This shirt is based on the upcoming DS game Tingle's Love Balloon Trip, the sequel to 2006's never-released-in-America Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland.

Not much more to add to that, really. You either agree that The Love Is Mightier Than The Sword, or you don't.

[Tingle @ King of Games]

First appearing in Nintendo 64 game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Tingle will starring in Color Changing Tingle's Love Balloon Trip, the sequel to 2006's DS release Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland. While the theme of the prequel was "money", the theme for the upcoming Tingle is, wait for it, "woman".

The other title is a DSiWare game called Too Much Tingle Pack and is a set of "mini tools" to delight and amuse. There's a fortune telling mini-game, a "Tingle timer", a Tingle calculator, a marionette Tingle dancer and a Tingle coin toss. It's already available for download for 500 DS Points.

There's a brief cameo from Tingle, there's a fortune teller surrounded by skulls, and there's a section where you can write in and say what's on your mind. And that's it. A trailer will go live on the 18th, which is next Thursday.

Could it be a sequel to Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland, a quirky but somewhat excellent RPG for the DS that was released in Japan and Europe, but not the US? Let's hope so!

Tingle - ! [Nintendo]

The newest issue of Famitsu teases Tingle's return, offering little more than an elfin sprite, the text "Fairy?" in Japanese, Nintendo of Japan's official URL and a platform—the Nintendo DS. Tingle's already been given star treatment in two DS games, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland and Tingle's Balloon Fight DS, the latter a Club Nintendo of Japan exclusive.

A new Tingle game may seem like the perfect fit on Nintendo's downloadable DSiWare service, but this teaser appears to be for a full-fledged title. Perhaps this one will come to America. Even if it doesn't, we're likely to see this haunting scenario played out once again.

Nothing on the official Nintendo site yet, but perhaps when the mag hits newsstands later this week, we'll know more.

Nothing says I love you like a rectangular printed sheet of inkjet paper containing romantic message from a random Nintendo character. The folks at Play-Nintendo have realized this, and in honor of Valentine's Day they are creating new special printable cards every day until the 14th, each containing a different Nintendo game personality. So far they've featured Samus, Tingle, Tom Nook, Link, and my personal favorite so far, Navi, seen left.

The cards range from eh to pretty amusing, and are probably the best way to tell a gaming friend that they are worth 1/6 of a piece of paper and some ink. I really wouldn't recommend giving one of these to your significant other, as Play-Nintendo suggests, unless you are 8 years old or in a special ed program, which oddly enough covers a large portion of our readership. Not you, of course. Michael Fahey

Nintendo Valentines [Play-Nintendo]

With the advent of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, one classic Zelda character has been all but forgotten about. Of course, I'm talking about that green suited, ugly as sin, fairy wanna be, Tingle.

Torokun, who claims not to be neither a drug user or gay, has made this amazing piece of Tingle fan art. He felt that poor, maligned Tingle needed a slightly more masculine image and so inspired him to create this hilarious and grotesque Tingle meets Shadow of the Colossus image. At first, I was little disturbed by the thought that Tingle was taking a piss on poor tiny Link. Then I realized it was just Link's sword pointing to the colossal Tingle's "power spot", which is in the end, I think, even more disturbing. Flynn De Marco

Tingle Fanart [Torokun's Deviant Art Gallery Thanks, Tim!]

Whoever told you it was gay enough in here was lying. And by "here" I mean both Kotaku and the United States of America.

Luckily, GayGamer thinks they have recourse in the form of a petition to bring Tingle's Freshly-Picked Rose-Colored Rupee Land to our crass American shores. Now, I'm the first to titter behind my fan at the efficacy of online petitions, but "gay" is a synonym for "happy" for a reason.

I signed it. Eliza Gauger

GayGamer Petition for Tingling [The Petition Site]

The cam isn't too shaky, and the pelvic thrusts are absolutely authentic: could this be a tip-o-the-assless-chaps to supergreen Japanese television personality Hard Gay? God I hope so.

Game|Life says:

I've been continuing my excursion into the off-kilter world of Tingle's Rose-Colored Rupee Whatever. I bring to you this evening news that there is, in the game's second level, a character whose overtones make the green-spandexed Tingle look positively hetero.

It's Duke, the short-legged-no-shirt-overalls-straight-out-of-The Village People construction worker! Who communicates primarily by way of thrusting his pelvis.

Eliza Gauger

Tingle RPG: Gay as in Happy [Game|Life, via 4 Color Rebellion]

Tingle At Akiba 2 Go

Now he's taking that knowledge of Japanese and video games and finally doing something good with it. He's giving us impressions of the newly released DS game, Tingle's Freshly-Picked Rose-Colored Rupee Land.

If you thought the title was bizarre, you might not be prepared for the gameplay and the story. According to Kohler, Tingle's on a quest to get to Rupee Land where he'll gorge on food and spend time with tons of lovely ladies. Yeah, ladies. *cough*

There's a bizarre battle system and a bargaining calculator and all sorts of middle-aged fairy wackiness. Let's hope Nintendo of America brings this stateside so we can all get together in the desert, ingest copious amounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and sort out this whole Tingle thing. Michael McWhertor

Tingle's Rupee Land: First Impressions!

This Tingle trailer is from DarkZero, and what's that I see? Could it be...yes, I think it is! Giant undead pirate skeleton boss!

Perhaps a new microtransaction model could be constructed: if one does not want to play the whole game, they can buy the boss battles individually. The idea has merit... Eliza Gauger

Ummmm, what the hell? I didn't know Tingle was in Enchanted Arms? Seriously, what the hell? I'm officially disturbed, officially. Brian Crecente

Tingle is everyone's favorite intoxicated, insanely giggling pixy. With a nose that looks as if it has spent much time buried deep and snorting in a pillow made of blow, he's vaguely nightmarish. His game, literally translated from Japanese, is called Tingle's Freshly-Picked Pink Coloured-Ruppee Land. These facts are all unrelated... logical non-sequiturs. Which is fine, because blinking incredulously and not quite following what's going on is the only way a sane person can react to Tingle, or view this commercial for his upcoming, implausibly titled game. Florian Eckhardt

Tingle is a small, masculine fairy who shares a name with a common auto-erotic accessory aimed at women. His game is called Tingle's Freshly-Picked Pink-Coloured Rupee Land... a clear euphemism for Tingle's Freshly-Picked Clitoris. You'd have to be a lunatic to ignore all that and come up with the notion that Tingle's gay.

Still, Nintendo has apparently been keeping abreast of the whole "Is Tingle A Homosexual?" debate and has decided to more scientifically gauge American gamer's reactions to Tingle via a poll on their website. "Do you think he's gay?" is not a question on their politically-correct questionnaire. But here's an unrelated question:

Rupee Land incorporates a unique gameplay system in which everything costs Rupees — the trick is that you never know how you need to pay. What do you think of this system?

I think the exact same thing of it now that I thought as a backpacker of a similar system being employed all throughout the Middle East: it totally sucks. Florian Eckhardt

In following with the kerfuffle following GayGamer's posting of the Top Twenty Gayest Game Characters, I bring you the rebuttal from a blogger that has a problem "with people unnecessarily labeling fictious characters as gay".

LJ user Count_Zeroor, pictured at right falling feet-first out of a portal into a White Stripes concert while evacuating a monster-fur bezoar, maintains that even though the King of the Cosmos wears a skintight unitard, has fancy facial hair, impeccable makeup, and sneezes rainbows, he's just not gay.

Same goes for Bloody Roar's Fox, who, if the Count remembers correctly, is female.

And Tingle? No, he's definitely not gay...you see, Nintendo is a family-centric company, and would never expose children to that sort of sexuality. Tingle is just "silly".

The count admits that a few on the list might be gay, maybe.

There are some characters on there that are actually homosexual. For instance, #12, Vamp from Metal Gear Solid II, does kind of work, if only because vampires do have a fair amount of eroticism attached to them. The drinking of blood and the biting of the neck has been described by not just literary critics, but by literary scholars as a [sic] erotic act, and in Bram Stoaker's Dracula (not just the film, but the novel as well), Dracula's bite causes his victim to experience a feeling of ecastacy [sic].

Not just critics, but scholars as well (literary ones), agree that vampires are gay because it's erotic when they bite you. Which I agree with, as just last night I had to ask Florian which compartment of my makeup case was appropriate for the storage of my fangs. He maintained that they should be stored with toothbrushes, et al. Eliza Gauger

Citing his afinity to wear green pantsuits with red man-panties on the outside, his neatly-manicured wispy facial hair, and his habit of keeping the company of other swishing men, he's pretty much a lock. Appearing later this year in a game called Freshly-picked Tingle's Rose Colored Rupee Land isn't helping his case for heterosexuality either.

Check out the full list, one that borders on NSFW simply based on Nagare Namikawa of Capcom's Rival Schools 2 well-stocked banana hammock. Michael McWhertor

Top 20 Gayest Video Game Characters

Take Two, publisher of Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, received it's ruling from the Federal Trade Commission over the infamous "Hot Coffee" hidden sexual content incident. What was the punishment? Nothing really. Just a warning from the government. Still, Take Two did incur almost $25 million in losses in conjunction with the product's recall.

Footage of the Tomb Raider remake for PSP snuck out this week, much to the ire of publisher Eidos. First, the original Google Video was pulled, then all YouTube videos. It's looking good, but this was surely not how the Eidos marketing department wanted to reveal the game.

In other handheld news, every Nintendo fan's ultimate fantasy has been realized. Legend of Zelda alum Tingle is getting his own RPG, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Pink-Coloured Rupee Land! Surely, the title will be Americanized for its Western release, but we still expect the same effeminate mannerisms and copious prancing about for which Tingle is famous.

Sure, it's fun (and easy) to hate on 50 Cent's video game, Bulletproof. So fun, in fact, that the lead designer of the game let slip his distaste for working on such titles. Hey, I don't like showing up for my weekday job either, but these $200 jeans aren't gonna buy themselves.

What's the benefit to owning a PlayStation 3 on day one? Bragging rights, of course. Also, you may be the owner of a fully backward compatable PS2 playing device, sans software emulation, as the PS2 chipset may be included in earlier versions of the next-gen console. Suspect? Maybe, but who can guess what Sony will do these days?

Do you, or someone you know, have a World of Warcraft addiction? Now, there's help. Amsterdam-based Smith & Jones Addiction Consultants are set to open a detox center for console and PC gaming "addicts". Doesn't anyone just do heroin anymore?

Finally, it seemed that last week was full of DIY content. From the Xman portable to this homemade DDR pad to the Freetar beta release to this mutant Lego-Xbox-SNES monstrosity, it seems that gamers are more content than ever to make their own fun.

Contrary to 1Up's report that it will be a Zelda spin-off title in which Tingle "explores Rupee Land and converses with the townsfolk", we have it on good authority that Freshly-picked Tingle's Pink-coloured Ruppee Land is actually an upcoming DS game about the androgyne fairy making his or her way through a fearsome valley of anthropomorphical clitorises. What else could explain that frankly incredible title?

Ah, the untranslatable Japanese idiom! So pregnant with super fun innuendo and sometimes Super Nintendo! Where would Internet humor writing be without you? No doubt forced to focus even more than we already do on the strange fetish videos of school girls being molested by a mollusck tentacle snaking out of the toilet drain that do seem to trickle out of the Land of the Rising Sun (largely thanks to distribution by the always kind Brian Ashcraft!)

The real problem is that the Japanese come up with these just amazing names for their games and then some gray ascetic at the NoA home offices decides to Strunk it all up to something grim and joyless like Tingle's Quest or The Adventure of Tingle. Seriously, five bucks says the localized version of Freshly-picked Tingle's Pink-coloured Ruppee Land is called one or the other. Florian Eckhardt

Dragon Quest, Tingle RPGs for DS [1UP]