Nintendo Wii Fanboy

This is how you do new take on a Guitar Hero/Bemani game. Smarty Pants developer Planet Moon has just revealed their encouragingly clever music game Band Mashups, which focuses on the concept of the "battle of the bands."

Each band in Mashups represents a different genre of music: country, marching band, funk, etc. Songs are played as duels between two bands, with each band playing the licensed soundtrack in their own style. The style of the audio track alternates, with the winning group's style coming through more clearly. The game is controlled by moving the Wii remote left, right, down, and forward to match onscreen cues.

The cleverest thing about this game, we think, is how it turns a problem into a positive. Guitar Hero dealt with the issue of not having access to original recordings of licensed music by recording soundalikes. Planet Moon realized with Band Mashups that a cover doesn't have to sound like the original, and built a game around it. We are actually looking forward to hearing all the cover songs. Symphonic "Spoonman"? Latin "Blitzkrieg Bop"? Yes, please. The full soundtrack includes other weird and wonderful choices like Tenacious D's "Master Exploder" and "Man of Constant Sorrow" from O Brother Where Art Thou. More screens and even video are available at the IGN link.

It must have taken a lot of work to make the NES Kung Fu game look cool, but Mission Accomplished. Mission so accomplished. Thomas from Kung Fu takes on pretty much every other NES character (and Zangief) with the help of his massive arsenal of special moves stolen from other games. We hate to spoil it, but Thomas doesn't make it all the way through the video. It is Kung Fu after all, and a violent death is inevitable.

The second half of the video follows Mega Man as he faces the same kind of pan-gaming gauntlet, but with much more loss of (his own) life. Get equipped with E. Honda-Launching Pipe and check out the video after the break!

[Via NeoGAF]

We're not going to lie: we're huge Daily Drawing fans. More importantly, we're fans of Jim Welch's gaming mash-up paintings, which usually center around Nintendo characters. See, that's our thing. So when he sent word of his latest illustration, combining the dungeon crawling goodness of The Legend of Zelda with the tense, barrel-dodging gameplay of Donkey Kong, we couldn't help but check it out. Good thing we did, as it's one of his best works yet.

As always, we've embedded the video past the post break.

Past illustrations:

• ContraVania: a gaming mash-up
• Metroid + Mario = Metrio?
• Yoshi gets reimagined

We're no strangers to the work of Jim Welch who, through his website, maintains a strict regimen of drawing daily. His end products are, often, amazing and instill in us feelings of envy and jealousy. We wish we could produce such lovely pieces of art. Instead, our destiny seems to be on the business end of a laptop, captured in a cage and left to blog until our fingers are tiny nubs and the last sliver of light has disappeared on the dungeon wall.

Video has been, as always, embedded into the post past the jump. Update: now with working video!

Past illustrations:

• Metroid + Mario = Metrio?
• Yoshi gets reimagined