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The "Nintendo Icon" Amazon Gold Box has gone live, so it's time for those of you who can shop at Amazon.com to get your credit cards at the ready. With nine different deals on the table today, you might just find something that appeals to you.

The "Deal of the Day" is Super Smash Bros. Brawl for $25.99, which really leaves you with no excuse not to buy it. The lightning deals are where the excitement is always at, though, and there are eight of them that will cycle throughout the day.

Before we get into what's on the list, we must say that the sales are slightly disappointing. Maybe it's just us, but we wish Amazon had included more second-party titles. After all, such games are considered "Nintendo Icons," too. There's one title in particular that we feel is sorely missing -- but we digress.

To see Amazon's hints for the eight lightning deals, just click past the break.

Gamefly is having a sale on some of its used-but-in-great-condition games again, also offering free shipping to spice up the deal a bit. As always, we're passings these savings along to you, while picking out a few we think are worth highlighting for their respective prices:

• Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire for $12.99
  
• Dewy's Adventure for $14.99
  
• NiGHTS for $14.99
  
• Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law for $14.99
  
• Manhunt 2 for $14.99
  
• Victorious Boxers: Revolution for $15.99
  
• Soulcalibur Legends for $15.99
  
• Bleach: Shattered Blade for $17.99
  
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for $27.99
  
• Super Mario Galaxy for $36.99
  

Click on the picture or "source" link to see the full list of Wii games, but keep in mind that you might be able to find some of them cheaper elsewhere.

Balloon Pop!'s U.S. boxart was never the most eye-catching piece of work, a mistake that 505 Games was determined not to repeat when it launched the game in Europe last week. In place of Balloon Pop!'s forgettable NTSC art, the PAL edition features a shot of the game's hero hurtling through space beneath brightly colored letters, passing a lush planetoid covered in greenery on his way.

And if that all sounds extremely familiar, that's because it totally is, as one NeoGAFfer recently noticed. Whether intentionally or not, Balloon Pop! -- or just Pop! as it is known in Europe -- sports boxart that is eerily similar to that of this other game called Super Mario Galaxy. There's even a damn mushroom!

Suffice to say, Nintendo's crack legal team have been contacted. In an office located somewhere beneath Redmond, Washington, they wait. Suits pressed. Teeth bared. Preparing to feed.

Cory Barlog may have sneered at what he deemed to be Super Mario Galaxy's "vapid story," but game researcher and designer Douglas Wilson couldn't feel more differently. Writing for GameSetWatch, Wilson argues that Galaxy is not only the first Mario title to produce an engaging story, but that it addresses human tragedy more expertly than most other games.

To illustrate his point, Wilson draws on the story told by Princess Rosalina, whose life story is recounted throughout Galaxy. Although this narrative thread starts life as the kind of standard fare you'd expect from a Mario title, Rosalina's tale quickly becomes tragic, as she recalls how she realized her mother had passed away -- or, as she touchingly puts it, is "sleeping under the tree on the hill." Sad face.

As Wilson points out, this surprisingly poignant turn of events creates a pretty weird dichotomy. After all, Galaxy is a game where you fight a giant piranha plant in a diaper.

Mamma mia, that's a nice mod.

We'd expect no less from the ever-so-incredible Morpheon Mods crew, who've put together quite a nice collection of Wiis for us to gawk at. The Super Mario Galaxy theme of this particular mod, though, helps it rank as our favorite of the bunch.

The LEDs are a nice touch, especially the ones in the back-lit marquee, and we approve of the various sounds they've rigged to the console. We also like the twinkling stars effect -- simply awesome.

All in all, it's a stunning mod that can be yours if you have deep pockets, since it's up for auction on eBay. This is one auction that we won't mind seeing skyrocket, however, since a portion of the profits will be donated to Child's Play!



[Update: The eBay auction has been removed, for unknown reasons. If the item gets relisted, though, we'll be sure to update the post again with the new link!]

[Update 2: Yay! The auction was relisted and the eBay link above has been fixed. Or, you can just click here.]

As we've already established, we're not science people ('D' grade at GCSE Science, thank you). Bring up a subject such as photosynthesis, or the properties of sulfur dioxide, and it's likely you won't get much of a reply, short of us standing there and saying "buh?" like some slack-jawed, mouth-breathing farmhand.

In other words, Gamasutra's article on debunking the physics found in Super Mario Galaxy never stood a chance of entering our enfeebled brains and staying there. Oh, it definitely interested us, but terms such as "unit vector" and "collision mask" quickly appeared to make us feel like absolute thickos again. What we did pick up from the feature was that gravity can only exist in the real world on spherical surfaces, and that the laws of physics themselves were twisted to accommodate Galaxy's zany world of misshapen planetoids.

If you're one of those people who feels confident conducting conversations about "surface normals," give it a look.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl hung onto the top spot last week, but not by much. For the first time, the king of Nintendo fighters was actually close to the game behind it, with a lead of less than 10,000 units. Considering that Brawl has dominated for a month and is already over the million mark, though, we're not surprised to see a little less dominance from the title.

A lot of new software was released last week, which finally caused Super Mario Galaxy to fall out of the top thirty. Winning Eleven: Play Maker 2008 was the Wii's new game, debuting at the number six spot. Family Ski also managed to jump up five spots, despite the plethora of new titles.

On the hardware side, the Wii continues to reign in first place. The PSP and DS aren't too far behind, but the Wii is outselling the PS3 4:1 with the help of Brawl.

You can check out the listings and sales numbers -- they're posted after the break.

The Wii extended its hardware lead over the PSP this week (which dropped to third), as Smash Bros. continued to dominate in software. Family Ski fell out of the top ten, but still shows some legs at spot sixteen.

Predictably, Nintendo's big games (i.e., games with "Wii" in their titles) are still doing well on the charts. Super Mario Galaxy, which has been in danger of falling out of the top thirty, managed to hang in tough despite the big load of new releases littering the chart.

The Wii also had the second best showing of games this week, with six in the top thirty (the DS was first with fifteen). With the exception of Namco Bandai's Family Ski, though, they were all first party titles.

The hardware and software numbers are listed for your perusal after the break.

Yesterday's popular video demonstration of how Super Mario Galaxy would look on the SNES made us wish there really were 2D remakes of the 3D games we love. Wouldn't it be totally rad if Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 was recreated as a top-down shooter in the style of Medal of Honor: Infiltrator (GBA)? Or if Super Paper Mario was, uh ... Okay, so that example doesn't work.

What 3D titles, old and new, would you want to see turned into a 2D project?

If you've been keeping a keen eye on monthly NPD data, you might have realized that Super Mario Galaxy sales have been dipping in the U.S. And by dipping, we mean plunging.

Before you have a stroke, or perhaps get your fighting gloves on, just look at the numbers. While January's Galaxy sales were by no means modest (172,000 for the month), they were a huge drop from December's (1.4 million) and November's before that (1.12 million). The game also fell from it's comfy position at second place, ending up in the sixth spot for January.

So, what gives? Is it just a matter of holiday madness (not to mention, other games stepping up), or is there more to it than that?

Fortunately, there are analysts around to figure out this kind of thing, so that we don't have to. Jesse Divnich from the simExchange logically reckons that the low sales for Galaxy correlate to the low sales of Wii hardware. Because Wiis have been in such short supply, people haven't been buying them, and thus haven't been buying Galaxy either.

Damn that hardware, always keeping Mario down. Hopefully once Nintendo stops diverting Wiis to Japan, we'll see Galaxy rise again. Yet, by then, there will be only one thing on the minds of Wii owners -- you guessed it, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Although Galaxy won't be able to compete with the new game, we hope there's enough room for both to succeed in the charts.

As we informed you yesterday (and predicted last week), Super Smash Bros. Brawl ripped up the Japanese sales charts. Selling an incredible 820,000 copies in a mere four days, that's not a game to be messed with.

Some other Nintendo titles didn't fare as well, however. Super Mario Galaxy nearly fell out of the top thirty this week. Brawl, it seems, is starting to cannibalize Galaxy's sales. Wii Fit's streak as the number one game also ended with Brawl's success. Not only that, but Wii Fit was pushed to number five by the plethora of new games released last week. Most of the other Wii games got knocked down, too, like Wii Sports, Wii Play, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, and Mario Party.

Family Ski represented the top third-party Wii game this week, ending up at number twelve. That's not too shabby, especially considering that the game was rumored to have poor first-day sales.

Oh, and did we mention that the Wii was the top seller in hardware, for the second week in a row? We wonder how long Brawl will be able to keep it at the top.

The full hardware and software numbers are listed after the break, as usual.

When most gamers think of that sense of amazement the certain parts of Super Mario Galaxy seem to invoke, they attribute that moment to the Miyamoto touch, a direct result of the imaginative developer's attention and care. While it's a natural assumption to make, one shouldn't forget about Yoshiaki Koizumi, the director behind the critically-acclaimed platformer!

In a recent interview with Next-Gen, Koizumi championed the importance of surprising players: "If you think about games only as a thing that you interact with, you're missing the possibility of immersion. The inspirations that I tend to draw on for that all come from real life itself. Hiking on a mountain and seeing a cave and thinking about what's inside -- it's that sense of wonder and excitement I want players to feel."

Well, we certainly had a lot of that with just the Gusty Garden Galaxy!

Let's face it: the Japanese sales numbers for the week of 1/21 are just foreplay. What we really want to know is how Super Smash Bros. Brawl did, although rumors are coming in that the game sold a whopping 500,000 copies in its first day. All this hype even catapulted the Wii above the DS in hardware sales last week, according to the numbers released by Famitsu. We think the Wii will hold the top spot in Japan for at least another few weeks, while it basks in Brawl's glory.

The Wii may have made a stir in the hardware charts, but all's boring on the software front. Wii Fit shows us its well-toned legs by remaining at the number one spot, and Super Mario Galaxy has fallen out of the top ten once again. Wii Play also slipped a bit, losing some of its former dominance.

To see the Japanese hardware and software figures for last week, look no further than after the break.