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.
Unskippable from the Archives (Youtube playlist, 326 items, approximately 38 hours)
