Digital Remix: Super Mario Buskers - the Lost Subway Levels

Now ordinary commuters have to suffer the wrath of the musical nerd

Here in my fortress of everlasting damnation, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of people out there who just aren't as into stuff as I am. Only last week I dropped by the peasants in the scorpion pit, and not one of them cared for the 8-bit rendition of Smile.dk's Butterfly that I'd found. Simply incredible.

Suffice to say, I was stumped. Stumped, that is, until I found these crafty minstrels, demonstrating a maxim in which I firmly believe - if you can't lead a horse to water, grab a bucket and stick his nose in it. These blameless commuters will be busked at by Super Mario whether they like it or not, and if only more musicians had such good taste, the world would be better for it.

Tim Schafer Funds New Game in Just Eight Hours

The nicest man in gaming appeals to the fans - and is repaid several times over

Two days ago, video game industry veteran Tim Schafer started a campaign on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $400,000 to fund a brand new point-and-click adventure game. In eight hours, the total had been reached. At the time of writing, just two days later, Double Fine Studios have been pledged almost $1.5 million by 37,000 backers, and the total just keeps on climbing.

For the uninitiated, Kickstarter is a portal where budding inventors, artists and other assorted entrepreneurs can appeal for funds, making their case on the project's page while requesting a funding amount and a date by which the limit must be reached. Kickstarter can be used to fund theoretically anything, from comic book veterans looking to break into children's literature to films about sexuality and disability. Some bids are more successful than others, but Schafer's has set a new record for the site.

As Kotaku's Luke Plunkett explains, Double Fine's success is pretty understandable. Although Call of Duty and its ilk continue to smash worldwide sales records, the success of Schafer's Kickstarter bid shows that there is a core of increasingly disenfranchised gamers who feel that gaming is moving away from its roots, losing its diversity and creativity as it goes.

In isolation, it's unlikely that Double Fine Adventure signals a sea-change in the way that media is funded; this is only one game, after all, and Schafer is already a much-loved industry figure. His venture into the uncertain waters of cheap, download-only games was a very public one, and the critical success of titles such as Costume Quest and Stacking mean that his position as a modestly-funded indie developer has never been far from the public consciousness.

Nonetheless, the success of this bid is one that indie artists of all flavours should take note of; funding for Double Fine Adventure is not the only Kickstarter project to wildly exceed its goal, with webcomic The Order of the Stick raking in an astonishing $600,000 for paper reprints. These are not just successes for Kickstarter, but for the old adage of putting your money where your mouth is.

See the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter page here.

Retro|Spective: Sonic 3 & Knuckles

Not actually S3&K, but let's thank Nerkin
anyway for daring to dream the HD dream

There's more to this 16-bit classic than slick gameplay - so, so much more

I'm not going to spend long waxing lyrical about S3&K's lock-on technology, as it's pretty well known by now; originally planned as one game, Sega realised that they couldn't fit Sonic 3 on to one cartridge without having to spend ridiculous amounts of money making a bigger one. Instead they split the game into two, renamed the second part to Sonic & Knuckles and gave it a slot on top of the cartridge itself, allowing players to plug in the preceding game and combine them into one single, seamless experience.

The result was legendary; not only could players get the full Sonic 3 experience, but they could also play through Sonic 2 as Knuckles, making Sonic & Knuckles an expansion pack for not one, but two games. Three in fact, if you count the ability to lock on to Sonic 1 and play a selection of brand-new special stages.

But this is old news; Sega have re-released the 16-bit Sonic games every single console generation, including the ability to 'lock-on' with Sonic & Knuckles, so there isn't much that needs saying about that particular innovation. But what does need talking about is that S3&K is an early and still extremely relevant example of voiceless storytelling, the kind that video games excel at and Sonic has proven to be a prime example of.