The Flipside of Gaming
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):
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
As I type this it’s about an hour and a half until my presentation on the history of Loadstar at Vintage Computing Festival Midwest 2025. I think I’m ready for it, but yeah, am I really? That’s the kind of question that sends me into a panic attack.
Since I’m so busy panicking, and because I’ve been on my feet for most of the day, I’m going to post something more random than I usually like. Sundry Sunday is themed around randomness, yes, but this is even more. This week I’m posting NATRAPS X FINAL (5½ minutes).
It’s one of those oh-so-very memeish videos where video game characters do various violent things to each other. I think I grew out of these videos… hm, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to into them. But it’s 16 years old, and both the internet and myself were a lot younger then. Maybe I would have liked it when it was new.
“NATRAPS,” if you haven’t noticed yet, is SPARTAN spelled backward. SPARTAN X was the title of the game that was released in the US as Kung Fu. Despite the name, it was absolutely not the last of these videos posted to the account of Bash4208. If you can bear it, look for more of them here.
I’ll have a report up on VCFMW 2025 soon.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So, Deltarune Chapter 4. After the mostly-comical adventures of Kris, Susie and Ralsei through three alternate-world dreamscapes, the fourth got a lot darker with the revelation that there’s an entity trying to revive Titans, huge evil monsters that could rip up the world.
During the battle with a Titan near the end of the chapter, a point is reached in the fight where none of your attacks can get through its defenses. That is where Susie, the bruiser of the group, has her idea.
You aren’t told what the idea is, it just shows up in the menu as Susie’s Idea and a little graphic of her face. Selecting it is necessary to win the battle; it causes Susie to grab Kris and jump directly into the Titan, reckless behavior sure, but that’s just who Susie is. And it works!
Susie’s Idea has become a meme, with at least enough standing to get its own Know Your Meme page. chorālunar made a Youtube video of many of these meme images with (mostly) quirky music, akin to the old collections of cursed images set to Earthbound music. It’s five minutes:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Something has come up. I’m no longer at DragonCon. This weird animation (3 minutes), another done in the style of an old DOS game, will have to suffice for this Sunday. I’d have trouble describing it anyway, so I’ll burn it today on a day where I really can’t describe much of anything.
I find this video hilarious. (1 minute) It does feature the vaguely upsetting image of a couple of cartoon anthropomorphs being devoured by predators, who are also cartoon anthropomorphs. Surprisingly safe for work… except for a couple of not-illustrated pieces of trivia.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The circus is back, the creation of wonderful Youtube animator Gooseworx and distributed by Glitch on Youtube and Netflix. We’ve linked to several of their past installments, for being obviously computer-game adjacent. It’s about a bunch of humans trapped in a virtual world, as cartoon characters, overseen by a well-meaning but generally hapless AI overseer.
Here are the previous times we’ve linked TADC: Episodes 1-3, Episode 4 and (with Wigglewood) Episode 5. If you aren’t caught up it might be a good idea to see the ones you’ve missed; if you’re new, you should at least watch the first episode to get a good idea of the situation and the characters.
So, that new cartoon (34 minutes). Fed up with trying to come up with interesting adventures for the trapped humans, ringmaster Caine just dumps a bunch of guns in on them and puts them in a standard first-person shooter scenario: everyone gets three lives, go ahead and kill each other. the stakes are pretty light because they can’t die, a fact understood intuitively by the most mischievous of the Circus’s inmakes, Jax.
Not many of the characters like Jax. He’s the most cartoon-like of the bunch of them, always teasing the others, sometimes relentlessly, and making them the butt of his jokes. He really leans into his animated reality, a Bugs Bunny figure (although one who hates cross-dressing). But it’s hinted that he hasn’t always been like that, that he lost a friend, a frog called Ribbit, to being abstracted, the closest a Digital Circus character comes to truly dying, turning into a big blob-like eyeball monster and then being sent by Caine to a dark place called The Cellar for the safety of the others.
It’s a fun episode, but also very dark. Of course, most Amazing Digital Circus episodes are that way. Here it is:
In response to Bowser’s “Peaches” song from the Super Mario Bros. Movie (the later one, not the 90s one), and a certain Smash Bros. announcement from a few years back, Alex Henderson Animation made a villain’s anthem for Donkey Kong’s (other) nemesis, King K. Rool, ruler of the Kremlings. My suggestion is to turn on subtitles; I’d never have understood all the lyrics without them. (10 minutes) The animation is pretty good for a small production.
I hope this isn’t spoiling anything by now, but just in case here’s a bit of space….
In Donkey Kong Bananza, King K. Rool is the secret final boss, and not only that but at the end of the game the Mario and Donkey Kong series kind of cross over, as the final level and boss fight are in New Donk City, which is attacked(briefly) by K. Rool, but saved by Donkey Kong and Pauline. I wonder if this explains why streets in NDC, in Mario Odyssey, bear the names of Donkey Kong characters?
Anyway, I guess the only real take away is Mario’s world has a long-standing problem with big reptilian megalomaniacs stirring up trouble. And big primates too, but sometimes they’re heroic. Come to think of it, Mario’s been a villain too, and in a Donkey Kong game….
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Nathorz is an animator who has made several videos that took game character noises and put them into humorous contexts. To date he’s made videos with the sounds of Luigi, Kirby, Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong. The longest of any of these videos is 1½ minutes, so they’re not going to eat up your day.
Most recently he made a video, again just a minute and a half long, with noises from various incarnations of Link and Zelda. Warning: this includes the old Zelda cartoon from the Super Mario Bros Super Show. Additional warning: includes a cameo from “Suaveamente Ganondorf” at the very end.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’m really dipping into the archives today, from long-time internet funnypeople Waverly Films comes a 15-year-old video hyping from Master Chief’s mercifully short singing career. It’s just a minute and a half long.
Waverly Films has been at the Youtube funny video business for a long time, and although it’s been five years since their last output, every once in a while their members put out something new, so we haven’t yet lost hope that we’ll see something new from them, someday.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)
That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!
Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!
An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)
As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’m a little late on this one, I was watching the end of SGDQ late last night. This week’s video is from deep i the files, a fan animation by Mario Ramirez of Wario stealing a statue from Bowser Jr. and Kamek. It’s pretty simple and disjointed, but watchable. It’s around 6 minutes long.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It was vitally important to tell all of you about Pugberto last week, I’m sure you’ll all agree. A couple of other items had to wait a week before I could present them to you.
The Amazing Digitial Circus has a fifth episode now. It got over 40 million views in a few days so there’s a good chance you’ve found it by now. Still though, here ’tis (25m):
The Amazing Digital Circus has merchandise, and some pretty amusing videos to sell it. There’s a new one of those too (4m):
Over on a much less trafficked portion of Youtube, the hapless heroes of the Wigglewood Tales have a couple of new videos too, The Bandit (2m):
And, the Mystic Emporium (2m):