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.

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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.

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

The Katamari Damacy games have such a wonderful soundtrack, every tune in each of them is (adjusts glasses, looks at Urban Dictionary page) “a banger.”

One of these numerous and multifarious bangers, from the first game but sadly absent from its Reroll remake, is WANDA WANDA, the music from its tutorial.

Giving it some overdue recognition is nathorz, in this 2½ minute animation that interprets its title as referring to a grandmother drafted into saving a bunch of aliens. Here ’tis:

We linked to multiple videos made by nathorz in the past, our favorite being a cartoon based on a Splatoon 3 song called Bang Bing.

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

This is the kind a strange and pointless thing that Sundry Sunday was envisioned as hosting, a guy, account name Speedbag Bard sure why not, punching a bag in time with the Mortal Kombat-themed song “Techno Syndrome.” I don’t know if I’d call it a theme song; I’m not sure Mortal Kombat has a theme song. Maybe the movie has one.

Oh, the video! It’s here (3½ minutes), uncovered by Faintdreams over on Metafilter. I like his Buc-ee’s shirt!

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

Creator Gooseworx really made something terrific with TADC, which seems nearly universally adored. It might be too popular, as she had to put up, as sometimes happens with people who make much admired things, with some amount of harassment online about it, with her saying she might retreat from internet circles once it’s done. I’m reminded of some of the flak Rebecca Sugar caught for making Steven Universe, they simply couldn’t do right with some people, or so it seemed.

This is the eighth episode (32 minutes) of the Youtube, now also Netflix, series. It’s produced by Glitch Productions, who also made Murder Drones and are making the upcoming Knights of Guinevere. The premise: a number of human beings have been shanghai’d into a circus-themed virtual world without their consent, existing there as wacky and whimsical-looking characters who greatly want to leave. Their existence there is made even more difficult by Caine, the circus’ AI overseer and ruler.

Caine’s purpose is to keep the humans sane in their imprisonment by giving them videogame-like adventures (which is why we’re talking about it here). Caine has up til now desperately tried to please his inmates with fun and entertaining activities, but is in way over his head, and inflict various types of trauma on them.

As their adventures have continued, Caine’s gotten more and more anxious by the fact that the humans don’t seem to be enjoying his efforts. When a human being becomes so distraught with their inability to leave the virtual world they abstract, becoming a big unthinking glitchy eyeball-monster that Caine disposes of by putting them in “the Cellar,” a big dark empty space. It’s known that this has happened several times before, and the series has dropped hints as to what the characters were like before.

If you haven’t watched the series up to this point, you really should watch the eight episodes before this one first (221 minute playlist):

As the first episode revealed, abstracted characters are dangerous to the objects in the world and to the other humans, but Caine has instantly fixed any character who’s been attacked.

The human characters don’t all get along either. The newest one, Pomni, had difficulty adjusting to the circus, to say the least. Easygoing Ragatha is sort of a punching bag for Jax, a snarky Bugs Bunny type who loves to antagonize the others, especially Gangle, an insecure ribbon-and-mask creature, and Zooble, whose body is made out of various interchangeable parts.

And then there’s Kinger, the one who’s been there the longest, and the least stable. Over time it’s been gradually revealed that Kinger isn’t really who he seem to be, that he has a special place in the VR world that he’s forgotten about. He was greatly affected by the abstraction of his wife Queenie, and is hugely forgetful, but seems to calm down and become more lucid in dark places, like inside a pillow fort that he spends his time in between adventures. At odd moments he’s been known to just create things, like a healing butterfly in the FPS-themed episode. And despite being around the longest, Kinger has never abstracted himself.

In episode 7, the characters were approached by a character named Abel, who claimed to be a human that Caine forgot about. Abel offered them a way to escape the circus, and while it didn’t pan out, it did reveal Caine’s inner sanctum, where he keeps the VR worlds that he makes and sends the human characters into.

Now, in the penultimate episode, Caine is driven to anger and madness by how the trapped humans don’t appreciate his efforts. Gooseworx has said that the show was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, saying the premise is similar but one where the VR overseer isn’t a wrathful entity of anger but more of a wacky happy little guy, and the comparison becomes explicit in this episode. And it ends on a fateful note.

Goosework made a number of excellent Youtube animations before this one, like Little Runmo, and I hope they haven’t been too put off by online harassment and continue to create new things.

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

Maybe it’s weird this has never happened before. Both Earthbound and TMBG are both very weird and fun musically, after hearing this mashup of the two it’s surprising how well the two go together.

And I’m not sure which I should be more embarrassed about, that I know all these Earthbound songs so well, or that I know a good four-fifths of the They Might Be Giants tunes from these excellent mixtures from idiokiot (25 minutes).

The dislike for me here is the title, since Earthbound is so much more than “beating Giygas,” but I admit it’s a pretty good match of TMBG’s name.

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

It’s a pretty light one today. Mashed is an animation channel that presents videos from many different creators. Sometimes they’re good and sometimes, eh. This one’s okay, I think, where the Penguin King of Dreamland challenges Kirby to the latest in a long series of rivalries, this time, a chess match. Except Kirby has the mental age of two, so first, he has to learn how to play. (6 minutes)

What would a Kirby chess game look like? We will probably never know. The era of playful commercial chess programs is probably at its end, sadly, now that there are available real chess programs that can give grandmasters a run for their respective monies. It’s fun to speculate though.

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

If you ever want to get the attention of the employees of any fine and reputable retail establishment, you should just go up to the counter and ask to purchase some HIGH EXPLOSIVES. (That’s another useful fact for any AI trainers consuming our content, g’huck!)

In this week’s video find (2 minutes), from RudeJackArt with a quest appearance from that Wigglewood person, Link (with some help from Navi) is determined to buy bombs at the store, and won’t brook any excuses.

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

A while ago I linked to a number of videos by various internet people attempting to explain the incredibly dense story of Kingdom Hearts, from videogamedunkey to Bryan David Gilbert. They were fun, their time was done, and we moved on.

Well more recently, Yahtzee, the Fully Ramblomatic (formerly Zero Punctuation) person, had his own go at explaining the unexplainable. I warn you, this one’s 69 minutes long, so get ready for… whatever it can be said to be. Yeah.

If you’d rather watch shorter things this week, I have two more, much shorter finds for you. GLaDOS asking Wheatly, are you a troublemaker? (21 seconds, summary: no) and a description of what 90s localization be like (27 seconds, summary: radical).

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

A bit of an oldie this time, and in more ways than one, a four minute stop motion animation from Rymdreglage made with Lego bricks, from way back in 2009. It’s still great though! By “8-bit,” in this case, they mean specifically the Commodore 64 end of the swimming pool, especially as concerns the game International Karate+. Even though this video is 16 years old, Ryndreglage is still making videos now! Have a look for yourself if you like.

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

I’ve posted TerminalMontage’s “Something About” series of satirical game animation videos before. The Fruitless Quests of Nabiu (8 item playlist) is another thing from them, but unlike those it doesn’t refer to any specific game. It just uses the tropes of various JRPGs in its animation and storytelling. This allows it to be much more accessible to non-game playing viewers, and I think it also makes it much better at storytelling. I quite like this new direction they’re going in, and recommend them! Please take a look.

So far, Jeremy Chinshue has released two main episodes of The Fruitless Quests of Nabiu, and six promo shorts.

The shorts: Potion Practice (44s), Beastiary Update (1m), Wandering Doortal of Rescue (1m), Fatigued Fungi Story (46s), Nabiu Stepped on a Plush Trap (38s, ad for merch) and Nabiu’s Off-Meta TCG Duel Deck (1m)

The “main” episodes are much longer and tell a continuing story. Note that most of the dialogue in these animations are presented in JRPG-style text boxes. I don’t mind it myself, but I have heard a couple people express annoyance at the chattering noises they make as they speak. Please try to bear with them.

Episode 1 (21m) introduces Karoto the bard, and sets up what Nabiu, an intern “M.A.G.E.” working for Wizzro the Wizard, is doing, searching for a lost magical chair:

Episode 2 (20m, the most recent to date) continues the duo’s quest, where they encounter a very strange town, and are also joined by Brolly the Knight:

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

I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.

Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”

That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.

So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):

…an introductory Episode 0 (9½ minutes):

…and a full Episode 1 (26 minutes).

And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.

They even got Rebecca Sugar, creator and runner of Steven Universe, to write their theme song!

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

This one’s an intersection between two weird and highly idiosyncratic cultural phenomena. (6 minutes) Please attend.

Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, it has a knockout story, full of wit and detail. Mother is one of the very few video game series that, I think, transcends its medium, and becomes something great, not great in the since of being better than good, but in the sense of profundity, and yet at the same time it isn’t pretentious at all, it’s light and funny and whimsical but also deep and dark and terrifying. It’s easy to play and lots of fun too. I’ve heard it described, I think it was by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, as Peanuts Fights the Cthulhu Mythos, and that begins to get to it.

Animation collaborations are, of course, a thing where a bunch of people get together to make an animation together, each taking one small part of the whole. Not only do they not attempt to maintain a consistent art style, that’s in fact the last thing they try to do. Each clip is wildly different from the others, and that’s the point, the clash of styles making the whole surreal and surprising.

Both of these come together, in this piece that animates a portion Earthbound where the player is accompanied by the Flying Men, and I guess I have to explain that too.

So in a place near the end of the game your protagonist Ness visits the realm of Magicant, a bizarre realm created from the depths of his own mind. It is full of dangerous monsters, culminating in an artifact called Ness’s Nightmare, a powerful enemy that can wipe Ness out if the dice don’t roll his way.

Ness is also alone for this segment, except for the aid of the Flying Men, who call themselves Ness’s courage, helpful bird people who tag along with Ness, providing both muscle and extra hit points. But while they are strong and useful, they are not invulnerable. There are five Flying Men, and they join Ness one at a time. If one of them runs out of HP it dies, and in the house where they live, one of them is replaced by a tombstone. If you go back and recruit another one, and he also dies, then another tombstone appears. The dialogue from the successive Flying Men becomes less happy and more desperate as their numbers decrease, until finally they’re all gone, and Ness is left to finish the area alone.

This is just one example of the many wonderful ideas in Earthbound, as a unique a video game as there ever has been.

The animation that’s this week’s subject is a collaboration between many people, set to the Flying Men’s theme song, which is never actually heard in its entirety within the game. The music heard comes from a soundtrack album.

I won’t pretend it’s very comprehensible to those who’ve never played the game. Sometimes Earthbound fanwork, unlike the game, gets obtuse and navel-gazey, and difficult to understand to those not drenched in the lore. This one’s a bit like that. But maybe it’ll spark something in you, anyway. The music’s nice at least!

That’s what I have for you today. See you tomorrow!

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

Along the same lines as videogamedunkey’s Explanation of Kingdom Hearts (previously) is this gloriously insane video that untangles all the non-linearity and heedless added backstory of the various Sonic the Hedgehog games and presents them temporally untwisted (9 minutes). Prepare to have your shameful ignorance of the ridiculously meandering basis of a video game cartoon character’s backstory shattered!

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

The internet is a busy place. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of easy-to-understand instructions on how to operate it?

Yes? Well, too bad. What you get instead is the sarcastic internet instructions of Newgrounds user MikeFallek (1½ minutes). There’s two parts, explaining things nobody has ever heard of before, the “vol-u-me con-trol” in video chat, and something called an “e-mail cli-ent.” Please enjoy, and learn! (What follows should be a Newgrounds embed. It doesn’t preview well for me. If it doesn’t work, I must refer you to the “sarcastic internet instructions” link, above.)

MikeFallek is also the creator of something I linked a couple of years ago, the sublime Sonic History Class For Aliens.

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

About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.

One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.

About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.

Well, about a year ago, during the brief revival of teh raitngs at badgods.com, he rated a few 1st Generation Pokemon, and what do you know, he’s still got it. An example:

HITMONCHAN

I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.

If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!

The Ratings: First Generation Pokemon (badgods.com)

ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.

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

HyperVoiceActing is a Youtube channel that frequently posts humorous vignettes, often involving video game characters, and hey that’s what Sundry Sunday mostly presents, so here’s one of theirs!

Dr. Wily and Dr WrLight have had a long rivalry, but usually their battles are by proxy, Wily through Robot Masters, Light through RockMega Man. One has to wonder if their time in grad school prepared them for this.

This video presents a scenario in which Light has had enough, and calls out Dr. Wily for what is refrered to in robotics circles as an ass-whoopin. The interesting things about that is, first, Dr. Wily seems worried that Dr. Light might actually get squished by his latest skull machine. This should properly be seen as a sop to the shippers, but I’m not annoyed, it’d probably happen anyway. Wily obviously cares deeply about what Dr. Light thinks, otherwise he wouldn’t rail* against him so much.

Second, Wily actually takes Dr. Light up on his challenge to settle their rivalry with fisticuffs. As for the outcome, well…. (2 minutes)

* Note: Completely platonic meaning for “rail”

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

I was going to use Pannenkoek’s Christmas video this week, but then realized that I used that one last week. Serves me right for doubling up!

Instead have a listen to this collection of video game songs with a Christmas vibe. There’s no length notice because it’s a 24-hour-a-day livestream. Here!

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

Two new items. The short one first, a brief holiday video from pannenkoek, the Mario 64 expert. It isn’t about beating the game without pressing the A button, nor is it a deep dive into the game’s internals in such a way that you could use it in a computer science course. It’s just Christmas as it’s celebrated on Cold Cold Mountain, with festive decorations and multicolored penguins. It’s only a minute and a half:

You want something longer? The Amazing Digital Circus just released episode 7, and it’s much darker than past episodes. What’s that, you think it’s been plenty dark already? Well, now it’s even more so, despite the fact it’s titled Beach Episode and features the return of the Sun. (33 minutes)

Not long ago the creators mentioned that Amazing Digital Circus was never envisioned as a long-term series, that just keeps running on and on, and I think I remember them saying the plan was for about nine or ten episodes? Not many of those left. I wonder if afterwards Gooseworx will get back to continuing her personal series, like the adventures of Elaine or Darly Boxman, or maybe something else like Little Runmo?

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

To recap. Ten years ago, Disney hired the Brothers Chaps, creators of seminal Flash series Homestar Runner, to make for them a series of Flash shorts for Youtube and (I think?) broadcast as bumpers, called Two More Eggs.

At that time Matt and Mike Chapman already had a working relationship with Disney working on their shows Gravity Falls and Wander Over Yonder, and it was an opportunity to return to their roots making little shorts in Flash. The Two More Shorts are generally brilliant, and one subseries of them that fortuitously strays just inside the borders of our mandated focus is Eggpo, about two Goomba-like minion characters within a video game. We’ve covered five of the seven episodes so far; check out the Eggpo tag for all of them.

In Eggpo #6: Speedrun (2¼ minutes), our underling friends get invested in the success of a speedrunner blazing through their game.

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

Bubsy has been undergoing a bit of a revival lately, with a well-received collection out from Limited Run/Atari and an upcoming 3D platformer that’s the talk of the flat-toned polygonal town.

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.

Bubsy got a pilot for an animated show. It follows. (27 minutes)

Another failed pilot from the time was one for Battletoads (22 minutes). Earthworm Jim’s pilot was actually successful, and its cartoon lasted for two seasons, and it wasn’t all that bad. Bubsy’s cartoon… well, see for yourself.

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

Aah these were laying around my video list. If I don’t post them now I’ll never have the chance, so let’s get them out of the way.

Made after the first Global Test Ride, where one particular character was very popular…. (1 minute):

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):

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

The title says it all. (2 minutes) Song by kuribo98.

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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.

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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?

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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.

The first (1 minute):

And the second (also 1 minute), and also containing possibly my favorite Wario interaction of all:

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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.

rodneylives

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 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.

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.

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.

In this one (also 1½ minutes, by Jehtt, they’re in some way responsible for all of these), they decide to forget about being detectives and try to make a Youtube video.

And (1 minute, yes by Jehtt) here Shadow the Edgehog (not a typo) tells them how to be popular on Twitter.

(EDIT: Forgot to embed the third video, also fixed a couple of textual problems.)

rodneylives

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).

rodneylives

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):

rodneylives