Jiffy’s Lazy Links: Oh Mario Edition

Hey kids, Jiffy here. Last time I checked, Newbs was busy placing stickers on spray-painted piping. I take that to mean the madness continues and I need to fill in again.

Some guy named Aaron Barr worked really hard to infiltrate Anonymous and take down WikiLeaks on behalf of corporate and government interests.

A video game has won a Grammy. The prize went to Christopher Tin’s “Baba Yetu” from Civilization IV.

The newest and greatest blog of user-submitted content is Fat, Ugly or Slutty. The site is dedicated to revealing the ignorance women encounter online. The latest entry as I write this: “bake me a cake cankles.”

The X-Men: First Class trailer is actually pretty cool. We’ll see if the movie will turn out as well June 3, 2011.

Metacritic has compiled a list of the worst games of 2010 by major publishers. Nintendo’s worst was AquaSpace, a WiiWare game I’ve never heard of. Also available are a number of graphs illustrating which “pubs” bring the most “lish” to gaming.

Man murdered after stealing GameBoy

Image: Adapted from Gameboy Original by PseudoGil under a CC-BY license.

GameBoys are precious things. We already knew they were worth stealing from dead people for some, and now it turns out others consider them worth murdering for.

John Rosa has been sentenced to 5 and 1/2 years after he stabbed and killed Devone McCrary over a GameBoy Rosa had stolen from him. The light sentence comes as a result of Rosa’s guilty plea of “passion-provocation manslaughter” which came in December.

Personally, I consider my GameBoy to be worthy of the noble shrine I have given it in my closet. We have a lot of memories together, but then again, it lacked backlighting.

Source: NorthJersey.com

Nintendo Power gets in on the Sonic bashing

Image: Nintendo Power.

February’s issue of Nintendo Power includes a listing of the three worst moments in sonic history. They are:

• Kissing a human.
• Turning into a Werehog.
• Big the Cat.

There are just so many to choose from. What about “existence” or “slippery physics”?

Nintendo was never as invested in the 16-bit rivalry as SEGA was. Sad and Pathetic Blue needed so badly to best and out bad-ass the Big N in every way, so they repeatedly trashed their opposition in advertisements.

With Nintendo Power no longer being published by Nintendo, it would seem the magazine is a little freer to mix it up with the company’s old rival. Even though Nintendo won, it would seem there is lingering bitterness.

Source: Aeropause

Nintendo “announces” another Kirby, Pandora’s Tower

Image: Pandora's Tower, Nintendo.

During an investors meeting, Nintendo stealth announced a couple of new Wii games: yet another Kirby 2D platformer (this time developed by Kirby’s old friends at HAL, and something called Pandora’s Tower.

The Kirby game appears to be the eternally under development GameCube game. The trailer can be seen here. It looks a lot like what was shown in 2005. Why this had to be delayed all the way until immediately after the release of Kirby’s Epic Yarn remains a mystery.

The other title, Pandora’s Tower is even less comprehensible. There’s a teaser site, which includes the art above and a Biblical quote. It’s supposedly coming to Japan this spring. Developer and genre are unknown. Expect an overwrought JRPG that will never be brought to the west.

Nintendo immune to Bieber fever

Image: Cover art for Baby by Justin Bieber. Copyright Island Records.

Teen pop infestation Justin Bieber, or someone working on his upcoming theatrical holocaust Never Say Never, was hoping to use a 15 second clip of Super Mario Bros.‘s iconic music. Nintendo, unlike the wallets of so many unsuspecting parents, was able to turn him down.

John Chu, director of Bieber’s moving-image thing, recently complained on Twitter:

aw C’mon Nintendo! Y won’t u let us use the Mario theme for 15 secs in the @Justinbieber movie…talk about free advertising passed up. Oops.

I’d love to know Nintendo’s exact reasoning for the decision. In my mind, it involves Iwata politely laughing, followed by Reggie leaping out of nowhere to “escort” Bieber from Nintendo’s secret underground layer of quality.

Source: MTV