Neatorama clued me into the burgeoning field of homemade versions of the Super Mario Brothers theme song.

This is a collection of videos of that time honored art form. I’ll put some of the more unusual/unique/original versions at the top of the list. I’ve never even heard of a Balalaika or an Er Hu before, and the hand farting kid’s face freaks me out.

If you watch only one, however, watch the first one. I couldn’t even figure out what a beat boxing flute player was until I watched the video… it’s truly impressive:Beatboxing Flut

FanTent » Blog Archive » Super Mario Brothers Theme Song - Homemade Versions

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From Boing Boing:

knightPhlight sez, “With the advent of the Wii, another generation of Zelda fans are born. My daughter’s 4th birthday is tomorrow and she asked for a Link cake. With two classes of pre-K munchkins coming over, there was only one solution: cupcake pixel art. The icing on the cake(s) would be a happy birthday wish from everyone in the bOINGbOING-isphere…”

Boing Boing: Legend of Zelda’s Link executed in cupcake pixel-art

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A while ago we looked at a really amazing game called PeekaBoom. In the game two people are revealing an image to each other and the magic is that the game itself is learning about pictures based on the input from the humans. Really cool.

Well here is a talk that the creator made at Google, and its all about how using Humans to perform computation can be the wave of the future. Its really awesome.

Seriously.. click it on.. and listen to it if nothing else. Its a fascinating talk on how human computation and gameplaying can yield valuable data.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

Theres an interesting article on Wired that examines how Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, is in fact a game designer. He has another project in the works, and it may be interesting. So.. here is the wired article, you can decide for yourself if hes worthy of considering a game designer.

Quick: Who are the defining game designers of our generation?

A serious gamer might think of Will Wright of The Sims, Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo and maybe John Carmack of Doom. But let me throw another one at you:Mark Burnett.Who dat? He’s the guy who created Survivor, the TV show.

Depending on who you ask, Burnett is responsible for a) crafting one of the most successful series in history, b) injecting yet more gratuitous T&A into broadcasting and c) single-handedly revitalizing a moribund CBS.But I think he’s done something even more interesting: He has brought game design to the mainstream. And he did it not on an Xbox or PlayStation, but in that most Jurassic of media, prime time TV.

Wired News: Who Gets Games? Mark Burnett

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Gamers rejoice… this guy is not Uew Bolle. And that means that our beloved Halo movie is at least not in the hands of a retard.The director will be Neill Blomkamp and he has a little Sci-fi TV background, though he has not faeture films to his credit just yet. Talk about starting with a biggy. On the bright side, it looks like Peter Jackson is very hands on, and helping the green director out.
Quint from Aint It Cool News got an interview with the man, and it is sounding good so far.

Quint: How faithful do you plan on staying to the design of Master Chief’s armor?

Neill Blomkamp: Master Chief is certainly something that I do not want to change too much at all, there are certain things inside the Halo universe that are sacred and he’s the main one.

Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

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This is simply bad-ass. A new technology unveiled at Siggraph, is demonstrating how they can now capture volumetric data as well as motion capturing. Basiclaly they use makeup to capture positioning within space. Instead of 10 balls on your joints in a mo-cap session, now you have a million on your face. Its pretty sweet, and it will only enhance the games that adopt it.Cool indeed.

Mova

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Too funny.

A series of square-stitch bracelets based on the audience graphics from the Commodore64 game Hardball

http://www.beigerecords.com/joe/beads/hardball_bracelets/

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Let no one ever say that life doesnt imitate art…. or vice versa..

File this one under “weird and wacky”. For your enjoyment I present: Pac Man using crickets to control the ghosts.Totally bizzare.

The computer game we used for our experiment is “Pac-Man” (Namco, 1980). Instead of computer code, we want to have animals controlling the ghosts. To enable this, we built a real maze for the animals to walk around in, with its proportions and layout matching the maze of the computer game. The position of the animals in the maze is detected using colour-tracking via a camera, and linked to the ghosts in the game. This way, the real animals are directly controlling the virtual ghosts.

Untitled Document

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Found this on Boing Boing today. I haven’t had the chance to really read it deeply, but it seems interesting.

“Raph Koster (game designer of such great titles like Ultima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies) shares on his blog the vestiges of a game idea. The game involves flapping around the screen with a bird learning to fly.” Raph also wrote the magnificent Theory of Fun, which does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics.

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

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