Category: sundaysundry

Sundry Sunday: Elegy for Waluigi

Let’s explore further the Youtube archives of Matthew Taranto, a.k.a. BitFinity, a.k.a. the Brawl in the Family guy. Last time we met Eario, Janitor of the Mushroom Kingdom. Now we meet his supposed son Waluigi, who Nintendo themselves have never quite known what to do with, and sort of the breakout character of BitF.

Waluigi has long been excluded from the Smash Bros. games as a playable character, at beast appearing as an assist trophy. This video is his lament at his perpetual status as outsider, set to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which scans precisely with “Waluigi”:

In a way though, this video is an echo of an earlier song, a closer tribute to Hallelujah featuring Waluigi, which has sadly seems to have been taken off of Youtube, but lives on in a number of imitators that are easily searchable.

There’s quite a few other Waluigi videos, lying around Youtube like broken dreams. We’ll get to those in due time.

Sundry Sunday: Eario, Janitor of the Mushroom Kingdom

From the files of the old webcomic Brawl in the Family, which has been gone for years now but is still fondly remembered in some circles, and who’s website is still on the web for as long as Keenspot’s servers survive, is this voiced version of the story of Eario. You know, Wario is Mario with the M upside down, so Eario is Mario with the M… sideways. Kind of.

This working-class version feels like it’s a bit more in keeping with Mario’s blue-collar roots. He wasn’t always the hero of the Mushroom people, he was just a carpenter working on a construction site one day when a gorilla went crazy, grabbed a lady, and climbed a tall building. Mario’s had many adventures since then, and a lot of job changes. Eario is the Mario who wasn’t so lucky.

Sundry Sunday: Lego Dimensions has GlaDOS meet HAL 9000

Lego Dimensions was much too awesome for this decayed world. Sadly, many of its greatest moments were part of DLC locked to various figures you had to collect individually.

But if you had the right bits of plastic, you could witness moments of pop cultural crossover greatness. Witness then this meeting between Portal’s GlaDOS and 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s HAL 9000, with the voices of each, sort of interacting with each other in their various impersonal AI ways.

Sundry Sunday: The People’s Mario

Content warning: cartoon blood, violence against Goombas.

This one goes back a ways. I wonder how many people have viewed this in the past decade? It was popular enough once to get up to nearly half a million views, but who knows how many since its original upload in 2007?

A reference to the website of an ancient meme (it seems to have died in 2007), itself riffing on the white flag with a red star that goes up when Mario reaches a castle. This realistically-proportioned Mario ruthlessly smashes and crunches Goombas in a variety of ways, armed with the People’s Hammer, while stirring Russian choral music plays in the background. The video is a rendering of a Newgrounds flash animation, that seems to still be up, and even playable (I assume they’re just using a recording of a higher-quality rendering of the Flash file).

While Russia’s actions as of late are not a laughing matter (except perhaps in the sense of laughing at incompetence at war), we can separate the action in a 2007 meme from their current misadventures, right? Freedom for Ukraine!

Sundry Extra: The Comic Bardo Thodol

CW: Not game related, which is why it’s up as a Sundry Extra. Also, has to do with Tibet, so I’m probably now making the Chinese government allergic to this post, yikes.

Some years ago, around the web went this interesting and entertaining comic condensation of the Bardo Thodol, a.k.a. the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It had fallen offline since then, although if one searches for it it might turn up again. (Ah, I see it’s up on ultraculture.org.)

The Bardo Thodol is a guidebook for those who have just died, detailing what worlds (Lokas) a soul will wander through, as well as their ruling entities (Buddhas) as it searches for a place to be reborn, unless it can become liberated from the cycle of rebirth, slipping between the cracks and not having to do it no more.

Well, as web observers may have noticed, different sites have different levels of staying power than others. The original was self-hosted, meaning when its creator Thomas Scoville stopped paying his site’s server bills it evaporated into residual electric charges.

While big tech sites tend to keep things around only for as long as it suits them (witness Geocities), Google tools that have had a substantive presence (other than Google Reader) seem to persist for a little bit. Por ejemplo, Blogger is still up and functioning, at least for now. Another thing within Google’s domain, at least until some bean counter decides the company can be made slightly more profitable by deleting it, is Google Sites.

So, with the permission of Thomas Scoville, I have put up the Comic Bardo Thodol in a corner of my Google Sites space. Please enjoy reading about all the wonders and horrors that await you after you pass away. And in particular notice which pop culture image was chosen for Yama Raja, the Lord of Death!

Sundry Sunday: Commercial for Atari Mario Bros.

We love weird old game commercials from before (or in this case during) the crash, before games and game ads began skew quite so much towards the stereotypical tastes of teenage males, and before companies like Nintendo became such jealous guardians of their products.

And just look at all the effort that must have gone into this commercial! This isn’t just people sitting in front of a TV raving about a game, these actors are wearing costumes and running from puppet creatures on an actual set! And this may well be the first human actor to ever portray Luigi in front of a camera (he may look like Mario with his color scheme, but his hat says Luigi, and he’s calling Mario for help). It even calls back to the theme song of Car 54 Where Are You. It’s a shame that the game couldn’t possibly have moved enough units to justify this production.

Sundry Sunday: The “Music” of Crazy Bus

Remember Crazy Taxi? How they got licensed punk music from Bad Religion and The Offspring for it? Remember how awesome that was? I’m not even a music person mostly, but I could still recognize that the soundtrack of those games was special. (I’m talking about the arcade and Dreamcast versions-other versions may or may not have that soundtrack, probably due to licensing issues.)

You want to know what game doesn’t have a great sound track? Crazy Bus.

Crazy Bus is a homebrew Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game that was created as a test for the programmer’s BASIC compiler. It wasn’t meant to be a real game. As a result, its soundtrack is almost a masterpiece in cacaphony. Listen for yourself… but you’re going to want to turn the volume down for this one.

It’s awe-ful-some. I encourage you to play it for for friends, family, co-workers, prospective employers, random strangers and household pets. I’m certain nothing bad will come of it!

Sundry Sunday: Animal World Soccer

Oh no! As a New Year’s Day “treat,” today’s weird game video is Animal World Soccer! Despair and dismay!

A “game” for the Playstation 2, this amazingly cheap production has no Soccer-based play. Instead, it’s a collection of simple puzzles and activities bundled along with a 43-minute video file of some of the worst animation that this spectator has ever seen, and I’ve seen Paddy the Pelican!

How and why this was made is unknown to me. It’s an inexplicable artifact of an unknown process. Why is the entire video under-laid with that tension-filled drumbeat? Why are character designs so inconsistent? Why does it look like they outright stole the designs for Simba and Mufasa from The Lion King for their lions? Why do some animals go about on all-fours while others stand upright and wear clothes? None of these questions are answered. None of these questions have answers! You see folks, they just didn’t care.

Okay, there is a bit of an explanation….

This animation was produced by a company called Dingo Pictures. The game, which Destructoid called “the worst game ever made,” (which is a big claim, there’s lots of awful games), was produced by Phoenix Games, which only distributed to the European market.

There is certainly more to this story. But I can’t bring myself to dig into it.

Sundry Sunday: Mort Strudel’s Tales of Dwarf Fortress

It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Dwarf Fortress tales were the toast of the internet. They made the viral rounds in a way few things had before, or since for that matter, partly because of the downfall of community sites, especially Something Awful, that had gathered them together. That energy seems to largely gone into social media, and we’re all poorer for it.

But there are people who are still doing Dwarf Fortress stories, and that game is still as wonderfully deep and weird as it has ever been. Youtuber Mort Strudel does video playthroughs, and while he doesn’t release them quickly or often, he is consistent, and his work is interesting.

In particular I’d like to point out the saga of Chantedfins, over three-and-a-half hours of dwarven weirdness in nine videos.

If you’d like to jump to specific chapters, here’s direct links to all nine, with general descriptions of what each contains:

Part 1 (30m), founding, undead siege
Part 2 (31m), underground caverns, necromancy
Part 3 (32m), undead werellama
Part 4 (31m), tantrum, forgotten beasts
Part 5 (31m), the Observatory
Part 6 (15m), the Cursed Year
Part 7 (16m), forays against the goblins
Part 8 (14m), the mayor’s backstory
Part 9 (14m), the new age

Sundry Sunday: Christmas Nights Into Dreams

The Sega Saturn was one of the first consoles to feature a built-in real-time clock. Most systems now have one, so I’m kind of surprised that very few games make use of it. Animal Crossing does, sure, and some Pokemon titles have time-of-day features (which they had to include their own clocks in the cartridge hardware to support), but few other games bother reading the date.

One prominent example of a game that did was the Christmas demo version of Nights Into Dreams. Ordinarily just a single-level of the full game, the disk had a number of special modes that would crop up at different times. December was one of them, which triggered Christmas Nights mode, with special cutscenes and graphics. But it also had special events for playing during November or January (“Winter Nights”), New Year’s Day, and April Fools’ Day. Especially notable was an unlockable mode that allowed playing as Sonic the Hedgehog, in what is his first true 3D outing!

This video shows off all of Christmas Nights Into Dreams’ special modes, and you don’t have to fiddle with your computer’s clock to see them!