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

Jay Peters at The Verge reports that, sadly, personal attacks from griefers have caused Ron Gilbert to stop posting updates on the development of his upcoming Monkey Island game. Booo! Don’t be a Gripe Monster, friends!

On NintendoLife, Damien McFerran mentions an piece in the next issue of pay fanzine Lock-On by Undertale and Deltarune creator Toby Fox, about the impact of the Japanese series Mother, known in the US as Earthbound.

Destructoid’s Chris Moyse mentions the remake of Pac-Man World mentioned at Nintendo’s indie-focused Direct has Pac-Mom instead of Ms. Pac-Man, pushing her further down the memory hole. The issue seems to be a rights issue around the character, who was not created by Namco but instead by classic indie arcade designer GCC, who has licensed her exclusively to AtGames.

It was a few days ago, but at Kotaku Jeremy Winslow posted about Simon Thomley, a.k.a. “Stealth,” of Sonic Mania developer Headcannon, about how he has complained that their work on Sonic Origins was done under time crunch, and they were not allowed to debug their work before release, and even that integration with the final product introduced new bugs they were not responsible for.

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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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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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