Pandora's mailbox
Also: teleporting bread, emo spies, and MTV2.
This week, we're showing up one day late to talk about Mario's office job, JC Denton's Halloween, and Leon Kennedy's marriage proposal.
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Seasonal flair spreads backwards through time
This week, the elaborate Deus Ex Randomizer mod project added a Halloween seasonal event (pumpkin decorations, costumes, etc.) to the nearly 25-year-old RPG. This is nothing new: community-made content for Christmas and Halloween are now common in most games with big mod scenes, like Skyrim, Quake, and Breath of the Wild.
The addition of seasonal events was once a charming surprise in games like SimTower (1994) and NiGHTS into Dreams (1996), where Santa actually showed up, or Shenmue (1999), where the shopping district got a Christmas makeover. But over time seasonal events changed from easter eggs into themed sales events for live service games, which dredge the calendar to find new excuses for limited-time offers. It’s hard to remember the original magic of the idea when the same holiday events cycle back around in Destiny 2, but it’s still out there in experimental, gag-driven modding scenes, where amateur developers continue to noodle around out of sheer love of the game.
More:
- World of Warcraft's Headless Horseman boss, part of the Hallow's End content added in 2005, was one of the original FOMO-inducing seasonal events; everyone wanted his helm.
- TF2's user-made "Helltrain" Halloween rollercoaster map, added in 2022, is absurdly good.
Three odd obbys
In the wake of Parkour Civilization, we’ve all been thinking deeply about our jumps. Maybe there’s something in the air, because we’ve also been seeing a lot of unusual obbys — hoppy Roblox obstacle courses — circulate on social media recently. Here are three of them:
- Very Easy Leon Kennedy Obby was featured in an immortal TikTok that’s been reposted since July. Kids do brag this way (not usually in whispered ASMR format) in videos about stuff like Strongest Battlegrounds; less commonly about five-minute-long meme experiences advertised as “very easy.” At the end of this game, you get married.
- obby definitive edition contains a full Celeste tribute level. Definitive has a lot of other stuff packed into it, too: it starts off in a drab little room, then launches you out of it with a bootleg Tears of the Kingdom-style freefall into an open world of theme park-y courses inspired by different games. We didn’t make it to “Goku Town,” though there is an achievement for it.
- Joyful Markiplier's Jolly Obby is a game that weaponizes both pop-ups and holiday cheer, bombarding you with pictures of Christmas trees and pickles whenever you try to get any platforming done. There’s a full Undertale boss fight later on.
Discord opens Pandora’s mailbox
On October 3, Discord introduced a “forward message” button that makes it easier to repost images and videos from one server to another. This makes sense, as a lot of activity on Discord was just people manually saving things and re-uploading them elsewhere. The rollout of forwarding led to the revival of many old chain-letter image like “teleporting bread.” However, the fact that forwarded messages reveal their point of origin below the image led to a new joke format:
Some users worried that Discord had unleashed hell and would send the worst content flying everywhere. One commentator called forwarding a “snitch button” because it can be used to reveal private DMs to public channels. Others thought it could be used to trick users into visiting malicious servers. But since all of that can already be done with plain old screenshots and links, the introduction of “Discord RTs” doesn’t seem to have caused any real disruption beyond a brief rash of chain letters.
The Undertale fandom comes in with a steel chair
There’s an unimaginable quantity of Undertale (and Deltarune) fan content on the internet. But there’s only one adaptation of the game’s Genocide Run Sans boss fight staged inside the mobile version of Wrestling Empire (see EX 9.21) set to a Spanish-language cover of the Undertale fan parody of the Steven Universe song "Stronger Than You." The costumes for Sans and Frisk (Undertale's protagonist) are inspired, and the work is presented in "lost media"-ready 144p resolution.
Chum Box
Games
- There are only two types of TF2 players: opera medics [link] and Midwest emo spies [link]
- After the Little Big Planet franchise was unceremoniously delisted from online stories, a fan made their own Breaking Bad-inspired sendoff [link]
- Horror streamer HeyyVance dodges jumpscares with some of the fastest menu work we’ve ever seen [link]
- A no-hit run of all 207 bosses in Elden Ring concluded by nuking the tutorial’s Soldier of Godrick [link, full run]
- There’s a first-person Super Mario 64 romhack where you attend a meeting and guide Mario as he jumps through the graphs on Powerpoint slides [link]
The Internet
- An unauthorized collaboration between K.K. Slider and Playboi Carti has commenters saying that “life is worth living” [link]
- TikToks where aliens annihilate the planet while saying “zip zip” and “understood boss” [link]
- “Subtle foreshadowing” videos improve bad jokes by ruining them [link]
- The r/Darkworldbuilding subreddit is a forbidden trove of stupid ideas [link]
- “Henry VIII, Private Investigator” [link]
MTV2 Special Interest Section
- “Please re-cut [Linkin Park’s “In The End”] with out of context clips of Megalopolis like they used to do with tie-in music videos in the 90s” [link]
- MTV2’s Video Mods, which aired from 2004-05, used video game assets to animate music videos like a Star Wars version of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” [link]
Screens
- A short history of the French TV presenter who appeared in several episodes of 90s tokusatsu shows like Kamen Rider Black [link]
- The iconic Ghanaian poster for Heat [link]; the owner of Chicago’s Odd Obsession video store used to display a bunch of these [link]
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One Last Thing
“I hated Shenmue as a kid bc for some reason I believed the dirt on his face was shit” [link]
