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.
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!
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)
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!
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:
It’s Sunday! Time to slide another bead on the survival abacus over from the left side to the right. You don’t have a survival abacus? How do you know how many weeks you’ve lived?
As a reward for making it this far in life, I present a fourteen-year-old comedy video from internet funnyperson Lore Sjöberg, one of the two founders of earlyweb gigglesite Brunching Shuttlecocks and sole maintainer of currentday chuckleplace Bad Gods, in which he rates elfyhero actionguy Link’s various weapons in videogame adventurething The Legend of Zelda. Being 14 years old, the specific game in question is The Wind Waker, that one with the cartoon art style that most of us love now but hated back then, because most of us are bad.
This was during a short period after Brunching closed up, back in that ancient year 2008, during which he wrote and made occasional videos for WIRED Magazine, which is as surprised as anyone that it still exists.
Having to do with an old The Legend of Zelda game this fits easily within the site’s sphere of subject matter, but the secret reason I post this is I’ve been a great fan of Lore since Brunching Shuttlecocks, and more people need to see the things he’s done. Certainly a whole lot of my own allegedly-humorous writing style can be directly traced back to him.
We’re back for another Sundry Sunday! Congratulations for making it another week into our technological hellscape! Your reward is another catchy tune and some information from the old days of arcades.
Gradius is a long-lived and storied series of shooters, full of interesting details and traditions, but my favorite part of it all is something not a lot of English-speaking fans may be familiar with.
The first arcade releases of Konami’s Twinbee and Gradius were produced using “bubble memory,” a type of storage that had to warm up, literally, to be read reliably.
It would work effectively if it had been running for at least a couple of minutes. So, to prevent anyone from playing the game too soon after the machine had been turned on in the morning, it would display a countdown on the screen. It would also emit a digitized voice, saying “Getting ready!” and then after a few seconds, it would play the MORNING MUSIC, while the computer warmed up, as in the video embedded above. I kind of think of it as the national anthem of arcadeland.
One of the quirks of Gradius‘s bubble storage is that it was read sequentially, from a starting point. Its stage layouts were stored in this memory. Dealing with this hardware quirk required the game, when the player lost a life, to return back to the last starting point they had passed. This was the source of one of the Gradius series’s major characteristics, having to return to a previous part of the level, which could then be read into memory going forward once again.
I forget where I heard this factoid, but I think I saw it in the supplemental material in the Gradius Arcade Collection, out on Steam and Switch, and no doubt other platforms. Hey, it’s Sunday, I’m not supposed to be stressing out about these details!
