The Pop-Culture E-Zine
Whoa, LEGO and Nintendo have given us a one two punch of sets – first with their LEGO Super Mario, and now, the awesome LEGO Nintendo Entertainment System set!
This awesome LEGO NES set will be available from August 1 and will retail for AU$349.99. You’ll now be able to assemble your own console and retro CRT TV, then turn the crank to make 8-bit Super Mario move across the screen! We are excited 🙂
source: LEGO
After the Legend of Zelda LEGO Ideas set, we thought that would be it with Lego news for this week. How wrong were we!
Japan is such a cool country! Wish we could visit there on a regular basis to stock up on super cool stuff that we will never get or get months or years later.
So what’s this about then? Well, it’s more cool Lego stuff. We previously informed you all that LEGO Super Mario was set to launch in August, however, Nintendo have announced that the Starter Course and two expansion (Piranha Plant Power Slide and Desert Pokey) sets will launch first in Japan on July 10.
Wish we could be at the Nintendo Tokyo store on July 10 to get our mits on this Lego awesomeness! Alas, we will have to wait till August 1 like the rest of the world.
story source: Kotaku / image source: Nintendo
Wa-hoo, it’s that time of year when we celebrate the greatest video game character of all time, that little Nintendo plumber who likes to munch of mushrooms, Mario! Or should that be Mar10? 😉
To celebrate (Super) MAR10 Day, we encourage you all to play one of his many many games, from the classic platformers, adventure, karting, to tennis, party games and even his old school Game & Watch based games!
Today is the day we honour one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. We are going to celebrate by playing something very old and also one of our favourite Mario games of all time. Oh yeah, we may even throw on a pair of overalls to get right into this great day!
Which Mario game will you play in celebration of MAR10 Day? Hit us up on Twitter or Facebook to share the Mario love.
Let’s start by saying we don’t condone illegal graffiti. However, when graffiti is welcomed as street art and makes a societal impact, we definitely take note.
The /r/Graffiti Reddit thread is one place that is full of great graffiti, some topical with recent events, and some tugging on our nostalgic heartstrings.
Here are a few that caught our eye, even the freight train carriage with the three-button NES controller! Check out the rest on Reddit.
image source: reddit – /r/Graffiti
So how much storage space would it take to store every Nintendo video game (from the stable of their major consoles) that can be emulated?
Don’t worry about trying to work out the answer, as Reddit user, RHYTHM_GMZ, has already done all the hard work for us.
You’ll need roughly 7.53TB (yep, that’s TERABYTES!) of space to be able to emulate every darn Nintendo video game! With the Wii making up 6.56TB of the 7.53TB total, you may want to know the breakdown of the rest of the Nintendo game libraries, so here you go:
For those of you that prefer to visualise these figures, we have you covered – see below!
NOTE: Games libraries based on the uncompressed NTSC versions
[story source: RHYTHM_GMZ via Reddit]
When it comes to hacking or modding, there are certain creations that make a lot of sense. Shank Mods’ Nintendo Switch GameCube Joy-Cons are exactly the mod we would love to become a retail product for all of us to enjoy!
Shank Mods goes into detail of this creation, which wasn’t easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Us mere mortals would be incapable to follow the instructions for fear of bricking our Switch or worse, sacrificing a working GameCube controller which would no doubt end up breaking. Having said that, there are other peeps out there that are adept to following instructions and taking calculated risks, which pay off – and this one is a big pay off, as the Joy-Cons are based on one of the best controllers of all time!
As this mod was quite gruelling, Shank Mods has confirmed that these Nintendo Switch GameCube Joy-Cons are a one-off, making them super ultra rare. So if you would like a pair, you better get hacking!
source: Shank Mods
[story source: technabob]
By: D.C. Cutler, U.S.A.
Metroid’s Mother Brain is considered one of the most diabolical she-villains in video game history.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with defeating Mother Brain every time I put my Metroid cartridge into my Nintendo Entertainment System. It took me a while to finally defeat her, and when I did, I wondered if Mother Brain had a backstory. How did she get to possess such vast power?
When I would play the original Metroid, I found Mother Brain fascinating. In later Metroid games, we got a little backstory on Mother Brain, but none of it seemed that imaginative. The original design of Mother Brain was the best. All of the designs in later games, especially in Super Metroid, when Mother Brain looked like a brain with a grotesque chicken body, were slightly extreme and almost silly. In the original Metroid, Mother Brain was captivating and menacing by just sitting in a glass jar, controlling the game like a puppet master. When I would defeat Mother Brain, my imagination would run wild. Was what we saw in the jar her original or real form?
image source: Samolo via Deviantart
Metroid was not the easiest game to beat. It took me several tries before I finally completed the game. I wasn’t an expert at the game like my brother. It took him just a day or two to defeat Mother Brain. Then he would usually move on to another game and beat that before me as well.
In the video game magazines of the time, like Nintendo Power, they never really went into much depth when it came to the iconic, she-villain. But the early games didn’t tell as much about Mother Brain either. It must’ve been a boring existence, just sitting there in a protective glass jar, ruling the planet, hoping that a bounty hunter wouldn’t come along and destroy you. However, she did have an army of henchmen protecting her. Villains in other major games at the time were primarily male and mostly on the beefy side.
Mother Brain was engrossing because she was so different from all of the other heavy villains in video games. Mother Brain is one of the reasons Metroid is a classic NES game.
image source: metroid.fandom.com
Still get surprised to the lengths some talented folks go to for merging their passions, like this Cranmer Guitars built Super Mario World guitar, made from 10,000 lollipop sticks!
We just want to know, how long did it take to lick and eat all those lollipops!
Oh yeah, we love the guitar 🙂
[story and image source: Geekologie]
It is amazing to think that we started ausretrogamer 8 years ago! How time flies when you are having fun!
When we started our site and social media channels in January 2012, we had no idea what was to come. We were pleasantly surprised to find so many like-minded people who enjoyed playing and talking about old games we used to play many many decades ago. Nostalgia is a powerful force that binds us all – long may it continue!
To all the people that have contributed and to those that are still contributing content and everyone that engages with us, thank you very much – you all rock our world!
Looking forward to another year full of retro gaming goodness 🙂
When we saw Codemasters’ thread on Twitter of all the relics they found in their vault, our knees buckled due to all of the nostalgia. Check out the classic games, consoles and peripherals they unearthed from their storage, some being over three decades old! We are well and truly intoxicated with nostalgia.
The gobsmackingly gorgeous Sega Saturn Development Unit. It’s MASSIVE!
Good luck fitting this SEGA Saturn in your TV cabinet. Egg for scale.
(this machine was used to ensure that games in development didn’t violate the Sega Memory usage guide) pic.twitter.com/pZaZCEHigN
— Codemasters (@Codemasters) November 8, 2019
source: Codemasters via Twitter
