My son will make paper cell phones that play games. He plays with those more than the freaking Roboquad that Santa brought him for Christmas!

An hour and a half?! I miss being a kid...

Who needs expensive pieces of technology!?

Good on your spawn, Bashcraft.

We must aquire this technology and discern its secrets!

Happy Birthday, Spray
I'm Disappointed in You

*sigh*

I miss the days when something that like that could hold my attention for hours.

the power of imagination my friends. this is why videogames have become nothing then visual showcases minus innovation or fun half the time. We don't leave much to our imaginations anymore.

My kids have a brand new cedar playset that we put up last year.

Of course they'd rather half-flatten a cardboard box and use it as a slide.

Ah, youth...

I will never grow up, make believe is much too fun.

@jp182: You're a couple decades off being original, go back to the 70s and talk about the imagination killing abilities of TV and you will be spot on.

AH, imagination. I spend a lot of time daydreaming nowadays, but it's still very hard for me to do anything like that. To be a kid again...

This story brings a huge smile to my face :D.I Remember what is was to be a kid and have a vivid imagination.

next time he asks for a game, just print out some screenshots. They'll most likely last him longer than the actual game.

Hurry someone call Nintendo and put a stop to this pirated version of their system...lol

just when I thought it wasn't possible for your kid to kick anymore ass.

I, for one, would much rather play a pink DS than a fake DS. Then again, I have no imagination and don't really care what people think and have never been mistaken for gay. Chances are, people would see me playing the pink DS and if they know me, just think that I'm being a goofball as usual.

Hell i'm gonna make a paper PSP here at work and spend the rest of the day watching videos from my paper PS3 at home. Ahhhhhhh, imagination.

Well, at least he doesn't have ADD.

Seriously though. As a parent, you could save hundreds, or even thousands of dollars by just giving your kid some paper and crayons and letting them go wild. Heck, throw in a roll of bubble wrap and a giant cardboard box, and you may never have to hire a babysitter again. As a bonus, your kid gets an imagination; something most people don't have.

And now I'm off to find bubble wrap and a giant box, 'cause that still sounds like fun.

@JustJake: Soon, Nintendo will be issuing a Cease and Desist to minibash. Heh.

@Generico: Everyone can play with bubble wrap for hours. You don't need an imagination for that.

Better graphics than any real DS game.

Mass manufacture them, I want one!

@Bon5ai:

I blame the wireless myself. Or possibly the novel.

lol, good kid.

Back in my day all we had was imagination. You couldn't play stickball because sticks hadn't been invented yet, so we just imagined it all and those kind of activities went on for hours. Then came the 50 mile, snowy, uphill walks to AND from school. Those were the toughest times of all.

@Generico: can I come over and play too?

Props on raising the kid to have an imagination. So many people I meet these days think reality TV is the height of imagination. I pride myself on having one such imagination, suitably scuffed, warped and twisted from a healthy upbringing of reasonable income, an 8 foot tall bookcase filled to capacity and state schooling. It's what makes life worth living.
That and it lets me and my flatmate build a fort in the living room from every duvet and cushion we can get our hands on, fortify it with cooking skewers to ward off invaders and decide upon a coat of arms that ended up being a giant prawn at 5am. Not a soul believes we were stone cold sober when we built it too...

But Ash, what does he REALLY think of your pink DS?

@Generico: And now I'm off to find bubble wrap and a giant box, 'cause that still sounds like fun.

The best days when I was a kid was when my parents or grandmother bought a new major appliance or something. Cardboard castles were so much fun. The big round oatmeal containers my brother and I used to build stuff out of.

My dad used to work at a newspaper and brought home cones that once had string on it which were big enough to put our hands in. Voila! Instant laser cannon hands!

But now I have papercraft to keep my imagination going. *goes off to play with his post-it Mr. & Mrs. Pac Man cutouts he has hanging on his cubicle wall.

@ceilingfan. JOY!:

So true. We have tons of bubble wrap at work, I'm slowly moving it all into my house, sheet by sheet.

I just love the face on the goomba.

Kids these days with their gadgets...

back in my day we only played on pink DSes, and we LIKED it!

Mini-bash does it again...

@FANBOY of ceilings: You do to use it for machine-gun fire as you fend off hordes of invaders and protect your fortress. Or you can wrap your fists in it and simulate the sounds of bones breaking as you and a fellow ninja battle to the death. ;)

so minibash is going on the pink ds strike? good for him!!! change that joint to another color dude! {^_^}

Now ingenious would be if he used some Yen. Imagine Nintendo's relief when they realize that it not only prints money, it IS money!

@aden.exe: It's a great stress reliever if nothing else.

But I thought it was Crecente's child that was "very cute! I saw proof on the recent day-note. Also... I wonder how that poison! fiasco went...

@Generico: I usually turn my neck and pop one so it sounds like I really loudly cracked my neck. Clicking the top onto a highlighter works for that, too.

BTW,
I think that we need a Kotaku contest for Mini-Bash's DS. Perhaps 'Create your own DS out of Paper'.

@zanzibarlegend: Maybe he should send it into colorware and actually make a Kotaku DS.

To be young again

*sigh*

Little does he know that he's played a hand in Nintendo's plans to unveil a new, pointless model of the DS: The DS Air.

I should just sell back my DS Lite and get one of these things. It's the wave of the future!

Awwww how cute!! my little cousin uses his sister's DS all the time (it's pink of course), and he has no problem with it!

Now that's what I call some FAMILY FUN.

I did this when I was a small child and my parents couldn't afford to buy me game consoles. When I was 5, I built a television with removable inserts out of matte paper and cardboard. Then I wired up some controllers by attaching hand-drawn paper dolls of game characters to unraveled coat hangers - improvised joysticks.

I would dream up game levels and draw them on the removable inserts, and then my friends and I would play through the levels by bouncing the character around the imaginary 2D worlds and making the sound effects ourselves.

Now I'm a game developer. Keep an eye on that kid of yours, Bash. :)

:D

that put a bug smiley on my face

DO WANT!

@jettokisora: I did the same, only with Lego :)

You should scribble "Boktai" on the bottom and yell "OH NO! IT WON'T WORK IF YOU'RE NOT OUTSIDE!"

I saw a complete metrosexual the other day playing a glittering pink DS lite at a restaurant. To be honest, I couldn't tell if it was a very pretty man or a very handsome woman until he spoke in which I *think* is a male voice.

It was very creepy indeed. Of course the first thing I kept thinking was Kotaku and those "male crossdressing cafes".

@RPGr: I should mention the moral of the story. Better to get him a regular color DS lite or have him become so gender neutral (yes, I do realize that's a "hot thing" in Japan right now) that you don't know if he is a he!

Yes, I'm (kinda) being sarcastic here.

ds slim/lite confirmed???!!!?!! and a new mario game?

Daddy must be proud.
I know I would be! WTG Bash.

Whats funny is that in like 1981, I did the same thing, except out of an old clamshell jewelry box. I swear to this day I was a crazy video game soothsayer, seeing 20-some-odd years into the future!

(Or I was just inspired by my dual screen Pinball Game and Watch.)

That DS is so thin and "lite!" It seems it never runs out of battery either. He better patent it.

I used to do that when I was a kid! I made tiny LCD games, make a hole through the screen, then place a small drawing on the other side to play with.

No surprise that Mini bash is on pink DS Lite strike. Kids are very fickle about colour. Esp when you consider that Pink is always reflected as female colour and blue as a Male colour.

Maybe you should consider buying a DS armour case to change the colour, instead of dropping another x amount of yen on a new Colour DS.

Question-Why did you get him a Pink DS lite in the first place? surely you were just begging for him to rebel against the colour.

Save the Pink DS for people that are more comfortable in their sexuality and don't feel definded/bound by the norm.

I used to have a pink DS Phat'

Ha, that would make an awesome custom skin for your pretty-in-pink DS.

This reminds me of [www.themorningnews.org] . Perhaps Mini Bash has a future in laptop design.

Rock on, MiniBash!

Heck, as a kid one of my favorite things was to get a large piece of paper or two and just go nuts drawing a little adventure that, looking back on it, is very much what Worms is. By the end of the "adventure" the paper would be just one big scribble!

... How long until we get an Ashcraft video?

"Dear Brian #1, my son is cute, for lunch, I ate fire. Sincerely, Solid Snake."

Goddamn, I still can't get that video out of my head.

nice idea, i'm going to make me a virtual boy

@Generico: Amen!

You can't find a better solution for boredom than dreaming up something creative by yourself.

Skin or paint his pink DS imo.

Pink is traditionally a color for boys in Japan:

In Japan, the color pink has a masculine association. The annual spring blooming of the pink-blossomed cherry trees (the Sakura) is said to represent the young Japanese warriors who fell in battle in the prime of life (the Samurai).

Source: [www.sensationalcolor.com]

Mini Bash could be a samurai!

@jettokisora:
that's perfect!
having grown up in a large, poor family we did the same:
racing empty aluminum cans attached to plastic shopping bags on windy days, sending messages with kites made from school textbook covers and bamboo, fishing for metal objects in the yard with broken speaker magnets attached to twine..and scaring the crap out of each other by using our voices and playing hide-and-seek in the dark when our parents were out at night.
i do software design work now too~

way to go minibash! the kid has taste!
would LOVE to send him a real ds if only it wouldn't take away that imagination!