The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A while back we posted Community, But Sonic, a fun little Youtoon from frequent Sundry Sunday appearator Pringus McDingus, of Sonic characters animated to audio from Community.
Along those same lines, here’s an animated storyboard of Sonic characters aniedited to fit Brooklyn Nine-Nine audio, from Doig & Swift. (Words in italics may not have actuality.)
ZoomZike on Youtube has been working for years on a comprehensive series of videos going through all the Mario Party games, and breaking down what parts of each are a matter of luck, and how many are of skill. Along the way, they also serve as fine guides to winning at them, at least as far as you are able.
They’ve gone through the series, trending longer with each one, for each game from Mario Party 1 through 7 (with an April Fool’s stop over at Advance). Even the shortest is at least an hour, and the most recent one is over five hours. That might seem like a whole lot, but imagine how long it took to construct! These are really deep videos, often with odds figured out through exhaustive, and exhausting, trial and error.
Mario Party 7 is the last of the four Mario Party games that came out for the Gamecube, even beating out the N64 portion of the series by one game. The early MPs were notorious controller destroyers, often resulting in the dreaded white dust of death, a result of ground plastic, emerging from the controller after heavy play. The Gamecube had controllers that weren’t as susceptible to wearing out, and so were better suited for the demanding play that Mario Party provides.
Anyway, here is the video, all five hours and 25 minutes of it:
And, here is the direct link:
Identifying Luck in Mario Party 7 (Youtube, 5:15)
From the recent trove of preserved video from Noclip Game History Archive, here’s a look through Nintendo Of America’s internal employee-only museum/store, circa 2006, on Youtube. There is very little sound in the footage, so you might want to increase the playback speed to double.
For context, it was near the end of the Gamecube’s life, immediately before the release of the Wii, and the early years of the Nintendo DS. Objects glimpsed during the stroll include various consoles, records of Nintendo’s collaboration with the Starlight Children’s Foundation, Pokemon merchandise, Nintendo awards, some arcade units (including a glitched Mario Bros. cabinet), a Virtual Boy, various character statuettes, old playing cards, a capsule timeline of Nintendo history, and various games for sale at the time. It seems that the museum also functions as a retail space for employees.
Exploring Nintendo of America’s Employee-Only Museum (Youtube, 28 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’ll admit it, there’s this cable that goes into my brain directly from Youtube, and I use it to cut the number of game-related things I have to post daily on this site by a full seventh. I know you all suspected it, I’m just confirmin’ it. I’m like a vermin, for confirmin’. I’m a squirmin’ vermin for confirmin’! In German! No, no let’s not write Shecks my language skills cannot kassieren.
Record scratch you know who does fun cartoons sometimes? Doobus Goobus. Like that other person, Pringus McDingus. I’d understand if you mixed them up from their names. But DooGoo posts more often, and longer things! Just a little less polished. Pringus has a really appealing art style, while Doobus traffics in the internet’s default art style: purposefully ugly. Nothing against that as a style, just calling a misshappen spade that thing that it is.
The requisite preamble now complete, please enjoy five Sonic the Hedgehog characters using profanity at each other in an entertaining manner.
The Chaotix Neighbors (& Knuckles) (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)
Displaced Gamers‘ Behind the Code series doesn’t get new videos often, but they’re always great. This one is more technical than usual, but I don’t think it’s really all that technical. It’s about how the NES processes and renders its sprites, particularly explains why there’s a eight sprite per scanline limit, and even reveals a couple of games that use that limit to produce special effects!
The gist: while each scanline is being prepared for display, the NES’ PPU looks through the entries for the machine’s 64 hardware sprites in order, finds the first eight that will display on the current line, and copies their attribute data to a small area of internal RAM. There is only space there for eight sprites, so, the NES cannot display more than eight sprites in a single scan line. Any later sprites in the primary attribute data won’t have room to be copied, and so the PPU won’t be able to display them.
One thing it notably doesn’t cover, however, is how games implement priority shuffling to cause sprites to flicker instead of not display at all. The video suggests that that might be coming in a future video….
NES Sprites, OAM, and the Battle for Priority – Behind the Code (Youtube, 19 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
This one is really short. It’s a capture from a mod of Tears of the Kingdom that changes many game messages.
Remember when Pikmin 2 came out on Gamecube? It marked a considerable departure from the first game’s structure. Pikmin had a hard time limit, and it was rather a rush to complete the game within its 30 days on your first try. Pikmin 2 dispensed with that, giving players as many days as they wanted. It also had “dungeon” areas, semi-random underground mazes where even the day timer was paused. A considerable portion of the game was in those underground areas.
One of the less-remembered things about Pikmin 2 was that it had actual product placement in it. Many of the treasures you found were outright commercial objects, modeled and textured in the game, some with vaguely promotional names, like “Courage Reactor” for Duracell Battery, or “Quenching Emblem” for a 7-Up bottle cap. Even the European and Japanese versions had these, although they reflected products from their territories instead.
Presumably because the licensing deals for these objects have expired, the Switch 2 version of Pikmin 2 uses different, more generic items in place of the trademarked originals. The replacements are an interesting lot. Where they could have just removed the old textures and replaced them with solid colors, they put in fake ingredients lists (too small to read), “Established 1920” notices, fake slogans and logos, notices of product quantity in Imperial units with metric equivalent, and more. You’d almost believe Olimar was finding real goods from Earth, ones that you just haven’t heard of. The tip-off is, the names of the replacement products are just slightly too generic. “Coconut Water” and “Night Lip Balm” are descriptive but generic, and so but really able to be trademarked. They’re a nice batch of fake brands though. For “Pineapple Fresh Slices,” they even made up a realistic-looking US-style Nutrition Facts label!
The differences have been recorded in a video by ModenXP on Youtube, embedded below:
And now, as an exercise in overkill, here’s a list of all the old and new versions, and interesting things about the replacements:
| Courage Reactor (280 poko) | Duracell D-Cell battery | “Electric Power Super Battery,” a fake brand that replaces the multiple Duracell items among the treasures. It’s also a D cell. There’s a warning box that’s too small for me to read. |
| Quenching Emblem (100 poko) | 7-Up bottle cap | Bottle cap for “Spicy Ginger Ale, Premium Quality.” There’s some other text along the outer edge that’s just on the other side of the readability afforded by the texture compression. |
| Alien Billboard (80 poko) | Kiwi Shoe Polish, 1 1/8 ounce (31 gram) size | “Shoe Polish, highquality shoe care.” “Established 1920.” The size is 32 grams, “1,128 OZ” in the British style, using a comma as the decimal separator instead of a period. The slogan “Shine & Protect” runs along the outer edge of the lid. |
| Drought Ender (100 poko) | Old-style Dr. Pepper bottle cap | A bottle cap for “Coconut Water,” evidently a product someone would want to buy. The rim assures us, twice, that it is in fact “100% Pure Coconut Water.” Promise or threat, you decide. |
| Survival Ointment (90 poko) | A tube of ChapStick lip balm | “Night Lip Balm,” with “Extra Moisture.” Lots of tiny unreadable text on this one. |
| Gerkin Gate/Flavor Gate (100 poko) | A lid to a jar of Vlasic pickles | The only item with a different title. This is “Orange Jam,” “Made With Real Fruit,” “Organic Homemade Product.” 13.4 oz (380 grams). Shouldn’t they have just called it marmalade? |
| Creative Inspiration (100 poko) | Old-style bottle cap for RC Cola, eternal third-place in the cola wars | “Delicious! Black Berry Soda.” One of the more generic logos. |
| Patience Tester (130 poko) | A can of Sun Luck water chestnuts. How many company ad departments would let a licensor get away with implying their product tests one’s patience? | “Pineapple, Fresh Slices.” “In heavy syrup.” Oh, joy. (I don’t like pineapple, and pineapple syrup is not something I would ever care to try.) It’s interesting that they changed even the type of product here, although it’s the same sized can. |
| Healing Cask (60 poko) | A jar of Carmex salve, “FOR-COLD-SORES.” Even though the lid looks like it’s from the 50s, I think this is how the product looks even today. | “Organic” Aloe Vera Cream. Nice stylized rendering of a plant on the cover, but otherwise pretty ordinary. |
| Salivatrix (30 poko) | A lid for Dannon “Fruit on the Bottom.” Fruit on the bottom of what? It doesn’t say! It does tell us it has “Same Great Taste!”, but again, the same great taste of what? The mysteries belie this treasure’s paltry value. Bee the why, “Salivatrix” sounds like an enabler of a particularly niche kink. | “Morning Fruit Yogurt.” Aaah that’s right, Dannon makes yogurt! Did they remake Pikmin 2 just so they could fix their omission? Blueberry, and Low Fat, Net Wt. 15 oz (425.25g). Thanks for the two decimal places of metric accuracy, fake yogurt lid. |
| Thirst Activator (300 poko) | Cap to a bottle of Tree Top juice. What variety is left unspecified. One of the little jokes of the game is how far off the retail value the Salvage Pod’s valuation of your treasures is. 300 poko is pretty valuable! | “FRESH Organic Fruit Sauce.” The name is still Thirst Activator though. Brings to mind gulping down a nice hearty jar of Ragu’s finest, mm-mmm. Both versions of the treasure have arrows telling a consumer which way to open the jar. |
| Massive Lid (100 poko) | Old-style cap to a bottle of Yoo-Hoo Cola. Cola? The internet is mum as to the history of this mysterious product. I don’t want to imagine what it was like. | The cap now reads “Mountain Water.” It’s a metal bottlecap, as if to a glass bottle. At least it’s recyclable. The title is odd; it’s a small cap, there’s plenty of bigger lids in the treasure hoard. |
| Happiness Emblem (100 poko) | Another old-style bottlecap, this to a can of Squirt grapefruit soda. Squirt, a Dr. Pepper brand, is still made and sold even today. | Ginger Ale LIGHT. Has an ingredients list right on the cap, just like the Squirt cap had. The ingredients are even readable: carbonated Water, high-fructose corn syrup, ginger extract. Hey, I’d drink it. Nintendo’s localizers know their territory. |
| Durable Energy Cell (160 poko) | Duracell C-Cell battery. | Electric Power Super Battery, again, Duracell’s counterpart in the Pikmin ludomatic universe. |
| Endless Repository (130 poko) | A can of Beach Cliff Sardines, “Proudly made in the USA” and “in soybean oil.” | “Sardines, Skinless & Boneless.” “In olive oil & lemon.” The “pull ring easy-open” and fake UPC code are nice touches. This is one of my favorite fake products, even though I’ve never eaten a canned fish in anger. |
| Pondering Emblem (100 poko) | Cap to a bottle of Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Flavored Beverage. The pondering part of it is wondering what the hell Yoo-Hoo is made of. | “Milk Crown” Cream Soda. Nice stylized representation of a splash of milk. The cap tells us “artificial flavor & color.” Remember to demand natural flavoring and coloring from your fictional video-game beverages! |
| Abstract Masterpiece (30 poko) | A Snapple Cap. You can’t flip it over to see if there’s a Snapple Fact on the bottom. | Sunny Tropical Juice. “What kind of juice?” “Tropical.” At least the label tells us it’s made from the best natural fruit. No synthetic fruit here, oh no no. |
| Optical Illustration (140 poko) | Lid to a jar of Ragu tomato-based sauce. I joked about it, and lo, it has come into being. There is very little optical here, and it hardly qualifies as an illustration | “Tomato Basil” homemade pasta sauce. One of the faker-looking treasures. |
| Activity Arouser (100 poko) | The “W”-logo from the lid of a can of Wilson tennis balls. | One of the few overtly fake brands, with a logo of a flaming tennis ball and the cryptic word “TARAI” in a sci-fi font. No other information is supplied. This mystery is going to haunt me. |
| Proton AA (90 poko) | Duracell AA-Cell battery. | The third of the Electric Power Super Battery collection. It looks a whole lot like one of those battery brands you can find at a dollar store, that last roughly 23 seconds when put to use. |
| Drone Supplies (130 poko) | Underwood Deviled Ham Spread. A really distinctive package, round but wrapped in paper with a unique fold at the top. | Tuna Salad Spread. The kept the paper wrapping. This is the one with the realistic Nutrition Facts label on the back. |
| Fuel Reservoir (120 poko) | Duracell 9-Volt battery. | Last of the Electric Power Super Battery set. |
| Fruit Guard (130 poko) | A can (not just the lid!) of Tree Top apple juice. The words “Apple Juice” are not written in Comic-Sans, but it does look a lot like they are. | FRESH Organic 100% apple juice. FRESH seems to be the replacement brand for Tree Top. At least it’s not drinkable fruit sauce this time. Also has a Nutritional Facts label on the back (as does the original). |
| Nutrient Silo (130 poko) | Skippy creamy peanut butter. | Ribbon’s peanut butter. They made a cute little logo involving a pair of cartoon peanuts for it! I demand fan art of them immediately, get to work! Also has a Nutrition Facts box and fake barcode. |
| Yellow Taste Tyrant (100 poko) | The yellow, unpainted plastic lid of a wide-mouthed container of French’s mustard. The French’s logo is molded into the surface, and seems to react to light, which is interesting. | A green painted illustration of a hot dog with the words “Hot Mustard” twice. The modeled French’s logo is gone. |
| Stringent Container (130 poko) | A canister of Clabber Girl baking powder. | The canister is of “Baking Powder,” “Queen’s Quality,” “Double Acting” and “Gluten Free.” Established 1932! Like the original, has both nutrition facts and a recipe, here for a chocolate muffin. You can just make out that a “serving” of this can of baking powder has 55 calories. At the bottom of the nutrition facts it says “European Leading Brand.” |
| Hypnotic Platter (100 poko) | Bottle cap for A&W (presumably) Root Beer. Caffeine free. | “19TH Anniversary” premium orange juice. Apparently sold in soda-style glass bottles? |
27 Treausres that Changed in Pikmin 2 on Switch (Youtube, 14 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Pringus McDingus again. Maybe a little explanation of this one would be to the benefit of those who aren’t so extremely online.
Super Mario Wonder is one of the games that was announced at the recent Nintendo Direct. The Elephant Berry is a powerup shown in that game. The green symbol in the berry’s eyes is the Deviantart logo. And what Daisy does in this animation is perfectly understandable and maybe even necessary.
I’ve mentioned Kaze Emanuar’s efforts to make the best Mario 64 there can possibly be on its native hardware. He’s compiled it with optimization flags turned on, made its platforming engine much more efficient, and worked hard to minimize cache misses, which was a major source of slowdowns in the game’s code. Under his efforts, he’s gotten the engine running at 60fps (although not yet in a playable version of the original). While these optimizations are not the kind of thing that can keep being found indefinitely, he’s bound to run out of ways to tune up the code, currently he’s still finding new ways to speed it up.
He made a Youtube video detailing his most recent optimization find: getting the game’s trigonometric functions executing at their speediest. What is interesting is that the Mario 64 code already uses a couple of tricks to get sine and cosine results in a rapid manner: the game only uses 4096 discrete angles of movement direction, and contains a lookup table that covers each of those angles. But it turns out that this optimization is actually a mis-optimization, because the RAM bus hits incurred to read the values into the cache are actually more expensive than just figuring out the values in code on the N64’s hardware!
The video starts out decently comprehensible, but eventually descends into the process of figuring out sine and cosine on the fly, and the virtues of the various ways this can be done, so you can’t be faulted for bailing before the end, possibly at the moment the dreaded words “Taylor series” are mentioned. But it’s a fairly interesting watch until then!
Painter Seap has done a number of very short Kirby cartoons that use the sound from bits of Aqua Teen Hunger Force as the soundtrack. It’s surprising how natural Master Shake’s voice seems coming from out the mouth of King Dedede! Here is a couple as embeds:
Here is all of them, linked:
Checkers (0:40) – Ice Cream (0:12) – Breakfast Time (0:32)
Tennis (1:05) – Hair (1:32) – Dedede Planet Robobot (1:42) –
And one extra, sort of (1:43)
St1ka is a Portugese Youtube creator who has retro gaming as his stomping grounds.
They generally do good work, although sometimes they include unexpected games in a series? As an example, their video on Forgotten 16-Bit games includes DOS and Amiga titles that are often not considered part of the bitness wars, PC Engine games that should rightfully be considered 8-bit, and even a couple of romhacks, which are a whole infested kettle. Once you start including romhacks your field has gotten large enough that you could likely never be done including things. And their monotonous vocal presentation grates quickly. Still though, they do their research, and the information is good.
Something else you’ve probably noticed from the thumbnails above is that St1ka’s not at all above focusing on female skin as clickbait, in such a way that it sometimes makes one feel vaguely creepy when loading his videos. It’s not a huge portion of the content, although the 16-bit compilation does feature as one of its subjects the Super Famicom title Princess Minerva which is a bit, as they say, sus. He admits to doing this in the Modern NES Games video, which, fair? Youtube is a content meat grinder and people try different things to be noticed. Also, the titles are a bit incendiary once in a while, in a style that many Youtubers use, and that often turns me away from a video.
Still, the amount of content that St1ka’s provides may overcome the negatives for you. He certainly cares about the subject. It’s a fun series, and it’s very likely to point you to some titles you’ve never heard of before. I leave the question of clicking through up to you.
St1ka’s Channel (Youtube) – 29 Incredible Modern NES Games (45 minutes) – Incredible 16-bit Hidden Gems You Never Played (44 minutes) – Forgotten 8-bit Games You Never Played (41 minutes)
The Modern NES Games video provides no information on where to get these titles! I believe strongly in accessible text, so here is where they can be found and what they are. If you choose to pore through this, or watch the video linked above, you’ll quickly discover that not all of these are actually “INCREDIBLE.” Blame St1ka for the discrepancy.
* It has become my policy not to duplicate egregious stylization in the names of commercial products, on the grounds that no one has time for that shit. The official spelling of Steins Gate is Steins;Gate, yes with a semicolon, but I can’t even bring myself to camel-case Youtube, Playstation, or Nethack (despite not even being commercial) these days, so I toss that misuse right out of my grammatical window.
Matthew Green’s Press The Buttons is a gaming culture blog that predates our efforts by many years. They don’t update as obsessively frequently as we do, but the find good things!
They found a couple of commercials promoting Link’s Awakening, which turns 30 years old this year, one from Japan and one from the United States. The Japanese one is light and fun and a joy to behold. The American one, well, has rap lyrics, and is poorly lit, and is mostly a guy singing to game footage. Nothing against rap, but if there was ever a Zelda game that was less befitting the approach that commercial gives it, other than maybe Wind Waker, this one is it.
Here’s the Japanese one, which at least presents characters actually in the game:
A Tale of Two Link Commercials (Press The Buttons)