Mario and Sonic Scene Creator and Character Designer online art games

These brilliant Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog Flash online art and design games (from MarioSonicGames.com) are amongst my favourite free web games, so I thought I'd put them all together in one place here to see if you like them too:

  Super Mario Brothers: Scene Creator

  Super Mario Brothers: Scene Creator 2

  Super Mario Brothers: Mario Dress Up

  Sonic the Hedgehog: Scene Creator

  Sonic the Hedgehog: Scene Creator 2

  Sonic the Hedgehog: Scene Creator 3

  Sonic the Hedgehog: Character Designer

  Sonic: Chao Character Designer

If you like the above games, then you'll hopefully also enjoy these other art and design games (from Dan-Dare.org):

  Transformers: Character Creator

  Cars: Ramone's Coloring Book

  Cars: Ramone's Painting

  Finding Nemo: Paper Toys

  Finding Nemo: Create-A-Scene

  Toy Story: Etch-A-Sketch

  Meet the Robinsons: Mural Mania

(See also here)

Free Mario and Sonic game downloads

For those of you out there that like free game downloads, I've just added links to free downloads of all the Mario and Sonic Flash games that I've designed so far to a new index page in MarioSonicGames.com here:

Mario and Sonic Flash games exclusive to MarioSonicGames.com

Sony have now fixed the PS3 problem

Sony say they have now fixed the worldwide PlayStation 3 problem. So that was a nice PS3-free 24 hours for most of the world then!

I was absolutely right - it was caused by PS3's wrongly thinking this year was a leap year, and then crashing when they discovered it wasn't February 29th after connecting to the PlayStation Network yesterday. Double Triple Doh!!!

Apparently you can all now safely switch on your PS3's and connect to the PlayStation Network, and the bug should go away automatically. If it doesn't, you will be able to reset your system clocks yourselves now, and that will fix everything.

Personally, I'd suggest selling your PS3 and getting yourslf a Nintendo Wii instead - Super Mario Galaxy 2 is due out this year, which will be the best game ever, for sure.

It's "World Sony PlayStation 3 Failure Day" today!

Every single original "fat" version of Sony's flagship PlayStation 3 games console failed to work properly today, all over the world!

Apparently the newer slim model seems to be fine, but since most of the millions of PS3's sold so far are of the larger variety, that's not a lot of help. No-one anywhere with the original model can connect to the PlayStation Network, no games any of those people have ever downloaded from the network will work, and no disc-based games with trophy functionality (i.e. most games) will work either. Oops.

It seems a calendar bug of some sort in the firmware might be the cause of this rather epic system failure, because the problem only started today, March 1st. Is it some sort of leap year screw-up I wonder? It isn't a leap year this year of course, but perhaps part of the PS3 firmware thinks it's February 29th today resulting in an unresolvable conflict elsewhere in the system. When I used to work in IT for big blue-chip corporations complex programming errors like that would slip through testing unnoticed from time to time, because not too many people would think to test for the relevant erroneous scenarios in advance of them actually happening.

Anyway, if you've got one of those original PS3's and you haven't recently switched it on and gone online, DON'T!!!

Keep checking the official US PlayStation blog (using your computer, not your PS3) and wait until Sony announce that they have fixed the bug!

Maybe now's a good time to buy one of the unaffected slim models: