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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
YES I KNOW, yet another Nintendo thing. Nintendo Adults are the video game version of Disney Adults, in so many ways. One more way now because there are actual Nintendo theme parks.
I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)
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.
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):
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.
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.
