There are gamers, and then there are gamers: Roman DeNu, who spent over 100 hours to reconstruct the overworld map from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as a 512 x 512 x 104 Minecraft map, is undoubtedly a gamer. According to Kotaku, “he has plans to continue the project with a complete reproduction of the Dark World and all of the buildings, caves, and dungeons from the game.”

Video tour below:

The wonderful artists over at Kay Circle decided to give the world an early holiday present and made photomosaics of Link and Zelda using screenshots from each and every Zelda game. Check past the jump to see larger versions.

Back in the winter of 1991, a fresh-faced, 22-year-old actor named Paul Rudd starred in a commercial for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which had just hit American shores that August. Must’ve been an easy gig, though: His slack-jawed excitement playing cutting-edge titles like Pilotwings and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was clearly 100% genuine.

(via Agent M Loves Tacos)

Zero Lives blogger Das Chupa has a son who’s going to be “out of beta” in a little over 3 months, but he’s not a fan of parents with “crap bumper stickers about their six year olds making the honor list.” We think that you’ll agree that his old-school gaming-inspired sticker designs are far more original:

Games and alcohol are two of humankind’s oldest pastimes. When homo sapiens first emerged from the simian gene pool over 250 thousand years ago, we’d toss our spears around every so often, drunk on some derivative of fermented yeast. Today, the essentials remain the same. But there’s more than the occasional game of wasted dodgeball; now we’ve found ourselves also in a digital age of gaming. And in such a video game age, 21 year-old college students Mitch Hutts and Travis Broyles of The Drunken Moogle have arrived to curate the world of alcohol.

Their website, which regularly collects and invents alcoholic drink recipes based on video games, has been popularly received on Tumblr and beyond, recently serving such gems as the Starcraft II-themed “Zerg Rush” (six shots of Fernet Blanca, Hot n’ Sweet, Baileys Irish Cream, and Tabasco sauce in succession, because who attacks with just one Zergling?) and “The Kirby” (cherry jello shot with Malibu, pink lemonade, Bacardi, and blackberry brandy). Geekosystem had the opportunity to chat with Mitch and Travis about the origin of their idea, drunk gaming, and their favorite concoctions.

The central tenet of good game design is ‘Don’t make it tedious,’ and on that score, the Water Temple from 1998′s Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was not a success. Last year, Ocarina director Eiji Aonuma personally apologized to gamers everywhere for the level, which required the player to put on and take off heavy boots a seemingly endless number of times to raise and lower water levels and flip lots of switches. “I am most sorry that it was not easy for you to put on and take off the heavy boots, that all the time you had to visit the inventory. I am very sorry about that. I should have made it much easier to switch to the heavy boots,” he said in a 2009 interview.

Now, Nintendo is correcting history: During a roundtable at E3, Aonuma said he felt “evil shame” over the design of the Water Temple, and vowed to make it better in the 3DS remake of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Did you hear that Nintendo is making a new Zelda game? Okay, so Nintendo will never be not making a new Zelda game, but…

New Zelda game! You swing a sword! There’s bombs! And arrows. And a clawshot. And a pony.

What more do you want?

Information? We got that.

Not only are we still undergoing serious LOST withdrawal, but we’re also big classic gaming junkies — which is why Adam Campbell‘s mockups for a LOST NES game were like a cool glass of DHARMA merlot on a hot summer’s day. We’re definitely getting a classic Zelda vibe here.

While it may not pass Roger Ebert’s muster, anyone who has played a video game since the dawn of Pong will be hard-pressed not to call Exploding Rabbit‘s Jay Pavlina’s flash game Super Mario Bros. Crossover a work of art. The game allows the player to play the entirety of the classic Super Mario Bros., but do so using some of the greatest characters in video game history as well as the mustachioed plumber. The ridiculous thrill one gets when using a warp pipe while playing as Mega Man, Samus, Link, [Contra's] Bill R., or [Castlevania's] Simon has to be felt to be believed. Pardon the hyperbole, but it’s true. Fortunately, Pavlina has been nice enough to allow us to embed an updated version of his baby so you can play it right here. Take a turn at it after the jump!

Just before accepting his British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship yesterday, Shigeru Miyamoto was caught mentioning everybody’s favorite onion people by the Official Nintendo Magazine. From their Twitter:

ONM is at the BAFTAs! Miyamoto just told us Pikmin 3 development is “well under way”.

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