What do you do when your three-year-old daughter, who has been playing Super Mario Bros. 2 as Princess Toadstool, wants to play Donkey Kong as Pauline?
If you’re Mike Mika, you stay up all night hacking the Donkey Kong ROM so she can do just that. Sure, he could just tell her to play Metroid, or teach her how to play Portal, but instead he’s taking charge and changing the game so she can play it her way. And why not? Check out the video to see what it would be like if Donkey Kong had kidnapped Mario, and Pauline had to save him.
Someday, historians may write about Dennis Rodman’s visit to North Korea as the beginning of a basketball diplomacy program that opened up the secretive nation to the rest of the world. For now though, he’s just the tattooed and pierced weirdo who shared courtside seats with a dictator at an exhibition game.
Naturally, this lead someone to mashup Kim Jong-un’s famed athletic abilities with the extreme stylings of NBA Jam. The “North Korean All-Stars” are lead by Kim Jong-un’s flawless skillset (10 out of 10 in Speed, Power, Shoot, Dunks, Steal, and Block) against a “Pathetic Americans” team that includes Mark Jackson and Sarunas Marciulionis of the 1996-97 Denver Nuggets.
Can you guess the final score? Let’s just say it makes Kim Jong-il’s purported 11 hole-in-ones on the golf course seem realistic.
As well as being one of the best animated films of all time, Wreck-It Ralph had a very well planned marketing strategy that built an entire history behind the titular retro arcade game, including this old-school advert. Now, to promote the release of the film on Blu-ray and DVD, Disney has gone one better, creating a fictional version of smash documentary King of Kong for Wreck-It Ralph‘s world.
Entitled Garlan Hulse: Where Potential Lives, the 28-minute mockumentary features the film’s director, Rich Moore, as he leaps back to 1982 to enlighten us about Garlan Hulse’s recordbreaking Fix-It Felix Jr. score. He held the fame-winning title for only six weeks, before it was lost to former best friend, Kent Zborski. Cut to present day, and Moore journeys through California in search of the former gaming wunderkind. It is as equally as funny as the film it is promoting, and deserves half an hour of your day.
Before Cliff Bleszinski… Before John Carmack… Before even Shigeru Miyamoto… there was Ralph Baer. While not known as a game designer, Ralph Baer gave the video game industry something much more important: the first home console.
Today is Ralph Baer’s 91st birthday and PBS has decided to celebrate with the “Father of Video Games” by profiling him as part of their Inventors digital series.
Baer began work on his “Brown Box” console all the way back in 1966. It would eventually be released to the public in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey. The prolific inventor is also responsible for the first light gun and the first light gun game, Shooting Gallery as well as the Simon handheld game. Happy birthday Ralph! Never stop inventing.
I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Warp Zoned’s Senior Editor, Nicole Kline. I’ll bet she had no idea she shared a birthday with video game royalty.
Two years ago, YouTuber FreddieW recreated World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros.in a first person perspective. It was glorious and great and it feels like I’ve been waiting forever for an encore.
Today, FreddieW outdid himself. He jumped over the flagpole, set off all the fireworks, smashed a Koopa Troopa into the staircase for a squiggly green box worth of extra lives, and moonwalked into the castle. In other words, his latest video is cool.
FreddieW has taken the final stretch of World 8 from Super Mario Bros. 3 and recreated it in a first person view. This includes the rolling tanks, Bowser’s castle, and the final fight with the King Koopa himself.
We all know that the greatest version of Link in animated form is forever spouting the catchphrase, “Welllllll, excussssssssse meeeeeeeeee, Princess!” But Read Only Memory’s “Link’s Triumph” is a pretty close second.
“Link’s Triumph” is a collaboration between Shamoozal and GoNintendo, retelling the story of Link’s battle against the dragon that stands at the end of the first dungeon in The Legend of Zelda.
The cartoon is only 45 seconds long, but it’ll definitely be the best 45 seconds of your day. Just imagine what they could have done with a full minute.
Political Kombat ’12, Slate’s series of videos depicting the battles between the candidates as one-on-one fights to the death, has been a ridicuously awesome success. Watching Romney lay waste to the rest of the Republican pretenders while Obama performs the long form fatality on Donald Trump is just good YouTube time.
But now we’re up to the main event… President Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney. This is the ultimate battle and only one can survive. So be sure to vote for your candidate at the end of the video and in the real election on Tuesday, November 6.
Political Kombat ’12 was clearly created by someone with a deep affinity for the fighting genre and it shows in every special attack. Direct references to Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs Capcom litter the entire series. And when… SPOILER ALERT… George Washington showed up as Shao Kahn, I nearly lost it.
Fan-made films based on video games are all the rage these days, with some efforts proving better executed than others. However, filmmakers Paul DeNigris and Caleb Evans have gone one better, by snagging Mark Meer, the voice actor behind Captain Shepard, to star in their Mass Effect prequel, Red Sand.
Set 35 years before the first game, the film explores the discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars. Meer plays Colonel Jon Grissom, who leads a small pack of soldiers defending the ruins from desert-dwelling terrorists. The terrorists are have become addicted to a refined version of the Element Zero power source, the titular Red Sand, which has granted them unstable biotic powers.
For more information on Red Sand, be sure to visit the film’s Facebook page. And to watch the film itself, just look up, it’s at the top of this article!
