Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I find myself looking back upon the Dreamcast’s library, which was outrageously experimental. Sega tried so many things to see what would stick, but sadly few of them did, even though they’re really cool games.
There’s probably no better example of this than Space Channel 5, which I sometimes like to call “How Many Ways Can We Remix Mexican Flyer?”
Mexican Flyer is a real song, that existed long before Space Channel 5 and the Dreamcast. It was first published by Ken Woodman and His Piccadilly Brass in 1966 on their album That’s Nice. Here’s audio from Youtube (2 1/2 minutes):
Space Channel 5 remixes it several ways. Here’s the beginning, which is a fairly straight rendition. (That link was made with Youtube’s Clips feature, which doesn’t embed too well in WordPress.) Here’s the start of the second level (5 minutes):
Space Channel 5 isn’t a very long game, with only four levels, and although there’s alternate sections of a couple of levels that unlock after finishing the game and a subgoal of rescuing all the hostages, it doesn’t have a lot of replayability. It’s an enjoyable trip while it lasts, though.
It ends with a (mostly) a capella version, about ten minutes long:
And here’s the music isolated without the gameplay sounds overtop it (3 minutes):
Ken Woodman passed away in 2000, only a few years before Mexican Flyer began its video game afterlife. He also did music for a couple of British radio productions, and arranged music for Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones and Sandie Shaw.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Why does Bowser set up race track courses in his castles? Does he have that many to spare? It’s a question with a simple answer, that he answers in 50 seconds. It’s also pretty good animation on Bowser, done in Blender by GleanieBOI!
There are three Black Knight pinball tables: Black Knight, Black Knight 2000 and the recent Black Knight: Sword of Rage. The first came from before music was regularly featured in pinball, but the latter two have amazing music. My favorite is the music in the second, by Dan Forden & Brian Schmidt, possibly the most epic metal sound track in electronic gaming history. That is not thoughtless hyperbole! Listen to it below! “You can do it you can do it!” There’s something about FM synthesis that lends itself to simulating electric guitar really really well!
This is a playlist of the 17 tracks from the game. If the voice of the Black Knight sounds familiar, I think he’s also the voice of the Mutoid Man from Smash T.V (“NO WAY! HUH-HA-HA!”) and designer of all three Black Knight tables, Steve Ritchie.
There is something about pinball that lends itself so very well to metal, and to characters like the Black Knight. Video games can be defeated and mastered in ways that pinball, real pinball, cannot, and that recognition mixes with, enhances, the Knight’s character.
Here’s a game on an actual table that demonstrates how the music comes together in play (12 minutes):
Black Knight: Sword of Rage also has an epic soundtrack, performed by Scott Ian of Anthrax and Brendan Small of Metalocalypse/Deathklok (oh, and Home Movies):
I think 2000 has the edge over it though? What do you think? This is not intended as a comment prompt (I hate those), but it’d be nice to get people’s thoughts!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s Waluigi, and he’s singing “Rainbow Connection.” You need more? Are you not entertained?
It’s from Matthew Tarando, aka. Bitfinity, the one who made the Brawl in the Family webcomic. It’s not the first of their works to make it to this site, and it probably won’t be the last.
The Muppet-like version of Waluigi is a highlight. He looks like Dr. Don from Point Blank, a.k.a. Gun Bullet! It feels like it’s come full circle, since Point Blank is essentially WarioWare with light guns!
Dr. Dan and Dr. Don, oft-emperiled protagonists of countless rapidly-shifting scenarios.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s a cover of the theme to Super Mario Bros. played in a medieval style (1 1/2 minutes). That’s all for today. This video has lurked in my files for months, I figured I’d go ahead and get it posted. Remixes of the SMB music are one of the oldest genres of internet meme music there is, so here it is in a really old mode. The channel it’s from does medieval covers of a variety of music, so if that sounds entertaining, please ambulate towards that vestibule.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
While there are examples of excellent music from the classic era of arcades (Frogger comes immediately to mind), I don’t think there is much that can equal that of Gyruss’ arrangement of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. Here it is, isolated from the rest of the game’s soundtrack, from Youtube uploader StyleK226 (1 1/2 minues):
Wikipedia tells us that the arcade arrangement is reminiscent of a version of the song from the British band Sky, titled just “Toccata” (4 1/2 minutes):
If you only know Gyruss from the NES port, you might be surprised that it’s an almost entirely different arrangement from the arcade version! Maybe it was changed because of the similarity to Sky’s version. Some people prefer that one, it’s got a bit more variety, although I think the arcade’s is a bit better. Judge for yourself (3 minutes):
The Toccata is only used for the intro and the first warp on each planet, which is a bit of a shame, the rest of the music isn’t bad, but it’s not Bach. In Japan, Gyruss was a Famicom Disk System game. The FDS had extra sound hardware, and the result is an upgraded version of the NES soundtrack (14 minutes in all):
There’s been a number of fan versions of the Gyruss soundtrack, although most of them seem to be inspired by the NES port rather than the arcade original. Here’s a metal medley of that particular musical mutation (3 minutes):
As commenter @Fordi says, “What I love is that Intro / Stage 1 is a genre cover (metal) of a game’s adaptation (Gyruss) of a genre cover (Sky – Toccata) of classical music (Toccata and Fugue in Dm).”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A really recent one this time! BitFinity, a.k.a. Matthew Taranto, who made Brawl in the Family and a fair amount of Waluigi music, animated and wrote this terrific little song about item hording in Final Fantasy VI, sung by Taylor Robinson.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The Adventures of Duane and BrandO were a nerdcore rap group that focused on doing video game parody songs. It’s an oft-told tale, old as time. They had some drama and broke up a few years ago, but not before making some nice tracks.
Honestly, that isn’t my scene musically, but they did some tracks based on Earthbound, and that entirely is my scene. The whole thing’s on Bandcamp, but here’s a sequence of three bits early in the game: a fairly straight rendition of part of the music for the first town, a diss track (is that what they call them?) from the first “Your Sanctuary” boss, and then the highlight, I think, in which the Onett police force get their heads handed to them by a 12-year-old kid. “I’m out of here that looks like it smarts/Check out my Super-Ultra-Mambo-Tango-Foxtrot Martial Arts!” (SUMTF?)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We linked a couple of weeks back to the Pirhana Plants on Parade music in an early level of Super Mario Wonder. Here are well-written and executed fan-made lyrics for the song, presented along with the level. It reads and sounds like something Nintendo’s own localizers might have made! Please enjoy:
Not to keep banging the drum about the new Mario game, but there are a number of what we might call “music levels” in the game, and a couple in particular fit in with the spirit of the day. Here they are: Pumpkin Party and A Night At Boo’s Opera (length: 3 minutes). This is an edited-down version of a 28-minute compilation of all of the game’s music sequences, on Youtube.
Ah, it crept up on me, so let me remind everyone that Roguelike Celebration begins today, although until tomorrow it just means they’re opening their social space for awhile. Nicole Carpenter at Polygon wrote a short piece about this year’s conference.
There is an admittance fee, but if you can’t afford it you can also get a free pass! Please consider paying them if you are able though, they do a lot of work every year in putting it together.
Here is the official schedule (linked), below is it presented just as a list of talks, with ✨sparkle emojis✨ around the things that personally enthuse me. ✨Just because!✨
Times given are US Pacific/Eastern. If you think the short times between starts are indicative of short talks, most of them aren’t that short, they have two tracks going on beside each other:
SATURDAY
9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Arron A. Reed, Klingons, Hobbits, and the Oregon Trail: Procedural Generation in ✨the First Decade of Text Games✨
10:00 AM/ 1 PM: Nic Tringali, ✨Abstract Space Exploration✨ in The Banished Vault
10:30 AM/ 1:30 PM: Linas Gabrielaitis, Fictions of Infinity in ✨Geological Finitudes✨
11:30 AM/2:30 PM: Florence Smith Nicholls, Another Stupid Date: ✨Love Island as a Roguelike✨
11:45 AM/2:45 PM Kes, Hunting the Asphynx: Roguelikes, ✨Provenance✨, and You
Noon/3 PM: Mike Cook, Generating Procedures: ✨Rule and System Generation✨ for Roguelikes
1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Scott Burger, The ✨Data Science✨ of Roguelikes
2 PM/5 PM: Nat Alison, In Defense of ✨Hand-Crafted Sudoku✨
3 PM/6 PM: Eric Billingsley, Scoped-down design: ✨Making a Tiny Roguelike✨
3:30 PM/6:30 PM: Elliot Trinidad, Touching Grass & Taking Names: Tuning the ✨Blaseball✨ Name Generator
4:30 PM/7:30 PM: Paul Hembree, Audible Geometry: Coordinate Systems as a Resource for ✨Music Generation✨
5 PM/8 PM: Jurie Horneman, Why ✨Dynamic Content Selection✨ Is Hard
SUNDAY
9:30 AM/12:30 PM: Mark Johnson, ✨Generating Riddles✨ for a Generated World
10 AM/1 PM: Jesse Collet & Keni, Fireside Chat About the Development of ✨NetHack✨
10:30 AM/1:30 PM: ✨Leigh Alexander✨, ✨McMansions of Hell✨: Roguelikes and Reality TV
1 PM/4 PM: Ray, Remixing the Layer Cake: Facilitating ✨Fan Reinterpretation✨ Through ✨Caves of Qud✨’s Modular Data Files
1:15 PM/4:15 PM: Crashtroid, Preventing Ear Fatigue with ✨Roguelike Music✨
1:30 PM/4:30 PM: Everest Pipkin, The Fortunate Isles: Fragment Worlds, Walled Gardens, and ✨the Games That Are Played There✨
2 PM/5 PM: ✨Jeff Olson✨, ✨Alphaman✨: Developing and Releasing a Post-Apocalyptic Roguelike Game in the ✨DOS Days✨ When Computers Were Slow, Memory Was Scarce, and No One Had Ever Heard of Object-Oriented Code
There was apparently a leak of the upcoming Super Mario Bros Wonder game (the first hour of gameplay is here), and it has a terrific little sequence that makes me think it’s going to become highly memeable. The part that really makes it for me is the flowers’ comments. Here it is, edited down to just that sequence. Note that this is a spoiler, but it’s for only the second level of the a whole long game.
Because of the danger it’ll be taken down, I’m not uploading this to Youtube. Please enjoy, it’s about a minute long.
Much much later, in a secret world, there is a reprise of this idea, and it’s much harder. Warning you now, It’s a more significant spoiler, not for story reasons, but just for existing. It’s fun, but looks pretty hard! I got the video out of a much longer video, at 4 1/2 hours and showing off all of that secret world, here. This is just that level, at two minutes long:
