Wii, really should be utilized more. Remember when the whole internet was abuzz about them? Social media would be full of everyone’s takes on recreating celebrities or comic characters with Nintendo’s limited yet oddly expressive tools. The Wii showed them off in a number of ways. The Mii Channel downloaded random Miis from other users Wii systems, and the Check Mii Out Channel provided a way to show your creations off to other users. Both of these sharing methods are defunct now, even if you have an operational Wii. They could well stand to make a come back, but who knows if Nintendo will ever think to do so.
Beyond that, there was a secret code that let you upload Miis into a Wii Remote. And now, on the Wii-U and Switch systems, you can upload single Mii into an Amiibo figure at a time, a trick I used to rescue our entire Mii collection from my Wii-U… but more on that story later.
Louie Zong, Youtube musician and comedy creator, posted a tribute to the Mii Channel a couple of weeks ago. (3 minutes) If you had a Wii, it’s certain to bring back memories. Maybe even fond ones.
