Not a whole lot of big stuff to report from Korea at the moment; Nintendo’s still really hot, people still play more online PC games than anything else, blah blah blah. As always, however, there are plenty of interesting tidbits, two of which I’ll share today.

The first being the above-pictured Cooking Mama Mits, yours with a preorder. Pretty slick, eh? I sure wouldn’t mind a pair. I actually had no idea they existed; it was good pal Eric Caoili that alerted me to them a few days back. All in all, an awesome preorder incentive.

The second bit I have to share is a little anecdotal story that shows the effect Nintendo — Mario, more specifically — is already having on Korea’s grade school kids after a few short months. I visited a friend’s house recently, and her son, a second-grader named Chang-jae, talked my ear off for over thirty minutes about Mario — the Mushroom Kingdom, Goombas, Yoshi, Bowser, everything.

He went on to tell me that Mario, thanks to NSMB and the recent release of Super Mario 64 DS, has become just about the hottest playground topic around, and he’s counting off the days until he recieves a DS and the latter game for the upcoming ‘Chu-seok’ holiday.

Simply put, Korean kids have gone from barely knowing Mario to becoming obsessive fanatics in a very short time. It’ll be interesting to see how far this goes. I must say, it’s nice to finally be in a Korea that appreciates the chubby little Italian plumber