Link roundup

1. The established video game reviewing press has known for at least a week that Brink was a disaster.

2. Steel Divers, which is supposed to really show the 3DS off, was essentially completed for the DS and then repurposed for the 3DS.

3. Captain America wallpaper.

Art Contest: Fix the Nintendo 3DS's red screen of death

UPDATE: It was tough to pick a winner, and of the artists I asked for advice, everyone had a different favorite. But I picked Cormac McEvoy's Dr. Mario as the grand prize winner. Thanks everyone, I'll post a new contest soon.



This month's art contest was improving the Nintendo's 3DS's red screen of death. Below are the wonderful entries. I'll announce a winner later today.



Chris Beaumont.



Joe D!.





Blayne Scott.




Helder Silva.




Lee Jackson.




Cormac McEvoy.




Ben Knight.

*Buy the 3DS at Amazon.

Super Mario Converse All-Stars

Super Mario Chuck Taylor's by Converse Japan for Mario's 25th Anniversary. Via.

*Previously: High-heeled Converse All-Stars.

Link roundup

1. From LA Magazine:

My parents both worked at the park in the summer of 1959, a year into their marriage and just four years after Disneyland opened. My dad was assigned to the cars of Autopia (back then kids would frequently knock out their teeth on steering wheels)

2. Zero Punctuation reviews the 3DS (and hates it).

3. Phil Saunders has been posting lots of Tron Legacy concept art.

*Buy Disneyland posters at eBay.

Super Mario Bros. wedding celebration video

John Fabry turned a Mario Bros. level into a video tribute for his friends' wedding.

And speaking of Nintendo, don't forget to participate in this month's art contest - - Fix Nintendo 3DS's red screen of death.

Illustration roundup

Mario vs. Somic by Bocognani Florent - - currently up for vote at Threadless.



Little Red Riding hood gets a Japanese makeover by Anna-Maria Jung - - also currently up for vote at Threadless.



Really looking forward to the Groon/Conan crossover featuring panels drawn by Sergio Aragones and Thomas Yeates.



Cover for an upcoming Penny Arcade collection. (Half off at Amazon.)



Operative by Yvan Quinet, who is looking for commissions. Via.

*Buy Groo toys at eBay.

Super Mario propaganda posters

Super Mario propaganda posters on sale here.

*Buy propaganda posters at Amazon.

Intense Wii play

"Wii Wife" by Andy Shaw.

*Buy sketchbooks at eBay.

Link roundup

1. Yahtzee Croshow of Zero Punctuation participated in an ask me anything at Reddit. One notable comment:

Motion controls are a dead end and the industry has thankfully started to understand that. Nintendo's more recent first-party games have left the motion controller behind almost totally, or use it with no more depth than a token Sixaxis control.

Relatedly here's a great video where he responded to hate mail he received after panning Smash Bros. Brawl.

2. From a much longer article about politics in Italy:

When unification came, it was led not by the major city-states of the past but by the half-French region of Piedmont, an area peripheral to Italian history and with a long record of rounding up and executing Italian nationalists. Nor had Piedmont planned to annex the whole peninsula. Exploiting wars between France and Austria to acquire the rich northern part of the country, the Piedmontese king was faced with a startling fait accompli when the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, initially leading an expedition of only a thousand men, quite unexpectedly conquered the whole of Sicily and southern Italy. Garibaldi then offered the territory as a gift to the now enlarged Piedmont, which, as much to avoid the spread of republicanism as for any other reason, sent its armies south to meet him. On March 17, 1861, Italy became a single state under the Piedmontese crown.

The new country’s prospects were not encouraging. The vast majority of Italians had not sought unity and many had fought against it; those who supported it were divided between republicans and monarchists, and some were not so much nationalist as internationalist, working toward a united socialist Europe. An estimated 97.5 per cent of the population didn’t speak the national language. (Most spoke one of scores of local dialects.) The Catholic Church, which before unification had governed territories in central Italy, remained implacably opposed to the new state and for decades instructed practicing Catholics not to vote in elections. Those in the north had little idea how to govern the economically backward south. In short, in Graziano’s view, it was a complete fluke that the country came into being at all. The fact that it survived, he argues, had far more to do with the fraught power games among France, England, and Austria than with any real will of the Italians to exist as a nation.

Via.

3. Funny 404 error page (ignore the instructions and scroll down).

Art Contest: Fix the Nintendo 3DS's red screen of death

Apparently this is the Nintendo 3DS's red screen of death. Kind of hard to believe that in 2011, Nintendo would design such a cold message instead of its own version of the Fail Whale.

Your challenge is to create a delightful error page for the Nintendo 3DS. As inspiration, check out the creatures The Oatmeal created for Tumblr:



Submit as many entries as you'd like. All entries must be submitted by midnight Los Angeles time Sunday May 8, 2011. Best entry will win a $100 Threadless credit.

And of course, you can buy the 3DS at Amazon.