Sundry Sunday: A Wallace & Gromit/Legend of Zelda Mashup, Sure

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

They can’t all be winners here on Sundry Sunday, but sometimes I find something pretty darn cool, and that’s the case this week with this spot-on Wallace & Gromit parody/Legend of Zelda parody. (4½ minutes)

One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.

It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.

Games From Scratch’s Recommended Free Tools

Games From Scratch is a prolific Youtube channel dedicated to helping solo and small team gamedevs with tutorials and tools. They really do post frequently, so if I linked to everything they made it’d overwhelm the blog, but it’s been a while since I referred to them, and they just made a nice omnibus video of free tools. There is a sponsored section in it, but if that kind of thing bothers you I suggest using the browser extension SponsorBlock, which shows time-wasting sections on the Youtube timeline in different colors.

Here is the video (13 minutes):

Here are the tools recommended, along with links (which the video maker neglected to provide):

Blender (3D modelling)
Godot (game engine)
O3DE (game engine)
Krita (raster art)
GNU Image Manipulation Program (raster art)
Audacity (audio editing)
Tiled (map creation)
Inkscape (vector art)
Pixelorama (pixel art & animation, can be run in browser)
DPaint.JS (pixel art, in-browser, recreation of Deluxe Paint for Amiga)
GraphicsGale (pixel art)
Material Maker (procedural texture creation)
Ucupaint (texture painting extension to Blender)
MagicaVoxel (voxel-based painting, Windows & Mac only)
SculptGL (browser-based sculpting)
LDtk (2D level editor)

Sundry Sunday: Remade Opening to Grim Fandango

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

Over on Newgrounds, Yespeace1 remade the opening to the classic 3D Lucasarts adventure game Grim Fandango in Blender. They adhered to nearly everything about the original, so don’t expect a tremendous amount of improvement, but when the first version was so great anyway that hardly matters. The Youtube version is linked below, since it’ll embed here cleanly.

Grim Fandango Resurrected, on Youtube and Newgrounds (3 minutes)