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

It’s a maxim among D&D players that the deadliest thing the DM has in his arsenal against players is the lowly pool, stream, river, pond, lake or ocean. (Zee Bashew has an entertaining 3-minute video about this.) There’s just so many ways to kill a PC involving water.

Well, this isn’t just a Dungeons & Dragons thing. Sierra On-Line adventure games had many excuses to off a wannabe hero for just thinking about approaching a body of fluid, as Sierra Art’s 4 1/2-minute compilation video demonstrates. Whether it’s drowning in it, being swept down current by it, creatures living in it, or it actually being deadly acid: if it’s liquid, it’s fatal.

That’s not the only adventure game in which the wet stuff will kill you. Famously, the only way to actually die in The Secret of Monkey Island is to hang around too long under water. If you wait for ten minutes down there, Guybrush Threepwood will actually drown, which replaces the action verbs with Bloat, Stare, Bob, Rot and Order Hint Book. (2 minute video)

You can drown in Return to Money Island too (2 1/2 minutes), which is funny because the game is presented as Guybrush telling of his adventure in discovering the secret of Monkey Island to his son, wrecking the whole premise.

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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)

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Here’s one from me. Retro365 has a vast collection of gaming media from the earlier days of home computing, and has been going for about three years now. They’ve got lots of demonstrated software on their Youtube channel. If you have an interest in learning about, or just seeing this stuff, they’ve got plenty for you.

Here’s a few choice items from their channel. There’s the classic CGA DOS game Paratrooper (the player doesn’t last long, only a minute):

Dungeon! for Apple II, published by TSR themselves in 1982 (32 minutes):

Oil’s Well for the Atari 400 and 800, a variant of the arcade game Anteater (8 minutes):

And a complete playthrough of comedy adventure game classic Sam & Max Hit the Road for PC (an hour and 47 minutes):

Retro365 blog, and on Youtube.

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For some reason MMORPGs are particularly rife with this. City of Heroes was a popular game that was shuttered completely because NCSoft decided they didn’t want to run it any more, at all, full stop. Oh, and no one else can run it either. I seem to remember, two long eons past, that WorldsAway, an early graphical service I was an avid member of once, was racked with management argument over whether it wanted to be a virtual world or a chat service, and in the process technology just left it behind.

This kind of thing happens all the time. Recently I was reminded by a Metafilter thread of the story of what happened to Star Wars Galaxies.

This recent article at PC Gamer is basically a love letter to Star Wars Galaxies’ early days. It highlights its great sense of immersion, something that has been lost from MMORPGs as World of Warcraft’s massive success drove everyone to make their games much easier to play, regardless of other factors. It also mentions its many design missteps, which make it seem almost inevitable in hindsight that, eventually, the game’s design would be completely overhauled.

Before the change, called by the management the NGE, or New Game Enhancements, Star Wars Galaxies had a classless, skill-based system. Jedi powers, particularly, were notoriously difficult to unlock. They required that players find very rare Jedi Holochrons in the game that would tell them what they had to do to awaken the Force in their character. It was a demanding system that meant most players would never become Jedis, but it kept Jedi powers special, ensuring that they wouldn’t overwhelm the game universe, especially important since SWG was set at a time, between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, when Jedi were thought to be almost extinct.

Lots of players wanted to be Jedi but couldn’t, but the game had become known for making a difficult design choice and sticking to their guns, and if players did achieve Jedihood, it accorded them a level of respect that was rare in MMORPGs. Anyone can reach max level in an MMORPG if they just spend enough time playing, but this was something special. And Jedi characters had permadeath on; if one perished, it was gone.

Among those that remember that period in MMORPG history, the New Game Enhancements are an infamous example of game mismanagement. Even now over a decade after the game’s closing, the fallout of Sony Online Entertainment’s decisions can still be found scattered throughout the internet. Here’s an article at Massively Overpowered. One at Wired. Engadget. An AMA with a former community manager on Reddit.

In short: the game switched to a class-based system, Jedi were made an ordinary starting class, and gameplay was made much more action-oriented. While locations remained the same, the underlying gameplay was completely changed. It immediately lost a large portion of its userbase. It gained some back over time, and continued along for six years after, but the popular perception was that it was a grave misstep.

Server-based games like MMORPGs are in a difficult spot in cases like this: the pre-existing game basically ceases to exist, even for players who preferred it. There is no going back for them. People who didn’t enjoy that style of play had no choice but to like it or lump it. Meanwhile it has to build a membership anew based off of its new form, while overcoming all the negative press around its change of direction.

The pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies spawned a fan recreation using the old gameplay soon after the gameplay changed, called SWGEmu, and it’s still running today with two servers. People who liked the later system, which was still in place when the game shut down, have had no recourse until relatively recently. Now a new fan-led effort, Star Wars Galaxies Legends, looks to revive the game as it stood when it closed, NGE systems and everything. SWGEmu’s website is just a forum system; SWGL’s, by contrast, is surprisingly slick by the typical standards of a fan project.

That’s a lot of words to write about a game that, in either form, I have never played, but that’s how much people care about Star Wars Galaxies, in both its forms, and Star Wars in general. I hope both are running decades into the future.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

This is a big one! Kat Bailey reporting for IGN and doing some quality journalism, looking into Nintendo of America’s problem with leaning on contract employees. Nintendo has enjoyed something of a reputation as a good place to work, but it definitely seems like this has changed. The article is long but a must-read!

M. Smith of Engadget previews Steam on Chromebooks.

Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun talks to Ron Gilbert about the in-development and eagerly-anticipated Return to Monkey Island.

From Sean Endicott of Windows Central, Microsoft open sources Windows 3D Movie Maker! Here’s the announcement tweet. Seems Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman was convinced to do so by hardware hacker and source of general awesomeness foone!

Christian Donlan at Eurogamer looks back at the Crystal Dynamics’ take on the Tomb Raider series. That would be the Tomb Raider games subtitled Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld.

And a marketing success story, zukalous at How To Market A Game (title’s to the point) describes how the pachinko roguelite Peglin managed to get popular so quickly! It also links to friend-of-the-blog Simon Carless’ game discovery newsletter!

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Slope’s Game Room has a video about the history of Golden Axe.

The Verge’s Ash Parrish writes about a revival of Lucasfilm’s 8-bit virtual world (which is not quite the same thing as a MMORPG) Habitat, something I know a little about I suppose.

Marcus Richert writing for Techradar has a provocative article suggesting that Nintendo might be either slightly younger than the company claims, by a few years, or alternatively might be much older.

Shmuplations translates three interviews from magazines with various people connected with quirky Sega action-puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket.

And Marc Normandin for Paste Magazine has an article suggesting 10 retro games that should be revived, and you know what, it’s actually a pretty great list! It’s got For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Dragon Slayer, and Terranigma on it, so it’s definitely got JRPG cred!

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Link. Information in the article includes screenshots, the team, and the news that they’ve been working remotely. Hype is running high for a new 2D Monkey Island game. The last trip to this well was Telltale’s episodic 3D take Tales of Monkey Island, which was appreciated but some thought was lacking.

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