Tag: youtube

Sundry Sunday: Summarizing Kingdom Hearts

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!

EXPLANATION THE FIRST: LONG MODE

Barry Kramer, A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts, up to 3 (33 minutes):

Then, his A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts 3 (12 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE SECOND: SHORT AND SNARKY

JelloApocalypse’s So This Is Basically Kingdom Hearts (5 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE THIRD: VIDEOGAMEDUNKEY

vgd “explained” it in four minutes:

As a followup, his “explanation” of Metal Gear Solid (about 7 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE FOURTH: REALLY REALLY LONG

Dialing down the snark, NovaZone did a more reverent explainer in about three-and-a-half hours:

EXPLANATION THE FIFTH: BRYAN DAVID GILBERT

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)

AND, MISCELLANEOUS

Honest Game Trailers (4 minutes):

And Loading Ready Run (7 minutes):

SORA, DONALD, AND GOOFY (2 1/2 minutes):

And that is just about enough of that. So, so long, from me, Mickey Mouse, and They Might Be Giants (1 minute).

SGDQ 2022: Silly Block Review

A highlight of the Games Done Quick speedrunning marathons at roughly six months apart each year is AGDQ’s “Awful Block,” of memorably bad games, and SGDQ’s “Silly Block,” of extremely weird, mostly-indie games. SGDQ has just wrapped up, so let’s take a look back at Silly Block this year.

DEEEER Simulator (video is 42 minutes long):

Of the Goat Simulator school of weirdness, “DEEEER Simulator: Your Average Everyday Deer Game” is mostly a delivery mechanism for ludicrous visuals.

Mi Scusi (29 minutes):

The plot hangs together slightly better than DEEEER Simulator, but it’s largely the same kind of thing, bizarre settings and happenings within a physics engine, only this time you’re a drunken Italian man instead of a “deer.”

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (52 minutes):

A bit more of an actual game than the previous two polygonbombs, Turnip Boy has a somewhat drier sense of humor.

Jimmie Johnson’s Anything With An Engine (28 minutes):

This one is actually a race between two players, in a cart racing game made with silly carts, in a mode where half the racers are driving one way around the track, and the rest drive the other way. (The race isn’t directly between them on the same tracks; they’re both playing their own systems. They’re racing in more of a speedrun fashion.)

Gourmet Warriors (39 minutes):

A side-scrolling brawler where you beat up weird thugs and robots that drop food, which you then make meals with. The ingredients you choose determines which stat boosts you receive! It’s less zany than the previous games, if that’s the way your tastes (heh) lead.

Thunder in Paradise (55 minutes but starts about 5m in):

“Imagine a game in the Baywatch extended universe where there’s a talking boat and Hulk Hogan is deus ex machina.” Actually the last episode of the 1994 TV show Thunder in Paradise converted, kind of, into a game for the Phillips CD-i. Most of the run is just video footage, but it was a really goofy TV show.

Incredible Crisis (1 hour 10 minutes):

Ah, this one is, somehow, not an indie title! Published by Titus for the original PlayStation, and with music from the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Incredible Crisis is a minigame collection where success at the games helps to avert ridiculous dangers to one of four members of a family.

Sundry Sunday: Pixel Orson Welles Disses Game Characters

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.

SGDQ 2022: Zelda Beta Cartridge “Triforce% run,” explained

Friday night at SGDQ 2022 the TAS Block show demonstrated something special. After a recording of a Portal 2 run that predictably demolished that game, they moved on to a rather more esoteric show.

In past shows, TAS Bot has some off some pretty ridiculous sights, using something called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Essentially, using certain well-understood exploits, the runner (usually, but not always, a set of scripted inputs) writes a sequence of instructions into the machine’s RAM, and then transfers the code execution to that sequence, allowing for “arbitrary behavior,” meaning, almost anything that can be written into that RAM. TAS Bot at AGDQ 2014 wrote Pong into memory during a run of Super Mario World and ran it (6 minutes):

This technique has also been used to run a variant of Flappy Bird, and even a bona fide hex editor into the save RAM of Super Mario World, without even needing scripts, entirely by a human player. But this is beside the point.

In 2017, TASbot demolished the NES Classic, NES games and pulled off other very weird shenanigans (59 minutes).

There’s several of these videos, which I leave it to you to search out. They’re pretty easy to find on YouTube with the search terms “games done quick” and “tasbot”.

The point of this post is to bring you news of how players finally “obtained” the Triforce in Ocarina of Time after 23 years. The video of the show has yet to be uploaded to YouTube (it has been since I wrote this! scroll to the end), but until it shows up, Retro Game Mechanics EX has a video explaining how it was done (34 minutes):

SwankyBox has his own explainer video that’s 22 minutes. Of course, it’s all an elaborate show, but it runs on the Ocarina of Time beta cartridge found back in January of last year.

EDIT: Here it is, the whole 1-hour 13-minute epic!

Technoblade, Minecraft YouTuber, passes at 23

I saw on Metafilter a post from The corpse in the library (an unfortunate user name in context) that the popular streamer has passed away. Technoblade is one of the few channels to have reached over a billion views. He is remembered for his playing skill and his friendly rivalry with fellow Minecraft Youtuber Dream.

A message from his father:

Here is Technoblade’s Channel. His website, with merch. I don’t like linking to Fandom, but it hosts a good backgrounder on him and his life.

Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About Zelda: Breath of the Wild Speedrun Animation

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.

Chrontendo #60

Chrontendo’s back! Dr. Sparkle’s long-running journey through the entire library of the Famicom and NES continues. He’s been doing this for at least 15 years! Chrontendo got its start as a blog, then moved to a YouTube format, although every episode is also uploaded to the Internet Archive. Dr. Sparkle tries to complete the games he covers, meaning, sometimes it takes a very long time to construct an episode, especially when it contains a lengthy JRPG.

In addition to being generally watchable by anyone with even a passing interest in video gaming history, Chrontendo is a good series just to have on in the background while you do other things. What I’m saying is that it’s comfortable. Like Comfortable Doug! (warning: earworm)

Chrontendo 60 is subtitled “The Most Perverted Episode,” covers April through May of 1990, and features:

  • horse racing sim Kurogane Hiroshi No Yosou Daisuki! Kachiuma Densetsu,
  • a long section the original Fire Emblem and the series in general,
  • Rare’s PinBot, a very unique and interesting simulation of a real Williams pinball table with some unique video extras,
  • GameTek’s home version of the Nickelodeon game show Double Dare, which was also made by Rare,
  • the ludicrously-titled Dinowarz: The Destruction of Spondylus,
  • Imagineering’s Ghostbusters II,
  • Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road, by Rare,
  • a very long section on the epic Final Fantasy III, from and by Square, which Dr. Sparkle proclaims to be the best JRPG on the system,
  • Kagerou Densetsu, a “sorta action RPG thing” published by “Pixel,” but we’re not sure who exactly that is, and may have been intended, it is speculated, to be a kind of RPG-ish sequel to The Legend of Kage, and
  • Nintendo World Cup (forgive me for not typing out the entire Japanese title), that weird Kunio soccer game that Nintendo published under their own banner, just with all the story and setting removed. It’s a decent soccer game even so.

With this episode, Dr. Sparkle is declaring a dividing point for the series. Up until now has been the rise of the Famicom; the rest covers its fall, what he calls the “Byzantine Empire” phase of the system’s life. This doesn’t mean the series is almost over though. Far, far from it.

Chrontendo #60 (YouTube, 2h 36m) – archives – previously

Sundry Sunday: Mornal’s Phoenix Wright Animations

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!

Above is the first, but they’re all great. Here’s the most recent:

Upscaling Classic Sierra On-Line Adventures

Hackaday’s Matthew Carlson points to an effort to make the graphics in old Sierra On-Line Adventure games better. The graphics in the games in question weren’t stores as raster images, but rather drawn with vector commands, so theoretically it should be easy. But as the video demonstrates, the resolution of their coordinate system didn’t take into account the possibility that someone might come in later and draw the art into a canvas with higher resolution, which causes some weird glitches that had to be accounted for.

Hackaday: Upscaling the Sierras – eviltrout: How classic Sierra game graphics worked (and an attempt to upscale them)

Sundry Sunday: Nintendo Reminds “You Cannot Beat Us”

It’s Sunday again! The weeks have been hard and they’re only getting harder, so as a reward for making it this far, please enjoy this entertainingly oppressive commercial from 1986!

Back in the NES days Nintendo of Australia sponsored this commercial to put players in their place. I especially like the voice of the Duck Hunt Dog, and the Mario castle music used as a background soundtrack.

Sundry Sunday: Remembering Unskippable

It’s Sunday again! Congratulations for making it to this late day and week.

Since you survived to this point, let’s relax and look at a couple of episodes of Unskippable, venerable web comedy group LoadingReadyRun’s riff project of video game cutscenes, formerly published on The Escapist.

There are 198 of these in the playlist, so let’s just do a couple for now. Above is the opening of everyone’s favorite embodiment of suffering, Dark Souls.

Probably because of the litigious propensities of gigantic megalithic corporations, their mocking of the cutscenes of the Kingdom Hearts games are not on the list. Since Unskippable is no longer hosted from The Escapist’s site itself, these are survived only by the random uploads of fans. One of those is here, for the HD release of Kingdom Hearts, in all of its manifest ridiculousness: