The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Prepare to get the Balatro music stuck in your head all over again, but with the Mother 3 “soundfont,” a word that I’m not thrilled with. I don’t hate it, it’s just that there’s already good ways to refer to that concept, like “instrument set.” Ah. Oh well. Anyway. Here it is. (4 minutes – wait, the Balatro music is only four minutes long?)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
tomoseen is a gifted stop-motion animator from Japan, who’s made over 40 videos on Youtube. They make animations with tiny figurines of cats and ducks, food, dice and Lego pieces. All of them are a ray of sunlight, but very few of them are relevant to our subject. In fact, really only one is: a Lego video of breakfast made from Mario enemies. It’s five minutes long, and amazing:
Wait, there is one other tomosteen video that’s slightly game-related: Steak Dinner with Dice has a special guest appearance by Tetris, but it’s not really enough to merit its own post here. Consider it a bonus:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Sometimes on Sunday we find very old things that survive down to us through years. But sometimes we find some fairly new memes, and this is one of those.
I don’t know when or where this started, but there’s this collection of videos on Youtube that are just silence, but with, very once in a while, maybe every two or three minutes, a sound effect to break the repose. Fortunately, most of these videos lead off with the sound effect, so you’ll know kind of what the result will be.
Why load up a video like this? Well as far as I can tell, the idea is to have it playing in the background while you do other things, such as watch a movie. Once in a while, the sound will happen to play around the time something significant in the other thing happens, and the unexpected juxtaposition is humorous, or at least interesting. Basically, humor through randomness. I’ve long had an idea for a mobile app that would do something like this, with randomized noises, but in the end figured it was too niche to bother with. Maybe I should try it after all?
While this idea extends beyond just video game sounds, several prominent examples have to do with games, keeping us within our site’s roomy theme. For best results, whatever those might be, it’s probably best to have on an ad blocker, or else some of the random noises will be commercials for terrible mobile games or Old Spice deodorant.
Here’s Lego Yoda screaming sporadically:
Mario, doing something similar:
Now the interruption is by the first four notes of Megalovania from Undertale:
A Minecraft Villager peppers your the next hour with infrequent noises:
Or here, just Minecraft sounds in general. The sounds in this one are fairly frequent, two or three a minute. There has got to be a Creeper noise in there somewhere to cause sudden jolts, I’m sure:
Angry Bird game noises:
The Mario 64 Thwomp sound effect:
Waluigi:
And, a duck quacking. It’s not a video game duck. I just like ducks.
If you watch more than one of these, expect your Youtube suggestions to get weird for a while. Now that your day has been enlivened and enriched I take my leave of you until the morrow. Ta!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been out for a week now and the internet is still abuzz about it. (Can’t you hear it? The incessant buzzing?)
Recently I had the opportunity to do a roundup of a number of Zelda fan animation videos. A few of these may have been shown here before. (We’ve been at it for over a year, it’s possible!) I’m sure some haven’t.
Racing for Rupees (4 minutes) was made with Source Filmmaker and Sony Vegas, and is a standout. With 24 million views it’s hardly obscure, but it’s eight years old as of this writing:
Shield Bash (2 minutes) is a lot newer. What are either of these two doing stealing items off the wall of a library?
I’m sure I’ve linked Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Animated Speedrun (5 1/2 minutes) before, but it’s a highlight of the Something About series for how many of the seemingly random elements, this time, have actual antecedents in BotW speedrunning. But not the “Excuuuuuuuse me Princess” part. That’s from the old Zelda TV cartoon.
Terminal Montage’s How To Get To Goron City (1 1/2 minutes) is also BotW related, and is also hardly obscure at 14 million views.
Pringus McDingus’ Breath of the Lovers (3 minutes) is not really much related to the games, but is still funny and cute.
Chasing Rupees (2 1/2 minutes) has only a third of a million views, but was made in stop motion, and rather well animated for that.
Let’s finish for now with Anger Management (5 1/2), starring everyone’s favorite put-upon money-grubbing shopkeeper, Beedle:
There’s tons of Zelda animations on Youtube, so you can bet we’ll be returning to this well eventually….
Pringus McDingus brings us another well-animated bit, this time with Sonic characters instead of the usual Mario characters, animated to sound clips from Community. It’s fun!
Louie Zong makes a bunch of fun song videos! Once in a while they’re game related. This one’s a short album made with Warioware D.I.Y’s composition feature. Even though it’s only about 12 minutes long, there’s ten songs squeezed in there, and each come and gone so soon that none have the opportunity to bore your brain.
This is a real rarity. Saturday Supercade has, to my knowledge, never been officially released on any media format. All of the tapes of this show date back to their original broadcasts in 1983-5. I’m sorry for the poor quality, but this is from a tape almost certainly recorded off of live television nearly 40 years ago.
The year 1983 was such a weird time in media history. Take for instance the movie Joysticks. A cheaply-made culture cash-in, essentially the Supervan of its decade, it was a teen sex comedy themed around arcades, and it could only have been released in 1983. In 1982 games were big, but it takes time for a movie to be made. In 1984, US arcades and consoles had crashed calamitously, and any projects in production would have been cancelled. Saturday Supercade also dates from 1983.
Saturday Supercade was a Saturday morning cartoon show that hosted a variety of different game characters and universes. By no means a classic of animation, there’s still a lot of interesting things about it. Donkey Kong gives Mario and Pauline their modern names (decided on around the time of Donkey Kong Jr’s arcade release), and Donkey Kong is voiced by legendary early TV children’s entertainer Soupy Sales.
Frogger is depicted by the show as a reporter for a swamp’s newspaper. Q*Bert is a student in a 50s-styled high school, and other characters (including a girl Q*Bert, “Q*Tee,” not seen in the game) are imagined as his friends and rivals. Donkey Kong Jr has the young ape searching for his father, while assisted by a greaser. Pitfall’s cartoon is not only the sole home-original game to be featured on the show, but also lent two of its characters, Pitfall Harry’s niece Rhonda and mountain lion pet Quickclaw, to cameo roles in the game’s sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Kangaroo and Space Ace were introduced in the show’s second season. Yes, somehow, it got a second season.
The Wikipedia page of the show notes that episodes of Space Ace were once shown late at night on Cartoon Network, and once in a while can be spotted between shows on Boomerang, while “The Best of Q*Bert” is available as a print-on-demand DVD from Amazon. Other than that, many episodes are lost outside of master reels held by whatever company owns Ruby-Spears’ output these days, which I expect is Warner Media. There’s tons of Saturday Morning shows that are lost; this one only survives to us in any form because classic video games have oddly persisted in this weird cultural cul-de-sac, the same one that made Wreck-It-Ralph an improbably hit for Disney.
So please, enjoy, or else, experience whatever substitute for enjoyment you can bring yourself to feel while watching an old old kids cartoon from the classic arcade era. Queasiness? Unease? Existential dread?