The Flipside of Gaming
This one’s actually playable! Josh Millard, cortex on Metafilter, some time back made a cute little Pico-8 game in which Luigi wanders a decaying Mushroom Kingdom having depressive thoughts.
Here is some video:
Ennuigi (lexaloffle.com)
Let’s explore further the Youtube archives of Matthew Taranto, a.k.a. BitFinity, a.k.a. the Brawl in the Family guy. Last time we met Eario, Janitor of the Mushroom Kingdom. Now we meet his supposed son Waluigi, who Nintendo themselves have never quite known what to do with, and sort of the breakout character of BitF.
Waluigi has long been excluded from the Smash Bros. games as a playable character, at beast appearing as an assist trophy. This video is his lament at his perpetual status as outsider, set to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which scans precisely with “Waluigi”:
In a way though, this video is an echo of an earlier song, a closer tribute to Hallelujah featuring Waluigi, which has sadly seems to have been taken off of Youtube, but lives on in a number of imitators that are easily searchable.
There’s quite a few other Waluigi videos, lying around Youtube like broken dreams. We’ll get to those in due time.
From the files of the old webcomic Brawl in the Family, which has been gone for years now but is still fondly remembered in some circles, and who’s website is still on the web for as long as Keenspot’s servers survive, is this voiced version of the story of Eario. You know, Wario is Mario with the M upside down, so Eario is Mario with the M… sideways. Kind of.
This working-class version feels like it’s a bit more in keeping with Mario’s blue-collar roots. He wasn’t always the hero of the Mushroom people, he was just a carpenter working on a construction site one day when a gorilla went crazy, grabbed a lady, and climbed a tall building. Mario’s had many adventures since then, and a lot of job changes. Eario is the Mario who wasn’t so lucky.
Via Matthew Green at Press The Buttons, Pedro Pascal in a mocked-up trailer made by Saturday Night Live positing a prestige Mario Kart drama produced by HBO:
Lego Dimensions was much too awesome for this decayed world. Sadly, many of its greatest moments were part of DLC locked to various figures you had to collect individually.
But if you had the right bits of plastic, you could witness moments of pop cultural crossover greatness. Witness then this meeting between Portal’s GlaDOS and 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s HAL 9000, with the voices of each, sort of interacting with each other in their various impersonal AI ways.
Content warning: cartoon blood, violence against Goombas.
This one goes back a ways. I wonder how many people have viewed this in the past decade? It was popular enough once to get up to nearly half a million views, but who knows how many since its original upload in 2007?
A reference to the website of an ancient meme (it seems to have died in 2007), itself riffing on the white flag with a red star that goes up when Mario reaches a castle. This realistically-proportioned Mario ruthlessly smashes and crunches Goombas in a variety of ways, armed with the People’s Hammer, while stirring Russian choral music plays in the background. The video is a rendering of a Newgrounds flash animation, that seems to still be up, and even playable (I assume they’re just using a recording of a higher-quality rendering of the Flash file).
While Russia’s actions as of late are not a laughing matter (except perhaps in the sense of laughing at incompetence at war), we can separate the action in a 2007 meme from their current misadventures, right? Freedom for Ukraine!
CW: Not game related, which is why it’s up as a Sundry Extra. Also, has to do with Tibet, so I’m probably now making the Chinese government allergic to this post, yikes.
Some years ago, around the web went this interesting and entertaining comic condensation of the Bardo Thodol, a.k.a. the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It had fallen offline since then, although if one searches for it it might turn up again. (Ah, I see it’s up on ultraculture.org.)
The Bardo Thodol is a guidebook for those who have just died, detailing what worlds (Lokas) a soul will wander through, as well as their ruling entities (Buddhas) as it searches for a place to be reborn, unless it can become liberated from the cycle of rebirth, slipping between the cracks and not having to do it no more.
Well, as web observers may have noticed, different sites have different levels of staying power than others. The original was self-hosted, meaning when its creator Thomas Scoville stopped paying his site’s server bills it evaporated into residual electric charges.
While big tech sites tend to keep things around only for as long as it suits them (witness Geocities), Google tools that have had a substantive presence (other than Google Reader) seem to persist for a little bit. Por ejemplo, Blogger is still up and functioning, at least for now. Another thing within Google’s domain, at least until some bean counter decides the company can be made slightly more profitable by deleting it, is Google Sites.
So, with the permission of Thomas Scoville, I have put up the Comic Bardo Thodol in a corner of my Google Sites space. Please enjoy reading about all the wonders and horrors that await you after you pass away. And in particular notice which pop culture image was chosen for Yama Raja, the Lord of Death!
We love weird old game commercials from before (or in this case during) the crash, before games and game ads began skew quite so much towards the stereotypical tastes of teenage males, and before companies like Nintendo became such jealous guardians of their products.
And just look at all the effort that must have gone into this commercial! This isn’t just people sitting in front of a TV raving about a game, these actors are wearing costumes and running from puppet creatures on an actual set! And this may well be the first human actor to ever portray Luigi in front of a camera (he may look like Mario with his color scheme, but his hat says Luigi, and he’s calling Mario for help). It even calls back to the theme song of Car 54 Where Are You. It’s a shame that the game couldn’t possibly have moved enough units to justify this production.
suckerpinch, a.k.a. Tom7, is a regular presenter at SIGBOVIK and no stranger to the intelligent-but-fun video presentation field. This isn’t the first time we’ve posted his work here, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Previously he’s run automated tournaments of extremely stupid chess-playing algorithms, wrote programs to try to learn to play NES games by watching memory, and tried to generalize the idea of uppercase and lowercase letters in order to make hypothetical letters that are more uppercase and more lowercase. Among other things.
This time he tells us of the culmination of a sixteen year project to walk down every street in Pittsburgh. Come for that, stay for the moving Pac-Man costume he makes for himself at the end!
How I Ran the Length of Every Street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM (Youtube, 32 minutes)
Remember Crazy Taxi? How they got licensed punk music from Bad Religion and The Offspring for it? Remember how awesome that was? I’m not even a music person mostly, but I could still recognize that the soundtrack of those games was special. (I’m talking about the arcade and Dreamcast versions-other versions may or may not have that soundtrack, probably due to licensing issues.)
You want to know what game doesn’t have a great sound track? Crazy Bus.
Crazy Bus is a homebrew Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game that was created as a test for the programmer’s BASIC compiler. It wasn’t meant to be a real game. As a result, its soundtrack is almost a masterpiece in cacaphony. Listen for yourself… but you’re going to want to turn the volume down for this one.
It’s awe-ful-some. I encourage you to play it for for friends, family, co-workers, prospective employers, random strangers and household pets. I’m certain nothing bad will come of it!
Found by MollyRealized over on Metafilter! It’s pretty much as the title says:
Oh no! As a New Year’s Day “treat,” today’s weird game video is Animal World Soccer! Despair and dismay!
A “game” for the Playstation 2, this amazingly cheap production has no Soccer-based play. Instead, it’s a collection of simple puzzles and activities bundled along with a 43-minute video file of some of the worst animation that this spectator has ever seen, and I’ve seen Paddy the Pelican!
How and why this was made is unknown to me. It’s an inexplicable artifact of an unknown process. Why is the entire video under-laid with that tension-filled drumbeat? Why are character designs so inconsistent? Why does it look like they outright stole the designs for Simba and Mufasa from The Lion King for their lions? Why do some animals go about on all-fours while others stand upright and wear clothes? None of these questions are answered. None of these questions have answers! You see folks, they just didn’t care.
Okay, there is a bit of an explanation….
This animation was produced by a company called Dingo Pictures. The game, which Destructoid called “the worst game ever made,” (which is a big claim, there’s lots of awful games), was produced by Phoenix Games, which only distributed to the European market.
There is certainly more to this story. But I can’t bring myself to dig into it.