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Recall past stages, enemies with these Mario prints
If we tried to roll our Mario memories into a neatly-compacted ball, the result would look much more crude then artist Christopher Lee's efforts. Each 16x20" piece in Lee's Mario Madness set of prints recalls the environments and enemies from one game from the Mario Bros.' NES trilogy, Super Mario World or Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. The 190-piece sets were made using offset printing and come with an embossed, gold foil replica of Nintendo's Seal of Quality. Lee is also including his take on each game's box art with orders of the related pieces, but it's not just prints that are up for grabs here - Lee is including "a bunch of loose stickers and a single unopened pack" of Merlin brand stickers from 1989 in each order. He's also throwing vintage enamel pins into random orders, so make sure to practice whichever luck ritual you follow before clicking the order button. Both the stickers and pins are available while supplies last, so if you order late and don't recieve stickers, everyone else beat you to it. Grabbing your favorite piece from the Mario Madness series will cost $25, or you can cave and get one of each series for $100. Update: Lee has reached out to explain the relation of the Merlin brand to the stickers he's including in orders while supplies last. The post has been updated accordingly. [Image: Christopher Lee]
Super Mario Bros 2 coming to Wii U Virtual Console next week
Super Mario Bros. 2 is coming to the North American Wii U Virtual Console service on May 16. The game will launch at $4.99. Super Mario Bros. 2 joins a fairly light list of games on the Wii U Virtual Console, including those that launched the service in April, such as Excitebike, Ice Climbers, Punch Out and Super Mario World. Earthbound will be coming to the service at some point this year as well.
The Queue: The one with goombas
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today is a very special treat. We have your standard-length Queue, plus I answer a very exciting bonus trivia question that has nothing at all to do with World of Warcraft! But you will love it, my gamer pals. You will. Camero asked: In the past week, I've recieved four emails from "Blizzard" all asking me to do something in order to get a Winged Guardian License. I just wanted to confirm that's not true.
The unsuccessful prototype that became Super Mario Bros. 2
Before there was a Super Mario Bros. 2 (in the US), and before there was a Doki Doki Panic, Nintendo was messing around with the idea of vertical platforming. "The idea was that you would have people vertically ascending, and you would have items and blocks that you could pile up to go higher, or you could grab your friend that you were playing with and throw them to try and continue to ascend," Donkey Kong Country Returns producer and Super Mario Bros. 2 director Kensuke Tanabe, who worked on the prototype, told Game|Life. "The game was mocked up (so that) when the player climbed about two-thirds of the way up the screen, it would scroll so that the player was pushed further down." The technology was cool, but there was a problem: the prototype wasn't actually any fun. Shigeru Miyamoto suggested adding some more traditional Mario-style side-scrolling, and the weird concept that eventually became Mario 2 began to take shape. "Picking up blocks was the same thing as pulling out vegetables from the ground," Tanabe said. This concept was first released as Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic; while it was in development, Fuji Television made a deal with Nintendo to release a game featuring characters for the Yume Kojo technology expo. Then when it was converted from Famicom Disk System format to a cartridge for Western release, Nintendo took the chance to make a couple of other changes -- like putting the Mario characters in. "We knew these Fuji TV characters wouldn't be popular in America," Tanabe said, "but what would be attractive in America would be the Mario characters."
Super Mario Bros. tricks explained with animated GIFs
With the launch of the 25th Anniversary edition of Super Mario All-Stars for Wii drawing near (this Sunday!), you may be seriously tempted to buy all those classic Mario games again for, like -- what? The fourth time? Think again! Not only is the "Limited Edition" Wii game a veritable ROM dump of the SNES All-Stars (which features graphically and musically enhanced versions of the NES games, by 16-bit standards), it's also missing a lot of the great "glitches" from the original games. TASVideos has assembled a comprehensive guide to the elite tricks and tactics from the original Super Mario Bros. games -- with pictures! Animated pictures. It serves as a stark reminder to us purists why there's really no substitute for the originals, even when said substitute comes in a nifty box.
Super Speedrun Bros. The Lost Levels
Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels (or Super Mario Bros. 2, if you prefer) is brutally difficult. For most of us, just completing the game is out of the question, much less completing it in under an hour. We're proud to say that we completed it once, but it took a week -- and two people.But YouTube user sprocket2005 managed to complete the All-Stars version of this ridiculous game, or at least through 8-4, in 8 minutes and 35 seconds. Even if it is a tool-assisted speedrun, this is an amazing achievement. More importantly, it makes for an impressive video -- which you can see after the break. It might make you want to download the Famicom Lost Levels on the Virtual Console and try it for yourself.[Via Destructoid]
Top 5: Jury's Still Out
In this little hobby of ours, there are undeniable classics. Only an utterly clueless fanboy will ignore Shigeru Miyamoto's contributions to gaming, and any Nintendo enthusiast can never deny the quality of a series like Halo or God of War. No matter the platform, there are games which make up the foundation of this medium as we've come to know it. Traditionally, the formula would seem to be game made by a respectable company + a few years to let it sink in = indisputable classic. Yet there are a few that still provoke debate. These are games that are neither universally adored nor hated. They almost always spark conversation, and are considered by some to be an acquired taste. Here are the Top 5 games that we all can't decide if they're classics or not. NEXT >> #ninbutton { border-style: solid; border-color: #000; border-width: 2px; background-color: #BBB; color: #000; text-decoration: none; width: 100px; text-align: center; padding: 2px 2px 2px 2px; margin: 2px 2px 2px 2px; } .buttontext { color: #000; text-decoration: none; font: bold 14pt Helvetica; } #ninbutton:hover { text-decoration: none; color: #BBB; background-color: #000; } The Top 5 is a weekly feature that provides us with a forum to share our opinions on various aspects of the video game culture, and provides you with a forum to tell us how wrong we are. To further voice your opinions, submit a vote in the Wii Fanboy Poll, and take part in the daily discussions of Wii Warm Up.
Drumming to Super Mario Bros. 3
He's back at it again. Following up his incredible display centered around Super Mario Bros. 2, drummer extraordinaire Andrea Vadrucci has put together another video of himself. This time, he's banging out some key tunes in Super Mario Bros. 3. As one would expect, his execution is near flawless and, well, it's just a great video to watch. Check it out already.[Via Kotaku]
Hatsune Miku sings your favorite video game classics, doesn't exist
Inexplicably, the voice synthesizer program Vocaloid 2 is a massive hit in Japan. Well, it's slightly less inexplicable when we specify that the "Hatsune Miku" version of Vocaloid 2 takes music and lyrics and exports voice output that sounds like it was sung by a female idol singer. And, of course, the fake idol's picture and name grace the product's box. We're happy for the linguists who, for once, can enjoy some commercial success (assuming that Yamaha is still employing the linguists who worked on this).The YouTube video after the break contains Hatsune Miku versions of classic video game tunes. It's pretty surreal. It's all acappella, but the voice, in this case, is computer-generated!
