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