Inaugural Video Game Hall Of Fame Inductees Announced

The Nation Museum of Play announced the formal formation of the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, NY last year. This week, they announced the first inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, and the games chosen for the very first inductees are certainly trail-blazers each in their own way.

At left are the games chosen: Pong, Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., DOOM, and World of Warcraft. These games beat out others in a finalists' field of 15 video games.

I think the Museum picked a great series of games to start out with. All of these had a significant impact on the industry, and were all game-changers (pardon the pun). However, I really feel like they should have allowed more than 6 for the inaugural session-- if for no other reason than help shore up the displays in the hall a little, and then fall back to six for every year after that. The pulled froma lot of history, especially for an inaugural year. I think that of the other announced finalists-- Angry Birds, FIFA, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, The Oregon Trail, Pokémon, The Sims, Sonic the Hedgehog and Space Invaders-- will be future inductees to the Hall of Fame.

What do you think, readers?

Win a FREE copy of Puzzle & Dragons Z + Super Mario Bros Edition

Friend of the blog, Tiny Girl, Tiny Games, has a cool contest and an even cooler prize! A free download code for the new Puzzle & Dragons Z + Super Mario Bros Edition for the 3DS. Here's the entry for full details, and it has an entry method after my own heart: talking about your favorite dragon (because seriously, you guys, dragons are so cool).

So what are you waiting for? Check out the contest!

Super Hair-io: How Hair Defines Video Game Characters

Photo illustration via The AV Club

There's a lot that goes into character design, from artist's concept sketches to emulation of hardware limitations.  The Onion's sister site, The A.V. Club, has an occasional feature that analyzes various ideas behind representations of the body in video games. The latest entry in this series takes a look at an essential aspect of character design that you might not have even noticed before: hair!

Without hair, Mario’s nose and ear completely disappear, congealing his entire face into a beat-up wad of Silly Putty. His appearance becomes harsh and unappealing. Perhaps some minor indications of his mouth would have been added, but the beautiful thing about that mustache was that he didn’t need a mouth; we just knew it was there. Without the sideburns and mustache, this is just a chubby guy—no charm, no flare. Add the mustache, and you can practically hear his cartoonish Italian accent ordering a pizza pie. Mario’s hair didn’t just soften him, it made him affable.

The article also examines how hair affects the character design of the Final Fantasy series, Mega Man and Bayonetta. Give it a read!

Hands-Free Super MArio: Now You're Playing (Music) With (SMB's) Power

Via Kotaku, an incredible 10 minute video of a Super Mario World level that not only plays itself, but plays MUSIC.

Go. Watch it now. NOW.

Life Meter: Amazing Art & Creative Comics, All About Video Games

Hey, you!

You read The Code, so you obviously like video games.

You probably like art. You've maybe even read a comic or two in your lifetime, I'd wager.

Then you will love the happy mutants over at LifeMeter.

Edited by Zack Giallongo, Dave Roman, and Stephanie Yue, Life Meter is a collection of comics and cartoon art inspired by the artists' collective appreciation and love of video games. The site manages to show off a diverse range of art styles, while maintaining respect for the characters and their game worlds.

And contributors to Life Meter have racked up some pretty impressive recognition. Life Meter contributor Matt Loux's videogame inspired graphic novel, Sidescrollers,
was listed by The American Library Association as one of the Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2008.

You can check out the art gallery or read up on the collection of comics.

(The art piece used in this post is entitled Castelvania by Bill Mudron and is one of many outstand fan works presented in the Life Meter art gallery.)

Mario Teaches Quantum Physics

The Mechanically Separated Meat blog took the youtube video of merged games played against "Kaizo Mario World" (which I first blogged about in this entry) and used the resulting video as the starting point for an illuminating and very accessible discussion of the Many Worlds hypothesis in quantum physics.

From the essay in question:

tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 1018 chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 1018 universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 1018 universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

You can read the whole entry here.

Mario ROMhacks make even hardcore gamers cry.

Remember Super Mario Frustration? Kaizo Mario World is another of those super-hard Mario level hacks, this one of Super Mario World. Someone played through its first level 134 times, with save states, recording all his deaths, then digitally composited them into one trip through the level. The result was Many-Worlds Mario. (For those interested, here's a video of a tool-assisted perfect run of much of the game. Here's the rest.

Get It While It's Hot: Fan Ripped SSBB Soundtrack

Now that Super Smash Brother Brawl for the Wii is out in Japan, everything that the Brawl PR team endeavored to keep secret has been released to the public by enthusiastic Internet fans.

In what is making me giddier than a schoolboy is that a SSBB fan is ripping music out of the game and dumping it into a directory for everyone on the 'net to enjoy. I'm guessing that it won't stop until all reportedly-300-plus songs in the game are on it.

Guys, there are a LOT of high quality tracks in there that will have you grinning from ear to ear if you've liked any Nintendo game pretty much ever.

There's the orchestral arrangement of the original Legend of Zelda. The boss battle music from Metal Gear Solid 2. And Humoresque of a Little Dog -- aka "The Drugstore music from Earthbound" is my favorite arrangement in there so far. The NES Medley is a great audio quiz to see how many old NES games you remember, though if you want medleys from just a single game there's the Kid Icarus medley.

The theme song to Sonic CD is in there. The ENGLISH version.

You need to go and check them out right now.
GO GO GO!