Islands in the net
Also: frog golf, ant tears, and medieval beats.
This week, we're talking about games that people won't let go of: a toon world frozen in time, a visual novel that spawned an empire, and a virtual island that's become a living museum.
First time reading? Sign up here.
ToonTown will never die
Disney’s ToonTown Online is an ancient kids’ MMO that refuses to fade away. Launched in 2003, it’s the most literally theme park-y of theme park MMOs, where kids playing Toon animals meet Goofy and other cartoon royals, level up their characters’ Laff Meters, and throw pies at evil businessmen. In its heyday, the kid-friendly social scene and “safe” (chat-limited) design even won over adults: a possibly concussed writer for Computer Gaming World named it MMO of the year over Star Wars Galaxies and PlanetSide. It came out the year before World of Warcraft changed everything (is this why people called their WoW characters “toons”??), and it hung on for a decade before closing in 2013; its online playground was ahead of its time, but its paid subscription model was not.
But ToonTown soon crawled out from under the piano that had fallen on it. Players made private free-to-play servers like ToonTown Rewritten (a relatively faithful version launched in 2013, which has now been running almost as long as the official game) and ToonTown Corporate Clash in 2018 (said to be more complex and “more toxic”). Both of these games have dedicated development teams, seasonal events, and new expansions. They still work: On logging in to TTR, we were immediately given the name “Harvey Cheezybatch” and taught how to throw pies. We saw plenty of real players galumphing around a quest hub that seems mostly unchanged after 20 years.
We learned about the continued existence of these toon worlds through a Twitter post by a user who named themselves “Fat Shithead” while playing a custom variant of the game. Some Toons play by their own rules!
Fate/stay night reaches new frontier in visual novel bugs
Somehow, despite being a remaster of a 20-year-old visual novel, the English version of Fate/stay night REMASTERED launched with several game-breaking bugs. The original game was the first entry in TYPE-MOON’s sprawling Fate series, which is best known today for spawning the gacha empire Fate/Grand Order. You wouldn’t think a visual novel could produce glitches as memorable as Cyperpunk 2077’s T-posing motorcyclists, but players across social media shared screenshots of misplaced backgrounds and multiplying character sprites, prompting commenters to joke that playing the remaster is like using a randomizer mod. (Twitter user @theaugusthail put together a fairly comprehensive montage of the best player reactions and game captures.)
TYPE-MOON issued a fix for the English release shortly after launch, but if you’d prefer to experience one of the most iconic visual novels as an unintelligible fever dream, then maybe consider leaving your copy un-patched.
They accidentally made Dead by Daylight fun
The popular 1v4 horror game Dead by Daylight has a reputation for toxicity. Maybe that’s just what eventually happens to every modern team game with a dedicated community; or maybe it’s because the game is about a supernatural serial killer stalking your team and hanging you up on meat hooks. (Oddly, teabagging “survivor mains” are said to be more toxic than killers.)
But the experimental introduction of a new, chaotic 2v8 mode — two killers, eight survivors — has been so successful at dispelling this poisonous atmosphere that players started saying they don’t want to go back to the base game. “There’s a lot less pressure on any individual…the game is just less stressful,” one DBD channel said. The developers announced that a version of 2v8 will eventually be added permanently and mentioned that it now accounts for 40% of all DBD games played. Makes you wonder: should every high-pressure multiplayer game try doubling their lobby size to see if it makes players happier?
An image prompt beyond AI comprehension
AI models may be better than humans at chess, Go, and solving “are you a robot” Captchas. But there’s one human benchmark that the machines have yet to equal: producing fan art of Shrek pregnant with Sonic. This challenge, introduced by a redditor earlier this year, involves an infamous mpreg image ("BatmanxShrek=Sonic") that dates back to at least 2016. Because it depicts three distinct characters, unrelated Christian iconography, and a long quote, replicating the image with a prompt was beyond the abilities of previous image generators like Dall-E 3, Midjourney 6, and Stable Diffusion XL (which often scramble both text and character traits).
A new image model released August 1, Flux, apparently does a better job:
The original BatmanxShrek artwork derived from an older tradition of “mistakes into miracles” Deviantart pairings, which is reflected here. But the scene requested isn’t as complicated, and Flux gets a good deal wrong anyway — Sonic appears to be tattooed onto Shrek’s belly, and the image is signed “9/11” instead of depicting 9/11. But the larger issue is that the image lacks imagination — not just the personality of the original pervert’s BatmanxShrek illustration, but even the erratic understanding of tone that Dall-E 3 would randomly demonstrate.
More:
- Image generators now occasionally manage another joke prompt, “horse riding an astronaut on the moon” (see comments)
- Twitter user claims to have BatmanxShrek tattooed on body
Chum Box
The Internet
- A Korean newspaper’s 2022 illustration of Pepe-style small-investor ants weeping at the fall of Samsung stock was widely reposted again this week after the stock market dipped [link]
- Someone stole the Bangladeshi PM’s PS5 [link]
- Half-Life side character Barney Calhoun, unseen since Half-Life 2: Episode One, resurfaced on TikTok [link]
- Hardcore Gaming 101, a website that has reviewed almost every obscure game in existence, mentioned the difficulty of keeping their site afloat these days; if you read them as often as we do, consider their Patreon [link]
Games
- Wuhu Island Explorer has ported the setting of Wii Sports Resort into the Unity game engine [link], thrilling Twitter user @WuhuIslandFan, who wrote “I’m gonna shit myself” [link]
- Shmuplations is a killer archive of translated magazine interviews with Japanese game developers. It’s not really about shmups, but a swath of game history stretching back to the ‘80s [link]
- Kero Kero King is a charming-looking PS1 game about golfing with frogs [link]
- A Cyberpunk 2077 modder is turning every gun in the game into a dildo, apparently because a commenter told him not to [link]
- A cool data-moshing effect made in Unreal may trigger unpleasant flashbacks to the 2017 game Observer [link]
- There’s a surprise Billy Idol concert inside the euro-jank RPG ELEX 2 [link]
- This 1995 Ace Combat ad starts out racist and then delivers an unbelievable payload of ’90s attitude [link]. It’s part of a longer promo from “the sick minds at Namco” [link]
- Brian Griffin has been added to Mario 64 with voice lines [link to video, mod]
Movies
- Justin Decloux (of The Important Cinema Club) is kicking off a “24-Hour Summer Movie Mind Melter” at 11 am ET today (Saturday) on Twitch [link]. Here’s a big list of picks from his older marathons to bring to your local deranged movie night [link]
- What was the best use of “fuck” in a PG-13 film? [link]
Music
- Four Tet iced the crowd at Lollapalooza by playing Autechre to end his set [link]
- AraabMuzik’s Aggro Dr1ft soundtrack can now be experienced without the need to endure the movie [link]
- Wired tracked down the creator of the ubiquitous “door slamming” sample heard in Clipse’s “Grindin’” and other West Coast beats [link]
- Teenage Engineering released an extravagantly designed “medieval beat machine” loaded with more than 220 samples of “hurdy gurdys, lutes, Gregorian chants,” etc. [link]
AI
- This great 404 Media investigation is the definitive report on who's been making all the Facebook AI slop [link] like "my homophobic homunculus" [link]
- Asking for Friend: how many backlinks do you need to make $1.8 million? [tweet from CEO, story from 404]
Connect with EX
- Feedback? Hit reply or email team@exresearch.co
- Follow us on Twitter [link]
- Follow us on Threads [link]
- Follow us on Bluesky [link]
- Write for us [link]
- Support us with a donation by clicking Account
One Last Thing
“Dog with a pipe, 1875” [link]
