My kids and I loved playing Paper Mario on the Wii. Today, Nintendo announced a new Paper Mario title for the Switch, called Paper Mario: The Origami King. Release date is July 17.
The kingdom has been ravaged by an origami menace! Join Mario and his new partner, Olivia, as they team up with unlikely allies like Bowser and the Toads to battle evil Folded Soldiers. Try to free Princess Peach’s castle from the clutches of King Olly in this comedy-filled adventure, only on the Nintendo Switch system. Use the 1,000-Fold Arms ability to extend your arms to interact with the environment and solve puzzles. In battle, line up scattered enemies and plan your attack to maximize damage with the new, ring-based battle system that requires both puzzle-solving skills and a quick wit.
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Instead of watching your stocks go up and down right now like a terrifying roller coaster, let's see what some Certified Financial Planners have to say about investment planning for a plumber-turned-jumping-pan-dimensional-warrior.
Public Domain Image via Pexels Read the rest
Level two, "Amateur", sounded so good that I suspected a joke was afoot. It was, but only the sort of joke a virtuoso like Rob Landes could pull off. Read the rest
Kisaragi double 6 created this fantastic hand-drawn stop-motion animation of the Super Mario Bros (1985) World 1-1 level.
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A few months back we bought a Nintendo Switch. The portable console gets shared between a 46 year-old dad and an 11 year-old daughter. The Switch sees a lot of playtime. Read the rest
From Nintendo president Tatumi Kimishima's corporate management policy briefing today
(PDF):
We have started
development of an animated movie featuring “Super
Mario” with Illumination, the movie studio that
brought films such as “Despicable Me” and
“Minions.” For this project Mr. Chris Meledandri,
Founder and CEO of Illumination and Shigeru
Miyamoto, Representative Director, Fellow of
Nintendo will co-producing the film. The film will be
co-financed by Universal Pictures and Nintendo,
and distributed theatrically worldwide by Universal
Pictures.
Further announcements on details such as release
dates will be made at a later date. We look forward
to providing further information about the release
timing for this movie that we hope everyone will
enjoy.
As a part of our effort to expand Nintendo IP beyond
video games, we look forward to bringing smiles to
people around the world through this movie.
Let's hope it fares better than last time.
(via Rolling Stone) Read the rest
A Pyro Designs prototyped this ingenious animated Mario fidget spinner, designed by Garrett Kearney. Fidgety zoetropic fun!
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Nope. This Super Mario children's birthday party cupcake arrangement did not turn out as planned. Read the rest
Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin (aka @ThePieous) writes, "It is National Pie Day in America tomorrow (not to be confused with "International Pi Day" - the cooler big cousin of pie holidays on March 14th...) In honour of this occasion I've posted a new tutorial video that is very attainable for any novice pie-geeks out there thinking about whipping something up nifty. It features our favourite 8 bit plumber hero, with a special guest appearance at the end." Read the rest
Charles Martinet has been the voice of Nintendo's Mario, Wario, and Luigi for 26 years. (Great Big Story) Read the rest
Redditor enzyme69 used Blender to generate a picture of Mario "drawn" in crayon; this should be a thing. [via r/GenerativeArt] Read the rest
Samuraiguitarist Steve Onotera created this fantastic cover of the Super Mario World music including sound effects made on his guitar. (via Laughing Squid)
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Charlie Cook performs cover versions of songs with a gunslinging twist. Read the rest
Super Mario Bros and other classic games can be run through 3DNes, a nifty 3D emulator. Read the rest
A bizarre glitch in Super Mario World, and an incredible amount of patience, and the SNES classic is transformed into Flappy Bird.
It's incredible to watch SethBling in action. Once the glitch (triggered by giving Mario too many power-ups) is active, machine code can be arbitrary rewritten in memory by carefully moving Mario around. This code can, ultimately, be executed. The process takes an hour of careful pixel-perfect actions in the game world, which becomes stranger and more nightmarish as Mario's universe-editing rituals proceed.
Welcome to the weirdest, most painful, most existentially-nightmarish IDE—and a reminder that our own reality is probably an abandoned simulation waiting for someone to take too many power-ups and turn it all into a sadistic casual game. Read the rest
Researchers at the ETH Game Technology Center of the Swiss national technical institute in Zürich, have applied their considerable talents to the critical problem of immersion in 2D side-scrolling, 8-bit era games. Witness in this video the splendor of a 360° projected Mario world that unrolls across the walls as players reveal each subsequent tile of the game map.
Robert Sumner, founder of the GTC explains:
...we observed that the 8-bit era of gaming had a huge collective influence on so many people, but the actual gaming experience was typically an individual one. We wanted to turn this idea upside down, and elevate the NES console experience into a group experience where the game surrounds a large event, allowing multiple people to play in a collaborative setting. The panoramic stitching and 8-way controller multiplexing hardware were the main ways we accomplished this task.
The group submitted the paper "Unfolding the 8-bit Era" to the European Conference on Visual Media Production, and then built the system to unveil at the Eurographics Conference. Utilizing a vintage 8-bit Famicom/NES system and a PC with a point-correspondence vision tracking algorithm, the researchers developed methods to detect the edge of each screen segment, adding it to a continuously expanding texture map in real-time. This panoramic texture is then seamlessly displayed on eight aligned projectors. The vision algorithm requires no prior knowledge about the game, so it is possible to play any side-scroller on this system, such as Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Metroid, and the like. Read the rest
In Josh Millard's excellent "game" Ennuigi, you are invited to "spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made." Read the rest
