Club Nintendo 2011 Platinum Status Reward: Mario Pins. Yes, Mario Pins.
The Club Nintendo yearly rewards have gone out, and if you got 600 Club Nintendo coins in the last year that means you got the Platinum Status reward. Last year, it was a Mario statue. The year before that, it was a Mario hat. Now, it's Mario pins.
No, it actually doesn't suck. Well, not entirely. I got the package in the mail today, and I'm fairly surprised by the quality of the whole presentation. For slavish Nintendo game registration, you get 25 pins in six boxes, with a shelf-worthy display.
The boxes are as much a part of the reward as the pins themselves. They're six long cardboard rectangles that can be rotated to make three different shapes: Mario, a mushroom, and a goomba. The other side of each box has cut-outs to show the pins. It's just thin cardboard, but you can stack them and they look... presentable? Okay, it's not the statue from last year. At least it's not completely half-assed, like a handful of pins in a plastic bag.
The pins are... pins. They're nice pins, and they're well-made, all-metal, with Super Mario Bros. characters on them. However... they're pins. You can't do much with pins, except put them on a bag or a jacket or something. Okay, not amazing, but pretty neat, hard-to-find Nintendo swag from Club Nintendo. And so it has a place on my Nintendo shrine shelf with all my Nintendo crap.
This Has To Stop: Angry Birds Gummi Candy
Angry Birds needs to stop. It's become a Simpsons-in-early-90s-level fad. Or tamagotchi-in-late-90s-level fad. Or pogs-for-that-one-week-in-the-mid-90s-level fad. It's not just a casual game that became popular like Bejeweled, Peggle, or your-Zynga-game-of-choice. It's a multimedia phenomenon. And I'm getting freaking sick of it. At Best Buy, they have Angry Birds iPhone cases, headphones, and speakers. At Toys R Us, they have giant plush Angry Birds. And at Forbidden Planet (and stores normal people shop at), they have Angry Birds Fruit Gummis
This is What the Saints Row The Third Headphones Sound Like
These are the headphones from the Saints Row: The Third Platinum Pack. I'm a sucker for collectors editions, and when I heard Saints Row: The Third would have Saints Row headphones that autotune your voice, I knew I had to get it.
They're pretty cool, but they feel cheap. For a $99 collector's edition of a $60 game, you can't expect high-quality headphones. They're decent, and they look great, though. The vocoder effect is pretty great, but the mic picks up a lot of background noise. I could describe it to you, but instead, here's the first Aggrogate micro-podcast, Saints Row Edition!
If the buzzing drives you nuts, here's a version I cleaned up in Audacity, for the pure autotuned goodness.
Final verdict: Pretty cool. Worth it, if you like messing with your voice and have low standards for headphones.
Greatest Nintendo Event Swag Ever: Mario Tanuki Ears and Tail
Nintendo usually goes big with its events, but I wasn't expecting the sort of thing it did today with its Super Mario 3D Land launch event. Mario took over Times Square, turning Military Island (the plaza next to the police station and recruitment center) into a huge Mario course. There will be more on that soon, but for now let's focus on what they were giving away: a mustache, tanuki ears, and a giant tanuki tail.
The Tanuki tail is like a huge beanbag with a belt. When you put it on, it bounces a bit and stays lifted slightly. You can spin attack people and really irritate them with it. The ears are soft and covered in felt, on a headband that's also covered in felt. The moustache is the only thing that seems like it won't last more than one use. The tanuki gear are joining my Mario hat in the Closet of Nerdy Swag.
From the Show: Doctor Who Sonic Screwdrivers
The season finale of Doctor Who is tonight, and in honor of "The Wedding of River Song," I've dug into my collection of nerdy crap and pulled out not one, not two, but five sonic screwdrivers. Well, four sonic screwdrivers and a laser screwdriver. Underground Toys has been making sonic screwdrivers since the series started again, and they're pretty cool toys for anyone who's a fan of props or cosplay. Read on for the five I have on-hand, and have at the ready to fight the Daleks.
PAX East 2011 Swag Round-Up
Lots of free stuff came out of PAX, and con goers were inundated with t-shirts, keychains, and other thotchkes. I got a total of 5 t-shirts (and I would have gotten 2 more were it not for humiliating defeats in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Team Fortress 2 at Antec and Alienware's booths, respectively), plus a ton of other great stuff. The highlight: an Aperture Science t-shirt from Valve's booth, a set of BlazBlue soundtrack and media discs from Aksys, and ridiculous light-up Kanye glasses from Ubisoft. Check it all out below.
The Bulletstorm Nutcracker is Exactly What it Sounds Like
Epic and EA are really taking the off-the-walls, over-the-top, crazy-lunatic-bullshit humor of Bulletstorm
From the Past: 25th Anniversary Wii Limited Edition Super Mario All-Stars
Yep, it's still the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. The limited edition Wii version of Super Mario All-Stars
From the Game: New Vegas Poker Set
A few weeks ago, I covered the Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Edition, a pretty awesome collection of New Vegas feelies piled on top of the already great (yet extremely, painfully buggy) game. It came with a set of poker chips, which would be both fun and useful, except the "set" included a single poker chip from each casino. You can't exactly have a game of cards with just one chip of every color. The chips are darn cool, though, and I lamented that you can't put together an entire, poker-worthy set of them.
It turns out that you can, and that the results are both striking and eye-poppingly expensive.
Reader Greg W. showed me his new project: putting together a complete poker set out of many, many Fallout: New Vegas Collector's Editions
Greg says he's spent about $500 pulling together all of these chips from all these collector's editions. He scours eBay for auctions selling just the chips, so he doesn't have to shell out the full $70-80 for each set. He's not done yet, though. Greg says he'd like to have 40-60 sets' worth of poker chips by the time he finishes collecting them. Our suggestion is to use FedEx or UPS to deliver them; those Wasteland courier companies have been getting accosted by raiders as of late.
From the Game: LittleBigPlanet Sackboy Action Figure… Sacktion Figure!
Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet is easily one of the most adorable game series mascots we've seen in the last decade. He's just a smiling dude made from burlap, buttons, and a zipper. While you can't pick up Sackboy in all his stuffed, zippered glory yet, you can at least get him in articulated plastic. Meet the Sackboy action figure
Navigation
Recent Posts
- SMBC Covers Internet Policy Better Than Me
- The Humble Bundle is Back Again, and Now For Android
- Happy Quinceanera, Final Fantasy 7
- Panning Silver: The Wrongo Superman (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #114)
- Bronycon: Bronies and Q Hit the Meadowlands This Summer
Recent Comments
- Doubleself on The Top 5 Sandbox Games
- I_TBAG_U87 on Anatomy of the Rage Quit
- Hosting forums on Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Yes, Deadpool Can Shoryuken (And Why This Is Awesome)
- TheShufflingSkeleton on Get a LittleBigPlanet 2 Beta Key Here!
- Brian on Is Sony Screwing Up the PS Vita? Not Yet. Maybe. Sort of.
