Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Its from Dorkly, a gamer content channel on Youtube. I usually try to keep the finds we present here to one-person operations or similar. But the animation (2 ½ minutes) is entertaining, and it addresses the experience of those people standing to the side watching others beat the crap out of each other. I’m surprised they don’t take an accidental Hadoken from time to time. Doesn’t seem very safe to be at ringside for a Psycho Crusher.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’ve been following Sundry Sunday for a while here, you might have caught on to a few trends. One, too many Nintendo characters. And two, I have a high resistance to schmaltz.
There’s fifty-pound bags full of unearned sentiment just laying around the Youtube platform, and most of it I will have no truck with. A lot of it depends on your past connection with characters, and despite surface appearances, I don’t have a lot of connection with game characters. And it feels like theft, to cloyingly play off of pre-existing characters in such cheap and easy ways.
But that’s not to say it can’t be done well, as in this short voice-acted slideshow that was released soon after the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. The (newer) SMB movie definitely has its faults, but it also has some pretty deep cuts from throughout Mario’s history, and the best of those has to be Foreman Spike, semi-antagonist from Wrecking Crew, and Mario & Luigi’s boss in the mundane world of plumbing.
There are slight hints that, despite his abrasive personality, there is a tiny bit more to Spike than seems at first, and that’s what makes the slideshow, from GabaLeth, feel like it’s slightly more entitled to its emotion than your standard cartoon sugarjob. And it’s only a minute long. Here:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Vibri is from NaNaOn-Sha’s classic bring-your-own-CD rhythm game Vib-Ribbon. P. Carredo is a Youtube content maker who’s done a lot of videos starring the angular rabbit. And Roll Along is the last of the six playable songs in that game, notable for being difficult due to its fluctuating beat, which speeds up and slows down in a way that’s tricky to match.
Mix them all up and we have this music video. The second pink Vibri is her version from Vib-Ribbon’s sequel Vib-Ripple, which came out on the Playstation 2 and so has better graphic effects. (2 ½ minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Something of a follow-up to last week’s post, this one’s another of nathorz’s animations of Nintendo voices (1 ½ minutes), this time of perennial second-banana Luigi. Most are from Charles Martinet’s voicing, but there’s also Danny Wells from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, and John Leguizamo from the first Super Mario Bros. movie. There’s also some voices I don’t recognize; I presume Luigi from the more-recent Super Mario Bros. movie is in there somewhere.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Since Mario 64, Charles Martinet certainly recorded a lot of noises for Mario and Luigi. If you look far enough (specifically, to the Mario & Luigi games for GBA and DS) you can find some entertaining random Italian-like sounds. Mayo on Youtube combined some of these noises with comical animation, to produce these very short (1/2 minute) videos.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.
It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.
Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.
Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)
My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the goodonesreallyaregood. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
You know, it’s a effort sometimes to keep up this weekly game culture section. Youtube’s algorithm sucks unless you have an account you use for one purpose and none other, for it’s always trying to send you things related to the very last thing you watched. That means its efficacy as a source of finds varies widely and wildly.
Today’s find, however, is the kind of insanity that makes the effort worth it. It’s no thanks to the Youtube feed either, but from a Bluesky post. As it turns out, they made a music video for Lemmings 2, involving adorable Lemming puppets (4m).
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.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Last week I put off Sundry Sunday to let you know AGDQ was about to begin! So this week I’ve brought multiple videos, all with the theme of looking at a Legend of Zelda game from the point of view of the usual-rescuee, Z-girl herself. No, not the one in the green suit! What are you saying?
In Wind Waker, Zelda gets to take a fairly active role in the story, until you (and she!) find out that she’s actually Zelda, and then gets stuck in hidden secret sunken Hyrule Castle for the second half of the game, boo! What did she do down there? K_Grovyle gives us a look (2 1/2 minutes):
Of course the newest Zelda game as of this writing actually has Zelda as the protagonist for the first time, allowing her the kind of malicious gaming shenanigans usually reserved to Link (and to confirm, the one in the green suit is Link, not Zelda, honest). jjjj4rd presents an animation of her usual hobbies while wandering the fields and wilderness (3 minutes):
And some more (3 minutes)!
What’s that you say? Zelda is actually the main character of all the other games? Zelda’s a boy you’re telling me? Why that’s not true, how could you even think that, I thought it was obvious, I–
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
