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Not quite Mario Paint, but it'll have to do for now
Though the Wii seems like the perfect platform for a Mario Paint revival (as does the Nintendo DS), it's doubtful that you'll hear an announcement for that in the next year or so. In the meantime, if you have a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and are interested in the Wii homebrew scene, you can try out WiiPaint, a new program from Spanish programmer Kontakatilu. So far, it looks like the version 1.0 application only lets you draw on the screen with a 28-color palette. While that doesn't seem like much functionality, it's a start! Pretty soon*, you'll be looping animations and composing Mega Man 2 themes!*This probably won't happen "pretty soon."[Via DCEmu]
GDC08: Hands-on Inchworm
Bob Sabiston, creator of the rotoscoping software behind A Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly wanted to draw and animate on his DS. So he wrote his own application, Inchworm. He says, "[It was] sort of a passion project, something we really want to see on the DS." In between his GDC meetings to find a publisher, I sketched through the latest build of the tool.Even though Inchworm is closer to Painter than Mario Paint, it's still fun for dabbling. Artists use the stylus to scribble out stills or cels. Top-tier tools that I'd expect in Photoshop even filter down to this level, including layers, opacity settings, alpha channels, selections, and onion-skin animations. Sabiston also intends to add smear brushes to blend paints and sound effects for animations.
GDC08: Inchworm: Mario Paint meets Photoshop
It has been almost a year since we heard anything new about Fatbits Pocket Painter, and we were beginning to worry that the project had been abandoned. While homebrewers already have Colors! to satisfy their DS-digital-painting needs, we really wanted to see what Bob Sabiston, the programmer behind Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly's Rotoshop software, had come up with.Dismissing concerns of its halted development, the painting and animation application has appeared at GDC, this time under the name Inchworm. Along with its reintroduction comes a new site packed with tutorial videos and user-uploaded samples/flipbooks. Artists can easily create and share their work online, all with a robust selection of drawing and editing tools.One unique feature we spotted in Inchworm is the ability to draw under a painting without having to create and move around new layers. Very useful for animation, we hear!We're not sure if Inchworm has found a publisher yet, but we hope someone helps this program hit the mainstream market. Bob Sabiston definitely sees potential in the software: "If people can make money selling math and brain teasers to kids, imagine how popular a program that lets you draw and make cartoons [would be]!"
DS Fanboy poll: Remakes of choice
Earlier this week, we asked you, our dear readers, to discuss games you'd like to see given a spit and a polish for the DS in this age of remakes, and as usual, you came through in a big way. In fact, you gave us so many fantastic suggestions that we've decided to split our selected list into two polls instead of just doing one. We can't include everything suggested, obviously, but we've prepared a selection of bigger releases and more obscure titles, and we're going to let you vote every day, just in case you want to throw your support behind more than one game. Once you've voted, we will profile the top two results from each poll and examine exactly why they would be well-suited to our favorite handheld. So try to vote for the titles you think are the most suitable, those that would most benefit from the kind of treatment we're seeing with the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy titles ... and hey, vote for the games you'd just like to see in portable form as well.And if you just can't decide ... well, that's why we're letting you vote more than once! You can vote your heart and your brain, and the cream will rise to the top.
Today's most musical video: Final Fantasy in Mario Paint
YouTube user TomBobBlender has built a stockpile of game music songs recreated in Mario Paint. One of his latest, the Final Fantasy IV battle theme is our pick for today's video, but browse through his YouTube page for even more selections. Game music recreated in a game -- does it get any geekier better than that?See the clip after the break.
DS Daily: What do you desire?
Pocket Gamer issued some DS demands recently, with their list of titles that should already be on the handheld, but aren't. While they offered up some interesting candidates -- a good place to start the discussion -- we'd love to see you guys start throwing out ideas on all the games that could be. Sure, a GoldenEye or Mario Paint DS could be really excellent, but there are a lot of games out there. What do you think might benefit from the touchscreen, the WiFi, or both? Last time we discussed the what-ifs, we talked only about franchises ... but this time, anything's game.
Totaka's song: The search is on
A seventeen-note theme that has been hidden in Nintendo games for over a decade is finding new life as internet sleuths track down new instances in old games. Totaka's song is most easily accessible from the title screen of the SNES' Mario Paint, but the quirky ditty has appeared in over a dozen games featuring the work of Nintendo sound designer Kazumi Totaka.Interesting trivia, but not too relevant to today's gamers until a few months ago, when Powet.tv compiled a video of the song's known occurrences and put out the call to gamers everywhere to track it down in other games. Within a month, video confirmation for instances in Pikmin 2 and Wario Land for the Virtual Boy had been obtained, and earlier this week Powet posted a video of the song in Luigi's Mansion.MobyGames lists 24 games Totaka has worked on, including the recently released Wii Sports, and it's a decent bet that his song is buried somewhere in most if not all of them. And so the call goes out to Nintendo fans across the land. Let's harness the awesome collaborative power of the internet to solve a mystery that has been plaguing humanity for, er... well... not exactly plaguing but... oh, let's just figure it out, OK?[Via Digg]
