11)  Gamer wedding
Our experience of weddings is limited to ridiculous meringue dresses, uncomfortable suits, crap food, lame throwback music and the inevitable short wait for an invite to the ‘divorce party’. We’ve never been to anything quite as cool as this, which looks like a match made in heaven. Or, at least, the Mushroom Kingdom.

12)  NES table
Kyle Downes earned our admiration and jealousy by making himself this coffee table based on an NES controller. It opens up to reveal a storage space for games, magazines or, erm, coffee, but the coolest part is when you remove the glass top, it’s actually a functional NES pad. The buttons and D-pad really work. Beyond awesome.

13)  Slime stylus
Prepare for the wonder of Dragon Quest IX by ordering this rather excellent Slime stylus. Add a couple of stickers to your DS and you could pretend you’ve got some sort of special limited edition, direct from Japan. We won’t tell.

14)  Mario car
Once upon a time in Russia, people used to drive clapped-out government-issue tin cars, painted in regulation Soviet grey. Those days are no more. Now they can express their individuality by driving the same tin cars with glorious Mario scenes painted all over the sides. Hooray for capitalism!

15) Yet another Zelda DS
This airbrushed DS looked pretty cool to us, and we’d have been happy to use it as long as the paint didn’t rub off on our hands. We didn’t bid for it, assuming it would be really expensive, but despite being brand new it only fetched a little over $100 on eBay. It’s always worth keeping an eye on those listings.

16)  Racing wheel
If you don’t fancy rigging up a training wheel from plastic crates and bungee cords (see below), there’s always this accessory. The Wii remote clips inside and the whole thing can be suckered onto a table, providing a stable base. No idea how solid it is, but this online shop is selling it for only a few bucks. Shipping from Hong Kong might be a bit expensive, though.

17)  Greenpeace destruction
The environmental lobbyists at Greenpeace are still snapping at the console manufacturers’ heels. For their latest trick - having previously condemned Nintendo as a particular environmental disaster zone - they dismantled and analysed all three consoles. This time Nintendo didn’t fare so badly, thanks to the omission of certain toxins from the circuit boards, but Greenpeace reckon that if consoles were classified as toys, they’d be banned because of all the nasty chemicals in them. It’s an interesting read.

18)  Training wheel
The Wii Wheel isn’t for everyone, but don’t you feel just a bit envious when you see other Mario Kart racers with that gold emblem of wheel mastery? Here’s an innovative method for training your muscles to use the wheel for precision movements rather than big, imprecise twists. It’s not exactly portable, but you could always store extra… stuff in the crate.

19)  Rare memories
They might have been assimilated by Microsoft a few years back, but former Nintendo heroes Rare haven’t forgotten their roots. The trailer for their next Banjo Kazooie game on Xbox 360 features a glimpse of a 2D Mario sprite in the background.

20)  Zelda mosaic
We like this rustic dish thing, if only for the hope it gives us that we could maybe do something similar ourselves with a bowl of plaster and some shards of pointy, shiny stuff. Yes, we’ll get round to it one day, maybe. When we remember…

Jun 27, 2008