Hasta La Gadget!

Now that it’s after Thanksgiving, it’s officially okay to talk about Christmas, and put up the tree. But even if you picked out a festive blue spruce, do you know how you’re going to decorate it? Well, you could put some ordinary department store ornaments on it, or you could go full on geek.

This set of Donkey Kong themed ornaments ($60) comes from Etsy artist LighterCases, and it includes everything you need to recreate the classic Nintendo arcade game on your Christmas tree. The set of 12 pieces includes girders, ladders, barrels, Jumpman and his Princess. To top things off, it comes with a Donkey Kong tree topper. Each piece is made from melted Perler beads to form the pixels.

If you’re not into Donkey Kong, their shop has got lots of other fun holiday ornament sets, including Super Mario Bros., Excitebike, Zelda, Tetris, Mega Man, and even some South Park themed sets among others.

If you think the life-sized treasure chest is too big or expensive, check out ThinkGeek’s tiny version. It measures just 4″ wide, 4.5″ tall and 3″ deep. But what it lacks in size it makes up for in fanfare. It lights up and emits a chiptune tone when opened.

These images should give you an idea of how small it is:

Here’s a quick video demo of the chest:

ThinkGeek is selling the Legendary 8-Bit Treasure Chest for $30 (USD).

[via Gamefreaks]

A couple of weeks ago we checked out 80s Tees’ kick ass Voltron hoodie. It turns out the apparel shop also has something for Transformers fans. This officially licensed Starscream hoodie is based on the treacherous Decepticon’s design in the original Transformers cartoon.

As you can see the hoodie has wings that make it look like a wingsuit. But that doesn’t bother me; what bothers me is the canopy detail on the front of the hoodie. It will make skinny people look even thinner; just look at the dude in the pictures. I guess only robust people are worthy of wearing Starscream.

Practice your screechy voice and order the Starscream hoodie from 80s Tees for just $60 (USD).

[via GeekTyrant]

Looking back at the Atari 2600, it really wasn’t very good until Activision came along and raised the bar for graphics and sound for the early 8-bit console. To commemorate these classic games, Chicago Toy Collector Dan Polydoris created this nifty set of custom action figures.

The set of five action figures got their start as various G.I. Joe characters, but they’re now sporting that perfect Activision 8-bit look. While Pitfall Harry is surely the most recognizable of the bunch, the other games were all pretty solid too – especially H.E.R.O. – though I never knew its protagonist’s name was Roderick.

Awesome job, Dan. These are all quite special. I only wish you would make a little burglar dude for Kaboom!

[via it8bit]

If you love staring at gadget teardowns, check out photographer Brandon Allen’s Deconstructed. It’s a series of images of dissected video game controllers, their parts neatly arranged for the camera. All of the controllers in Brandon’s series were donated and heavily used (some of them don’t work anymore) hence the dust and worn out parts.

I would’ve loved to see labels for the parts as well, but I guess they would only clutter the images.

There are 18 controllers from different consoles in Brandon’s series; you can see the rest here and here. If you really want to take a closer look at the parts you’d be better off looking at the desktop wallpaper-sized images, which Brandon so generously made available for free. You can also buy prints of the dissected NES, SNES, PS3 and Xbox 360 controllers from his online shop.

[via Laughing Squid]