Tag: humor

Things Pvt. Skippy Is Not Allowed To Do At A Switch 2 Launch Event

Things Pvt. Skippy is not allowed to do at the Switch 2 release event, #14: Loudly read their erotic, explicit Sonic/Shadow fanfic.

#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.

#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.

#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”

#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”

#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.

To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.

Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.

Sundry Sunday: Major Death Cutscenes From Lego Star Wars

The Lego Star Wars games (in fact, almost all of the Lego video properties) are very funny, even though they’re not all made by the came people. The games are made by Traveler’s Tales, the movies by Warner Animation, and the made-for-video productions by at least one separate group. And yet, they all share a certain light-hearted and irreverent sensibility that I find really appealing.

Star Wars has a lot of character deaths, but the Lego games do a good job of making them fun instead of tragic, as befitting their style. In this compilation of scenes from Skywalker Saga, note particularly how Darth Maul “dies”:

All Major Deaths in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (Youtube, 12 minutes)

You Are a Skeleton & That Is a Problem

Blogfriend Phil Nelson pointed me to this absurd little homebrew Gameboy game. You don’t have to play it on a Gameboy though, its itch.io page has an embedded emulator. It’s got fun music, and its text is digitized typewriter writing.

It’s a simple choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing, made in a week, with a good number of suitably silly branches. You’ll die often, so you’ll restart a lot if you want to see everything that can happen. If you remember what you did it doesn’t take long to get back where you were (so long as you don’t scream at the beginning). While it’s a silly trifle, a certain word at the beginning filling the screen probably makes it unsuitable for kids.

You made it past the snarky cat picture! You must really be into this. You might find more of interest at the submissions page of the Bad Game Jam.

You Are a Skeleton & That Is a Problem, by Nicky Flowers (itch.io, $0, consider donation)

Sundry Sunday: “Everything You Need To Know” About Five Nights At Freddy’s

Oy. There are few lorebombs of niche gaming more intricate, and as utterly impenetrable to the uninitiated, as the Five Nights At Freddy’s superseries. What started mostly as a jumpscare delivery mechanism turned out to have backstory, and sequels, and prequels, and novels, and side games, and more.

The “Everything You Need To Know” series takes properties with sizable amounts of lore and tries to condense them to make them generally understandable. By no means do they cover all of the details, choosing to get the gist across simply rather than to explain everything that’s going on. It’s a bit humorous, but the point here isn’t a comedy and/or snarky retelling, as with the So This Is Basically series, but to give you a good rundown with some leavening humor along the way.

So, what will you do with your newfound knowledge? Impress kids? Write fanfiction? Perform exorcisms? Seek to create knockoffs?

Sundry Sunday: CUBE

It makes pocket calculators look like the cotton gin

It’s coming….

It’s fifteen years old now, but I still love the old “funnymovieinternet” video CUBE, which is a promo video from an era of video games that never really existed. In our little circle of friends, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR CUBE is still a signifier and in-joke all to itself. The site it came from is long defunct, but fortunately it hasn’t been hit by a spurious Youtube takedown notice yet, which as time approaches infinity, appears to be the ultimate fate of all videos on that frog-forsaken website.

Find The Spam

Find The Spam is an internet legend at this point, like zombo.com and Homestar Runner, although it’s much less well-known. It is a game, sort of. It is fun to play, for a couple of seconds at least. I won’t spoil any more, go see it now.

You could see it as a riff on hidden object games, although it predates them by two decades. While the Wayback Machine‘s earliest archive of the site is from 2001, it already had over 1.3 million views by that point. My own recollection is of seeing the site on a Windows 3.1 installation, meaning it may go as far back as 1994.

A recreation showing how the site would have been presented at the time.

The joke is slightly ruined on current machines. Viewed on older graphics cards (with resolutions of 800×600 or even less) the user would have to scroll down a little to see the image, and so would have time to read the intro text before it is revealed. Weirdly, on my Samsung tablet even more of the page is visible on first load, the screen seems positively anxious to spoil the joke for me.

By the way, can you tell I’ve been on an early web binge lately? You can expect more old-timey game sites in the near future….

Find The Spam

Sundry Sunday: Mario Frustration

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! We’re turning the blog floor into a giant MUD PIT.

It’s your reward for sticking with us (the blog, and the world) for another week. And the monster truck of content we have for you? The video Big Foot? A blast from early in the last decade, Mario Frustration, a humorous voice-over of a play through of one of those absurdly difficult Mario romhacks, back before Ninendo co-opted that whole genre with the Super Mario Maker series.

This video went viral a while back, but it’s actually a voice over of an earlier video. I have a URL for it (it’s http://www.quixoticals.com/2007/04/most-frustrating-super-mario-mod-ever.html) but I’m not linking to it. Firefox doesn’t like that site, probably related to outdated encryption, and I remember it looking a bit dodgy the last time I was there. YouTube is probably a better showcase for it.

There is some “adult” language in there, in the Modern Internet Style, and some salt, but overall it’s not nearly as ireful as the Angry Video Game Nerd could be in the day.

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.

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.

The Looker

Remember The Witness? Remember how everyone loved The Witness?

What? You didn’t love The Witness? Are you it some kind of blasphemer?

Sure, it has all those smarmy tape recordings all over the place. Certainly, you never quite feel like you’re done with it. Absolutely, everyone has at least one puzzle they find maddeningly obtuse (mine was on the ship). But you gotta admit, the special category of puzzle was a work of genius. If you don’t know what I mean by the special category, um… forget I said anything!

Well whether you loved The Witness or if you think it Jonathan Blows, you might want to have a look at The Looker, a pitch-perfect parody that’s actually a pretty decent puzzle game in its own right. It’s rated Overwhelmingly Positive, and as a reviewer says, “If you liked The Witness, you’ll like The Looker. If you hated The Witness, you’ll love The Looker.”

It’s free on Steam, and only takes a couple of hours to complete!

Steam: The Looker ($0) via Dominic Tarason.

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:

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:

OSZAR »