At a glance, this 8-bit Mario clock seems pretty cool, it has a Goomba pendulum that swings back and forth like a pendulum should, simulating Mario jumping over it. Upon further inspection, I mean, go ahead and inspect it further. The Goomba sure looks like it is doubling as something else. Other than that, the clock is pretty sweet, and what do you know, you can shell out $60 (an extra $10 for shipping) and buy it off purveyor of weird things, Etsy. Hurry up though, as of this post, there is only one left!

You didn’t think that could have ended well, did you?

You ever have the urge to just punch your bedside lamp? Well, if that’s a problem for you, you might not want to get this Mario Question Mark Block lamp, which makes that urge all the stronger. Unlike in the game, you won’t get any money or mutant, oversized, and possibly toxic mushrooms out of it, but you may get a few splinters. If you can manage to not jump and upper-cut it from underneath, however, your room can get +10 swagger.

These Mario magnets are made of bamboo, classing up the game featuring a plumber that murders animal-like things by jumping on them with his butt. The magnet set contains 48 pieces, including a castle, so happy purchasers can build their very own static Mario level on their refrigerator. The magnets are made with natural bamboo and strong neodymium magnets. Upon purchase, Etsy shop owner Travis Chen will create and include one custom Mario power-up of your choosing. Head on past the break for more pictures of the set, as well as what is actually included.

There is a Spider-Man musical, so why not a Mario opera, right? Get ready for a big surprise: The Mario opera is actually really good. Okay, so it might be a stretch to call this one song in a stereotypical opera style — and a stereotypical Italian accent — an “opera,” but it’s not a stretch to call it awesome. The song is courtesy of legolambs, a YouTube channel devoted to pop culture musicals and run by Jon and Al Kaplan. Check it out. It’s a terrific way to spend 2:49 minutes and justify calling a huge part of your childhood “high culture.”

It looks like PETA is aiming their wrath cannon at video games once again, but instead of a relatively small developer like Team Meat, they’ve walked over the floating icon box, reloaded their cannon, and pressed the B trigger at Nintendo. PETA claims that when Mario puts on the Tanooki suit, rather than gaining the ability to turn into a statue, he gains the ability to support wearing fur. Like PETA did with Team Meat when they made Super Tofu Boy, they also made a game in response to the decades-old Tanooki suit, called Super Tanooki Skin 2D.

Remember the old days, before TVs, when you used to have to play all your side-scrolling games in a cardboard box? Of course you don’t. But now, thanks to Teague Labs, you can get an idea of what that would have been like. The concept of the game is simple; you turn a dial to move Mario up and down, avoiding Goombas and pipes that scroll across the “screen.” Since the game is limited to one scroll of baddie placement, the speed gradually increase to up the challenge.

The game works by having Mario hover slightly above the scrolling background with a magnetic detector strapped to his back. The baddies and obstacles, on the other hand, are magnets. You can probably see where this is going. The game was built with a teagueduino kit, a product that is intended to make programming and electronics easy to figure out for the curious but unfamiliar. The code for the game itself is open source and can be found teagueduino.org.

Normally, the Internet is a place of fear, but today, it seems to be a place where neat video game art roams, starting with the above Doom fingernail painting.

So on one hand we have Mario, the genre defining side-scroller still revered today as a classic, on the other, Portal, the genre-defying FPS that gave the scene the shake-up it so desperately needed. What happens when you put them together, you ask? Well, you get Mari0 (that’s a zero). As you can see above, it’s a curious little project that attempts to bring the best of these two incredibly different worlds together, and seems to be doing a pretty good job. For the record, Mari0 is actually a real game that is in development. It’s not a mod, so it’ll run on its own engine and, even better, it’s going to be completely open source when it’s finished. Also: Simultaneous multiplayer. Excited? I bet, but hold your horses because there’s no telling when it’ll come out, but when it does, get ready to start Goomba stompin’ with portals.

(via reddit)

For the Super Iam8bit art exhibition starting in August, artist Darick Maasen hacked together some dead animal parts and created the above realistic-looking Koopa Paratoopa, and by realistic-looking, I mean, oh my god. Adorable flying turtle no more.

(Darick Maasen via GamesRadar)