Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.
It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.
Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.
Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)
My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the goodonesreallyaregood. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
It’s been a bit difficult getting consistent signals from Earth lately, and what has gotten through hasn’t been of too much interest to my gelatinous brain. Maybe some of this might pique your interest?
Jonathan Bolding at PC Gamer says that playing dual-screen with a Steam Deck proves the Wii-U was a good idea! I knew it! What they’re talking about is the ability of a Steam Deck to play dual-headed via HDMI out. This play style is explicitly supported in Wii-U emulator Cemu. The article also notes that Valve has stated that the Steam Deck has out-performed sales estimates, which is good! After the Steam Link and Steam Controller were put on sale for ultra-cheap, I was feeling bad about scooping them up as Valve was clearing out stock. Not too bad, though.
SMB3 Scribe’s tile selector
Here’s some news from a different source than usual. At romhacking.net, creator Michael Nix has been working on a pair of GUI rom editors for Super Mario Bros. 3! One, SMB3-Foundry, is for editing levels, and the other, SMB3-Scribe, edits overworlds. A game like SMB3 is a bewilderingly complex beast under the hood, and the strictures of platform, rom space and development time sometimes force unorthodox decisions, like hardcoding some object placements. There is an article to be written some time about the lengths NES carts had to go through to encode their data, which was usually done using a kind of domain-specific data compression.
SMB3 Foundry’s level editor
I have been avoiding linking CBR.com for a bit because of some excessively clickbait headlines, but a recent device change has reset my killfile, so they’re back. Shane Foley from there reports on series nadir Metroid Other M having one level that made it worthwhile. The “level” in question is in fact the entire postgame; up until the main boss, the whole game is heavily on rails, with full exploration only possible afterward.
At Polygon, Nicole Carpenter mentions the content warnings on new indie title I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which has a number of traumatic events in the game, but is quite upfront about what will occur, going so far as asking the player if they’d like to be spoiled regarding which characters die, or may die. It is a heartening development.
(Note: the Guardian is in one of those phases where they nag you with a huge yellow subscription ad. It can be easily closed, and not nearly as bad as some sites out there, but it happens. One article I checked this time-I will not link them-had autoplaying overlaid videos in the corner, which resulted in them being ejected from this post. Bad web designer, no biscuit!)
Baba Is You
Shaun Musgrave at Touch Arcade lists the best recent iPhone game updates. Mentioned are Baba Is You (yay!), Genshin Impact, and Mini Metro (yay again!).
Blogfriend Kyle Orland at Ars Technica reports on Fabrice Breton, creator of indie game Brok the Investigator, and their efforts to track down Steam key scammers, curators who would ask devs for free Steam keys but then sell them. As usual from Kyle it’s great and informative reading!
From Alice Newcome-Beill at The Verge, a report on a new version of a Switch Pro controller from 8BitDo, who seem to make good products, although they note they have not yet received the controller for testing.
I’m sure I won’t see this image a thousand times over the next few months drebnar. (Source: Lorcana’s official Twitter feed)
And for our weekly eyeroll exercises, it’s been reported everywhere but GamesRadar hasn’t been seen in these pages yet so let’s give the link to them: Benjamin Abbott relates that Disney is releasing a Magic: The Gathering style trading card game going by the name of (roll your eyes now!) Lorcana. I’m already brainstorming jokes to make about it as they leak its features over the coming weeks!
