The Flipside of Gaming
…and neither do I.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
By the way, I made this post while sitting in Peachtree Center in Atlanta the Wednesday before DragonCon 2023! Hello! These posts will probably be somewhat low effort, but they’re still coming! It beats being back home in Brunswick, GA this weekend where Hurricane Idalia is smacking things around!
I Don’t Care For Freddy FazBear (45 seconds)
I love BASIC! I don’t make a secret of it. It was the product, even before DOS, that launched Microsoft. It was invented to be the language to bring programming to the masses, and, for a short time, it fulfilled that function. (These days, if you want to learn coding, I suggest Python. Not only is it a lot more capable and modern, but you can actually get a job writing it.)
Used to be if you had a new computer you wanted families to buy, you had to have a version of BASIC to ship with it. The Apple II had two, one written by Steve Wozniak himself. Right off the top of my head, computer systems with BASIC, go! Altair, Apple II, Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, 128, Plus-4, 16, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, MS-DOS, Windows (Visual BASIC carried the torch for many years), and, most improbably, the Atari VCS/2600, in its BASIC Programming cartridge, an effectively useless cart for its stated purpose that’s nonetheless an excellent hack. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM, but it can still run BASIC, by jove.
The Famicom has a version of BASIC too, coming in at the end of the language’s heyday. Over on the Peertube instance diode.zone, user RE:Enthused did a two-part introduction to it that may be of interested to people who still think in terms of FOR/NEXT loops.
Let’s look at Family Basic on the Famicom, Part 1 (8 minutes) and Part 2 (17 minutes).
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
In the year + one half we’ve been doing this, we’ve dug up a lot of varied things for Sundays. This one’s pretty short, but still, the fact they made it in stop motion is respectable. (At least I assume it’s stop motion. They could have made it in a computer I guess, but then, why make look like it was stop motion? Some kind of Lego Movie stylistic flex?)
Anyway, it’s another Pikmin 4 video. Pikmin 4 is not as sharply designed as Pikmins 1 or 3, it takes after 2 (it has caves, and even has one starring that game’s most infamous boss, the Waterwraith), but even the flabbiest Pikmin game is still a wonderful thing to behold.
This video covers is about an actual boss battle in Pikmin 4. Previous games had you fight monsters in the Long Legs family: the Beady Long Legs from Pikmin 1, the Raging Long Legs from 2, the Shaggy Long Legs from 3 and now… the Groovy Long Legs. This video is not confabulating much: it shines lights around, plays music, and your Pikmin actually do get down when you’re fighting it–which usually results in them getting turn into Pikmin Paste. Time to reload the floor….
The Groovy Long Legs Experience (Youtube, one minute)
Twinbeard is Jim Stormdancer, who’s on Mastodon. He created Frog Fractions, and its mysterious sequel. But these things are irrelephant to the subject of this post, which is that he’s playing Super Mario Galaxy, one star a day, and posting his play to Youtube.
There’s a playlist of the 51 (as of this writing) stars, and none of them have many hits right now. It’s possible that he does them in batches and just posts one a day, but that’s fine. It’s nice to just follow along at this pace.
Twinbeard hasn’t fallen prey to something I hate about the video internet, which I could complain of as TikTokification, but honestly there are people on TikTok who aren’t nearly as bad as some on Youtube. And Youtube was trending towards it anyway, with their often unwatchable Shorts section serving as just an extreme example of pre-existing trends. It may just be my advancing age, but I really really really dislike much of what I see on Shorts, and Twinbeard’s videos are a nice alternative to it.
From Youtube channel matt + megs, a one-minute cartoon about the end-of-daily lives of Olimar and the Pikmin. It’s adorable. See see:
Olimar is Tired (Youtube, one minute)
If there’s two constants here at SSB, it’s that we post a lot of Nintendo content, and a lot of Youtube video stuff.
Nintendo, because they’re the most interesting of the major console manufacturers, and one of the most consistently great developers around today. I still think that Atari’s coin-op division, later split off as Atari Games, was more ingenious in their classic era, because they made such a wide variety of games and rarely did sequels, but Nintendo would definitely be second place, and has the advantage of still being alive as a company. (Atari Games has been gone for 18 years now, and that number isn’t getting lower. That makes me really sad.)
One of Nintendo’s biggest series is, of course, Super Smash Bros. It wasn’t always so. Smash on Nintendo 64, the first in the series, was a great little game, and the first time that they crossed over between basically all their properties, but it wasn’t until Melee, the second game, that it really became huge, despite being on the relatively low-selling Gamecube hardware.
Super Smash Bros. Melee was the game that really established the pattern for the rest of the Smash series: offer a ton of content, give everyone unprecedented amounts of fanservice, and offer a super fast-paced game with an eye towards the esports scene.
On that last point they succeeded: Melee is a very popular esports game. I don’t know if it’s more popular than Ultimate, the current Smash game released for Switch, although I don’t follow that scene generally so I really have no idea. All of the Smash games have some esports interest, but Melee’s the most popular previous title, I think.
Melee had a 13 month development time, fairly short, and resulted in a fair number of bugs, and that’s where AsumSaus’s videos are most interesting. Few games have had their internals splunked as deeply as Melee’s has, and they dredge up the most interesting facts from all that data.
I’ll just present one of their videos this time out, from three years ago, but I leave the door open to spotlighting others in the future. They’re just that interesting. So, here’s their 37-minute video asking, in considerable depth: outside the specific and highly particular subset of Super Smash Bros Melee that is tournament-level competitive play, taken as a whole: is the game actually good? He obviously enjoys that one tiny bit of it a great deal, but, what about all the rest? Watch the video to find out.
Is Melee A Good Game (AsumSaus on Youtube, 37 minutes)
There are a number of NES games that feel like they’re held together with paperclips and chewing gum. Some of them are almost endearing for their glitchiness. When it comes to janky NES games, a few that I tend to think of are those made by Micronics (who implemented Ghosts N’ Goblins, which has an awful frame rate) and Athena (where one boss has a death animation that causes it to flip through many of the sprites in the game).
A company that usually did a lot better with their internally-developed games was Capcom, makers of Mega Man, 1943, Bionic Commando, and all the Disney Afternoon games from the time, all of which have slick 60 fps update rates and smooth animation. One game they made of which that is definitely not true, however, is NES Strider.
If you’re only familiar with Strider from the beautiful arcade version, you might wonder what even NES Strider has to do with it. It’s not proper to say Famicom Strider, because Capcom never released it in their home territory, perhaps because they were too embarrassed to.
Other than the first stage being set in generally the same fictional location in Russia (even if it doesn’t look at all the same), its story has absolutely nothing to do with it. Jeremy Parish looked at it (and remarked on its glitchiness) in an episode of Metroidvania Works from a couple of weeks ago. Some people, like Kid Fenris of the self-titled blog, actually likes it, although acknowledges its many issues.
Behind the Code, one of the best game internals series on Youtube, had a look at the implementation of NES Strider. It’s an interesting 15 minutes to my taste, but if you want a tl;dr, NES Strider often doesn’t make its framerate target, and instead of slowing the game down as most games do, it plows ahead forward into the next frame, leaving the incomplete data in its update buffer to be copied into the PPU. This causes the individual hardware sprites that compose enemy characters to sometimes have only one of their coordinates updated, or even causing data remaining from previous frames to be copied over.
Why does it does this instead of just slowing the game down? Possibly the coding was so crappy that it would have caused excessive slowdown; the scene chosen as an example in the video has the problem occur when there’s only two basic enemies on the screen in the game’s first area! Not the best engine on the system there Capcom.
The Garbage Sprites in Strider (NES) (Behind the Code on Youtube, 15 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Sometimes on Sunday we find very old things that survive down to us through years. But sometimes we find some fairly new memes, and this is one of those.
I don’t know when or where this started, but there’s this collection of videos on Youtube that are just silence, but with, very once in a while, maybe every two or three minutes, a sound effect to break the repose. Fortunately, most of these videos lead off with the sound effect, so you’ll know kind of what the result will be.
Why load up a video like this? Well as far as I can tell, the idea is to have it playing in the background while you do other things, such as watch a movie. Once in a while, the sound will happen to play around the time something significant in the other thing happens, and the unexpected juxtaposition is humorous, or at least interesting. Basically, humor through randomness. I’ve long had an idea for a mobile app that would do something like this, with randomized noises, but in the end figured it was too niche to bother with. Maybe I should try it after all?
While this idea extends beyond just video game sounds, several prominent examples have to do with games, keeping us within our site’s roomy theme. For best results, whatever those might be, it’s probably best to have on an ad blocker, or else some of the random noises will be commercials for terrible mobile games or Old Spice deodorant.
Here’s Lego Yoda screaming sporadically:
Mario, doing something similar:
Now the interruption is by the first four notes of Megalovania from Undertale:
A Minecraft Villager peppers your the next hour with infrequent noises:
Or here, just Minecraft sounds in general. The sounds in this one are fairly frequent, two or three a minute. There has got to be a Creeper noise in there somewhere to cause sudden jolts, I’m sure:
Angry Bird game noises:
The Mario 64 Thwomp sound effect:
Waluigi:
And, a duck quacking. It’s not a video game duck. I just like ducks.
If you watch more than one of these, expect your Youtube suggestions to get weird for a while. Now that your day has been enlivened and enriched I take my leave of you until the morrow. Ta!
For this podcast I did, we took a look at the Shooter genre focusing on the 2010’s, when more RPGs elements were added to shooters and the rise of the “Role Playing Shooter”.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Did you know there was a Parappa anime? It was released in around 2001, around the time Parappa the Rapper 2 for PS2 was released.
Parappa creator Rodney Greenblat said, in a Gamasutra interview in 2005, that other than character designs he wasn’t allowed to be involved with producing the anime. I it shows, especially with the focus on the new characters Matt and Paula. They feel like the writers included them because they wanted to write to their personalities, maybe because they didn’t want to step on the toes of the developers of the games by writing for their characters. It’s not an awful show, but it’s not what a Parappa show should have been.
An episode that ties in with the games a bit more than usual is Episode 13, which involves Parappa’s karate teacher Tamanagi-sensei, known to English speakers as Chop Chop Master Onion. He sounds a lot like he does in the game, even speaking Japanese, and it’s great to hear him get more lines.
Parappa the Rapper: Episode 13 – ACHO! ACHO! (Youtube, 22 minutes)
This would ordinarily go into a Sundry Sunday post, but it’s interesting for historical value. Unlike the Switch’s spartan interface, the WiiU took some of its UI design inspiration from the 3DS, which was a bit more playful. The 3DS supported theming the main menu, which is a feature that never came to the WiiU, but they both did support StreetPass, with the WiiU still having its little-noticed StreetPass server settings among its rainbow-colored settings menu options. And of course both systems supported the Miiverse, Nintendo’s failed attempt at its own gaming-focused social media service, which let users make text and drawing posts, tied in with their Mii feature (still in the Switch although much declined in prominence), and allowed Nintendo to send users information directly to players. Miiverse is gone now, has been for years, but some people I hear are working on a fan-led revival. I shudder to think of what will get posted there without Nintendo’s moderators.
Back to the interface. Probably the quirkiest of Nintendo’s UI creations was an animation that went with the tool, downloaded fro the Wii’s Shop Channel, that transferred system and shop data from the Wii into an SD card package to be transferred to a fresh WiiU system. It could have been a simple progress bar, but they had their developers create a charming (gee I use that word a lot) sequence where Pikmin, at that point only those from the Pikmin 2 game that had last been seen on Gamecube, visually bundle up all of the transferable software, use a walkway to carry it into a waiting rocketship, and jet off to a nearby sun marked with the WiiU logo. At that point, the user would be prompted to move the SD card to the WiiU, where after installing a corresponding tool from the WiiU’s eShop, the process could continue, with a matching unloading animation.
If you never had the chance to see this sequence (easily possible given the WiiU’s low sales), or just want to relive the process, here it is, both of the Wii to WiiU data transfer animations, at about eight minutes:
This video only shows the animation. If you’d rather relive the whole process, including system menus, instructions and warning messages, here is a 15 minute video that records it. It also seems to have a couple of scenes that aren’t in the above video, including the one depicted in the head image.
A brief personal story. When the WiiU came out I got one. The WiiU’s fate was already sealed by that point, and I got it pretty cheap from a local Target. By that time my much-played Wii had been suffering from some serious issues. It had been hacked many times, the Homebrew Channel installed and its boot software replaced.
People will tell you that doing this is only for the purposes of piracy, and that’s really not true. We put the Wii to use as a general media player. It lived mostly at a friend’s house, and whenever I would go over we would use it to watch movies and things from SD cards. We even watched a DVD or two that way; while the Wii had a DVD drive installed, Nintendo didn’t spring for the licenses to play DVD movies, so it was purely intended as a data drive. You could bypass that restriction with the right homebrew software, although it wasn’t great and didn’t seem able to do menus, so we almost never used it.
My Wii had put into heavy use for game and media playing, and I put on and removed a lot of software over time, in addition of course to hacking it several times. As a result, it had gotten quite glitchy. Sometimes it wouldn’t boot, sometimes it would boot okay but wait until getting some ways into a game and freezing, and sometimes, weirdly, it’d show the opening Health warning screen, but the letters in the font would glitch out, individually. It was really a sight to see.
As a result I was really glad to get the saveable data off of that system and onto hardware that was reliable. I had to go through the whole sequence more than once, as the console froze along the way a time or two, but fortunately I got it, and our large Mii collection, all off and onto the WiiU, where it still lives today.
Collecting and saving Miis, from friends and the nearly-forgotten Check Mii Out Channel, and the Mii Parade of random Miis sent from Nintendo, is an aspect of the Wii that has not survived to the Switch. I hope whatever successor the Switch gets has something like it. And bring back StreetPass too!
Wii to Wii U Data Transfer w/ Pikmin (Youtube, 8 minutes)
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.)
