To mark the occasion, here are five doctor-type games.

SimHealth

From the folks who gave us SimCity and The Sims, SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation was released in 1994 during the Clinton health care debates. It’s not exactly a fun or funny game – but neither is health care, no?

Dr Mario

From saving the princess to playing tennis, Mario can do it all. Add prescribe red, yellow and blue pills to kill bacteria.

Theme Hospital

By creating facilities, players design a hospital to attract patients. Unlike SimHealth, Theme Hospital is fun and funny. Patient diseases include the Uncommon Cold and Hairyitis.

Trauma Center

The Trauma Center series from Japanese game company Atlus do a fine job of reproducing nail-biting surgery on the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii.

Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon

It’s been called health class meets Contra. While maybe not even a decent game, it certainly is *interesting* in the loosest sense of the word.

Atlus’ “ultimate love letter to retro gamers” 3D Dot Games Heroes features a main character so powerful that dragons consider him a boss fight. Funny, he just looks like a pile of blocks to me.

Of course what the hero of 3D Dot Game Heroes looks like is completely up to you. You can either customise the character you’re given, or create your own hero using the building blocks the game gives you. Once created, you can even share with your friends via USB stick. What, no network trading support? How very retro.

3D Dot Game Heroes is due out on May 11 exclusively for the PlayStation 3, with a suggested retail price of $US39.99.

For those who remember when the console first came out, this would be the Deluxe Set, which included the console and two controllers, plus the Light Gun, ROB, Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. and Gyromite, one of just two games in the ill-fated Robot series of the original NES.

“These are extremely difficult to find, and this unit comes 100% complete in the original box,” says the seller. “Additionally, I don’t believe this unit was ever used as it is in excellent shape, as can be seen in the pictures.”

Hell, I’d say some prop house in Hollywood should snap that up. When they do the reboot of A Christmas Story, set in 1986, and Ralphie ditches the official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle for the Nintendo Entertainment System Deluxe Set with Light Gun, R.O.B. and Duck Hunt, this would assuredly anchor the department store window-shopping scene.

Nintendo NES M9 Display RARE Deluxe ROB snes m82 m8 [eBay, thanks M]

Titled Play With Me, the painting is by Silvio Porretta, who has been a game industry veteran since 1990 and a not-so-subtitle commentary on phallic imagery. The work will be part of the Game Over 3 art show and on display at the Giant Robot store in San Francisco.

You can buy it! Just try not to accidentally bump into it. You might knock it off.

Classic Videogames Mutate in Game Over Art Show | GameLife [Wired]

Camper name-checks ye olde favourites like Milon’s Secret Castle, Clash at Demonhead and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link as the inspiration behind the 8-bit NYC project, built upon the foundation of the indispensable Google Maps. “What would the city look like if it were a game like that?” Camper wonders in the video explaining the project.

He explains it, specifically, on the Kickstarter project page for 8-bit NYC. Camper’s looking for a little monetary help from those who would like to see more cities, like Chicago, LA or, hell, anywhere else financial allies would like to see turned into an old-school map.

If you’d simply prefer to gaze upon his hard work on New York City, you can do that too. It’s a little slow, underscoring Camper’s case for financial aid that would go to a new host and better servers.

8-bit NYC [Official Site via Waxy]

True gamers have roots and I want to see them.

What do I mean? Take for instance this picture, circa 1987, of my bedroom. Note the distinct lack of tidiness or, for that matter consoles. That’s right my first taste of gaming may have come wrapped in faux wood panelling at the hands of the Atari 2600, but what made me a gamer for life was the time spent in my bedroom with this sweet-ass TRS-80 COCO. I spent my weekends and nights hanging out on BBSes, playing armoured Patrol, searching through stacks of floppies for my bootleg copy of Joust and taking turns texting through Zork with my older brother Drew.

Sure, I had a kick-arse sunglass collection, a wall packed with illustrations copied out of D&D books and a letter jacket in “sports health”. But what really made me a die hard geek was the COCO and it’s liquid-fast 300 baud modem.

Time to put up or shut up. Let’s see your roots – link a picture to them in the comments.

At this time last year, the idea for a Hall of Fame had barely taken root among local gaming enthusiasts, seeking to connect the city’s history as an arcade gaming mecca in the early days of video games to the present. Municipal and business leaders, reminded of the town’s connection in large part by this Kotaku feature story in April 2009, quickly pursued the concept as a tourism and business development opportunity for the city, with state support, and announced the Hall’s launch last year.

A full list of enshrinees was not immediately known at the time of writing, but an announcement in the Ottumwa Courier indicated that Atari founder and Pong creator Nolan Bushnell will be enshrined, along with Billy Mitchell, owner of the world record in Donkey Kong, and professional gamer Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendell.

They will be honoured during “The Big Bang 2010: Ottumwa’s Video Game Festival” from August 5 to August 8 in Ottumwa. The festival will feature contests, concerts, dealer showrooms, panel discussions, guest celebrities, costume contests, historic museum displays and movies.

Ottumwa, Iowa is the ancestral home of Twin Galaxies, the international high score sanctioning authority that began as an arcade in the city’s downtown. Though it rose to prominence during the early days of arcade gaming, attracting nationwide attention, it faded from view in the years since as video games moved out of arcades and pizza parlours and onto PCs and consoles.

For information on attending, visit the link below.

The Big Bang [International Video Game Hall of Fame & Museum]

The international high score sanctioning authority Twin Galaxies today certified that Wiebe, of Washington state, is the new record holder with 1,190,400 points (screen at left). The record changed hands twice since the spring of 2009, when Wiebe bested Ike Hall, whose 1,033,000 in 2008 had finally surpassed the Donkey Kong Jr all-time high score set by Billy Mitchell in 1983.

After Wiebe set the record, Mark Kiel of Enid, Oklahoma beat Wiebe’s mark in October with a score of 1,147,800.

Wiebe Scores Again [Twin Galaxies]