This has been shooting around the internet in the last few days. Some musically inclined Nintendo fans put together a rock opera based on Super Mario Bros. It is, surprisingly, not as bad as it could be.

Be sure to check out the trailer video.

Clickable Culture is reporting that Tringo, a portmanteau of a game that plays like a cross between Tetris and Bingo will be making its way to GBA screens soon. Tringo was originally created by players within Second Life, the graphical MUD/game/thing run by Linden Labs.

We've seen Popcap games make the jump to GBA before, but this is probably the first time that user-created content for a MMO has been licensed for its own game. I think that's pretty neat.

Danc over at the Lost Garden blog has a great navel-gazer of an article on the topic of Nintendo's next-gen offering.

Some of you may remember the original commercial for the first Legend of Zelda game for the NES. How many of us remember this scenario that played out across countless livingrooms in the United States? A nerdy kid with orthodontic work and glasses sits next to a cool kid in a jean jacket who is obviously only coming over because his mom won't buy him a NES. Fawn over the graphics, add a little beatboxing with some 80's white-boy hip-hop rhymes, and boom! I actually saw this commercial for the first time when my cousin (who had cable, and was thus cooler than me) sent me a tape of some Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future episodes. My seven-year-old non-cable-watching mind was blown by the idea of a commercial for a videogame. I remember rewinding to watch that commercial several times, while I think I only watched the shows wrapped around it once.

And, just to show how far we've come, compare the awesome graphics of the original Legend of Zelda to the Twilight Princess trailer.

The Japanese Nintendo site celebrates. The U.S. site? Not so much.

I don't know, but she was at PAX.

Killer Betties has an article by Bonnie Ruberg about the intersection of lesbian culture and gamer culture. While of general interest, Ruberg doesn't report much of anything that really jumps out. Lesbian gamers get marginalized for being women, for being gay, and for being even less represented in the industry than women. Ruberg gives an example by relating one lesbian's negative experiences in an online gaming forum community, but as anyone who is familiar with gaming forums will tell you, abuse is just par for the course. Does that make the abuse okay? No. But it doesn't go very far in convincing me that lesbians are particularly singled out for abuse in gaming communities.

At the end of her article, Ruberg points out that homosexuals generally don't get portrayed in videogames, positively or otherwise, with the notable exception of (all together now) The Sims. In the end, Ruberg paints the plight of lesbian gamers less as a unique issue than simply the combination of the plight of women gamers and homosexual gamers in general. I'm not saying that lesbians don't have issues in the gaming community unique specifically to themselves, just that the nature of those issues remains opaque to this reader.