Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A bit of an oldie this time, and in more ways than one, a four minute stop motion animation from Rymdreglage made with Lego bricks, from way back in 2009. It’s still great though! By “8-bit,” in this case, they mean specifically the Commodore 64 end of the swimming pool, especially as concerns the game International Karate+. Even though this video is 16 years old, Ryndreglage is still making videos now! Have a look for yourself if you like.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’ve posted TerminalMontage’s “Something About” series of satirical game animation videos before. The Fruitless Quests of Nabiu (8 item playlist) is another thing from them, but unlike those it doesn’t refer to any specific game. It just uses the tropes of various JRPGs in its animation and storytelling. This allows it to be much more accessible to non-game playing viewers, and I think it also makes it much better at storytelling. I quite like this new direction they’re going in, and recommend them! Please take a look.
The “main” episodes are much longer and tell a continuing story. Note that most of the dialogue in these animations are presented in JRPG-style text boxes. I don’t mind it myself, but I have heard a couple people express annoyance at the chattering noises they make as they speak. Please try to bear with them.
Episode 1 (21m) introduces Karoto the bard, and sets up what Nabiu, an intern “M.A.G.E.” working for Wizzro the Wizard, is doing, searching for a lost magical chair:
Episode 2 (20m, the most recent to date) continues the duo’s quest, where they encounter a very strange town, and are also joined by Brolly the Knight:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I promised yesterday that the next Sundry Sundays were going to be great, and so they are. The official Sonic the Hedgehog Youtube channel, in association with podcast outfit Realm, is releasing a sequence of audio videos featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite ridiculous video game detective agency, the Chaotix. Why are they called that? Who knows.
Actually I do know, because the three of them were introduced in the 32X game, and one of the few reasons to have gotten a 32X during its short lifespan, Knuckles Chaotix, suggested tagline: “It’s not great, but it is very weird.”
That game had absolutely nothing to do with detectives. I think the detective angle was added with the lore behind Sonic Heroes. From then on, they’ve popped up at random times, usually being pretty hapless. But all three of them are adorable, even and especially Vector the Crocodile, and mean well.
So for now there’s three things having to do with the Chaotix Case Files, a trailer (2 minutes):
And here is a link to it as a podcast. They’re roughly of a Saturday Morning Cartoon level of maturity, which I should be clear, is absolutely perfect for these guys, so pour a bowl of Trix, inundate that vessel with milk, and let the part of you that’s still ten years old listen in and enjoy it.
Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, it has a knockout story, full of wit and detail. Mother is one of the very few video game series that, I think, transcends its medium, and becomes something great, not great in the since of being better than good, but in the sense of profundity, and yet at the same time it isn’t pretentious at all, it’s light and funny and whimsical but also deep and dark and terrifying. It’s easy to play and lots of fun too. I’ve heard it described, I think it was by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, as Peanuts Fights the Cthulhu Mythos, and that begins to get to it.
Animation collaborations are, of course, a thing where a bunch of people get together to make an animation together, each taking one small part of the whole. Not only do they not attempt to maintain a consistent art style, that’s in fact the last thing they try to do. Each clip is wildly different from the others, and that’s the point, the clash of styles making the whole surreal and surprising.
Both of these come together, in this piece that animates a portion Earthbound where the player is accompanied by the Flying Men, and I guess I have to explain that too.
So in a place near the end of the game your protagonist Ness visits the realm of Magicant, a bizarre realm created from the depths of his own mind. It is full of dangerous monsters, culminating in an artifact called Ness’s Nightmare, a powerful enemy that can wipe Ness out if the dice don’t roll his way.
Ness is also alone for this segment, except for the aid of the Flying Men, who call themselves Ness’s courage, helpful bird people who tag along with Ness, providing both muscle and extra hit points. But while they are strong and useful, they are not invulnerable. There are five Flying Men, and they join Ness one at a time. If one of them runs out of HP it dies, and in the house where they live, one of them is replaced by a tombstone. If you go back and recruit another one, and he also dies, then another tombstone appears. The dialogue from the successive Flying Men becomes less happy and more desperate as their numbers decrease, until finally they’re all gone, and Ness is left to finish the area alone.
This is just one example of the many wonderful ideas in Earthbound, as a unique a video game as there ever has been.
The animation that’s this week’s subject is a collaboration between many people, set to the Flying Men’s theme song, which is never actually heard in its entirety within the game. The music heard comes from a soundtrack album.
I won’t pretend it’s very comprehensible to those who’ve never played the game. Sometimes Earthbound fanwork, unlike the game, gets obtuse and navel-gazey, and difficult to understand to those not drenched in the lore. This one’s a bit like that. But maybe it’ll spark something in you, anyway. The music’s nice at least!
That’s what I have for you today. See you tomorrow!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Along the same lines as videogamedunkey’s Explanation of Kingdom Hearts (previously) is this gloriously insane video that untangles all the non-linearity and heedless added backstory of the various Sonic the Hedgehog games and presents them temporally untwisted (9 minutes). Prepare to have your shameful ignorance of the ridiculously meandering basis of a video game cartoon character’s backstory shattered!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The internet is a busy place. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of easy-to-understand instructions on how to operate it?
Yes? Well, too bad. What you get instead is the sarcastic internet instructions of Newgrounds user MikeFallek (1½ minutes). There’s two parts, explaining things nobody has ever heard of before, the “vol-u-me con-trol” in video chat, and something called an “e-mail cli-ent.” Please enjoy, and learn! (What follows should be a Newgrounds embed. It doesn’t preview well for me. If it doesn’t work, I must refer you to the “sarcastic internet instructions” link, above.)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.
One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.
About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.
I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.
If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!
ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
HyperVoiceActing is a Youtube channel that frequently posts humorous vignettes, often involving video game characters, and hey that’s what Sundry Sunday mostly presents, so here’s one of theirs!
Dr. Wily and Dr WrLight have had a long rivalry, but usually their battles are by proxy, Wily through Robot Masters, Light through RockMega Man. One has to wonder if their time in grad school prepared them for this.
This video presents a scenario in which Light has had enough, and calls out Dr. Wily for what is refrered to in robotics circles as an ass-whoopin. The interesting things about that is, first, Dr. Wily seems worried that Dr. Light might actually get squished by his latest skull machine. This should properly be seen as a sop to the shippers, but I’m not annoyed, it’d probably happen anyway. Wily obviously cares deeply about what Dr. Light thinks, otherwise he wouldn’t rail* against him so much.
Second, Wily actually takes Dr. Light up on his challenge to settle their rivalry with fisticuffs. As for the outcome, well…. (2 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I was going to use Pannenkoek’s Christmas video this week, but then realized that I used that one last week. Serves me right for doubling up!
Instead have a listen to this collection of video game songs with a Christmas vibe. There’s no length notice because it’s a 24-hour-a-day livestream. Here!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Two new items. The short one first, a brief holiday video from pannenkoek, the Mario 64 expert. It isn’t about beating the game without pressing the A button, nor is it a deep dive into the game’s internals in such a way that you could use it in a computer science course. It’s just Christmas as it’s celebrated on Cold Cold Mountain, with festive decorations and multicolored penguins. It’s only a minute and a half:
You want something longer? The Amazing Digital Circus just released episode 7, and it’s much darker than past episodes. What’s that, you think it’s been plenty dark already? Well, now it’s even more so, despite the fact it’s titled Beach Episode and features the return of the Sun. (33 minutes)
Not long ago the creators mentioned that Amazing Digital Circus was never envisioned as a long-term series, that just keeps running on and on, and I think I remember them saying the plan was for about nine or ten episodes? Not many of those left. I wonder if afterwards Gooseworx will get back to continuing her personal series, like the adventures of Elaine or Darly Boxman, or maybe something else like Little Runmo?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
To recap. Ten years ago, Disney hired the Brothers Chaps, creators of seminal Flash series Homestar Runner, to make for them a series of Flash shorts for Youtube and (I think?) broadcast as bumpers, called Two More Eggs.
At that time Matt and Mike Chapman already had a working relationship with Disney working on their shows Gravity Falls and Wander Over Yonder, and it was an opportunity to return to their roots making little shorts in Flash. The Two More Shorts are generally brilliant, and one subseries of them that fortuitously strays just inside the borders of our mandated focus is Eggpo, about two Goomba-like minion characters within a video game. We’ve covered five of the seven episodes so far; check out the Eggpo tag for all of them.
In Eggpo #6: Speedrun (2¼ minutes), our underling friends get invested in the success of a speedrunner blazing through their game.
Soon after release hopes were high for Bubsy. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog and… well… Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had the world convinced that edgy animal mascot platformers were golden, and characters like Aero the Acrobat and Awesome Possum invested our consoles like wisecracking vermin. Bubsy was just one of them.
