The Flipside of Gaming
Oh this one goes way, way back. Since Saints Row is back in the news….
Back after the release of the first Saints Row game, long before the series went bonkers gonzo crazy-go-nuts and then got rebooted, it was really buggy. So buggy that longtime internet person Cabel Sasser (who helped make the Playdate and helped publish Untitled Goose Game) made a video about it with catchy music. Enjoy!
It’s Sunday! You’ve crossed the finish line (which is not a Finnish line) of another week. You deserve a short and funny video something for your dogged persistence against entropy.
In making these posts, I’m aided by there being a nearly 20-year history of weird and fun video game related things on the internet. According to the excellent Homestar Runner Wiki, Strong Bad Email 94 originally went up on January 12, 2004, over 18 years ago. It immediately became iconic and soaked its way into the soul of the web. If you ever see someone on the internet say hat their HEAD A SPLODE, this is where that came from.
They even made playable versions of the games in the animation, although they don’t work without Flash (Ruffle may work, but its compatibility isn’t 100% yet): Rhino Feeder, Secret Collect, Strongbadzone, and the Thy Dungeonman trilogy, one, two and three.
Here it is on homestarrunner.com, in case you somehow have a way to watch Flash. (The alternative web player Ruffle is an up-and-coming solution! There are even browser extensions available that make its use almost seamless!)
Welcome to a new week! You swam through tyrannical employers, terrible social media, and a generally-appalling political situation. To help make up for it, let’s watch an old commercial for the Atari VCS game Pitfall!, and if that kid at the front looks slightly familiar, that’s only because it’s Jack Black.
The other actors in this video are also pretty interesting. Video games were considered interesting to general audiences in the U.S. before the crash. We’re still not entirely sure what changed. A lot of people point to a glut of awful games for the Atari VCS/2600, but it affected arcades too, as well as the Intellivision and ColecoVision. Video games suddenly just seemed uncool to most demographics, for some reason. In Japan, Nintendo was known to be concerned that a similar kind of thing might have happened when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System hit the U.S. market. Thankfully it didn’t.
We previously offered Lore’s first video Alt Text piece for Wired Magazine, where he rated Legend of Zelda weapons, so as your reward for making it through another week of the unbridled horror of 2022, here’s another game-related bit he did, about his picks for the five most guilt-inducing games.
It’s interesting that, with video games being such an imfamously fast-moving field and all, three of the picks are just as relevant today: Animal Crossing, The Sims and World of Warcraft, and, holy cats, this was made 14 years ago. The other two are Nintendogs and Lemmings, both series that could stand to be revived.
So thanks Lore for your video, and thanks Wired Magazine for not taking these down, and thanks to you for caring enough to watch a video about video games that’s nearly old enough to qualify for a learner’s permit!
Welcome, and congratulations! You’ve made it to another Sunday. Your reward this week is… well, it’s something.
Classics of Game is the premiere contextless video game WTF channel. It’s a curated sequence of game clips, every one the cause of compulsive head-scratching. The embed above is a playlist of all (currently) 174 clips. Even if you know a lot of games, the chances are great you won’t know more than 10% of these. Good luck!
Well, it’s Sunday again. The world around us is burning down in flames. As I write this [warning: U.S. politics rant], the overturning of Roe v Wade is fresh in memory, with the obstructionism of two particularly terrible Democrats, as well as every single Republican in the Senate, and the traditionally hard road to climb for the incumbent party during midterms, making it seems like nothing will be done about it for a while in the future. It’s pretty bleak, and it was all done by thoughtless, horrible people thinking they’re in the right. This is going to ruin tens of thousands of lives.
Well for a moment at least, let’s try to console ourselves with a silly remix of a small part of Take Me Home Country Road with Mario in it.
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! We’re turning the blog floor into a giant MUD PIT.
It’s your reward for sticking with us (the blog, and the world) for another week. And the monster truck of content we have for you? The video Big Foot? A blast from early in the last decade, Mario Frustration, a humorous voice-over of a play through of one of those absurdly difficult Mario romhacks, back before Ninendo co-opted that whole genre with the Super Mario Maker series.
This video went viral a while back, but it’s actually a voice over of an earlier video. I have a URL for it (it’s http://www.quixoticals.com/2007/04/most-frustrating-super-mario-mod-ever.html) but I’m not linking to it. Firefox doesn’t like that site, probably related to outdated encryption, and I remember it looking a bit dodgy the last time I was there. YouTube is probably a better showcase for it.
There is some “adult” language in there, in the Modern Internet Style, and some salt, but overall it’s not nearly as ireful as the Angry Video Game Nerd could be in the day.
You made it through another week! As a reward, we’re going to watch a few people attempt to explain possibly the most confusing game series of all time: KINGDOM HEARTS. Prepare for several embedded videos!
Barry Kramer, A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts, up to 3 (33 minutes):
Then, his A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts 3 (12 minutes):
JelloApocalypse’s So This Is Basically Kingdom Hearts (5 minutes):
vgd “explained” it in four minutes:
As a followup, his “explanation” of Metal Gear Solid (about 7 minutes):
Dialing down the snark, NovaZone did a more reverent explainer in about three-and-a-half hours:
Part of the Escapist’s Unraveled series, Bryan not only promises to explain Kingdom Hearts, but all narrative, even including those that don’t contain Donald Duck, at least if you consider “all stories” as being the standard hero’s journey thing we’ve seen over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by now. (15 minutes)
Honest Game Trailers (4 minutes):
And Loading Ready Run (7 minutes):
SORA, DONALD, AND GOOFY (2 1/2 minutes):
And that is just about enough of that. So, so long, from me, Mickey Mouse, and They Might Be Giants (1 minute).
It’s Sunday once again! You crossed, not a finish line, but a significant leg of the race. You deserve a reward. Here is one.
Orson Welles’ hilarious high-brow yet earthy tone, presented both as actual quotes and adapted, twice, have made the rounds lately. (Note: Welles had wide-ranging opinions of various degrees of cultural suitability, and so his posthumous imitators imagine he would now.) Here is a video of a pixel Orson Welles (no word on if he is also pixelated) trash talking various game characters. He is especially dismissive of Cool Spot.
Welcome to another Sunday of life in the hellscape of 2022! But you made it this far, and so here is a funny video reward.
TerminalMontage’s Something About series is, if I’m being honest, a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s way too over-the-top for my 49-year-old sensibilities. But when it works, it works, and this is one of the better ones. The lolrandomness and sudden cuts fit in very well with depicting a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild speedrun of which, if you’re not familiar with them, more is accurate than you might think at first.
It’s Sunday again. You made it! Every Sunday you pass a checkpoint and your progress is saved, so if you die over the next week you can just reload to this point! Unless your universe is playing by “roguelike” rules. If that’s the case, I’m sorry. Anyway, as a reward for making it this far into the hellscape of 2022, here are some funny game-related videos.
Mornal’s made some hilarious animations on the video sharing site all the kids love: TikTok! What no? Ah, YouTube! I knew that! I’m “down with the street,” sure!
Above is the first, but they’re all great. Here’s the most recent:
You’ve made it another Sunday! For making it this far, why not take a break with some fun things? The whole point of Sundry Sunday is to be a low effort thing for the end of the week, but to be honest I couldn’t resist putting in a little extra work on this one.
It might not be evident on the surface, but the classic riffing show Mystery Science Theater 3000 has roots deeply entwined with video games. The show’s staff were known to spend off hours playing Doom against each other on a company LAN they had made for that purpose. During the show, they produced a clip that was distributed on the PlayStation Underground magazine CDs in which they riffed on some of Sony’s artsy commercials from that time (above).
After the original run of the show ended, some of the cast and crew drifted for a bit, doing various projects. One was a short-lived web comedy magazine called Timmy Big Hands, which we might look at some day. Show leads Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett did a couple of other things together, like a four episode movie riffing project called The Film Crew, before they eventually settled into doing Rifftrax, a project the three of them work on to this day.
While at Rifftrax, they’ve produced at least two game riffing clips. The first was made for sadly-departed gaming site Joystiq, and riffs on Mega Man, Final Fantasy X, Sonic the Hedgehog and, especially, something from the Metal Gear Solid series, which I would think is the perfect fodder for such video merrymaking:
Afterward they made another short clip for IGN riffing on Gears of War 3:
Rifftrax makes their living producing and selling clips making fun of shorts and movies, and one of those is the 1993 schlockfest Super Mario Bros. I call it schlock, but it’s one of those movies that critical opinion has slowly been coming around on over the years since its release. More and more it’s being seen as a competently-made and entertaining kids’ sci-fi fantasy movie perfectly of a piece with the era in which it was made-it’s just not a very good adaptation of the games with which it shares a title.
Rifftrax sells the whole Super Mario Bros. riff, complete with the movie on which it’s based, on their site. I highly recommend it, but IGN presents a nine-minute clip teaser from it on YouTube: