Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game's "kill screen" for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen--and some complicated memory manipulation it enables--to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges. We've covered similar "arbitrary code execution" glitches in games like Super Mario World, Paper Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the past. And the basic method for introducing outside code into NES Tetris has been publicly theorized since at least 2021 when players were investigating the game's decompiled code. But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game's high-score tables as machine code instructions.

You can tell a Nintendo game not just from its feel – the satisfying swish of Link's sword in the Zelda games, the weight of Mario's jump – but by its look. They are bright, energetic, characterful. In Splatoon, the game-maker's most recent hit series, the shooter is reimagined as teams of transforming squids splattering arenas in glossy paint. Mario's red cap and blue overalls, originally designed to create a recognisable character with just a few pixels for 1981's arcade hit Donkey Kong, is now a stylistic signature – Nintendo's logo is the same shade of red. When you look into the company's department store outlets in Japan, a dozen colourful characters stare back at you from reams of merch: Animal Crossing cookware, Super Mario gloves, Zelda wallets and ties, Pikmin vases.

It isn't quite fair to call the engineer Masayuki Uemura, who died on December 6th, at the age of seventy-eight, an unsung architect of the global game industry. He is widely known among gamers for his work designing the Family Computer, the game console that became the Nintendo Entertainment System abroad, and its successor, the Super Famicom, known outside of Japan as the Super Nintendo. After retiring from Nintendo, in 2004, he remained deeply engaged with the industry, directing the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies in Kyoto until stepping down in March of this year. Despite the cravings that Uemura's machines invoked in the young--and not so young--customers who coveted them, his creations were inevitably overshadowed by the content that they were designed to serve up: the games themselves, the virtual adventures that were eagerly consumed by countless players around the planet. But these games would not have reached their destinations without Uemura's consoles.

The 2021 Game Awards kicked off last night, mixing the year's winners (It Takes Two, Deathloop, Kena and several more) with fresh game trailers and bona fide compelling new releases incoming, including Alan Wake 2 . We also got a release date for Final Fantasy VII Remake on PC, new Star Wars, Dune and Star Trek games and several (ten, actually) Lady Gaga hits coming to Beat Saber. There may be something for every gamer. 'Among Us' is heading to VR with help from the'I Expect You To Die' team'Slitterhead' is a new horror game from the creator of Silent Hill The'Cuphead' DLC will finally arrive on June 30th Oppo has teased its first foldable smartphone nearly three years after it unveiled a prototype device. The Find N looks like a device along the lines of Samsung's Galaxy Fold lineup, created after "four years of intense R&D and six generations of prototypes."

Kyoto – Masayuki Uemura, the lead architect for the breakthrough Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES, and a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University, has died, the university said Thursday. After joining Nintendo Co. in 1971, Uemura was in charge of developing the NES and its successor the SNES. The consoles, known in Japan as Famicom -- an abbreviation of family computer -- and Super Famicom, became huge hits with combined sales of 100 million units worldwide. The mega hits propelled Nintendo to become one of the world's leading video game companies. The cause of Uemura's death on Monday was not released.

For many, HAL Laboratory is just the studio behind the Kirby games but there's more to this company than first appears. I was lucky enough to catch up with the studio's president Satoshi Mitsuhara and find out what makes HAL Laboratory so special. Mitsuhara has had a long and eventful career in gaming but how he got into games is very interesting. Especially as he started out as a programmer but not out of mathematical interesting, but something more mechanical. "I grew up in Hamamatsu in Shizuoka Prefecture. It was the countryside so you could say I grew up surrounded by nature. In those days, the source of information in areas like this was just TV and radio. That meant whatever was happening in more cosmopolitan areas, I was a long way from that covered in mud. "I used to really enjoy playing with radio-controlled cars when I was younger, so I think that lead up to working with computers in a way.

OSAKA – Nintendo Co. has resumed sales in Japan of a smaller, palm-sized version of its 35-year-old popular "Famicom" game console, in response to requests from fans for its revival. Many stores in Japan sold out of the Nintendo Classic Mini Family Computer console after its initial release in November 2016, and the firm halted its production in April 2017. As of Thursday the mini console is now back on sale, preloaded with 30 games -- including "Super Mario Bros." and "The Legend of Zelda" -- and carries a suggested retail price of ¥6,458 (about $59). Players can plug the console into a television or PC monitor and play the games with a pair of controllers. Major home electronics chain Yodobashi Camera Co. promoted the console at a flagship outlet in front of JR Osaka Station. A 43-year-old man was among the customers who purchased the palm-sized device, saying, "I was not able to buy it at the first launch due to supply shortages.

In the world of the magic, the climax of a trick -- aka the grand reveal -- is known as the "prestige." Today, Nintendo officially announced more details on its Switch console, including that modular controller, dubbed JoyCon. In a video that is aimed to mimic a magician pulling off tricks, the Switch's general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi demonstrated just how much the JoyCon can do. The controller seems to be able to do everything. It's got enough buttons to be a traditional console controller, but there's also an accelerometer and gyroscope so it can do the same motion/gesture controls like the Wii's controller. That's not all: the JoyCon also has motion-depth infrared camera that can scan the distance and shape of objects, and a built-in haptic feedback engine that Nintendo calls "HD Rumble."