Big Pickles

[Warning: this post is chock full of Nintendo, although I will try to keep discussion of Pokemon to a minimum.]

Owing to the generosity of the Blockburger clan, my kids have been glued to the Wii since Christmas morning. Their favorite game on the Gamecube was Super Smash Brothers Melee, and so it should come as no surprise that they are just as excited about the Wii reboot of the title, Super Smash Brothers Brawl. (It's only a matter of time before Super Smash Brothers Nuclear Annihilation, isn't it? Back in my day we were satisfied with Super Smash Brothers Fisticuffs, and its sequel, Super Smash Brothers Donnybrook.)

Personally, I don't get the appeal of these games, and I'm pretty into video games myself. But that's kids these days. If you aren't familiar, these games feature characters from all over the Nintendo universe fighting one another for trophies, or points, or something. You would have to be a serious Nintendo junkie to actually recognize all these characters, though, so the game serves as a pretty nifty marketing tool for Nintendo to introduce a generation of kids to characters they may have missed while they were busy not being born yet.

So it was with my kids and Starfox. They had grown to like the character on the Gamecube version of the game, but the Wii version actually includes a snippet of the old Starfox gameplay, which is kind of a 3D futuristic dogfighting thing. The kids fell in love with that and wanted more. As luck would have it, the Wii allows you to download games from older consoles, so it wasn't long before the boys were playing Starfox 64 like it was 1997.

That's when I started seeing these Lego formations all over the house.

On the printer:


On the piano:


And more of a minimalist installation:


I assume these are Starfox characters flying around in formation. I like how they chose a basic design that could be reproduced with ease.