Billy Mitchell is not a creep.

For people who saw last year’s documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters — and perhaps for gamers in general — that sentence alone is anathema. But I’m telling you now: In a one-on-one conversation with the guy, he comes off as nice enough. A little eccentric maybe, but what person who has so thoroughly immersed himself in the world of classic arcade games wouldn’t be?

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I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises in the video, so let me just say that I had a blast making it and I hope we are able to collaborate our efforts on a few more of these random videos.

We also want to give a huge thanks to The OneUps for letting us use their “Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride” for the video. I think that you will agree that it made a perfect addition to the video. If you haven’t checked them out yet, you should do yourself a favor and listen to some of their tunes (including “Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride”) over at their myspace page.

Happy Holidays everybody and we hope you enjoy our short greeting to you!

So when did Mario get his start as an athlete? Mario Kart perhaps, since that game established the effectiveness of the Mario spin-offs? Or was it NES Open Tournament Golf, since that was Mario’s first starring role in a sports title? Or could it even be plain ol’ NES Golf, even though Mario looked more like some golf-playing uncle who just happened to be named “Mario” rather than the mustached wonder himself?

None of these is the true origin of Mario sports, actually.

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To start this off, I’m going to offer my predictions for the next eight female Mario characters: Marble, Tea, Snowflake, Olive, Diamond, Soap Bubble, Cute Hat, and, oh, I don’t know… Walnut.

So where the hell do I get off making such a stupid prediction?

Well, in the first of my two-part look into female characters spinning around among the floating coins and grinning clouds of the Super Mario games and their extended network of spin-offs, I discussed the odd tendency for Nintendo to create many female characters in the image of Princess Peach, the dainty-to-the-max, pink-and-blonde embodiment of all things girly. The “why” of it is easy: While not the first, Peach is easily the most famous female video game character. But the result of this trend is interesting, when viewed from a distance: Considering how many children grew up or are growing up playing video games, what might the effect be of having a popular series’ best-known female character be so often helpless and so frequently kidnapped? Furthermore, what’s the implication of making Peach the physical model for so many other female characters?

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Don’t get me wrong — I’m a Princess Peach fan. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who wears a gown and heels and who nonetheless stands on equal footing with the likes of plumbers, apes and dinosaurs is A-OK in my book. And while Ms. Pac-Man may be the grande dame of video games, my calculations say that Peach has had more playable appearances than any other female character in the history of video games. (Specifically, I count 53, starting with Super Mario Bros. 2 and ending with Mario Party DS and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Take that, Chun-Li.) However, just because a certain princess might be the most well-traveled female video game character ever doesn’t mean that every other woman in her universe has to look like her.

Nintendo, it seems, likes Peach so much that her likeness graces even characters other than her. This actually happens to such a degree that I’m dedicating an entire column to what I call “Peach Syndrome” in hopes that I can shed some light on the many Marioverse inhabitants who bare a resemblance to the monarch formerly known as “Toadstool.”

So who does Peach look like?

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Having played the Mario games since the notion of a Mario game was novel — opposed to the Donkey Kong games that preceded them, at least — I’d like to think I know a thing or two about the expansive universe that’s grown up around everyone’s favorite portly plumber. One specific field of Mariology, however, that has continually confounded me is fans’ views on Mario’s world with respect to what separates it from the Donkey Kong’s world.

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Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn ships for the Wii tomorrow, and those who have played through Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the GameCube should have no trouble getting into the story - Radiant Dawn is a direct sequel. If you haven’t played PoR, though, don’t worry. The game does a good job of setting you up. The story is your classic brother and sister rising up against the oppression of an evil empire. There are ancient religions with mythical powers. Oh, and there’s a primary enemy in big, black armor that took your father away from you. Sound familiar?

Radiant Dawn draws many parallels to a story that is near and dear to many of our hearts. We’ll take a look at them after the break. I won’t reveal any major plot spoilers or game endings, but some details from very early on in the game might be brought up. Just so you know.

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MLB Power Pros: the game that hardly anybody has heard of. I walked into Gamestop on Tuesday (just a day before the official street date) and the clerks had no idea what I was talking about. I might as well have asked for Duke Nukem Forever. Hell, I probably would have had a better chance of scoring a copy of DNF at the time.

The Power Pros series has been extremely popular in Japan before making it’s rookie debut in America, so it’s a real shame that MLB Power Pros is unknown to most of the Western gaming world. I understand that you can’t expect much hype from a game that is released at the very end of the season, but this little gem deserves to get some recognition.

Don’t let the goofy character models with giant eyes and missing legs (aka: Pro Yaky? style) fool you, Power Pros is not a “just fot kids” type of game. In fact, Power Pros blasts the competition out of the park by becoming the first great baseball title for the Wii.
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Talk about a long night. The footage capturing worked like an absolute charm. Everything went off without a hitch and the footage looks beautiful, although I wish I had some component cables for the Wii.

Unfortunately, that’s the last thing that went right during the night. I just spent the past 4 hours fighting my broken microphone, extremely slow computer (send money for a Mac Pro!), and an even more sluggish internet connection. The first upload was going so slow that I decided to run a speed test, only to find that I was boasting a 3Mbps connection when we are paying for 20Mbps (10-15 being “acceptable”). Sexy, I know.

Now that I am finally off of the phone with the cable company and the first upload is finally finished, let me be the first to say that the quality sucks. As I write this message, my computer is rendering 3 more videos of much higher quality. I will get those up as soon as they are finished, along with my initial impressions of MLB Power Pros.

As for my initial initial impression: It’s fun.

It looks like this week is shaping up to be surprisingly good in the world of game releases. Not only do we get some stellar Wii releases with Pokemon Battle Revolution and The Bigs, but the Virtual Console games don’t seem to suck either. Well, the ones that actually matter…

This week’s contenders: F-Zero X, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, and China Warrior.

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