OMG Nintendo.com

I forget what I was looking for when I found this delight. A Mario Brothers glitch vid, I think. Regardless, this trumped everything else I could've possibly found on YouTube. Behold the terrible beauty of the 1986 Super Mario Bros. anime, mortals, and despair. Maybe other people have found it before, I don't know, but hell if I'm gonna pass up the chance to post it.

Although relatively rare and hard to find in hard copy form now, a watchable version is up on YouTube. Even in postage-stamp-vision, you'll marvel at the poor direction, cheap animation, and writing that veers between awkward comedy and incomprehensible craziness. There's no subtitling and it's all in Japanese, but fear not! I've watched this thing in stupefied disbelief more times than I care to count in the past 24 hours, so I'll be there with a running commentary for each clip. You won't be any more confused than I am.

Jump behind the cut to start your magical mystery tour of the place where Mario intersects with crap anime.

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Ah, energy drinks. A lot of gamers love them, but I don't quite grasp why. The post-buzz crash isn't worth it to me.

Tracey John at MTV Multiplayer seems to feel the way I do about energy drinks, and especially about the Mario and Donkey Kong-themed energy drinks available at the Nintendo World Store.

It should also be noted that while both cans state somewhere that they are not intended for children, only Power Up clearly says that its an energy drink; meanwhile, the name Donkey Kong Jungle Juice implies that it is actually juice, a favorite beverage among children (and certain twenty-something, energy drink-hating video game writers). ...

And as far as energy level, though I just finished about one and a half of the drinks, half the recommended daily dosage (Consume responsibly. Limit 3 cans per day, Power Ups can told me), I dont feel too energized at the moment. In fact, I have a growing headache and my teeth feel sticky.

There are, occasionally, things that are too awesome to not be posted. This is one of those things. The man known only as ashens reviews terrible Chinese bootlegs of popular consumer electronics, and the Chinese Wii knockoff-- the Chintendo or KenSingTon Vii-- was an inevitable target.

His reviews are actually pretty thorough and legitimately interesting in addition to being funny, and how often does that happen? When you're done with the vid, make sure you hit up the Extras page for reviews of the 7-in-1 VC cartridge and extra gameplay footage.

Awesome? Stupid? Or awesomely stupid?

Wii Fanboy dug up this bevy of truly laughable Nintendo-patented uses for the Wii Remote. There's a full gallery up at the link, but for now, just bask in the ridiculous glory of the Wii Bear.

Deep down I imagine Nintendo patented these because they knew if they didn't, even in an incredibly crude way, someone else would go for it. So, these may actually be preventatively silly... still pretty silly, though.

So, the point of online play in a game is generally to let you play anyone, anywhere via the network if you really want to. Right?

Nintendo seems to think not. A disgruntled gamer has sent this complaint about the Mario Strikers Charged wireless play to pretty much every outlet that'll listen to him (since Nintendo deleted it on their official forums). He bought Mario Strikers to play matches with a buddy in Finland, to which the network said "lol, no".

In order to add a friend to play them online you both have to add a friend to your address book by typing in a 16-digit string of numbers... OK fine. I can deal with that.

I thought that would be the end of it if I wanted to play my friend in Mario Strikers Charged, but I had to enter in another 12-digit code just to do that. However we both just found out that the WFC for online game play is region-locked so we can't even ADD each other to our friends list to play!

Pretty lame. I wasn't watching Nintendo as closely back when Strikers came out, but I wonder how public the info about the WFC region lock was? Probably not public enough...

Oh, PEGA. First your still-amazing Shark Gun, and now a set of accessories that make the Cooking Mama Kit for Wii seem brilliant.

The Trauma Center Kit for Wii is a pair of plastic Wii Remote sleeves with fold-out crap attached to the top. One has a bunch of scalpels and some other medical thingies I sincerely cannot recognize. The other has a big fold-out... you know, I have no idea.

Now, the Cooking Mama kit was stupid but would probably bring sheer minutes of delight to the five-year-old girl it was probably meant for. You could recognize what the attachments were and they probably wouldn't impede your game in Cooking Mama in any meaningful way. Man, but this Trauma Center Kit? Yeah, nothing like useless plastic crap dangling off your controller in a game about making precise Wii Remote movements.

I didn't follow this story as it was breaking since I had no idea it was going to lead anywhere so gloriously stupid, but here we are. It's time for a symphony of incompetence, as conducted in Kotaku links.

For a brief period last week, Wal-Mart appeared to be offering Super Smash Bros. Brawl pre-orders at the ridiculously low price of $19.82. This was a mistake and now Wal-Mart is offering a price closer to the title's usual MSRP.

Where things get stupid is how Wal-Mart dealt with their error. Folks who pre-ordered the Brawl at the reduced price, got e-mails informing them that their order had been forcibly canceled. People were obviously upset at this, so Wal-Mart decided to make nice by... offering the folks who had their Brawl pre-orders canceled a measly $10 gift card.

Yeah, that's an awesome way to compensate someone who thought they were going to get a new copy of one of the most anticipated games of 2008 at a $30 discount. I wouldn't be angry at all.

Okay, Activision. First you publish a rhythm game that ships not with promised 5.1 digital audio, but without any stereo sound at all. After lots of fanboy tooth-grinding, you announce you'll be doing a corrected pressing and issuing free replacement discs to everyone just before you get slapped with a lawsuit. You start taking pre-registration info via the phone and your website.

Yet, you can't manage not to publicize the e-mail addresses of everyone who pre-registered to everyone else who pre-registered, violating your company's own Privacy Policy. Kotaku reports that's about 860 e-mail addresses in the hands of 859 people who were never meant to have them. If your e-mail got screwed, contact Activision and give them an earful at (310) 255-2000.

So, it makes sense to flip a Wii. It makes sense to even flip a broken Wii, if you can find someone willing to buy it from you in a parking lot. It doesn't make sense to let someone get your license plate numbers so they can track you down with the Wii doesn't work, and it really doesn't make sense to let police search your house while you hide in the closet. I guess this is why drug addicts don't have a reputation for cleverness.

After gathering more information about the suspect, the deputy went to an address along the 2500 block of Stetson Avenue on Saturday to contact the man.

The suspect's girlfriend was at the house and she said he wasn't home. The deputy asked the woman if he could search the home to confirm the suspect wasn't there. The woman conceded.

The deputy found the man hiding in a closet and arrested him.

The suspect said he didn't steal the game console but instead bought it online from someone. When he learned it was broken, he said he tried to pawn it off to someone else.

The biggest problem with any "worst of" list lies in its writer's lack of personal experience. Nobody goes out and plays every crappy game in the world on purpose, so all you end up with are variations on "the worst games of 2007 that I've played." As a result, you'll hear ridiculous things like "Manhunt 2 is one of the worst games of the year because it made a lot of people mad!" and "I sure was disappointed with Kayne & Lynch! This means that it's the worst game of all time!" instead of anything that's actually based in reality.

Nuts to that. You deserve better. You deserve not to be patronized with a list of supposedly putrid games that are merely below average. Because I love you all, I've hunted down and played as many Wii games as I could find over the last year, so that I could definitively report that the game with the gingerbread ninja on the cover is not very good.

What follows are the five worst games to be released for the Nintendo Wii in 2007. For real, this time. Believe nothing else.

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