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Dad re-tiles Donkey Kong for his daughter, has Pauline save Mario
To a 3-year-old, it's a logical enough assumption: We can play as a girl, Princess Peach, in Super Mario Bros. 2, so we should be able to play as Pauline in Donkey Kong. Most seasoned players know this isn't the case, since Donkey Kong features a static game of boy-saves-girl – until now."My 3-year-old daughter and I play a lot of old games," writes Other Ocean Interactive creative director Mike Mika on Facebook, as picked up by Reddit. "Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particular Mario game; she seemed really bummed out by that."To put a smile on his daughter's face, Mika hacked the 2010 NES Donkey Kong ROM, using Tile Layer Pro, and swapped out Mario with Pauline. He shows off the end product in the above Donkey Kong: Pauline Edition video, though we don't need visual confirmation that this is the most adorable story we'll write today.
Father flips Link's gender to make his daughter the heroine
Maya has really been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Her father, developer Mike Hoye, says she likes "sailing, scary birds and remembering to be brave," much like Link, the game's protagonist. But girls can go on adventures and rescue their little brothers, too!To emphasize that, Hoyes altered the game's disk image with a hex editor, changing all of the dialogue references about Link's gender to be feminine. Since all the alternatives had to be exactly the same byte-for-byte length, he used "swordmain" for "swordsman," and "milady" in place of "my lad" and "master." He's provided a patch for the disk image, which you can then load up in a GameCube emulator to play.The end result of all this hacking is that a little girl gets to see herself as the hero, and find the courage to defeat Ganon in her own little heart. And that makes us feel, just, you know, so ... What? No, we're not crying! Call of Duty, bro! Go have a look at the Wii U pictures again.
What to do when a player dies
This AP story is making its way around the community -- Jerald Spangleberg's daughter was faced with a growing problem when he passed a way: figuring out how to notify the guy's in-game friends. As online relationships grow more and more prevalent, relatives of those who pass away are often having trouble notifying some of the deceased closest friends. Even Blizzard can't help in this situation, apparently -- they have no policy or rules to deal with players who have died, and no way for relatives to log in to the game without the password to let guilds know what has happened.You might suggest that these relationships aren't that big a deal, but when you think that guildies are encountered almost nightly, while real-life friends connect only when schedules allow (maybe once or twice a week), you can see why it might be important to let the ingame associates know what has happened. Unfortunately, all of the solutions so far are pretty morbid -- there are sites that will send email for you, or some players have left lists of contacts to reach when they move on.The importance of online relationships is likely to increase in the future if the past few years are any indication. And given that the average player is getting older even as they're making more and stronger friends online, it might not be long until we've got a much better solution to deal with this problem.
