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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)

Artist Mike Puncekar teaches us what would happen if the enemies from the Mario franchise broke out into real life -- no, I'm sorry, they'd probably still be adorable little turtles and mushrooms whose greatest weakness is an Italian plumber's butt, but hey, one can dream, and Puncekar helps that dream along.

Anthony Clark, otherwise known as Nedroid, makes some pretty amusing webcomics with a fairly distinct art style, as well as does the colors for another popular webcomic, The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. Clark has a Tumblr for some of his odd doodles and things that didn't make it to the main site, which is where these really odd one-panel Mario comics appeared. The main theme of these comics is that Mario is insane. Like, clinically. When you think about it, it's a fairly accurate way to perceive the happenings in the games. Head past the break to delve into the depths of Mario's insanity and head on over to Clark's main site, Nedroid.com, for even more delightfully twisted comics.

The above chart documents the evolution of three of Nintendo's biggest characters, Mario, Link and Donkey Kong. Link seems to have been battling certain body image issues over the years, changing heights and weights with each generation.

(How to be a Retronaut via Bit Rebels)

WIFE GET!

(via BuzzFeed)

Above is a rather amazing video of someone beating Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 3 and the Famicon Super Mario Bros. at the same time, with only one input. Paying attention to the video would reveal a few points where not all of the characters' actions seem to match up, but there are a few theories regarding this, such as lag, or the mechanics between games, for instance, how the characters in Super Mario Bros. 2 are extremely floaty (not counting Princess Toadstool's actual floating). Lending credit to the legitimacy of the video, however, is that these runs seem to be an actual genre, as a MetaFilter thread contains links to other such runs being performed across multiple installments in series such as Mega Man and Final Fantasy.

(via MetaFilter)

YouTube favorite Freddie Wong imagines Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 as a 3D first-person shooter, complete with pop-up achievements onscreen. Like most FPSes, it makes me nauseous, but it looks pretty neat. Be sure to look at the picture-in-picture comparison in the top-left corner to see how everything compares to old-school SMB. (via THD)

Attendees at this year's South by Southwest were treated to "Mario," a Jon Nicolosi-directed and -produced indie drama about the existential and romantic anguish of Super Mario. (via Laughing Squid)

Someone clearly has too much time on his or her extremely talented, detail-oriented hands. (Reddit via Buzzfeed)

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The Leicester branch of the UK's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (which sounds an awful lot like group with a strategy to make teenagers pregnant, rather than help prevent it) has developed a YouTube campaign in order to help remind teenagers to wear condoms. Entitled "Game On!," the video seems to rip assets and ideas from Mario (warp pipes, bricks), Mega Man (the boy's sprite and animations), and Sonic (the title screen) in order to convey the safety involved with using a condom by having the boy fight off evil STIs.