Video games have been brought to life by many means, from Japanese game shows to college marching bands. Those are all pretty cool in their use of synchronization and stop-gap motion, but they're not terribly complex. What if you added some wheels and props? Chances are you'd get some incredibly cool neon downhill Tetris:

"Adventure" is the name of two landmark games. The first is the classic text adventure, also known as Colossal Cave. The second, and perhaps better known to console gamers, is the Atari 2600 game that featured colorful castles, malformed dragons, and invisible dots.

There are plenty of shirts that celebrate the era that produced these games — BustedTees.com and 80sTees.com have practically made it their stock in trade. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover what could be the best Eighties t-shirt ever made coming from Despair.com:

Can you say "WANT"?

A remake of Adventure was published earlier this year. Followed by this shirt a few months later, it seems that this game in particular is enjoying the renaissance brought about by the retrogaming craze.

Ten years ago, on 9/9/9, Sega released what would prove to be their final hardware console.

In every video game console generation since 1984, store shelves have supported only two dominant platforms. In the 16-bit era, Sega made itself a household name, daring to go up against the company that had revitalized the American market, Nintendo. With its edgy games, hip mascot, and sleek console, the Sega Genesis quickly became a household name.

After that, Sega drowned, not in overwhelming competition, but in its own ideas. The Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, and Game Gear divided their house against themselves. Developers didn't know which combination of hardware to support, and gamers suffered as a result. Both parties abandoned the Sega brand, promising that they'd come back after Sega had reestablished a successful track record.

But the prophecy that developers and gamers had issued was one that they themselves ensured Sega could not fulfill, as without anyone to make and then play the games, Sega found themselves without the software or sales to continue in the hardware market. Sega had lost to Sony in the 32-bit era, and gamers were persuaded to skip the Dreamcast in favor of Sony's pending entry into the 128-bit generation.

As a result, the Sega Dreamcast was practically DOA, but back then, you'd never have seen it coming. Its launch featured many more titles than the two the Nintendo 64 debuted with, or the solely first-party games that premiered with the Saturn. It was the first 128-bit console on the market, with graphics better than anything we'd seen before. The inbuilt 56K modem promised networking capabilities previously the province of PC owners. And four controller ports would engage players as only the Nintendo 64 had before.

Of course, all that is for naught without quality games — but its two-year life, the Sega Dreamcast consistently offered the highest caliber of software. Sonic Adventure was perhaps the last good game to star the blue hedgehog. Power Stone as raucous party games that made fighters fun again. NFL 2K debuted Sega's own line of sports games. A strange little memory card had its own display for PDA-like functions. And Seaman and Shenmue were experimental, quirky titles that proved the Dreamcast could take gaming to a whole new level.

Sure, some of these memories are tainted by nostalgia. The console had its poor games; Sega.Net was a bear to configure; and the controller was unwieldy. Yet some games that first saw the light of day on the Dreamcast continue to be repackaged for new generations, evidence of their staying power.

In January 2001, Sega announced it was going "platform agnostic" and would become a software publisher. Under this new strategy, the company almost immediately began realizing profits unlike any it'd seen in recent years as a hardware developer. Peter Moore, formerly of Sega, reminisced today about that decision and the console it killed — a difficult but necessary call.

It's hard to believe it's been a full decade since the Dreamcast hit store shelves. It was a milestone event in more than just in the lives of gamers and the gaming industry; Wikipedia lists the console's launch as the only significant event of 1999. The Sony PlayStation, which released on this same day in 1995, receives no such honor.

I type this blog while sitting in front of my home theater. Currently set up are my Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo 64, and Sega Dreamcast. If I had room, far older consoles would join this lineup. But if I had to choose my setup based on significance, at least one console would remain constant: the Dreamcast deserves to be played, remembered, and honored as a last hurrah that echoes to this day.

Epilogue: Rush Rally Racing is a new Sega Dreamcast game that comes out next month and looks to capture the top-down racing gameplay of Micro Machines and R.C. Pro-Am. I guess you can't keep a good console down!

PAX, or the Penny Arcade Expo, has now closed its doors for 2009. I've never attended this annual celebration of gamer culture since its 2004 inception, due primarily to the time and cost involved: the video game industry is no longer my line of work, and hauling myself from Boston to Seattle is a difficult expense to justify.

Fortunately, the philanthropists behind PAX, Penny Arcade, and Child's Play have seen fit to bestow their good graces on us remote fans. PAX East, the first ever PAX outside the Seattle metro area, will descend upon Boston on March 26th for three days of glorious gaming. Registration is now open and is priced even more affordably than their Web site suggests: a three-day pass is only $45, cheaper than two individual one-day passes.

Registration for PAX East comes with a free one-year membership with the Entertainment Consumers Association, a group I'd not previously heard of. Curious, I accepted the offer and will send an inquiry to the Massachusetts chapter to learn more.

I attended enough E3 events to grow weary of them, but none was aimed at my gamer self or was as accessible as PAX East promises to be. With four dozen dollars and a half-hour drive within my budget, I find myself looking forward to partaking of Gabe and Tycho's bounty — followed a month later by ROFLCon II, where a geek can be a geek. There's never been a better time or place to be one.

Via Slashdot comes news of a programming competition to create an AI that can navigate the world of Super Mario Bros. It's a topic of interest not just to developers and theorists but to gamers as well, as the proving ground for the results is a Super Mario Bros. random level generator. Infinite Mario Bros. is based on the Super Mario World game engine but creates new maps and levels with every game and is playable right from your Web browser.

Random levels can be a boon or bane: without the conscious choices of a designer, such levels can lack any inspiration and challenge whatsoever, as I found in the PlayStation 2 RPG Dark Cloud. But as any fan of Roguelikes can tell you, when challenge and fun is inherent in the game design and moveset, random levels can mean infinite replayability.

So get hopping! Even if your intelligence is natural and not artificial, Infinite Mario Bros. is still a lot of fun. And if you're interested in other scientific applications of Super Mario World, check out Kaizo Mario World for a study of quantum physics.