While a few of the references in this 1 hour, 25 minute video by torkirby may seem half-baked, they’re greatly out numbered by the ones that seem dead on. A lot of Kirby’s staff, especially in the area of music, have been with the series a long time. People try to leave Kirby’s presence, but they keep suckin’ them back in: even Masahiro Sakurai is returning to direct another Kirby game, with Kirby Air Riders slated for the Switch 2!
Speaking of which, I have a post in the works about the rising netplay esports scene around City Trial in the original Air Ride. That looks really interesting!
After a year in the works, ZoomZike’s epic in-depth series examining each game in the Mario Party series has reached the Nintendo DS version, and as always it’s very long (4½ hours this time!) and extremely detailed. The title makes it sound like it’s got a very narrow focus, but the Identifying Luck in Mario Party series is more like a comprehensive review of nearly every aspect of the Mario Party series. They’re among the best game breakdowns you can find on Youtube!
ZoomZike doesn’t just cover Mario Party games on his channel, and we linked to his video on Sonic Adventure 2’s Final Rush level, but the Mario Party series is probably his greatest achievement, and are like a complete strategy guide and a course on game design all in themselves.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It was vitally important to tell all of you about Pugberto last week, I’m sure you’ll all agree. A couple of other items had to wait a week before I could present them to you.
The Amazing Digitial Circus has a fifth episode now. It got over 40 million views in a few days so there’s a good chance you’ve found it by now. Still though, here ’tis (25m):
The Amazing Digital Circus has merchandise, and some pretty amusing videos to sell it. There’s a new one of those too (4m):
Over on a much less trafficked portion of Youtube, the hapless heroes of the Wigglewood Tales have a couple of new videos too, The Bandit (2m):
Kirby Air Ride appears set to be finally remembered, with the announcement that a sequel is in the works for the Switch 2, with Masashiro Sakurai again at the helm.
Air Ride, possibly the most atypical game in a franchise with maybe 50% or more atypical games in it, is a sadly-neglected title that is, no lie, one of the truest underrated classics of the Gamecube, and it’s mostly because of the amazing City Trial mode, which I’ve mentioned here before.
In play terms, City Trial is what turns Air Ride from a severely diminished F-Zero clone to a game for the ages. Multiple colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) explore a sizable map, not huge but not tiny either. Scattered around it are a variety of randomly-generated vehicles and items. Of the items, the most important is probably the upgrades, or “patches,” which improve the stats of whatever vehicle a Kirby may pilot. They are Boost, Top Speed, Turn, Charge, Glide, Weight, Offense, Defense and HP. Each has a definite effect on your vehicle’s performance; the more you have, the stronger the vehicle gets.
People who haven’t played Kirby Air Ride, but have played Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, may recognize this idea as the basis of its exclusive Smash Run mode, but in Smash Run you each had your own map to explore; it only became a true multiplayer game at the very end. But in both Air Ride and Smash Run, after the players build their vehicle or character, they’re all thrown into a competitive event. It might be fighting, but it might also be something different. Their success at collecting stats helps determine how well they do in the event, but while there may be clues, there is no definite indication of what the event will be.
So collecting the stats is very important to success. But the game doesn’t explain what they do very well, and in fact some of their effects are quite complex and difficult to communicate briefly. The video above goes into detail, but here’s a few quick takeaways:
The “Boost” stat, as it turns out, is more like Acceleration.
The Glide stat works partly by reducing weight, so it and the Weight stat counteract each other a bit.
All of the stats work by multiplying the vehicle’s base stat, so a vehicle with a 1.3 base gets more effect if it collects that kind of powerup than if it were at the usual 1.0.
However, the default vehicle, the Compact Star you begin each City Trial game with, has a Defense stat of zero. Since any number times zero is zero, you get no benefit from Defense patches if you stick with the Compact Star vehicle.
Watch the video if you want to know more. And if you’ve never played Kirby Air Ride but have a Switch 2 keep a look out, because it seems very likely that Nintendo will give it a rerelease for Switch Online Expansion Pack eventually!
I’ll admit, I’ve sat on this one for months. After posting about U Can Beat Video Games, I started to worry that this blog might get a bit repetitive if I kept posting about video game walkthrough series, and they take a long time to construct because there’s so many links, but it’s been a while since then, and VG101 has been around for years now.
Video Games 101, a side channel of a Let’s Play channel, covers much the same ground as U Can Beat Video Games. Some of the specific games are different. VG101 is a bit more about entertainment than the specifics of beating games and the strategy involved. Professor Brigands has three “TA” characters that assist him: Scary Gary (covering bosses), Blaze (a surfer who goes over the available items in each game) and Fluff the cat puppet, the most fun of the group, who explains game trivia and history.
I’m just putting it off still further at this point. Here is the intro video to the channel, followed by the list of every walkthrough VG101 has posted to date.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Just a few days ago I linked to the complete two-season run of the CG Donkey Kong Country cartoon that got made and aired on Saturday mornings. Well, there’s more where that came from.
As it turns out the people who animated it, “Medialab,” had other plans for the character. It’s not very well known, but in France they made another show, a general cartoon anthology, with the characters performing in bumpers between them, like the original version of Cartoon Planet. It was originally called Donkey Kong Planet, and it’s both bizarre and entirely in French.
Then, the model who was the co-star, along with the DKC characters, left the show. They rebranded it to DKTV, and, um.
You have a choice. You can start off with this 10-minute explainer video by Carlito. It’s the standard Youtuber, “can you BELIEVE this happened??” video. It’s not really bad, I’ve definitely seen worse, but it’s not really a sterling example of the genre either. Here it is embedded:
Or, if you’re a jaded connoisseur of bizarre video like I am, you might want to just go ahead and jump into the deep end of the pool, unprepared. If you’re like that, I got you covered. This is what you want (41 minutes). Don’t say you weren’t warned.
It is. It IS. It is not recommended, for hearing, for knowing about, for existing.
Two playlists, one for each season. Yes, they made a second season. So many characters are off model (literally, their models are off), but Cranky Kong’s is especially different.
I’m still deep in the 8-bit computing weeds right now, and I always look to connect what I’m personally researching with what I put up on Set Side B. So lucky you, what I’ve been looking at today is The 8-Bit Guy’s videos about the history of Commodore!
It’s a series of videos (yes, on Youtube) exploring the history of that company, both lauded and hated. They released one of the best-selling computers of all time in the Commodore 64, but founder Jack Tramiel wasn’t all that great a guy. Word is the C64 was priced so low because he held a grudge against Texas Instruments, a calculator company Commodore competed against, so he moved to undercut and destroy their sales of the TI-99/4A, turning it into just another computing history footnote. He also bought rising star MOS Technologies, which had a terrific things going with the ultra low-cost 6502 processor, but then basically only used the company as Commodore’s bespoke chip fab.
But say what you will about Tramiel and other strong personality company Presidents and CEOs, when they’re successful, their ups and downs make for interesting times, to read about and hear. So “hear” you go!
The series is collected into a 13 video playlist, 8 parts of the series itself averaging about 25 minutes each, plus some extras. It’s a tale that begins with one of the first (if not the first) pre-assembled mass market personal computers, and ends with the Amiga. If the dice had only rolled differently (and maybe if Tramiel hadn’t bee forced out of the company), then instead of Apple rising to become the leading computing device maker in the world, we might be using Commodore C-Phones today.
Smash Melee has had a huge amount of attention payed to it over the years, and one source of player obsession has been the Home Run Contest.
In brief: Smash Bros. games are about racking up damage to a target, measured in percent. The higher the percent, the further an attack target flies when struck. The idea of the Home Run Contest is to do as much damage to a special Sandbag character, which doesn’t move on its own, in 10 seconds, then to hit it as hard as you can, usually with a baseball bat item, to make it fly as far as possible.
The Home Run Contest has been in every Smash Bros. game since Melee, and its first implementation has lots of weird things about it. Like, if you set the game language to Japanese, you get a slightly smaller platform, which makes your distances count slightly longer.
Lots of oddities are pointed out by Youtuber “Practical TAS”, in their 26-minutes video, here. Warning: serious geekery ahead!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Given how similar their art styles are, it’s surprising that there aren’t more stylistic crossovers between Charles Schulz’s and Shigesato Itoi’s respective classics of popular media, but this is the first direct connection between them that I can name.
Let’s break down the title. “AsumSaus” is one of the best Youtubers on the subject of Super Smash Bros. Melee. He makes well-edited, entertaining videos that don’t go overboard. Overboard is hear defined as employing obnoxious editing and a speaking style that would make a morning zoo radio host say, “hey, maybe you should dial it back a little.”
AsumSaus is great, and his most popular video, which we posted here back in 2023, tells an engaging story well, about the success of aMSa, the Melee player who won championships using Yoshi, a character nearly everyone else in that scene looks down upon. Hey, if you missed that video you should go watch it now (54m). It’s enough to almost make people who (gasp!) don’t care about goofy tournament platform fighters take interest.
This video isn’t about that. In fact, I’ve been trying to not post so many Youtube videos here lately. This is the first one I’ve posted since Sundry Sunday! See, I’m trying! Josh Bycer’s doesn’t count!
AsumSaus’ video this time, his first in 10 months, is about the most emblematic Melee stage: Final Destination. The boring stage, and its symbiotic relationship with most of the roster of Melee. Specifically, the group of players who don’t want to get killed by Fox, Falco, or sometimes Captain Falcon. (20 minutes) Enjoy, if you’re of a mind to enjoy that kind of thing. If anyone could cause you to care, it’s probably AsumSaus.