Tag: youtube

Sundry Sunday: DK Rap Remixed by Kirkhope and Substantial

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).

We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:

Sundry Sunday: Ganon Complains About People Spelling His Name With Two ‘N’s

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

BitFinity, aka Matthew Taranto, the guy who made the long-running webcomic Brawl in the Family, has kept busy since with making Youtube songs. In addition a number featuring Waluigi, and one with Aeris from Final Fantasy VI, most recently he’s made one starring Ganondorf complaining about people who spell his name wrong, and who also takes the opportunity to dress down peoples’ issues with game language and pronunciation more generally. (3 minute)

Gamefinds: Pac-Man Superfast

Part of Youtube’s doomed-to-fail Playables series, so enjoy this before it gets heartlessly deleted by Google when they decide games on their video platform don’t make sense, isn’t worth it, or whenever Netflix gives up on games and they don’t feel they need to compete on that front anymore.

The game is basically Pac-Man, but with a Championship Edition-like speedup gimmick. As you eat dots, the game slowly increases the simulation rate. it never really gets up to CE’s white-hot speeds, but it does get pretty fast. You get a slight slowdown when you finish a board and lose a life. Since you start with five lives, earn an extra one every 5,000 points, and each of a rack’s three (instead of the arcade’s two) fruit are worth at least 1,000 points, and even more as you advance to later boards, you are unlikely to run out of lives. The game ends after 13 levels, so you have a decent chance of finishing this one!

My best score is right around 150,000 points, but I was only playing casually. See if you can do better!

Sundry Sunday: Supper Mario Broth’s Mario Compilation Video

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

The maintainer of awesome Mario obscurity site Supper Mario Broth has had a hard time of things lately. Their mother died and send them into a spiral of emotional and economic uncertainty, which the community helped out by generously contributing to their Patreon.

As part of their thanks, they posted a Youtube video to answer the question, “What is Supper Mario Broth?” and it’s, well…

It’s great! And very, deeply weird! And it’s only 2 1/2 minutes long! Every image comes from some point in Supper Mario Broth’s rich and aromatic history, and it’s a masterpiece of meme imagery. It’s here:

Every rapid-fire clip in the video is worthy of pausing on and zooming into. It’s incredibly dense! Please enjoy, perhaps with the benefit of the mind-altering substance of your choice. And here’s only a few images from the video:

The End of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games

He mentions that it’s possible that he might dust off the channel from time to time, but that he feels it has accomplished its mission. Here it is (46 minutes):

To remind everyone: Sakurai is the famed creator of Kirby, Meteos and Smash Bros. In the video, he relates the surprising fact that no only did he write out nearly every script, 256 in all, before the first episode even aired, but he also filmed them all in advance too! That’s why he looks older in this video: it’s the first time he’s been before the camera, with just three exceptions, since it started. The video, in fact, is mostly about how the series itself was made, which as it turns out was done without a camera crew, and in a residence of his too, outside of a recording studio and without soundproofing, so production had to pause if am ambulance drove by outside, and couldn’t happen at all if it was raining.

I have no doubt that these videos will be an important document in the coming years, not just as a guide to making video games, but also preserving the processes of current-day game development, and the words and thoughts off one of the foremost game designers of our age. BTW, note the split second of Rogue at 18:58!

The video has always had a feel like maybe Nintendo was helping out with it, but as it turns out, other than approving the use of their game footage, they weren’t greatly involved. The similar feel may be due to the use to HIKE, a.k.a. QBIST, a production company that Nintendo also uses for some of their videos.

To close this out, I’ll link a short bit from earlier on, at a mere 2 1/2 minutes, the video about Sakurai’s cat, Fukurashi. Meow, or perhaps, nya!

Video Games 101

We’ve linked the Youtube channel U Can Beat Video Games a number of times here previously. Their posting rate has fallen off a bit lately, likely because they’ve been tackling longer fare. It isn’t a simple matter to construct comprehensive video strategy guides and walkthroughs to lengthy JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV or Dragon Quest II.

While we wait for their next effort-intensive guide, we can watch episodes off Video Games 101, courtesy of Brigands and his other channel Let’s Play With Brigands. It’s been going for a couple of years now, and has tackled some formidable games, including The Adventures of Bayou Billy, Castlevania III and the infamous Battletoads. A particular one to check out is the bizarre Dr. Chaos (1h,7m), a game that’s half janky platforming, half haunted house exploration.

VG101 has a very different vibe from UCBVG. It doesn’t try to be nearly as comprehensive, mostly showing a typical playthough. It doesn’t provide maps or many secrets. But it does have some strategy callouts, mostly provided by their whimsical “TAs,” three side characters who wear silly costumes. The best of these is undoubtedly Fluff, a fairly realistic cat puppet, who lives in a lavish study and smokes a bubble pipe, and who provides interesting trivia about the games being played. It’s worth checking into if you have the time and inclination!

Fluff could hold down a channel all by themself!

Sundry Sunday: Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Chessete‘s video series Dumb Lawyer Quotes in Ace Attorney is a series of dumb statements made by lawyers animated in the style of the Ace Attorney Games. Many of them are even stupider than the statement I just made. Here are just the first two.

The first (3 1/2 minutes):

The second (4 minutes):

The rest can be found in this playlist (9 videos)!

Why is NES Ikari Warriors So Terrible?

Displaced Gamers’ series on investigating design and programming problems with NES games continues with a game that I’m surprised isn’t more notorious, Ikari Warriors. (21 minutes)

The biggest problem with Ikari Warriors is probably that it was ported by infamous anonymous NES developer Micronics, who even in their best efforts tended to produce buggy, janky messes. Some other games they made: Ghosts & Goblins, 1942, Tiger-Heli, Elevator Action, Super Pitfall and Athena. All the other problems have their root in that.

Ikari Warriors runs at 15 fps. One game frame for every four screen frames! It uses expensive multiply routines instead of look-up tables for movement! Everything is slow even accounting for that! And it tries to adapt the arcade game’s character rotation system, which supports 16 directions (even though there are only character graphics for 8 of them), and forces the player characters to rotate through them to move.

All of this overhead makes Ikari Warriors really slow and frustrating to play. Displaced Gamers not only diagnoses the problem, but even makes a game attempt to fix them. And they come to the conclusion that it has additional problems, beyond even these, and really needs a bit of a redesign to really make it playable. Ah well, it was a good attempt.

Jeremy Parish’s NES World Vol. 1

It’s too late to inform you of preorders, those ended yesterday, but Jeremy Parish, whose Video Works series is, along with Chrontendo and Atari Archive, among the best and most informative video game history series on Youtube, and the whole internet, is preparing to sell The NES Era Vol. I, a book that’s as complete a picture of the early 3rd generation video game world in Japan as has ever written. If you’ve been following the channel you’ve seen reviews of strange and obscure games have hardly ever been heard off outside of jolly old Nippon.

This promo compilation presents a good selection of the games covered both on his channel and his upcoming book (2 1/2 minutes):

It is true that publisher Limited Run Games has a book in the works from me about Mystery Dungeon, but I’d be posing this here regardless. It’s an important work, and if it’s as fun as the video series then it’s an essential purchase when it comes out. It’s made of candy!