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

I was going to use Pannenkoek’s Christmas video this week, but then realized that I used that one last week. Serves me right for doubling up!

Instead have a listen to this collection of video game songs with a Christmas vibe. There’s no length notice because it’s a 24-hour-a-day livestream. Here!

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

The title says it all. (2 minutes) Song by kuribo98.

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Sundry Sunday is when we present gaming culture finds from across the years and decades. We’ve changed things up a little for the season!

A Christmas Warol, from GabaLeth, is an entertaining remix of A Christmas Carol, starting Nintendo’s charmingly notorious money-grubbing libertarian.

It’s interesting to muse on how Wario has escaped popular condemnation for his capitalist ways, or at least aspirations? I think it’s partly because he’s an object of fun and not presented as a positive figure, the wa of warui, Japanese for bad, is right in his name. He’s also rarely successful, and sometimes implied (very vaguely) to have a good heart under there somewhere.

Anyway, here’s Wario as Ebenezer Scrooge. There’s four installments so far, and they’re all surprising short (although it never was a very long story); presumably there’ll be a fifth by the time you see this.

Episode 1 (3 minutes):

Episode 2 (2 1/2 minutes, with Wagooigi):

Episode 3 (1 1/2 minutes):

Episode 4 (1 1/2 minutes):

A Christmas Warol, Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 (Youtube)

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Waluigi Sings: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Youtube, 2 1/2 minutes)

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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!

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Psygnosis released several of these as free pass-around demos. This one is of the MS-DOS version, and is only about 19 minutes in total. Enjoy the festive yuletide peril!

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