watched Doctor Who with some friends last night and this pause made us burst out laughing

re-experiencing Yu-Gi-Oh! through the magic of the “I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s nth episode down to about a minute” series and everyone in the room lost their shit at this line

this game looks extremely my shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_wvFtCS2QE

https://nebulous.group/index.php/projects/translations/hybrid-front/

this video has loud distressed cat noises

heard this from the bathroom and genuinely thought that my cat was dying but another cat had just managed to get to the outside windowsill

I don’t watch game streamers much but one of the few who I have enjoyed a lot is Videochess (a.k.a. Chess). She doesn’t stream regularly at the moment but she has wonderful chaotic energy and a propensity for “crimes”, a term she uses for playfully exploring the mechanics of and pushing at the boundaries of games and seeing what is possible if one strays from the designated path. This can manifest as things like impromptu sequence breaking but not for the purposes of speedrunning or anything like that, just to see where it goes and tease out the foibles of a game. And sometimes she does things like collecting every star in Super Mario 64 while playing the game with a DJ Hero controller.

There are two main places to find her videos, her own Youtube channel that has her streams up until 2022 and another unofficial but endorsed channel that has archived more recent streams. One of her most popular series is an Ocarina of Time randomiser with GGDG but below I will share some of her videos that have had the largest influence on me.

Snolf

Her truly Sisyphean streams of Melon’s Snolf hacks inspired me to make my own Snolf Robo Blast 2 mod for Sonic Robo Blast 2 as well as a chat control mod that Chess ended up playing herself.

Discovering new games

I have also learnt about games and mods that I have since played or are now on my (long) list of things I want to get around to.

Robot Alchemical Drive I still have not gotten around to playing but seems fascinating. I love games with weird controls and especially when there is a diegetic basis for them. Having to remote control a giant robot from the perspective of someone on the ground who has to watch it from a distance rather than getting a camera from the perspective of the robot itself or even a cockpit is an incredible concept. You may be familiar with the game from clips that get shared online showcasing the best value greengrocer or Nanao having a miserable time.

I had only vaguely heard of Cave Story before watching her play “Cave Story Normal Regular”¹, i.e. Sonic Story, a mod that replaces the main character of the game, Quote, with Sonic the Hedgehog. Yes, I know this is a massively important and influential game. No, I never bothered looking into it at all despite having had the Steam version in my library for years from some Humble Bundle or another. I have played both Cave Story and Sonic Story since and I can attest that Sonic Story perfectly replicates the feeling of how Mega Drive Sonic games control. It’s not just a reskin it is is playing as Sonic the Hedgehog in the wrong game in a way that is wonderful and silly.

For the opposite she has played Mario put into a Sonic game with the SM64 Generations mod, which uses libsm64. She has also played some other games using libsm64 as well as other regular normal Mario 64 mods.

Willy Wombat

I also became obsessed with Willy Wombat for a while after watching her play it. It is a fascinating, experimental 3D platformer with an isomorphic perspective with maps that have the same limitations as a Doom level: There are no slopes and not only are there no floating platforms but it’s impossible to have a floating platform in this game. Like Doom the levels are defined by floor sectors with designated heights. There are pillars and walls that rise out of the ground for vertically, but you can never go under anything. It leads to some unique level design, especially as the game progresses to areas were the developers had clearly gotten much more comfortable with their tools. The only thing I can think of that is similar (though lacking the top-down perspective) is older versions of Sonic Robo Blast 2 and that is literally a fork of Doom.

It’s also one of those bygone ’90s games that is fully voiced in English with a script penned and directed by a Japanese crew, giving it a surreal quality that is aided by a post-apocalyptic setting with jarring name choices and very little up-front exposition. Above is a fan animation I adore of a cutscene of Notes and Mail talking about “the peace and eternal life of Prison.”

I have a page on this website dedicated to my cat Easóg where you can see a video of her trying to kill Willy while I am watching Chess play the game and mushroom32x made a fun little Neocities webpage for the game’s 20th anniversary.

There’s plenty more

That’s enough for now. If you want to watch more check out the official and unofficial Youtube channels to dig through yourself.

I adore that the Sonic Spinball options menu theme is now Surge’s unofficial theme song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uPJqSA-in4

Because of Nathalie Fourdraine’s video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVFGeuenBc4

teardown of the worst bike in the world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgPUpccQ_mw

One of the habits I had on Cohost was making some specific daily posts. I didn’t always get around to it, there were long stretches of times where I didn’t post any of these, but on my main account I liked to post a song of the day and I had a few side accounts too. One of them I posted intros to TV shows, games, movies etc. and another where I posted joke Sonic Heroes teams.

I don’t plan on continuing these but I have gone through the posts and made an archive of song of the day and intro posts in the form of Youtube playlists. I had to find alternatives to some videos that have been taken down or upload some myself that were not originally Youtube videos and they will continue to succumb to link rot but for the moment they are, I think, complete archives of what I posted.

They are also very long. The intros playlist is a little over nine hours and the song of the day one is technically over two days long but it includes a couple of joke ten hour videos and also an entire movie score but even discounting those it’s still almost twice as long as the intros playlist.

Due to the nature of Youtube playlists I can’t put warnings on the videos but some videos in both have some flashing lights and there’s at least one video in both that talks about or depicts suicide.

Also it looks like the embedded versions of the playlists below are limited to two hundred videos and some videos won’t play embedded so click through to Youtube for the full thing.

Introducing…

Song of the day

the vibe here really comes off as lesbian couple going on adventures and also their supportive friend Sonic the Hedgehog is there

https://youtu.be/G-QS1N6rGK8

which is, frankly, the ideal relationship dynamic