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Remember that set of minimalist video game character images featured here several months ago? The collection broke down familiar faces like Pikachu, Kratos, and Street Fighter's Vega into simple shapes and colors as an experiment to show how recognizable their designs are with gamers.

Spurred by recent attention from video game sites, illustrator Ashley Browning (an artist for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe) added four new iconic designs to the set -- Mario, Wario, Luigi, and Waluigi. I never noticed the differences in Mario and Luigi's mustaches, but I totally see it now!

Ashley's selling several of his previous designs (Donkey Kong, Jigglypuff, Kirby, Pikachu, and E.Honda) as t-shirts. He used to also sell posters, but those don't seem to be available anymore. You can see the full collection of "video game minimalism" artwork on his Flickr set.

As one of her assignments for the Afterschool Comics Workshop she runs, graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier (Baby-sitters Club, Smile) asked her 6th graders to create a short comic based on their favorite video game.

Most of the 11 year olds seem enamored with Kirby, but a couple used chose "high definition games" for their inspiration, like Alessandro with his Blazing Angels strip (above) and Nuriden's Metal Gear Solid 4 scene (below). Wait, aren't these titles rated Teen and Mature? Should they really be playing these games?

Anyway, you can see all five of the comics at Life Meter. And if you liked the two I've shared with you in this post, make sure to head over there and leave the students feedback!

Some people really dig genre pieces, works that stick to convention and don't really deviate from the norm. You experience them because you enjoy the tropes of the genre and the familiarity of it all. This game is a standard hop-and-bop platformer, but if you have a platformer fetish like I do you'll most likely squeeze some enjoyment from it. Obake takes elements from Mario and Kirby and mixes them in a not-too-radical fashion, but does it with a decent amount of polish and a fair amount of charm.

You play as the titular Obake (Japanese for 'thing that changes') and take him through a six-world romp. The aesthetic is slightly off-kilter retro, and should appeal to fans of the 16-bit era. In your normal ghost-like form you can only move and jump, but if you press the down arrow you can possess an enemy. When you do so you gain their mobility and attack patterns, each of varying strength. The game takes Kirby's absorption motif a step further by also giving you that enemy's health. This coupled with generally low difficulty makes the game fairly easy, but it's fun to mess around with the various forms and explore the levels. The six worlds go a long way as well, so if you're into this sort of thing there's a lot of content to be played.

Nothing revolutionary, but a nice way to kill a couple hours.

And because I like you guys so much, here's an extra game at no additional charge: http://mogera.jp/gameplay?gid=gm0000000345
You play an albino deer,tripping on some psychedelic, that throws rocks at police. Enjoy.

Ignoring the fact that nearly two years have passed since Cloverfield's box office release, and the idea that spoofing the movie now is long past passe, the Mascot Wedding crew parodied the "reality film's" style, replacing its mysterious and disappointing antagonist with familiar monsters we can cheer on: George, Lizzie the Dinosaur, and Ralph from Rampage.

The group produced the video as part of "The Uwe Boll Totally Awesome Videogames Filmmaking Competition", presented by G4's Attack of the Show and Fantastic Fest. Participants shot movie trailers for potential films inspired by video games -- two finalists will be sent to the Fantastic Fest film festival, where Uwe Boll will announce and congratulate the winner (um, and that's pretty much the prize, other than the paid flight/room/food/show badges).

This is the only decent submission I've seen from the contest so far, but this goofy Time Crisis trailer is funny just for the brief scene of three dudes doing cartwheels and shooting each other in a cramped room, all of them failing to hit anything:

Oh, and on the topic of Cloverfield, there's another, longer parody (also better produced) from Seakitten Collective making the rounds, again replacing the movie's monster with video game characters -- Samus, Luigi, Pyramid Head, LocoRoco, Kirby, Space Invaders, and many others. Definitely worth checking out if you liked that first video above!