Not does the cake look and sound absolutely amazing, "Bride" here goes above and beyond, integrating Mario into her special day to such an extent that the lucky man will need to show up to every anniversary with diamonds to even begin to deserve her.

"I had found pics of a very similar cake online, and it inspired me to create my own Mario cake and surprise my groom on our wedding day (November 5th). My groom is a professional video gamer, and his favorite game is Mario cart. We were married in Vegas, so I had the bottom tier a desert theme, and I went with the old school Peach Castle rather than a modern one. I'm brunette, and my groom a blonde, so I had them customize Peach and Mario accordingly. The only hint I gave my groom about the cake was I had a pair of Mario boxers delivered to him to wear during the ceremony the morning of the big day, and then I had our rings brought forth by the ring bearer on a 1-Up key-chain which later snuck itself into my bouquet for the rest of the day. The entire cake was edible, the desert tier was berries and creme, the galaxy was bouncy chocolate with chantilly cream, and the castle (which has been preserved in my freezer for the 1 year anniversary) is peanut butter chocolate. I hope you post the pics on your site, so your readers can find more inspiration for their own wedding creations!"

I don't know who her husband is, but if he ever hurts her there'll be a slew of gamers waiting to take his place. Line forms at my back, ladies and gentlemen.

While other massively multiplayer online games have drawn huge numbers and then struggled to retain them, CCP's EVE Online has spent the past six years growing. So far 2009 has been very good to the game, with the concurrent user record being broken three separate times so far, with a standing record of 53,850 online at one time in one universe. The launch of the latest expansion, Apocrypha, has drawn even more players to the game, with active subscribers passing the 300K mark in the past week. Having started off the year with approximately 244,000, that's a 22% growth - for a six year-old game.

Along with the announcement, CCP sent along this picture of the celebration cake they enjoyed at their North American headquarters in Atlanta. I'd congratulate them, but they know I live in Atlanta and neglected to invite me over for gamecake, a transgression I'm afraid I can never forgive. Check out their full announcement below, while I curl up on the couch with a Little Debbie Swiss cake roll and cry.

Happy Birthday EVE Online!

EVE Online celebrates its 6th year of existence today—May 6th. That's six strong years of continuous growth thanks to tireless integration of user feedback into game design and pushing to release around two major free expansions per year. Our single-shard world, where everyone plays on the same shared server, has seen tremendous benefit from having each player able to interact and affect each other player in a persistent manner. From massive fleet battles to individual bonds of trust, every pilot in EVE has the potential to rock the ship of hundreds of thousands of others by their actions.

At one population milestone we saw agreements form between alliances. At another we were able to fully turn over the economy to the players. As the population of New Eden has grown, so have the instances of emergent behaviors of its pilots. A 6 year persistant history. A living history where truly brilliant strategies have unfolded. Truly terrible betrayals unveiled. We are excited to see what will happen next.

This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to our latest free expansion EVE Online: Apocrypha and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we've had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers. That doesn't include trial accounts. We've broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn't think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE's boundless potential.

As always, we encourage you to bring your friends, family and even enemies to New Eden by visiting www.eveonline.com and downloading a free trial or by heading to your local retailer and purchasing a copy of EVE Online, which includes 60 days of game time.

Reader Joe M. sent in this gamecake - it was the wedding cake for his friends' recent ceremony. It came with just a minimalist description - I'd love to know if the music drawn on the second layer is the Super Mario Bros. theme.

First, the Best Buy tale, because once you hear this SKRU-ed up SKU promotion, you may want to see if it's going on at your local big blue box. Ed says (this was emailed late Saturday):

So I walk into a local Best Buy today and spot sale tag in the Xbox 360 aisle advertising Guitar Hero: World Tour for $59.99 ... no big deal. I take a closer look and read "Save $20 Instantly" which confused me because that's the MSRP for the game. Upon further inspection I noticed it read "Band Kit" and "Reg. $189.99."

In other words, boys and girls, they stuck the right promotion on the wrong SKU. So, guess what happens next.

I thought "This is worth a shot" and dragged one of the band kits over to the register. The guy behind the counter laughed and said "Man, what a deal!" he called his supervisor over who scratched his head and input the SKU printed on the tag into the register. Sure enough, it was the same item only it rang up as $169.99 (this was the accurate sale price). He walked over to a manager with the sale tag and explained what happened. After about 5 minutes the manager walked over, said "How much? ... OK" and sold it to me for $59.99! He then said "Sorry for the wait, sir ... have a good night!"

That's right. When confronted with a difference in the printed, incorrect in-store promotion, and the correct price in the system, they gave him the cheaper one. With no chest-beating argument over obligations to honor an obviously incorrect price. I checked Best Buy's latest circular and I don't see any $20-off promotion for the GH:WT bundle. This may have been local to his store only. But who knows.

Update: Commenter willparry79 says:

As a Best Buy employee, I can confirm that we do this. If we messed up pricing a certain item, we'll give it to the customer for whatever price that it's advertised for, as long as we're pretty sure that we did it. If someone just moved the product to a cheaper price tag or something like that, we wouldn't do it, and we won't continue to sell the item at that price, but I'll change at least one or two items' price for that reason almost every day I work.

Good to know, and thanks Will.

Now, where were we? Oh right, gamecakes. Ed also just got hitched to Ursula, his girlfriend of seven years, and for the groom's cake she had the designer create that Rock Band drum kit cake you see above. Mmm, tasty. And the topper - literally - Ursula contacted Tristan Eaton, one of the co-creators of the Kidrobot Munny toy, and he designed these custom Munny cake toppers.

So, congratulations Ed and Ursula. Now in addition to finding space for all your wedding gifts, you have to house a second set of instruments. Be sure to write Best Buy a thank you note eight months from now. (That's OK, I always give wedding gifts 11 months after the fact.)

Constructed of pure greatness, actual cake, fondant, Rice Krispy squares, fiber optic lighting, and pure love, the cake features several Super Mario Galaxy features and characters, including the under-glass pill-shaped puzzle area and Princess Peach's castle. And then just when you think it couldn't get any better, the damn thing moves. Hit the jump to see the cake in action.

The cake was designed and implemented by a man named Will, who suckered his daughter Hannah into the Super Mario Galaxy creation for her 4th birthday party. His trickery cost him 7 batches of Rice Krispy treats and 7 different cakes, but the results are simply amazing.

I had an extremely hard time deciding what to put on the cake. If you've played the game you might understand. There are so many levels its ridiculous. I had to have the castle and one round world. And for some reason I got bent on having the glass pill looking planet thing which I just thought would look cool on a cake. The silver disc was an add on at the end of my decision so I could add Luigi and some Galaxy like spinning. Seriously, I had the worst time cutting out worlds I wanted on here.

On behalf of everyone who has ever admired a video game-based cake, I hereby dub Will our new king.

Hannah's 4th Super Mario Galaxy Cake [Will and Liliana's Web Page]

It also sounds like it's about a billion calories per serving, with scads of fondant and 100 percent pure lard icing (I kid. It's buttercream, which is close enough). Its creator was contacted and she described its construction.

The cake was a mint chip cake hand carved from round cakes, stacked, and iced in buttercream and then covered in fondant. The metallic parts were made of belgian modelling chocolate and painted with silver highlighter dust. The entire cake was airbrushed to add color and dimension to the metallic parts as well. The cake was a surprise for the Groom, he and the bride are huge fans of the game.

Also, here is an image of a sugar-cookie mosaic of a (literal) Metroid that some of you spotted and sent along too.

Hey, it's Sunday, we can have sweets for breakfast, can't we?

Just When You Thought Cake Couldn't Get Any Better [Metroid Quarantine, thanks Cybershark]
Metroid Mosaic Cookie [neebit]

Whatever the reason for the absence of gâteaux de jeu, this birthday treat from blogger Kim Vallee to her husband (and former Xevious world record holder!) Jerome was special enough to attract our attention.

Montreal's Clever Cupcakes were commissioned to create a set of, well, cupcakes emblazoned with retro gaming icons such as Space Invaders, Frogger and Robotron, artfully arranged around a tower crowned with a delicious Weighted Companion Cube.

Oh, and they played Still Alive while the birthday boy cut the 'cube. Nice.

My Husband's Classic Video Games Cupcake Tower [Kim Vallee]

Look closely because there's a ton of detail here. The cake's base is inspired by the beach level in Mario Galaxy; the middle layer (just underneath the castle) is a kind of spiral bas-relief drawing on the scenery in the Super Mario Brothers worlds; and the massive castle at the top, Frank says that came from a phony screenshot back when people were talking about the "Nintendo Revolution" as the third-gen console. I'm not a structural engineer, but there has gotta be a load bearing wall somewhere within the standard cake layers below, because it looks like a ton of fondant and heavy sugary mortar up there.

Congratulations to Frank and Paige and best wishes from Kotaku.

Source material for the beach:

For the middle column:

For the castle:

This couple did a gamer-themed wedding — tastefully eschewing cosplay for the wedding attire, I might add. But they did trick out the reception with game-themed table cards and, of course, a Super Mario cake (which always gets our attention.)

I want to know who will be the first to have their wedding musicians set up on Rock Band. It's inevitable.

A Gamer's Wedding [StarCraft 2 Feeds, thanks Lipton]

Or it's a cake for reader Blue Cheez's birthday, and his friends were too self conscious to provide the Safeway with art samples, so they did the decoration themselves Lifeinthefridge sent the photo of the yummy-looking carrot cake, describing it as a "combination of Olimar & pikmin (Brawl) and Portal," but admitting the visuals didn't go very well.

Either way, I want a slice. But only if it's 100 percent lard icing.

[Thanks to Lifeinthefridge!]

From here on out, GameCakes' unique coverage of all things interactively epicurious well be bolstered by Kotaku's in-depth, up to date coverage of the video game cake scene, backed by their industry clout and trademark wit and charm.

Rejoice, for a new age of gaming cakes is upon us!

Crap, Kotaku Purchases GameCakes.com [GameCakes.Com]

According to Lafemmereaper:

I wanted the icing to be black, however I settled for grey - the black colouring got so messy (as I watched somebody else get black staining on their hands...that wouldn't wash off for two days...)

It still took me three weeks just to get it to the right grey colour.

Before you DDR freaks criticize that the speakers are not meant to be that way, I was trying to stay true to the machine, but icing bags are awfully hard to control when you are learning to decorate a cake for the first time. The arrows on the screen were all piped on when the cake was standing up - ie. it was vertical. I also realise that the red "bars" (those 3D curvy bits at the front) should have a black bit on them, but I've left that off as it was too complicated to stick on (the black icing didn't want to stick to anything.)

Thunderous applause!

DDR Cabinet [That Girl's Site]

My attempt at a Nintendo Wii cake and you can eat it Martha Stewart

The big cake is called the Bloody Mess cake, and features happy-go-lucky mascot Vault Boy shooting another Vault Boy in the head. YAY! Accompanying this masterpiece were two slightly more mundane cakes, which we were allowed to eat.

The assembled press at the after presser party in Washington DC were in awe of the magnificent creation, which Bethesda's VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines said was inspired by the Food Network's Ace of Cakes as well as Gamecakes.com. One attending press member was so enraptured they were heard to exclaim, "I want to taste Vault Boy in my mouth." Now that's love right there.

Reader Mario P. sent in pictures of this Goomba cake his girlfriend made for him the other day. While not reaching the heights seen in some of our technically brilliant game cakes, Mario notes that she made it "for no reason at all!", so I have to give credit for some on-the-fly artistic impulses. Maggie Greene

For a while, it seemed like we were posting game cakes every damn day. It actually got so bad that I begged for a game cake ban. Didn't happen, but eventually, the game cakes kinda petered out. We haven't posted a cake in a while, so here goes...

This was done at a baker in Mumbai. Over at game site GameGuru, Ratnaraaj Parekh blogs, "She [the baker] was a little bit skeptical about making it. Yeah, it is understood as she mostly gets orders for cakes that are in shapes of wrestlers, sports stars or animated characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. We literally had to explain, what Gears of War was, to her." Nice cake, but that logo keeps making me say "Eat shit and die" over and over again. Saying it right now, actually! Brian Ashcraft

Gears Cake [GameGuru]

While I was looking over Bungie's most recent weekly update, I scrolled all the way to the bottom and found this awesome picture. A fan made these great Mr. Chief cupcakes and sent a photo to Bungie's Frankie who had this to say

A reader we shall call Alkaline Black somehow convinced his GF to make Mr. Chief cupcakes. I for one do not wish to enjoy the creamy filling, but they are kinda awesome...

Agreed, Frankie. Something about that nuclear green icing makes one a little queasy. Flynn De Marco

Mister Cupcake [Sweet Shock, Thanks Jared!]