I've always written about the intersection of games and real life – that's where the interesting stories are often found – but rarely do I get the opportunity to do so quite so literally as I have this week. Yesterday I visited the Universal Studios theme park in Osaka, where the world of Mario has been reconstructed in the real world. You walk through a green warp pipe and, when you come out the other side, through Princess Peach's castle, you emerge into a primary-coloured, crowded Mario-scape, all green grass, yellow blocks and brown brick, with critters moving back and forth across banks of question-mark blocks and the yawning maw of Bowser's Castle across the way. I've been dying to see this Nintendo theme park since it opened, but I wasn't prepared for how impactful it would be to walk into a physical manifestation of my eight-year-old self's dreams. Super Mario World is constructed in such a way that you can't see the outside world when you're in there, helping you to disappear into the fantasy.

Follow the steps in "Installation" and "Running the Project" to begin. In the emulator press File - Open ROM and choose /Dependencies/Super Mario World (USA).smc . Mario should now begin to play on his own!

Welcome back to Gaming IRL, a monthly segment where Engadget editors dive into everything they've been playing lately. We're well past the holidays and finally recovered from CES -- it's the perfect time to sit back and pick up a controller. Unfortunately, we haven't played one of the biggest recent releases, Resident Evil 2, but you can take a look back at our preview from E3. This month, we have a comparison between Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Origins, a look at New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and one of our editors dives back into the glory of StarCraft 2. We'd also love to know what you've been playing, shout out in the comments below! Assassin's Creed Odyssey has everything: glorious vistas, a wide variety of skills to learn and an open world filled with tons to do.

We all remember that one Christmas present we got as a kid. The one we'd begged our parents for all year, the one we'd looked up 100 times in the Argos catalogue or on Amazon, depending on our age … For many of us, that present was a games machine. Whether it was a ZX Spectrum or a PlayStation 2, the process of unpacking these technological marvels, getting our mums and dads to set them up, then finally playing with the whole family, was magical. We asked game developers, gaming journalists and Guardian readers to share their favourite memories of receiving a games console at Christmas. "I think it was 1997. We had a normal Christmas, woke up, opened presents, had dinner as always – super nice. Anyway, it got to around bedtime and me and my little brother went to brush our teeth and get ready. All of a sudden, my dad calls to us: 'Boys!? What's this?' He's shouting from our bedroom. Confused, me and my brother head in and Dad's like, 'How did you miss this? Under the bed!' We look and there's a big present all wrapped up. We were so confused, but ecstatic. We opened it and … it was a Nintendo N64. We stayed up an extra hour setting it up and playing Super Mario 64 for the first time with Dad on the bedroom floor. "My mam told me two weeks before Christmas that the shops had sold out of Sega Saturns.

In the blog "From Autonomous to Smart: Importance of Artificial Intelligence," we laid out the artificial intelligence (AI) challenges in creating "smart" edge devices: We also talked about how Moore's Law isn't going to bail us out of these challenges; that the growth of Internet of Things (IOT) data and the complexity of the problems that we are trying to address at the edge (think "smart" cars) is growing much faster than Moore's Law can accommodate. So we are going to use this blog to deep dive into the category of artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. We are going to see how reinforcement learning might help us to address these challenges; to work smarter at the edge when brute force technology advances will not suffice. With the rapid increases in computing power, it's easy to get seduced into thinking that raw computing power can solve problems like smart edge devices (e.g., cars, trains, airplanes, wind turbines, jet engines, medical devices). Look at the dramatic increase in the number of possible moves between checkers and chess even though the board layout is exactly the same.

Einfach nerdig, a Youtuber with currently only one video up, started a livestream of an AI learning to play "Super Mario Bros." 4 days ago. It's still running, and watching it is amazing. The AI, MarI/O, comes courtesy of creator SethBling, who despite his own huge following, isn't the one streaming the training session. The account streaming the video has disabled embedding, but you can watch it learn to play the game here on YouTube. SethBling, a world-record holder for "Super Mario World" speedruns, previously trained the MariI/O AI to play "Super Mario World" by feeding it footage of his own gameplay.

The success of last year's NES Classic Edition clearly took Nintendo by surprise. The company was completely incapable of meeting demand, leaving many people unable to buy what became the must-have gift of the holiday season. Now Nintendo has given its SNES the Classic Edition treatment and promises it's going to build way more than it did last year. Having grown up with the SNES (OK, we had a Sega Genesis and my best friend had SNES), it's easy to assume that everyone knows what it is and why people are so excited that it's back. After dominating the 8-bit era with the NES, Nintendo came late to the party with its sequel. The SNES launched in '90 in Japan, '91 in the US and '92 in the UK. The Genesis had a two-year head start in almost every country, but Nintendo's second-generation home console was worth the wait.

Nintendo says the retro version of one of its iconic video game platforms is making a comeback in 2019. The 8-bit NES Classic went on sale last year selling 1.5 million units, but the Japanese gaming firm shocked fans by mysteriously pulling the plug on production in April. The company now says its NES Classic Edition will now return next summer due to popular demand. Nintendo says the retro version of one of its iconic video game platforms will return to stores next year. The Japanese announced in April that it had ended production of the nostalgic NES classic, re-released in November 2016 and selling around 1.5 million units The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, was an 8-bit home video game console initially released in Japan as the Family Computer, or Famicom, on July 15, 1983.

In the blog "From Autonomous to Smart: Importance of Artificial Intelligence," we laid out the artificial intelligence (AI) challenges in creating "smart" edge devices: We also talked about how Moore's Law isn't going to bail us out of these challenges; that the growth of Internet of Things (IOT) data and the complexity of the problems that we are trying to address at the edge (think "smart" cars) is growing much faster than Moore's Law can accommodate. So we are going to use this blog to deep dive into the category of artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. We are going to see how reinforcement learning might help us to address these challenges; to work smarter at the edge when brute force technology advances will not suffice. With the rapid increases in computing power, it's easy to get seduced into thinking that raw computing power can solve problems like smart edge devices (e.g., cars, trains, airplanes, wind turbines, jet engines, medical devices). Look at the dramatic increase in the number of possible moves between checkers and chess even though the board layout is exactly the same.

In the blog "From Autonomous to Smart: Importance of Artificial Intelligence," we laid out the artificial intelligence (AI) challenges in creating "smart" edge devices: We also talked about how Moore's Law isn't going to bail us out of these challenges; that the growth of Internet of Things (IOT) data and the complexity of the problems that we are trying to address at the edge (think "smart" cars) is growing much faster than Moore's Law can accommodate. So we are going to use this blog to deep dive into the category of artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. We are going to see how reinforcement learning might help us to address these challenges; to work smarter at the edge when brute force technology advances will not suffice. With the rapid increases in computing power, it's easy to get seduced into thinking that raw computing power can solve problems like smart edge devices (e.g., cars, trains, airplanes, wind turbines, jet engines, medical devices). Look at the dramatic increase in the number of possible moves between checkers and chess even though the board layout is exactly the same. The only difference between checkers and chess is the types of moves that pieces can make.