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.

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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. I’m getting tired of Angry Birds, but I love a good gummi candy, so I got a box.

The headline says it all. Steam usually has some pretty good deals, but they might have outdone themselves with this one. The sale runs through Sunday, so pick up these games while you can. Highlights include, for today alone:

• Fallout: New Vegas – $5
• Monkey Island Special Edition Bundle – $5
• L.A. Noire – $25
• Total War Mega Pack – $12.50

Other sales going on for the weekend include:

• Portal 1 and 2 – $17.50
• Orcs Must Die! – $7.50
• Mass Effect 2 – $10
• Dungeon Defenders – $7.50
• Sam and Max Complete Pack – $33.50

If you want some PC games, now’s a great time.

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.

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.

We last looked at Orange Mod Works’ Nerf mod kits in August, where I had some tiny-spring-losing problems but otherwise thought it was brilliant. Orange Mod Works makes modification kits for Nerf guns, offering stronger springs and reinforced parts to make Nerf guns even stronger. Now they’re putting out an all-in-one kit for completely overhauling your Nerf gun. The Massacre mods don’t just give you springs and backplates (like the kit I reviewed). They give you stronger springs, metal backplates and trigger catches, and most importantly polycarbonate bolt sleds and plungers.

To get the best distance from your Nerf gun, you need to remove the air restrictor from the breech. This requires you to either cut the mechanism in half and reseal it (which is really difficult), or to drill/melt through the barrel until the restrictor falls out. It’s a pain. Since this kit gives you a completely new, reinforced breech, plunger, and bolt sled, you don’t have to do any of that. The downside is that the Massacre kits are $37, which is more than the guns themselves.

If you want to go hardcore with your Nerf guns, you can do it in November, when the Massacre kits start to ship.  It will be available for the Recon, Alpha Trooper, Longstrike, and Raider, and the Alpha Trooper, Longstrike, and Raider versions will come with metal triggers if you preorder them (yes, a preorder bonus that’s not useless!). Pretty cool if you’re into Nerf insanity. Which we all know you are.

Hey, check it out. Free music. Specifically, a free soundtrack to Portal 2. More specifically, Valve is offering the complete 64-track soundtrack to Portal 2, “Music to Test By,” for free on the Portal web site.

The Portal 2 soundtrack, like every other aspect of the game, was excellent, with some haunting and tense music that reflected both the dark humor and the surreal, clever action of the game’s various Aperture Science settings. It had some great electronic and ambient tracks, and listening to any of them will take you back to the shifting walls and grimy pipes of the testing facility. For the record, the two catchy sounds in the Portal 2 commercials are “Science is Fun” and “Halls of Science,” both of which are in the soundtrack.

Valve also released a handful of ringtones from the soundtrack and the game’s sound effects. There aren’t any quotes from GLADoS, Cave Johnson, or Wheatley, but there are portal and button sounds, plus short clips of the more notable tracks in the soundtrack cut for ringtone use. If that’s not enough, Valve is also releasing the “Peer Review” DLC for Portal 2 Wednesday. It’s free and mostly co-op but with some single-player support. Keep an eye out for it on Steam.

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.

A few months ago, Hasbro announced a new line of Nerf guns, competing with the Nerf N-Strike series by offering a new, non-dart-based form of foam projectile. The company started showing off Nerf Vortex discs, and unveiled four new Nerf Vortex blasters to use them. Well, the Nerf Vortex guns are finally here, and while they might not be dart-killers, they’re certainly impressive for cube warfare.

Instead of using compressed air to blast out foam darts, Nerf Vortex guns fling discs like little frisbees, sending them farther with less effort. Hasbro sent me the four new Nerf Vortex guns, and after spending some time with them I can safely say that they’re the go-to weapons if you want the most range without modding your weapons. They’re far from perfect, though.

Nerf gun mods are nothing new. People have been stretching springs, replacing barrels, and removing air restrictors for almost as long as Nerf guns have been around. However, they’ve always involved off-the-shelf parts and a lot of creative gluing, bending, and cutting to get things to work. Now Orange Mod Works has taken the guesswork out of replacing and improving parts of your Nerf gun.

Orange Mod Works is a small company that sells mod kits for Nerf guns. Instead of just offering the tools (though there is a very large tool kit you can buy from them to be prepared for complex and extreme mods), they offers measured springs and all-metal replacement parts you can just drop into your Nerf guns to both make them more powerful and reinforce them. They sent me their Alpha Trooper Stage 1 modification kit, and I was surprised by just how well-made the entire kit is.