One of the things I most loved about Homestarrunner.com was the "anything goes" vibe of following the site in its heyday (I found it fairly late into this period in mid-2006, but that still gave me a few years' worth of new content to follow). It's something that defies attempt to archive it, since an archive will necessarily organize things, losing that anarchical updating style that made it a fun surprise to follow in real-time. Like, you were usually there for Strong Bad responding to an email, but sometimes you'd tune in on Monday to find that you were apparently there for a G.I. Joe parody's Thanksgiving Episode, or a music video crossing a fictional Scandinavian heavy metal band with a double-fictional gangsta rapper, or a sloppily-drawn comic about a quartet of teen-aged girls trying to get several boys on Vamlumtimes Day and dying gory deaths in the process.
And sometimes you were there for video games. The Brothers Chaps put out a surprising amount of these, mostly exploring riffs or jokes from their cartoons. They were rough, buggy, often simple, and very silly, but darn if they didn't all have heart. There were a lot of different types of Flash Games they put together, but to my way of thinking, the two biggest were Peasant's Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest...)))), and this. A Mega Man parody based on a 70s anime parody (named after a throwaway line said by a dopey athelete in a fantasy sequence) of a masked luchador named after some characters from NES game Pro Wrestling.
Alright, despite the obvious Mega Man base for Stinkoman's sprite and abilities, the game is generally more straightforward as a platformer. A full level select, Robot Master setup is a bit too ambitious for this game's scope. But it is very much having fun being a silly idiosyncratic supposedly 80s game. There is no logical consistency to what makes up this world, with a character at one point walking across a screen transition from the planet's surface to the moon. Level concepts are played with either because it's the done thing ("Stratosfear!" and "Turbolence"), for maximum silliness ("Dumb Wall!" is a very basic level mechanically, but it's so stupid a high concept that it makes it all the more enjoyable), or a combination of the two ("Negatory!" is perhaps one of the few times I've seen a video game acknowledge stuff like the Minus World, and a great trip to boot). The game is so quick to pivot what it's doing that nothing has the time to grow stale; you can very much tell that the Brothers Chaps ran with whatever ideas amused them, between the level concepts and the writing that at times feels like a joke on a joke on a joke.
So they developed the first 9 levels over the course of 2005, and then it took them 15 years and the pending death of Flash as a platform to finally deliver the long-promised level 10. And they joke about it, but you can reeeeeally tell that the last level came out 15 years later. The jump from Level 9 to Level 10 is astounding in just about every way. Background sprites are suddenly ridiculously more sophisticated, physics feel a little better, level design is longer and more impactful, they got friggin' Toby Fox to compose the last couple stages' music. It's jarring, and in any more serious release would strike me as awkward. But for Stinkoman and Homestar Runner, accidentally hailing the end of an era? It feels perfect.
Flash being dead and Ruffle being an imperfect emulator, I'm not sure if this game has an audience anymore, though I know the Brothers Chaps are working to restore the game. But if you're able to, it's a cute, extremely-out-of-context snapshot into the energy of a lot of Homestar Runner, distilled through the lens of early anime and NES-era gaming.
And sometimes you were there for video games. The Brothers Chaps put out a surprising amount of these, mostly exploring riffs or jokes from their cartoons. They were rough, buggy, often simple, and very silly, but darn if they didn't all have heart. There were a lot of different types of Flash Games they put together, but to my way of thinking, the two biggest were Peasant's Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest (Quest...)))), and this. A Mega Man parody based on a 70s anime parody (named after a throwaway line said by a dopey athelete in a fantasy sequence) of a masked luchador named after some characters from NES game Pro Wrestling.
Alright, despite the obvious Mega Man base for Stinkoman's sprite and abilities, the game is generally more straightforward as a platformer. A full level select, Robot Master setup is a bit too ambitious for this game's scope. But it is very much having fun being a silly idiosyncratic supposedly 80s game. There is no logical consistency to what makes up this world, with a character at one point walking across a screen transition from the planet's surface to the moon. Level concepts are played with either because it's the done thing ("Stratosfear!" and "Turbolence"), for maximum silliness ("Dumb Wall!" is a very basic level mechanically, but it's so stupid a high concept that it makes it all the more enjoyable), or a combination of the two ("Negatory!" is perhaps one of the few times I've seen a video game acknowledge stuff like the Minus World, and a great trip to boot). The game is so quick to pivot what it's doing that nothing has the time to grow stale; you can very much tell that the Brothers Chaps ran with whatever ideas amused them, between the level concepts and the writing that at times feels like a joke on a joke on a joke.
So they developed the first 9 levels over the course of 2005, and then it took them 15 years and the pending death of Flash as a platform to finally deliver the long-promised level 10. And they joke about it, but you can reeeeeally tell that the last level came out 15 years later. The jump from Level 9 to Level 10 is astounding in just about every way. Background sprites are suddenly ridiculously more sophisticated, physics feel a little better, level design is longer and more impactful, they got friggin' Toby Fox to compose the last couple stages' music. It's jarring, and in any more serious release would strike me as awkward. But for Stinkoman and Homestar Runner, accidentally hailing the end of an era? It feels perfect.
Flash being dead and Ruffle being an imperfect emulator, I'm not sure if this game has an audience anymore, though I know the Brothers Chaps are working to restore the game. But if you're able to, it's a cute, extremely-out-of-context snapshot into the energy of a lot of Homestar Runner, distilled through the lens of early anime and NES-era gaming.