Tag: sundrysunday

Sundry Sunday: Animal World Soccer

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.

Sundry Sunday: Mort Strudel’s Tales of Dwarf Fortress

It doesn’t feel like that long ago that Dwarf Fortress tales were the toast of the internet. They made the viral rounds in a way few things had before, or since for that matter, partly because of the downfall of community sites, especially Something Awful, that had gathered them together. That energy seems to largely gone into social media, and we’re all poorer for it.

But there are people who are still doing Dwarf Fortress stories, and that game is still as wonderfully deep and weird as it has ever been. Youtuber Mort Strudel does video playthroughs, and while he doesn’t release them quickly or often, he is consistent, and his work is interesting.

In particular I’d like to point out the saga of Chantedfins, over three-and-a-half hours of dwarven weirdness in nine videos.

If you’d like to jump to specific chapters, here’s direct links to all nine, with general descriptions of what each contains:

Part 1 (30m), founding, undead siege
Part 2 (31m), underground caverns, necromancy
Part 3 (32m), undead werellama
Part 4 (31m), tantrum, forgotten beasts
Part 5 (31m), the Observatory
Part 6 (15m), the Cursed Year
Part 7 (16m), forays against the goblins
Part 8 (14m), the mayor’s backstory
Part 9 (14m), the new age

Sundry Sunday: Christmas Nights Into Dreams

The Sega Saturn was one of the first consoles to feature a built-in real-time clock. Most systems now have one, so I’m kind of surprised that very few games make use of it. Animal Crossing does, sure, and some Pokemon titles have time-of-day features (which they had to include their own clocks in the cartridge hardware to support), but few other games bother reading the date.

One prominent example of a game that did was the Christmas demo version of Nights Into Dreams. Ordinarily just a single-level of the full game, the disk had a number of special modes that would crop up at different times. December was one of them, which triggered Christmas Nights mode, with special cutscenes and graphics. But it also had special events for playing during November or January (“Winter Nights”), New Year’s Day, and April Fools’ Day. Especially notable was an unlockable mode that allowed playing as Sonic the Hedgehog, in what is his first true 3D outing!

This video shows off all of Christmas Nights Into Dreams’ special modes, and you don’t have to fiddle with your computer’s clock to see them!

Sundry Sunday: SIMPSONS PIXELS

It’s Sunday again! This time we have for you a seven-year-old fan-made pixel art version of the Simpsons opening. It’s gotten 27 million views since it was uploaded, but some of you must have missed it, right?

It’s loaded with jokes and in-jokes, and is so pitch-perfect that it got used on an actual episode of The Simpsons! It really needs to be paused frequently to catch every reference.

SIMPSONS PIXELS (Youtube, 1:52)

Sundry Sunday: Mortal Kombat 11’s Friendship Moves

You remember Mortal Kombat from the 90s, right? The dark grim grimdarkness, the gore, the Congress-dismaying Fatality moves. Maybe you’re too young for that, but I’m sure you had to have absorbed it from (airy gesture) the culture. Midway may be long gone but they’re still making Mortal Kombat games, after all.

A lesser known aspect to the series is, starting with MK2, in addition to the gory over-the-top Fatality moves, they included alternate forms of them. There were Animality (where the character turns into an animal), Babality (where the opponent is turned into an infant) and, most entertainingly, Friendship moves, where the victorious character does something endearingly silly for the player’s amusement.

Because Friendship moves are humorous and whimsical, many thought they didn’t fit in with all the, you know, grimness of the Mortal Kombat series. But the Friendship moves are back in Mortal Kombat 11’s “Aftermath” expansion! deathmule posted a compilation video of all of them, and every one of them is terrific. See for yourself!

Sundry Sunday: “Everything You Need To Know” About Five Nights At Freddy’s

Oy. There are few lorebombs of niche gaming more intricate, and as utterly impenetrable to the uninitiated, as the Five Nights At Freddy’s superseries. What started mostly as a jumpscare delivery mechanism turned out to have backstory, and sequels, and prequels, and novels, and side games, and more.

The “Everything You Need To Know” series takes properties with sizable amounts of lore and tries to condense them to make them generally understandable. By no means do they cover all of the details, choosing to get the gist across simply rather than to explain everything that’s going on. It’s a bit humorous, but the point here isn’t a comedy and/or snarky retelling, as with the So This Is Basically series, but to give you a good rundown with some leavening humor along the way.

So, what will you do with your newfound knowledge? Impress kids? Write fanfiction? Perform exorcisms? Seek to create knockoffs?

Sundry Sunday: Little Runmo

Gooseworx’s Little Runmo has 24 million views on Youtube, but it’s amazing how many things with a ton of views are still obscure to most people. Here it is in the likely event you missed it.

Little Runmo is a platforming character in a video game world who begins to question the metaphysics of his existence. Who benefits from him running through this deadly obstacle course? And what happens if he doesn’t just run to the right, but actually explores his world? The answers are funny and disturbing! But mostly funny!

Sundry Sunday: Super Brothers by Guitar Vader

Every song on the soundtrack of Jet Grind Radio (a.k.a. Jet Set Radio) is out of sight. One of the most memorable (they’re all memorable, but even among this group) is Super Brothers by Guitar Vader, a cheeky riff (in lyrics) on Super Mario Bros., in a Sega game.

That’s all. That’s enough.

Sundry Sunday: Chip Tanaka’s Hammerhead Shark Song

Hirokazu Tanaka, a.k.a. Chip Tanaka, who used to go by Hip Tanaka, has had quite the career. He composed music for many Famicom games, including Kid Icarus, Tetris, Mother, and Mother 2/Earthbound. Especially he composed the music of Metroid, which did a lot to establish the feel of that entire game. He currently serves as President of Creatures Inc., the company that produces Pokémon. He has a personal website.

And he’s still making music! His second album came out in 2020. The above video is a song from it, which has a music video made by Undertale creator Toby Fox, and sprites by Temmie Chang. Give it a listen, why not?

Chip Tanaka / Hammerhead Shark Song from 2nd album “Domingo” (Youtube, four minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Vs. Balloon Fight Soundtrack

For making it through another week of internet life in 2022, let’s reward ourselves with the notably changed soundtrack to the arcade version of a NES classic, Balloon Fight.

Balloon Fight is remembered for its catchy music, which you get to experience in length when you play its Balloon Trip endurance mode. The music is also heard during the bonus round. Well, the arcade version, called Vs. Balloon Fight in keeping with Nintendo’s branding efforts at the time, has a rather fancier version of that track! Whoever is playing those virtual drums is a real show-off.

Extra! There’s a lot of cool little touches that make the arcade versions stand out. Vs. Excitebike has a fun and simple little bonus stage that requires you to jump over trucks evidently owned by the Mr. Yuck Moving Company.

Sundry Sunday: CUBE

It makes pocket calculators look like the cotton gin

It’s coming….

It’s fifteen years old now, but I still love the old “funnymovieinternet” video CUBE, which is a promo video from an era of video games that never really existed. In our little circle of friends, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR CUBE is still a signifier and in-joke all to itself. The site it came from is long defunct, but fortunately it hasn’t been hit by a spurious Youtube takedown notice yet, which as time approaches infinity, appears to be the ultimate fate of all videos on that frog-forsaken website.