It stands 4.5" tall, and is coloured to match Mario's distinctive overalls and hat. The frame is made of 10K gold, while the total in diamonds adds up to 14.5 cts.

Of course, the item's actual worth is debatable. The seller claims that the "retail" price for such a thing would be $11857, yet has it for sale for "only" $7000 (with free shipping!), so take your pick as to which of the two you're going to believe.

Doesn't matter which of the two you ultimately settle on. The kind of person willing to spend $7000 for an unlicensed (note the MR instead of M on the hat) pendant of Mario covered in diamonds would be stupid enough to spend the extra 4g's.

Super Mario 10K Gold Diamond Pendant [gameSniped]

Hushed Casket has a great piece up about all of the issues with Games for Windows Live. The service, I think many of us thought, was meant to be as robust and easy to use as the 360 version of Live, but instead it's just sort of an awkward appendage.

Once you're in a game you can use it like you would Live on the 360, but if you're not in the only two games that currently support it, then you're out of luck. There is no desktop application for the service. Worse still, as Hushed Casket points out, a lot of the little things that make Live sparkle on the 360 are completely missing from the Vista version.

You can't download movies or games, you can't use it to listen to music, you can't customize the user interface. The service doesn't even alert you to achievements.

It looks like GFW-Live has a long way to go before they catch up with their 360 counterparts. Brian Crecente

Top ten things that are wrong with Games for Windows - Live [Hushed Casket]

Dark and Light, the MMO game tied for the lowest user rating in MMORPG.com history, has announced that their crappy game is now free to play...kinda. It is really convoluted, but I will try to clear it up here. Right now you can go to their website, download the game, and play for free up to level 10. After level 10 you can continue playing forever, but you won't gain experience until you purchase a game key for $30. After that you can progress all the way to level 100, but in order to be able to use certain equipment or learn trade skills you have to purchase a recurring subscription or buy game credits, which can be used to activate equipment.

So basically, you can get to level 10 for free so you can tell your friends, "Oh yeah, I played that. It sucked!" The highest recommendation I can give doing this is that it is indeed something to do. If you have nothing to do, it'll fix that.

The saddest thing is that a year ago Dark and Light was one of the most highly anticipated MMO games out there. I myself was hanging on every screenshot they released. Just goes to show you how little hype means in the long run. Michael Fahey

Dark and Light Free Discovery Mode [Dark and Light]

If this thankfully short teaser clip is any indication of the quality of... oh, who am I kidding? It's Boll, for Christ's sake. It's just going to suck out loud during the single weekend it's in theaters. Michael McWhertor

Postal The Movie Official Site

All it does now is let you play music, videos and pictures that are stored on your Playstation 3's harddrive. While you can also browse around a mirror image of the PS3 Menu, which is a copy of the PSP Menu, you can't do much else. You can use the PS3's Internet browser, instead of the PSP's, you can read and send messages through the PSP, but in general it seems sorta worthless.

Initially, I thought the music playback was choppy, but after testing it a few times I realized that playback was choppy for the first few seconds, but quickly smooths out. The single neat thing about Remote Play is that while listening to music stored on your PS3 your PSP also gets treated to the mellow visualizer, which is kinda neat.

In theory, you are supposed to be able to play games you purchased at the online Playstation store on your PSP, but the directions are pretty damn confusing. There's nothing that tells you, for instance, which games you can or cannot play from the store. So my assumption is that all of them are playable on the PSP, though I suspect I'm wrong.

I'm in the process now of downloading Cash Guns Chaos to my PSP. That's right, you have to download the damn thing, you can't just copy it from your PS3 to your PSP's memory card. That right there is genius design. This will be the third time I download this eternally slow 326 MB file from the store.

I'll do a post when I get it on my system and working, probably in a year since the download is still stuck at zero after ten minutes.

Even if I did like the PS3 access granted to the PSP, it still would have issues. For instance, you have to leave your PS3 both on and in Remote Play mode to be able to use Remote Play on your PSP. And, worse still, right now it only works within your home.

Pretty worthless all around. Brian Crecente

Finally downloaded Lumines Live!, and it was pretty much like the version on my PSP, but bigger. Thing is, the game on my UMD is a full game, not a crippled download—this all, ironically, has given the PSP and UMD the best press it has had in months!

At E3, Microsoft touted the music video element of Lumines Live!, an element not found in the current half-baked version, but an "Artist Pack" available next year. The initial purchase leaves gamers with a mere 12 skins, five puzzles, five missions and one CPU opponent. Xbox 360 owners are pissed.

Microsoft's Gamerscore blog is running damage control, stating:

The material posted on Xbox.com, and that was sent out in the media alert wasn't detailed enough, and believe me, the message is being heard. When we said 'full version,' we didn't make what that meant clear enough. You are getting all of the 'modes' that are in the game, but the base version includes only some of the skins, puzzles, missions, or CPU opponents. There will be future content you can choose to buy. Just like other games with downloadable content, you can choose what you might enjoy the most, or stick with the base game.

Eh? Isn't that what my PSP is for? Brian Ashcraft

The Message Is Being Heard [Gamerscore via 1Up]

There are some baaad games out there. And game mag EGM has hand-picked 20 of the stink stankiest titles to hit the gaming world. Originally, this list appeared in print earlier this year, but the article's writer, Seanbaby, explains:

Most of the swearing that I left out or that was edited out of the print version has been put back in to better express how these fucking cunt ass games pissed me off. The print staff also took a strange artistic license and took most of the words that I wrote ending in "g" and replaced the "g" with an apostrophe, making a good portion of the article sound like I was yellin' it from the back of a pickup truck.

Good to know. The list includes such jewels Kriss Kross: Make My Video (I had a copy), Total Recall (that too) and Night Trap (yep). Man, I was into some really shitty video games as a kid. Brian Ashcraft

20 Bad Games [Seanbaby via VGB]

Lucas Arts really needs to do something about Legos Star Wars II for the Nintendo DS. I love the Xbox 360 and Playstation Portable versions, but the DS version just plain sucks.

First off the game relies on what sounds like midi music and sound effects and I've come to discover that much of the pleasure I got from playing the Lego Star Wars games comes from those very authentic sounds, from the laser blasts and chilling theme song to the fun little pop you hear when you get Lego Chewy to yank a Stormtroopers arms from his sockets.

Next come the graphics, which I could learn to live with, but certainly don't live up to the rest of the franchise.

And to make matters worse, the developers decided to completely redesign all of the levels, making them shorter and, frankly, much less fun to play. Forcing you to run back and fourth along levels to accomplish simple tasks simply to lengthy gameplay.

But I could live with that, in fact I was coming to terms with the sub-par graphics, repetitive level design and horrid sound and music, but to top it off the game is filled to the rim with bugs.

My son, who initially loved this game, was playing it during our entire trip to New York City and while killing time in cab rides. After a day or two of play we both started to notice that the game has some insane design flaws.

To start with, there are levels you simply can't complete because the sub-human AI built-into the game can't figure out that there are places where you need it to do things to get past a bottleneck in a level. For instance, there are levels where you have to trigger two levers at the same time and no matter what I, or my son, did we couldn't get the other idiotic Lego character to go flick the switch for us. This isn't a problem in the next-gen games, but apparently the Legos were lobotomized for the DS.

Worse than that, there are levels where you have to switch between characters to make it through. For instance, in one level you have to take turns using Luke's force power and Lando's grapple ability. But the game has these glitches where your idiotic followers either continually kill themselves by jumping or walking off areas or, much worse, the game makes them materialize underneath things or in areas where they get frozen.

I saw this happen multiple times in multiple places. In one case Luke starting materializing underneath a skywalk and immediately dropping to his death, over and over and over and over again. Finally, we just had to turn the DS off and start all over again.

In another case R2D2 got frozen behind a bad guy and no matter what I could do I couldn't get him out, kill him or even switch to another character.

Finally, after a few hours of play the game started showing graphic's bugs, with the icon for the characters turning into a multi-hued mosaic of bits or the character itself beginning to look janky.

I'd say the Traveler's Tale developed game borders on needing a recall and certainly doesn't live up to the rest of the titles in the franchise. Brian Crecente

Gizmodo pointed out that GameExpert has come out with a "Portable Home Theater" for the Playstation Portable. Apparently, the difference between a portable home theater and a docking station is four blue LED's, the sole purpose of which appears to be adding blue-tinged glare to your PSP while watching movies.

That's certainly worth $75. Brian Crecente

GameExperts' PSP Portable Theater Fancy Way of Saying Dock [Gizmodo]

For the man who collects everything, yes even arcade-themed crap: The Pac-Man Motion Light. The idea behind this ugly thing appears to be that a motor spins an inner tube of images and such around inside an outer tube that depicts a Pac-Man screen. The end result is Pac-Man and ghosts frozen on a shimmering sea of dots. Hmmm, sounds kinda crappy. Brian Crecente

Pac-Man Motion Light (vintage [eBay, via GameSetWatch]

In an interview over at Gamespot, he says:

I was actually amused by the fact that [the main character] ran around with chopsticks and poking people's eyeballs out. But in my university career, I became more and more aware of [regional] stereotypes and hierarchies that continue to be perpetuated in the mainstream media. Not just in video games—[but] television, news, movies, and stuff like that.

This almost happened to me with my "Women in Art History" course. Every class was a bunch of drivel about why various great works were oppressive, phallic records of the Male Gaze and should be removed from their museums and etc.

And as the class progressed, you could see the students being convinced of this, and the joy they felt for the pieces being strangled out of them by indignant rage or impotent guilt, depending on their gender.

Parungao also seems to be a little behind on his game canon. He says he feels "that these games symbolize, in many ways, the constant trend in themes in video games when considering 'Asian-ness' and stereotyping in video games." More like, they were the only games he still had left over from middle school.

The blatant truth of it is that none of these games are representatives of anything current. Shadow Warrior came out in 1997, and Kung Fu in 1985. Asian-ness, my ass.

Way to go, Rob. You psyched yourself into no longer enjoying your childhood entertainments. I just hope no one else is taken in by this gradegrubbing masquerading as "research". Eliza "the man" gauger

Read full article and wearily angry flames here [GamePolitics, and also thanks to Alan for sending this in earlier]

"It is our distinct pleasure to bring this much loved SNK fighting game to cellphones." said John Greiner, President and CEO of Hudson Entertainment. "It is quite impressive how all the action-packed essence of the classic title fits on a small device. It serves as a great compliment to our library of games.

Fatal Fury Mobile features include:

8 Combatants: Terry Bogard, Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, Big Bear, Jubei Yamada, Cheng Shizan, Kim, and Mai Shiranui
Each character has unique special moves
Controls and combos have been optimized for play on cellphones
Numerous play modes, including Quick Play, Single Match, Training, Survival, and Tournament mode, which features an unraveling story
8 unique locations with beautiful parallax scrolling backgrounds

I've never played a fighting game on a cell phone, but I can't imagine it would be anything but pure suckage. Some games should never make the leap to the phone screen. Brian Crecente

Holy! Unheard of gadgety toy maker Techno Source just announced that they're going to start selling two new retro plug-and-play systems. Btoth the Intellivision 10 2nd Edition and Activision 10 will sell for $15 and sport, you guess it, ten games.

Man, I sure hope they don't still come built into those cruddy generic controllers. They really need to take a cue from the Atari Playback and build the Intellivision dealio in a little mock-up of the original console. Brian Crecente

UK developers Codemasters are stinking it up with Turds, a fecal fetish game site. It features famous titles like Donkey Kong based around one universal permise: doo-doo. More fecal flash mini-games like Dungbeetle Rally and Poobert are scheduled for next month. Thank Wired's Chris Kohler for pointing out this crap.

More Here [Funsta] via Game|Life

It looks like Capcom will be shipping little Cellphone strap-enabled weapons with Basara 2 (the sequel to Devil Kings). If you preorder the game in Japan you get one of five weapons that you can attach to you cellphone via a dinky strap. No word if people outside of the Island nation will get this completly useless promo item. Personally, I want to load all five of them up on my Treo. I can't wait to whack myself in the face with a bunch of tiny daggers and staves everytime I answer my phone. That should make for some interesting emergency room visits. —Brian Crecente

Kick! Punch! It's all in the Cellphone! [GSW. Worst headline ever, btw.]

Why the hell isn't Sony jumping on the downloadable content bandwagon? Do they want the PSP to fail?
I can buy Lost for UMD, but there's no way I'm going to waste the money or the time.
Sony's been promising downloadable videos since last year and they've delivered squat.
The only reason I watch any videos at all on the PSP is because third parties have stepped up to create recorders and port movies. And the rest of the PSP's features aren't doing much better.
Let's look at the score card:
Location Free TV is overpriced and not fully supported.
Web browsing is a hellish pain in the ass thanks to the telephone-style text entry.
Music is essentially in the same boat as video support.
Hollywood has given up on UMD.
The video games are still very hit or miss.
And images... well, at least they got that right.
Come on Sony, either shit or get off the pot. —Brian Crecente

Why Hollywood feels it necessary to recreate The Hills Have Eyes is beyond me, but I suppose it is inevitable. The website to promote the movie has a flash game that delivers the sort of sub par, flat experience I fully expect the movie to bask in. Check it out if you want a taste of what the movie has in store for you: no plot and endless roaming through darkened tunnels punctuated by the occasional scare.

The Hills Have Eyes 3D Game [THHE]

Namco is working on two Dilbert games for the mobile phone. As much as I know that mobile games have improved leaps and bounds, these still sound like they are going to suck. For some reason, any Dilbert game sounds like it would suck. I think it's because I made the mistake of watching the TV show when it was on. It scarred my psyche. The games are supposed to hit this fall, for those of you who have faith in Namco Networks ... and didn't suffer through the show.

Namco Making Dilbert Mobile Game [Game Daily]