They’re some of the most-used software in history. Some of them were written by legendary techies, such as Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. They’re a tradition that’s lasted for decades and shows no sign of ending. And yet they get no respect–in part because very few people stop to give them much thought at all.

I speak of the little games that come with operating systems–Windows Solitaire being the most obvious example–and it’s time they got their day in the sun. Benj Edwards has rounded up twenty of them, including ones you’ve played (I still miss Windows Reversi) and ones I suspect you’ve never heard about (Gorillas?).

View The Great Operating System Games slideshow.

Everybody knows Mario–Super Mario.  And how: an oft-cited 1991 poll found that more American children recognized Nintendo’s cheerful mascot than they did Mickey Mouse.  Almost two decades later, the famous cartoon plumber, forever clad in blue overalls, regularly stars in blockbuster games for the Wii and DS.

Regarding Mario’s origins, it’s common knowledge among game fans that legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created him for 1981′s Donkey Kong arcade game. But few know that Nintendo borrowed Mario’s name and Italian heritage from a real man.

That man’s name is Mario Segale, and he’s not a plumber. He’s a wealthy real estate developer in Tukwila, Washington.  Segale unwittingly stepped into video game history by renting out a warehouse that served as Nintendo’s U.S. headquarters in the early 1980s. At that time, a financially struggling Nintendo of America (NOA) was preparing the U.S. launch of Donkey Kong. Legend has it that NOA President Minoru Arakawa noticed physical similarities between Donkey Kong’s short, dark-haired protagonist and the landlord. So the crew at NOA nicknamed the character Mario, and it stuck.

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The most potentially interesting thing I’ve seen so far at the TechCrunch50 conference is Spawn Labs’ Spawn HD720 box. It’s also one of the easier things to explain: Just as a SlingBox lets you redirect your TV signal to another PC on your home network or anywhere on the Internet, Spawn lets you broadcast console games–it supports PS2, PS3, Xbox, Xbox 360, and GameCube, but not Wii–to distant computers. You can use it to play a game in another room when your TV is otherwise occupied, or to play a game remotely when you’re traveling–and you can even play against someone who’s in the living room using the console directly, or who’s in a third location.

It all works via a $199.95 box (which goes on sale today) and adapters you plug into your computer to let you connect gamepads, and Spawn says it’ll work with any game for the consoles it supports. It worked well in the demo–which isn’t a given, since several TechCrunch50 debutantes haven’t–and if it does what it’s supposed to, it’s going to be cool. Spawn says that games look good and there’s virtually no latency on home networks and only a tiny bit over the Internet, but even the impressively-engineered SlingBox sometimes has trouble dealing with chokey real-world Internet connections. I’ll believe it when I play it.

Even if it performs as advertised, it is, of course, another box to buy and install. Wouldn’t it be nifty if this feature was built into consoles–or if Spawn and Sling teamed up to sell one box that did both games and TV?

When IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov back in 1997, my reaction was pretty dispassionate: As someone who’s played only a few games of chess in my life, I simply didn’t have a deep understanding of the game or an emotional attachment to it. But when the news came out over the weekend that IBM is programming a supercomputer to play Jeopardy–well, that’s a breakthrough I can relate to. I haven’t watched the venerable game show much in years, but back in the 1980s, I planned my college courses around it to make sure I was home in time to watch (this was before I had a VCR). I get the game’s subtleties–it’s not just about having an encyclopedic knowledge of both serious stuff and pop culture, but also about being able to unpack the meaning of those questions-phrased-as-answers in a split second. And given that countless very smart people have gone on the show and fallen flat on their faces, I’ll be impressed if IBM’s computer manages an unembarrassing third-place finish. But I don’t have any difficulty dealing with the idea that a computer might someday beat any flesh-and-blood Jeopardy player on the planet.

Thinking about the prospect of a computer taking on Alex Trebek, metaphorical buzzer in hand, led me to the conclusion that game shows in general aren’t a bad Turing Test-like gauge of artificial intelligence. They require knowledge–okay, only a little of it in many cases, but some. They’ve got a social component, by definition. They involve thinking on one’s feet, or the simulation thereof.

So how might a really well-programmed supercomputer fare at other famous game shows of the present and (mostly) past?

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With a bit more than a week to go until the first pitches of the baseball season, I’m in a sporting mood. So I’ve prepared a slideshow on the hottests sports toys of three decades ago–the early electronic sports handhelds produced by Mattel, Coleco, and others. Never have LEDs engaged in such heated competition, from the baseball diamond to the football field to the hockey rink and beyond.

View Smallball slideshow.

When it comes to buying and selling used video games, Gamestop has failed to win me over. The store pays criminally low rates for used games, especially recent releases, and it’s all the more infuriating when you see that same game sold back again for more than double what you’re offered. A couple of weeks ago, the store quoted me roughly $25 to buy back Afro Samurai, which is currently sold used for $55.

Any competition is welcome in my book, so I hope Toys R’ Us’ experiments with buying and selling used games works out. Joystiq confirmed today that the toy giant is trying the idea in “a couple of New York stores,” according to a company rep, not including the Times Square location. Another blogger spotted one of the stores in Nanuet, N.Y.

Details are scarce, because Toys R’ Us doesn’t like talking about its test runs, and at present no one is saying how the rates compare to Gamestop. Still, as Joystiq points out, used game sales account for 42 percent of Gamestop’s profits, and sales are expected to reach $2 billion this year. If another major retailer wants to step in on that turf, so be it. As much as it pains me to buy video games from a toy store (you know, the infantilization thing), I can’t argue with saving a few bucks these days.

For now, I’m selling my games back through Gamefly, the mail-order rental service, which offers solid trade-in rates towards the cost of a subscription. Used game sale prices are also better with the service, to the point that you can buy a game with the money from two used ones and still have some leftover credit. Two used games would rarely, if ever, cover a $55 purchase at Gamestop.

Good news for people who don’t like juggling a half dozen top-shelf video games at the tail end of the year: an Electronic Arts manager says the company might be backing off the holiday release strategy.

The big takeaway from last year’s success of Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto is that AAA games don’t have to be introduced in the holiday season to perform well. NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier said as much after her company put out its annual sales figures. “Get some high profile releases out in the first and second quarters,” she suggested.

Mulling over a fairly unsuccessful year, Electronic Arts is coming around to that school of thought. Glen Schofield, General Manager for the EA branch that developed Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, told Gamesindustry.biz that there were “far too many” games to choose from before the holidays.

“I think that we traditionally thought that people only buy games at Christmas or around holiday time, and now we’re looking back and going, ‘You know what, GTA launched in May; Resident Evil comes out in March’.”

I picked this story up from Destructoid, where one commenter posed a clever theory: Publishers previously had the mindset that video games are just kids’ toys, and children are most likely to get them on Christmas. Personally, I can relate to that. I used to always get a video game on the eighth night of Hannukah, but now I just buy them when they deserve my $60, period. I would have loved to play Left 4 Dead in the summer of 2008, when nothing was going on. It’s still on my backlog now.

Let’s hope other publishers follow suit. With Halo Wars and Resident Evil 5 coming next month, and Street Fighter IV in stores now, it seems that this strategy might already be in play.

Back in October, a federal appeals court listened to arguments on a three year-old bill that would put government labels on mature video games and ban their sale to minors. At the tail end of last week, the court ruled that law unconstitutional.

Judge Consuelo Callahan said while the games that concerned lawmakers are “unquestionably violent,” there are ways for parents to keep them from children, such as parental blocking features on consoles and the voluntary ESRB labels that appear on every retail game. Further, Callahan dismissed studies that suggest a link between violent games and aggression. None of it establishes or suggests a casual link between playing games and real mental harm, she said, according to the AP.

State Sen. Leland Yee, who wrote the bill, wants the case taken to the Supreme Court, but it’s not known yet how the state’s attorney general will respond.

The original hearing was one of the first stories I wrote about for Technologizer. Fresh-faced, I let out some of my pent-up frustrations with these kinds of laws, which have failed numerous times in the past. In short, sealing off mature video games as “harmful to minors,” along with cigarettes and pornography, can really hurt a medium that does address serious topics in new ways. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, while violent, are great examples.

Entertainment Software Association president Michael D. Gallagher called the laws “an exercise in wasting taxpayer money,” which sounds funny given that the trade group is taking some of that money back — Californians were already forced to pay $282,794 to the ESA after the legislation was originally sticken down. Still, the industry does have the right to recoup its legal costs, and when it says a Supreme Court battle would only hurt taxpayers more, the anti-game crusade becomes even tougher to justify.

Here’s a fun little rumor:  Microsoft is said to be mulling an acquisition of 3DV Systems, an Israeli company that makes “virtual reality” imaging technology for digital cameras. The implication is that advanced motion controls are coming to the Xbox 360, or perhaps Microsoft’s next console.

The report comes from Haartez, a respectable Israeli newspaper, but lacks sources or quotes. Microsoft is reportedly offering $35 million to acquire 3DV — not a fantastic deal considering the company has already raised $38.6 million. Some investors would lose out if the report comes to fruition.

3DV made news at the end of 2007 when it unveiled the ZCam. Unlike the Playstation’s EyeToy and the Xbox Live Vision camera, which only read location in two dimensions, the ZCam detects depth as well. VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, who also wrote about the Haaretz report, said from first-hand experience that the ZCam is “much more” accurate than the Wii’s motion controllers.

It’s obvious why Microsoft might be interested in the technology; now that everyone’s seen how much money the Wii is making, console makers are questioning the old video game model of thumbplay. A device that allows players to punch toward the screen with their fists or flap their arms to make avatars fly sounds fun, and therefore lucrative. It’s not a carbon copy of the Wii, but it’s a similar enough to make for healthy competition with Nintendo.

I don’t doubt that Microsoft is considering various motion control technologies for video games. Entertainment division president Robbie Bach hinted along those lines when he said it’ll take more than something “faster and prettier” to lure consumers the next time around. But rumors come and go about current generation motion controllers, and speculation on the Xbox 720 (or, for that matter, whether it’ll be called that) isn’t a rarity either. It’s a little early to say how the ZCam will play into Microsoft’s future gaming plans, if at all.

Are the Xbox 360-killing problems that cause the infamous Red Ring of Death gone? And will people who send in their consoles for repairs have to cycle through the process multiple times to get a real fix?

Over at Edge, Kris Graft put those questions to Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg, who said the console’s biggest technical woes have come to pass. “We’ve put the worst behind us on this, but we know there are a few lagging systems, and so we want to take those and make it right,” Greenberg said. Asked about the technical nitty-gritty of hardware updates, Greenberg wouldn’t answer, saying that Microsoft’s attorneys “would not allow me to say that.”

In the summer of 2007, Microsoft fessed up to an “unacceptable number” of defective systems. We’ve heard of failure rates as high as 30 percent — which I’m skeptical of — but the company never provided specifics. In any case, all console owners were given an extended 3-year warranty should any red ring problems arise.

Since then, new Xbox 360s received an upgrade. These so-called “Jasper” models feature a new motherboard and a smaller, cooler-running GPU. This is huge, because ATI’s original graphics card was at risk for overheating, thus warping the motherboard and putting undue stress on solder joints. Greenberg said the improvements that went into the new models also go into repairs.

In stores, different Xbox 360 models aren’t clearly marked on the packaging. If you’re considering a new console, look for “12,1A” where the power information is listed on the back of the box. Greenberg, always restrained when he’s talking about this stuff, told Ars Technica last month that Microsoft obscures that information because it wants customers “to buy with confidence,” he said. “They shouldn’t, you know, get hung up on the internal components of the device.” (Read: We don’t want them to worry that it’ll brick.)

The massive multiplayer music game RockFree has been in public beta for a while now, and will launch for real in a few weeks. When that happens, players will get a taste of the revenue model that’s built to please record labels more than that of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, VentureBeat’s Evan Van Zelfden reports.

In those console hits, the publishers paid a flat fee to license each song, with Activision paying $20,000 per track. Naturally, the troubled music industry gets irritated when the game franchises then rake in millions of dollars, or billions in the case of Guitar Hero.

Acclaim won’t pay any licensing fees at all. Instead, CEO Howard Marks said his company will hand over 20 percent of the revenue from microtransactions to a song’s master holder and publisher.

The otherwise free-to-play game includes three playlist “slots” that can be filled with selections from an online library or uploaded by users. Players can purchase more slots at $1 a pop, and Marks expects that the average user who chooses to pay will fork over $14 per month for this privilege. Warner Music — whose CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., called the flat fees for Guitar and Rock Band “paltry” — is in the database for RockFree.

I’m a little skeptical that RockFree will be more lucrative for record labels. At 20 cents for every new track, 100,000 transactions per song are needed to equal what Activision was paying for its Guitar Hero tracks. And the problem with that is, RockFree kind of stinks. Massive multiplayer perks aside, banging out guitar tracks on a computer keyboard doesn’t compare to wielding a fake plastic instrument — which isn’t as cool as playing a real instrument, but that’s another story.

This arrangement will probably work out nicely for the companies involved because it’s happening on a smaller scale. I don’t expect it to shake up how the bigger console franchises are doing business.

This is no surprise, seeing as the company was looking at $150 million in debt last December with just 50 days to pay it, but today Midway Games filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Chairman, President and CEO Matt Booty called the filing “a difficult but necessary decision,” adding that it buys the company time to figure out how to proceed from here. For now, business continues as usual, and Midway has filed several First Day Motions in hopes of keeping it that way as restructuring takes place.

But enough of that business talk. As various publications covered the news today, they unwittingly pointed out the publisher’s biggest flaw. “Midway Games Inc., the creator of the Mortal Kombat video-game series … ,” wrote the L.A. Times. “Midway, famous for its ‘Mortal Kombat’ franchise … ,” Reuters noted. “The long-struggling publisher of Mortal Kombat filed for bankruptcy this morning,” Kotaku wrote.

See the pattern? Now, try to think of another major publisher whose entire existence is defined by one franchise. EA’s got Madden, but it also has The Sims and Spore. Activision has Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and — after becoming Activision-Blizzard — World of Warcraft. Ubisoft has several successful franchises under the Tom Clancy umbrella.

You could argue that Take-Two will be remembered most for Grand Theft Auto, but that just proves my point. GTA seems to reinvent itself as something new and exciting with each generation, but Mortal Kombat is no longer revolutionary. Cartoonish blood and gore, once a novel concept, is old hat now. Without that trick up its sleeve, the franchise became a follower of better button-mashers like Soul Calibur, Tekken and Virtua Fighter. To be fair, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is doing well, but that idea is more of a gimmick than a long-term cash cow.

The sad thing is, Midway was once a glorious game publisher. It put out Space Invaders and Ms. Pac-Man, for goodness sakes. And who could forget NBA Jam?

Apparently, everybody. I could go on about why those games aren’t viable anymore, but the point is that Midway has done little to stay relevant. While other companies have figured out how to milk their best franchises through the years, Midway seems like it never grew out of the arcade era.

When Microsoft boasted of 1 million sign-ups for the Xbox 360′s Netflix application — covered briefly Thursday in Harry’s “5Words” news roundup — Sony struck back, saying the Playstation 3′s movies and rentals download faster and don’t require subscription fees. Ouch.

But this was just the latest in an endless back-and-forth between the rival companies. Taken as a whole, this record of petty bickering actually makes for a good overview of each console’s pros and cons. Join us after the jump for more snipes, disses and burns. Continue reading this story…

Every once in a while, a video game publisher will be outed for producing doctored screenshots of a popular title. There’s usually some sort of outcry, followed by assurances that this happens all the time, and eventually we forget about the whole thing.

So even though I’ve definitely heard of this phenomenon before, I was shocked to read today that Activision is actually looking for someone to create these “Bullshots.” In a job posting for “Art Services Screenshot Associate,” one of the listed duties is to perform “advanced retouching of screenshots and teach skills to others as needed.” You might want to cast a skeptical eye when images surface for the next Wolfenstein, Call of Duty and James Bond titles.

Previous games to flaunt doctored images include Killzone 2 (pictured above, can you guess which is retouched and which is from the actual trailer?), Red Steel and Madden ’06, with Web comic Penny Arcade claiming the term “Bullshot” after seeing the latter example. Coincidentally, GamePro published a nice feature on the subject earlier this month.

If history repeats itself, we should see the latest news brushed away by publishers and apologists. “It isn’t any secret that many publishers touch up screenshots before sending them out to the public,” IGN explains in its coverage of the story. “If a game doesn’t look snazzy enough in its current form, digital artists can make sure you and I don’t get the ‘wrong idea’ about an upcoming game.”

For my part, I’ll make sure to remember these examples when looking at any screenshot I see from here on, because this is ridiculous.