Our first thought upon seeing this very cool hack was "that's awesome." Our second thought was "do you have to blow on it to make it work?"

BenHeck.com forum member "darkeru" created this inventive new take on a home made NES portable, which manages to squeeze all of the 8-bit dynamo's guts into a 4.1" by 5.5" space ... with a backlit LCD display. We just had a third thought: what happens when you connect it to this portable NES?

[Via Hack a Day]

All right, we'll admit that headline is a little inaccurate. The heavily modified Super Mario Bros. cart shown above actually plays Japanese Famicom carts (like the not-at-all-bootleg Super Bros. 5), not the slightly larger American NES carts. Semantics aside, we're sure you'll share our sense of awe at the accomplishment of fitting an entire video game system into what, at one point, was used to hold the data for a single game.

All the pieces are there, believe it or not, including A/V outputs, a svelte power switch, and two controller ports sticking out at the bottom of the cartridge. The machine seems like a one-of-a-kind hack, and doesn't look like it's going to be sold any time soon. It's a shame, too ... we' d love to get our hands on one of these, if only so we could plug in our Flash Memory PowerPak via an adapter to create the ultimate NES-cartridge-shaped hacking monstrosity.

[Via Engadget]

The half-baked, non sequitur style of Adult Swim prevails in this trailer for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Zombie Ninja Pro-Am. They couldn't even resize footage from different sources to be the same resolution. That's the Adult Swim seal of approval.

Strangely -- like some of those cartoon shows the kids are into -- the trailer comes off as engaging and funny. There's golf cart racing, a helpless Carl taking the detectives' abuse, Mooninites, and very little actual golf. Hopefully the actual game will strike a similar balance.

See the trailer after the break.

You young whippersnappers today have it so easy. Hard drives... downloadable content... power buttons right on your the wireless controller! Back in my day you actually had to get up and put a cartridge in the system when you wanted a new game. Of course, that's not so easy for me anymore, what with the rheumatism and all. And don't get me started on blowing in the dang things ...

What's that? You say there's a new flash cart that lets you store multiple NES games on a single cartridge? You say you can put hundreds of ROMs on a standard CompactFlash card and play them through the standard NES hardware? You say my days of getting up to put in Clu Clu Land are over?

We'll see about that. I'll just adjust the old InterWeb browser and ... $135! Do ya think, I'm made of money? Back in my day $135 would buy you a brand new Cadillac sedan with enough left over for a fancy dinner at Roxy's. Why even today I could use that money to buy 57 27 [update: us old folks make typos too] legally downloaded NES games for my Wii. Stop wasting my time.

[Via insertcredit]

We used to jam the game all the way back, force it all the way down, shove (of all things) one of those plastic SNES cart covers in there to keep it in place -- and then (as seen above) feverishly press 'Reset' until that sucka started up. Other techniques?

See also: How did you blow your NES cartridge?

Known only as "drx," some mysterious mage has resurrected a Sonic the Hedgehog 2 prototype cart and promptly dumped it (for emulation). It's an early build of Sega's sequel that's more akin to the first game than to the final version of Sonic 2. Can you spot the differences?

It's been suggested that this prototype is the same alpha build that was featured in several episodes of Nick Arcade. Another early build, often referred to as Sonic 2 Beta, was stolen from a toy show in New York back in '92. The cart was pirated and sold as a final version in parts of Asia and Brazil, despite only featuring four semi-playable levels.