Earlier this year, Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation author Blake J. Harris offered us a peek inside the official Nintendo Character Manual from 1993 where we learned such fascinating facts about classic Nintendo heroes and villains such as Yoshi's real name (T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas) and mushroom retainer Toad's original hometown (he has family in the Fungus Federation).  Now Blake has provided PTB with more pages from that guide.  Thrill at official artwork, PANTONE guides, and brief biographies for characters such as Luigi, Wario, Samus Aran, Kirby, and more.  Long-running questions about these characters are finally answered in this guide including Wario's relation to Mario and why Pauline returned to the Donkey Kong spotlight after an absence of nearly fifteen years.  Did you know that Mario loves opera music?  Some of this you may have seen before in previous excerpts (such as parts of Mario's bio), but I'm posting all that I have here in one place in the name of completeness.  It's a fascinating look behind the curtain at licensing guidelines that the end-consumer typically never gets to see.

Oh, Assassin's Creed Unity, you try so hard. #PS4share pic.twitter.com/h1nP3yQVQR

— Matthew Green (@PressTheButtons) December 29, 2014

Even after being patched four times with hundreds of tweaks and fixes, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Unity still has a few lingering problems.  While most of the major gameplay bugs and errors have been ironed out by now (or just declared features), sometimes the game still veers off into surrealism.  Consider this screenshot captured from my PlayStation 4 in which protagonist Arno Dorian finally makes a move on love interest Elise when his large collar gets in the way.  Fortunately, as a smooth Assassin, Arno can just push his face through his collar as if it weren't even there.  Points for effort, Unity.

Our year-end cavalcade of annual special episodes rolls on this week as we turn our attention to the biggest gaming news of 2014 worth recapping.  Join Blake Grundman and I as we revisit the year's most memorable gaming events and trends such as the rise of the Nintendo Wii U library, the rush to own to amiibo figurines, the glut of broken games sent out into the marketplace, crowd-sourced gaming via Twitch streaming, and so much more.  Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton. Next Week: It's time for our big Game Of The Year discussion featuring returning special guest Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation.  Call the hotline and leave a voicemail message with your GOTY picks and you just may hear it on the show!

Nintendo has a reputation for producing games that are made of smiles and sunshine, but sometimes their titles have a dark side.  Over at WhatCulture, David Oxford has taken a look at ten moments of Nintendo's questionable behavior.  There's sexual innuendo in the Mushroom Kingdom, monsters being boiled alive, protagonists clubbing seals, and villains vomiting up blood.

In New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS, the battle to close out the first world is a recreation of the classic “fight Bowser on a bridge over some lava” bit from the original Super Mario Bros. Hit a switch, into the hot drink he goes. Nothing new there.

But as you can see above, there’s a twist this time around. Bowser roars and struggles, much like Crocomire, and while not depicted in as gruesome a manner, you can see that the Koopa King and his flesh are soon parted, leaving behind a skeletal form and a blackened shell. For a Mario game, this turn of events was still surprisingly intense, and it’s amazing that Nintendo ran with it.

I remember coming across that moment in New Super Mario Bros. and being legitimately shocked that Nintendo allowed one their most recognizable characters to be graphically cooked.  Bowser looks like he's in real pain when his flesh sloughs off his bones.  The whole thing is undone by the end of the game and Bowser's skeleton (dubbed Dry Bowser after the Dry Bones skeleton Koopa Troopas) has gone on to become a recurring presence in other games that need their character roster padded (such as Mario Kart sequels), but still... yeowch!  It's pretty dark stuff for the series that brought us a "Woo hoo!" with every major jump and the classic "Let's-a go!" when starting a level.  I was sitting in the Kombo hotel suite back at E3 2006 when I first came across this moment and I explained to the others sitting around waiting for news to happen what had occurred, but nobody cared.  Sure, other games kill their villains all the time, but in Super Mario?  That was unheard of.  Show some respect; the King of the Koopas was just boiled alive!

Back when animation studio DIC held the rights to produce cartoons based on Nintendo's popular Super Mario Bros. line of video games, children were captivated by such productions as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Super Mario World.  Unfortunately, those cartoons just weren't all that great.  What can I say?  We were kids excited to see our digital heroes appearing on weekday syndicated and Saturday morning network cartoons.  The actual quality of the show wasn't that important.  Both incarnations of these Mario cartoons celebrated Christmas in their own way with the episodes "Koopa Klaus" and "The Night Before Cave Christmas", neither which have gone down in history as essential holiday viewing, but it's slow this time of year and you're not doing much, so why not revisit some mid-quality, occasionally off-model animation?  For more on this stuff (or maybe even instead of it), check out our salute to 1990s cartoons based on video games in Episode 137 of the Power Button podcast.

In the interest of equal time, here's DIC's idea of Christmas with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Christmas Blast.  We've come a long way, folks.  If these episodes were produced today, the whole thing would be done with computers.

Christmas is the season of giving so it's only right that the author of the fantastic Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, Blake J. Harris, choose this day to give us all a gift: a deleted chapter from the book that was left on the cutting room (editing room?) floor.  Presented at the Huffington Post, this short piece is set on Christmas Eve 1991 and is presented as rhyming couplets in the spirit of Clement Clarke Moore's "Twas The Night Before Christmas" (you know the rest... "and all through the house, not a creature was stirring", etc.).  As children dream of unwrapping a fancy new 16-bit console, Nintendo comes to the rescue of its adopted American home in Washington state with an offer to buy an ailing baseball team.  For more on Console Wars be sure to listen to Episode 134 of the Power Button podcast in which Blake joined us to discuss the project and, if that's not enough for you, don't miss the upcoming Episode 160 in which he returns to update us on what's happened to the book since we last spoke and take part in our discussion of the best games of 2014.

We all complain when a company takes an action that is not in a customer's best interest, so I think it's important to take a moment and point out when a company goes the extra mile to make things right even when it doesn't have to do so.  I was cleaning out my media closet this morning and found my old copy of The SimCity Box from Electronic Arts which includes a bundle of classic SimCity games and expansion packs for PC spanning up to 2007's SimCity Societies.  I never got around to installing Societies on my old Windows Vista PC, so I decided to try my luck and install it on my modern Windows 8 PC.  It went about as well as you can imagine.  The installer tried to trigger old Windows XP/Vista functions, launched web links to long-dead EA websites, encouraged me to register my software by dial-up modem or fax machine, and, as a final insult, refused to take a software update patch.  So here I am with an old PC game, a valid product key, and nothing to show for it.

It's the holiday season which means that it's the perfect time for us to dedicate an episode of Power Button discussing video games that include Christmas elements such as music remixes, holiday weapons, festive missions, and appearances from Santa Claus himself.  There's some deep cuts mixed in here with the mainstream titles; we cover everything from Christmas trees in Sonic Adventure's Station Square to the special Christmas cheat code in Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie's Double Trouble to Banjo-Kazooie's Freezeezy Peak to the special holiday demo of Jazz Jackrabbit to Sega's limited edition Christmas NiGHTS to the hard-to-find Daze Before Christmas from Sunsoft.  Settle in with some egg nog and spend eighty minutes with us this holiday season.  We also sidequest off into NES Remix, adorable amiibo, and much more.  Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!  Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, find us on Stitcher, subscribe via iTunes, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan, or for just podcast updates, @ThePowerButton. Next Week: It's time for our annual year-end wrap-up shows with a look back at the year's biggest gaming news and then, in the first week of 2015, we'll name the best games of 2014 in our Game Of The Year episode. Call the hotline and leave a voicemail message with your GOTY picks and you just may hear it on the show!

As Stephen Colbert prepares to sign off from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report for one last time tonight, I thought it was only right for us to take a look back at some of my favorite moments from the show that intersect with my love of video games.  Colbert didn't go to the gaming well that often, but when he did, the results were golden. Revisit some of these classic moments as Stephen credits the BP oil spill solution to an anonymous plumber, points out how games influence children, coins new gaming catchphrases, dismantles GamerGate, launches his own MMORPG, and so much more.

Stephen Credits BP Oil Spill Fix To Super Mario

One of those great rules in life is that in most cases, the simplest explanation behind a question is also the correct one.  Consider the recent attempt to cap the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill that was suggested by an anonymous plumber, for instance.  Who is this mysterious figure?  How can we possibly identify him or her? Leave it to Stephen Colbert, as he knows the answer. It could only be Mario behind the fix! After all, he had just as much to lose in the spill as anyone else. Also, we know for a fact that he has experience cleaning up spilled gunk. Just ask the residents of Isle Delfino.

We're planning the final Power Button podcast episodes of the year which means it's time to speak up and be a part of the fun.  It's almost time for our annual Game Of The Year show, so call our voicemail hotline at (720) 722-2781 and leave a message in which you talk about your pick for the year's best game.  We're also prepping a News Of The Year show in which we discuss the year's biggest gaming news (both good and bad), so feel free to call in and leave a message about your picks for that topic, too.  You might hear your call on one of these episodes.  We do all of these shows just for you, so let us know you're out there by telling us what you think of 2014's gaming highs and lows.  For the full list of upcoming episodes through the end of the year, check out the Power Button episode list.