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WTFriday: The Mario Paint Music Showcase

Posted by Bob Mackey

Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where I find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what I normally do every day of the week.

With all the hardcore furor over the recently-released Wii Music, I think it's important to put things into perspective. Luckily for me, someone has already done this: namely, 1UP scribe Jeremy Parish, who made a remarkable amount of sense with a recent blog post. And, on his personal site, he also made a great comparison that I'm going to monopolize for the remainder of my own post:

Have self-proclaimed hardcore gamers always been this hysterical about "non-game" software? I feel like Wii Music is the latest in a long line of toys and apps that Nintendo has been churning out for years; nothing new in the least. Maybe it's because I wasn't lurking in the proper corners of USENET back then, but I really don't remember Mario Paint eliciting so much FUD back in the day; on the contrary, people seemed to love it, and it's still regarded fondly.

Seems sensible enough. But where would we be on WTFriday without something strange and disconcerting? This, my friends, is where Mario Paint comes in. I goofed around with this "game" quite a bit as a child, but little did I know that people were still actively using Mario Paint's composer for both good and evil. There's even a free program, aptly titled Mario Paint Composer, that emulates the game's basic music-making functions while adding a few new features that weren't exactly in demand back in 1992. After all, I doubt Nintendo anticipated an eight year-old reproducing anything like Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flames:"

Through the magic of searching YouTube, you can find quite a bit of these amazing compositions; but I suggest you first check out this article from Kezins on the 10 Most Creative Mario Paint Compilations. You'll find music theory--as with anything else--is much more interesting when it involves Mario.

Related Links:

WTFriday: The Chrono Trigger Anime
WTFriday: Goldman's Drama Academy
WTFriday: Play it Loud

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Posted Oct 24 2008, 02:00 PM

Filed under: jeremy parish, wii, music, snes, wii music, mario paint, bob mackey, wtfriday

Comments

Roto13 said:

Pfft. Using that composer thing is cheating.

You do have a point, though. It's not like this is the first non-game Nintendo has ever put out. People love Mario Paint even today. Remember the Game Boy Camera from ten years ago? That wasn't a game, but it was hella fun to play with.

Seriously, you could do a WTFriday every week based entirely on the stupidity and hypocrisy of gamers.

October 24, 2008 2:53 PM

Peter Smith said:

Although in fairness, from the descriptions I've read of Wii Music, Mario Paint's composer, limited though it is, lets you do more actual composing than Wii Music does.

October 24, 2008 3:10 PM

Roto13 said:

I think you're kind of missing the point.

October 24, 2008 11:39 PM

Peter Smith said:

Well, heaven knows it wouldn't be the first time. :)

October 27, 2008 10:35 AM

About Bob Mackey

For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.

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