Roomba Pac-Man? Done before, but mostly as a cosmetic enhancement. Here it’s taken to the next level — five Roombas (Roombi?) engaged in a contest of Pac-Man with programmed “chase” and “escape” AI.

Roomba Pac-Man [site, via RipTen]

Osama calls it The NEStickle (not to be confused with the NES emulator) because, well, why not. It’s not like FightDeck or TurboConsole’s gonna make this look any less weird. The NES controller houses the stick’s USB cable, and it’s compatible with all consoles and PC.

Osama says Nicolas, his friend, had to carve a reinforced interior from wood “using nothing but his laser vision. This insures that I don’t over-zealously cave the NES in while pressing hard on those buttons when I’m losing badly to a cheap-ass who won’t stop throwing me.”

You can see more pics of the NEStickle and its construction over at the link.

Introducing the NEStickle! [Towards Mecca]

Perhaps a little late for Halloween, but you can use this modded Mario costume for inspiration and get to work on yours for next year. Certain motions while wearing the suit trigger fireball, jumping and 1Up sounds, among others.

The get-up was built by an Adafruit Wave Shield user, connecting the gadget to an Arduino system. I know none of what that means, really, but it allows for the motion-activated sounds. And the soundtrack of course is customizable. So you can bet your bippy someone’s dreaming up a Mega Man version as we speak.

Arduino Inside a Mario Costume [Adafruit via Gizmodo]

As Joe and everyone who’s seen this point out, that’s rather like picking 1234 for your ATM PIN. Because the first thing anyone would do with an idle, disconnected NES controller is punch in the Konami Code out of boredom. Joe shows how it works, and so I assume the code can be changed up. But whatever its utility, it’s damn cool and a triumph of mod ingenuity.

Retro Gamer Drive (Konami Code NES Controller Flash Drive) from ProtoDojo on Vimeo.

Retro GamerDrive [ProtoDojo via Gizmodo]

What? Don’t tell me you can’t see it, too? The U.K. games festival Gamecity recently commissioned this and two other works – iconic games animated with just 15 pixels.

Explains Gamecity:

This year we commissioned design collective the Alaskan Military School to produce an animation package to communicate the ethos of the event. We recently launched a series of viral spots that are the first part of this collection of new work. They each take one of our favourite games at GameCity HQ and translate them into a 15 pixel grid. It’s Hyper pixel minimalism! We realised that you can communicate the essence of great, iconic games with minimal visual information. I think this approach echoes the values of the festival, to take a sideways look at games, and foster a creative space.

Gamecity squared will be Oct. 27 to Oct. 31 in Nottingham, England. At the link, you can see also Parappa and Noby Noby Boy done in the same style.

Parappa and Street Fighter in Just 15 Pixels [Tim Maughan Books]

On his Flickr stream, KodyKoala describes his Guts-Dozer as kit-bashed from the parts of a “Mech Hulk Top” and a “GI Joe vehicle that I used to have as a kid”. I think that’s the “Wolverine”, the missile launcher that Cover Girl used to drive. Once again, I can’t remember the formula for circumference of a circle, but I can recall that. And that’s probably why I write about video games now.

As for HRH Hippo, I thought that 200-pounds-of-suet physique looked familiar. “I used a BLOB build [from the X-Men continuity] figure as the base, and unfortunately I had to make the legs not movable to make it look right.”

Custom Guts-Dozer figure by Donald “KodyKoala” Kennedy [TinyCartridge via Go Nintendo]

Team Ironheade of San Francisco took top honors and a VIP NASCAR experience for their winning entry. What’s more, their speed record is an all-time track and event best. Team member Christine Phelan says that hunk of debris clinging to the front “is actually a piece of the speaker we busted through at the start of our skit.” In profile, however, it looks kind of like a nasty gargoyle face, so all’s still cool.

And here’s a video. Ironheade’s epic run (and speaker smash) is toward the end:

Really though, a 160GB USB hard drive, or Super Mario Bros. 3? Is it really that easy a decision? I know what I can go out and buy tomorrow.

SMB 3 External Hard Drive Sends My Gaming Heart Aflutter [GeekSugar via Gizmodo]

“8-Bit Trip,” according to its Swedish creators took 1,500 hours to animate. They pay respect to everything from International Karate on a tape drive to Tetris on the NES, with Pong and Pac-Man in between.

The music was written by Daniel Larsson and the animation was done by Tomas Redigh, of the Swedish electronica duo Rymdreglage.

8-Bit Trip [YouTube]

Joseph I. Hodas was a guy who never really knew me, and never knew he was in a video game. He was a professional acquaintance of a friend of mine, and we loved how the New York Times would insist on quoting him by his full name, with initial, instead of just “Joe Hodas.” So, as an inside joke, I put his full name on the back of a jersey of a team I created in NCAA 2004. He was the backup QB. He lost his job to a sophomore (incidentally, the writer who profiled Brian for 5280 Magazine.)

I later heard Joe was kind of disappointed about getting benched in the middle of a championship season, and I honestly felt bad for that. Like he’d been the unwitting butt of a joke. So when EA Sports asked for names, I submitted his and hoped for the best. EA Sports reminded that you were submitting names only for “potential use.”

Who knows, how, exactly, his last name got in there. I do know I’d never heard it said in previous versions. But I’d like to think that in a recording studio somewhere, maybe Florida, or New York or the West Coast, Brad Nessler of ESPN sat down, maybe cleared his throat, looked at a piece of paper and a pronunciation guide, and said “Hodas.”

And in a game on Friday, Virginia Tech vs. the University of Denver (above), I got to hear “Hodas comes to the line under centre.” As silly as it is, it was a game-pausing, fist-throwing moment. Joe, we’re going to the title game this year, and we’re doing it with you in the huddle.