Two Game Boy Advance games have randomly appeared in the Stars Catalogue, leading us to surmise that Nintendo has been spring-cleaning its warehouses and found a bunch of old, unsold stock. Kirby & The Amazing Mirror and Mario Power Tennis are both decent purchases, we suppose, even if the price (5000 Stars each) is steep (you'd need to buy at least 20 DS games to amass that many Stars). We're still waiting on the warehouse with all the sealed Super Famicom consoles to get cleared out (it must exist somewhere).
Some other new tat has also been added, including a Pokémon sports bag, and three further items that have (inexplicably) sold out: a Raving Rabbids T-shirt, a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon bookmark, and a Brain Training pen. Don't all rush at once, please.
Throughout the 1980s, Nintendo's Game & Watch series of handhelds provided the soundtrack to innumerable school playgrounds across the globe. A pre-Game Boy attempt to capture the portable games market, Game & Watch titles were relatively cheap but sturdily built toys which came with a single game and, as the name suggests, a watch. For the best part of eleven years, Nintendo kept manufacturing these forerunners to its other handheld devices, only for the Game Boy and Tetris to emerge in 1989 and squash the whole enterprise flat.
Nevertheless, the spirit of Game & Watch lives on through the hundreds of individuals who collect the games. For this one-off piece, DS Fanboy decided to interview two hardcore collectors in a bid to understand their love of Nintendo's first portable phenomenon.
Both 35-year-old Michael Panayiotakis (founder of Mike's Nintendo Game & Watch forum and the author of a quite superb FAQ on the subject) and 38-year-old Andy Cole possess the kind of retrolicious Game & Watch collections that we would maim (and possibly kill) for. To find out what they love about this charming series, why they collect Game & Watch, and why they dedicate so much time and money to their hobby, hit the break for our full interview. Once you've done that, don't forget to browse our gallery for a pictorial history of the Game & Watch phenomenon!
Perhaps it's the bright lights, but something about neon signs just interests us. No, it's not the science of it all (it's actually gas in there!), but the ... yeah, bright lights. Hey, look, a bright sign!
If the neon Nintendo sign doesn't interest you, then there are other Nintendo-related auctions today. There's a Mario statue and some test cartridges up for grabs, as well.
We were bowled over by the last batch of sprite/real-life art we posted, but this new material, from DeviantARTist RETROnoob (who, at just 16, has a more impressive grip on Photoshop than most of us supposed grown-ups) takes the biscuitwhole biscuit tin whole damn biscuit aisle. As we mentioned last time, this is pretty much what our daydreams look like, and we expect yours also. Yes, they do. Admit it! You're a bit odd too! Ha!
Advance Wars, Yoshi's Island, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Kart: they're all here, as well as many more at RETROnoob's gallery. And here's the really, really important bit -- they come in wallpaper dimensions (or 1024 x 768, at least). Head past the break for more.
For all of you in Taiwan who have relied on non-official distribution to satisfy your need for Nintendo, know that a new third-party distributor has made a deal with Nintendo to supply the region with video games from the Kyoto-based company. FarEasTone (FET) will be teaming up with Nintendo to provide the region with DS units and hopefully find as receptive a market as the handheld has in all other regions of the world it's available for sale.
Two specific models of DS Lite were mentioned, in the crimson black (or "senior") unit and a "New Super Mario DS Lite console." The handheld will be available from July 3rd on.
Whether you're a fan of the movie, the novel, or just a certain scene re-enacted by cats, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is one unique experience. Now, some person has gone and whipped up some great fanart, combining Hunter's world of drugs with none other than Nintendo's plumbers, the Mario brothers. It's not the greatest piece of art in the world, but it certainly brought a smile to our face when we looked upon it for the first time.
Sure, it's from a PSP game, but we can all admit that, aside from that small flaw, this video is pretty sweet. Apparently, this PSP game lets you create and download custom stages. From the looks of this recreation of 1-1 in Super Mario Bros., we're sure there are plenty of other sweet homages to other iconic gaming levels available for it, as well. Of course, the only problem with this user-created stage is that it lacks the music from the original Super Mario Bros. game. But, that's to be expected.
Someone let us know when there's a user-created stage that is modeled after the introductory level in Castlevania.
We've seen enough clothing branded with 1-up mushrooms to last us several lifetimes (which is sort of ironic), but other items in lastactioncowboy's new line-up of Nintendo clothing feature characters that haven't been so drastically overused. We've not seen too many Blooper hoodies, for example, while Bob-omb underwear is a new one to us.
Admittedly, probably none of this stuff is as effortlessly cool or obscure as those Sega-themed t-shirts from The King of Games, but then it's also not as horrendously pricey -- just $40 for a hoodie, or $18 per piece of underwear.
We're not exactly sure where each of you would place cushions on a list of life's essentials -- they're right next to DS games ending with 'z' on our list -- but if you are a lover of cushions (and some of us live with such people), you may as well be a lover of totally awesome cushions.
That's where Etsy member punzie can help out, because she's crafted a (currently very small) range of $20 Nintendo cushions, including the charming teal Blooper design you see above. While there's only three to choose from right now, she does take requests -- we're half-thinking about asking for a Kuribo's Shoe cushion to call our own. Sit yourself down in your cold, hard, unpadded chair and hit the break for a couple more examples of her work.
You know the Bathing Ape DS Lite that you can't get? You can get it, thanks to eBay user garakuta1028! Unfortunately, like all designer goods, you have to pay dearly for the privilege of a thing with a label. Combine this with the usual premium associated with a limited-edition DS Lite, and you've got one pricey monkeyed system.
The white Bape DS Lite is now available on eBay for just $550. Chances are, if you're a fan of Tokyo fashion, you're used to paying that much for stuff. The rest of us will just have to be satisfied with the option to skin (or draw on) our everyday DS Lites.
If there is one thing we can appreciate, it's talent. And these folk have it, as the students from Hermann Wesselink College manage to bust out into a pair of great Nintendo themes a capella style. They handle a choice selection from The Legend of Zelda, as well as Super Mario Bros. in the video above.
If our school had stuff like this back when we were in our developing stages, maybe we would've paid attention and not grown up to become blogging scum.
Update: Some readers point out that this isn't a capella. Sorry folks, we're not a music blog!
There's no doubt in our minds that the Bape DS is a hot little number, but we'd never wait on a line like this for one. At first, the line seems somewhat modest, but then the camera keeps on turning around more and more corners. We should have guessed as much, seeing how the video is over two minutes long.
To see exactly how much Japanese gamers love special edition DSes, check out the clip embedded above for yourselves.
We like this new trend of people crafting game-related afghans. First it was with Tetris, and now with a scene depicting one of our favorite plumbers (Mario, obviously). This particular blanket was made by ThomcatDesigns, who have earned our complete respect for their (his? her?) mad crafting skills. The detail in this makes it look like it came right out of one of our favorite NES classics.
Check the gallery to see the chronological progression of the afghan as it was created. It's pretty amazing to watch it turn from a mess of yarn into a masterpiece.
Gallery: ThomcatDesigns' Mario Afghan
[Via Technabob; pictures via thomcatdesgins' Flickr account]
Just when we thought we were tired of seeing videos of people playing the Super Mario Bros. theme with wacky, nontraditional instruments (including bottles!), here comes this brilliant piece of video to completely change our worldview. We cannot even imagine the time and effort required to arrange every bottle at just the right distance, with just the right amount of liquid, to accurately reproduce the Super Mario Bros. theme when hit in sequence by a passing RC car.
It must have been a lot less jovial in there for the guys doing this than it looked, and a lot more tense. Each note was another opportunity for the car to veer off course a bit and set off a domino-style chain reaction. Or even just to knock one bottle over and force the musicians to refill it to just the right level. The end result is transcendant enough to be worth it.
It's too bad that creating a DS out of paper wouldn't really work like this -- then we'd all have a lot more money in our pockets. Our hats definitely go off to you tuber and deviant artist Zikayn, though, for making this awesome video. While we've seen similar stuff before, we haven't seen anything with as much polish as this. We can't be sure how long these kind of animations take to create, having no artistic bones to speak of, but we imagine that it wasn't just a quick endeavor.
For all of you in Taiwan who have relied on non-official distribution to satisfy your need for Nintendo, know that a new third-party distributor has made a deal with Nintendo to supply the region with video games from the Kyoto-based company. FarEasTone (FET) will be teaming up with Nintendo to provide the region with DS units and hopefully find as 
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