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• Nintendo’s New Year’s Resolution

  Hell yeah! I love that new year smell. It’s a heady blend of desperation, manic behavior, stale cookies, and endless possibility! You can practically taste it on the air: the tang of freshly printed gym membership cards, the musk of old car models being discounted. This is the time when we wide-eyed lovers of videogames stare forward, ready for anything that may come. We take our last looks at 2008 and get to predicting what’s on the horizon. In the spirit of embracing new opportunities, I would like to recommend one New Year’s resolution for each gaming console maker as well as a select few third-party publishers. We’ll start with your friend and mine, Nintendo. Nintendo? You resolve to release Star Fox 2 on WiiWare in 2009. Read More... Posted Jan 05 2009, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, snes, star fox 2, wiiware, mother 3, new year’s resolution

• Style Over Substance: Why I'm In Love With WiiWare's "Art Style"

  There was a communal quandry of "huh...what?" last month when Nintendo quietly unveiled the Art Style brand of WiiWare titles with Art Style: Orbient. Some immediately recognized the game as a hi-def update of the late Gameboy Advance genre-breaker Orbital (previously loved by me here) and asserted that Art Style is a WiiWare rebranding of the bitGenerations series. This theory was reinforced when it was confirmed that skip Ltd. would be developing the Art Style games (they developed six of the seven bitGenerations titles) and that two more Art Style titles would hit WiiWare by the end of October. Let's take a quick step back here. For those unfamiliar, bitGenerations was an experimental series of Gameboy Advance games released only in Japan that favored style over substance. With smaller iconic packaging, minimal graphics and sound, and simple controls, these games almost all hid impressively deep gameplay. Much like Sony's PixelJunk series (developed by Q Games, who uncoincidentally developed DigiDrive, the seventh bitGenerations title). The games were never released outside of Japan due to the release of the Nintendo DS and unlikelihood that anyone would buy intentionally simplistic games with no corporate mascots attached, regardless of their low price point and critical acclaim. Two years later, digital distribution has finally taken off as a means of selling "experimental" games. XBox Live Arcade's Braid and Playstation Networks aforementioned PixelJunk series would arguably have no success whatsoever in retail stores, but at the low price of a download direct to your console they are finding the gamers they so very much derserve, and now the Wii has a series of inexpensive, unique, and beautifully stylish downloadbale games to call its own. Read More... Posted Oct 27 2008, 10:00 AM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, derrick sanskrit, wii, wiiware, bitgenerations, skip, orbital, dialhex, cubello, orbient, rotohex, coloris, art style

• Watcha Playing: World of Goo

  Have you ever become aware of a game that other people talked about enthusiastically but it just didn't interest you, only to play it and fall in love? I'm not a puzzle game fan. I like some action in my games. I like interesting characters and adventure. Puzzle games tend to be, at best, rentals for me. There are exceptions of course, individual games that were so addictively enjoyable that I would play them obsessively. Tetrisphere was one puzzle game that I loved, and regret not buying. Now, around a decade later, another puzzle game has taken over my life. Welcome to the World of Goo. Read More... Posted Oct 21 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: wii, amber ahlborn, world of goo, wiiware, watcha playing

• Watcha Playing: DDR and Helix

  These days where it's easy to put on extra weight but the in vogue body type is just left of emaciated, it's easy to have a poor body image of yourself and think you need to drop a few pounds for aesthetic purposes. Frankly, I think this is a bum deal and a lousy reason to exercise. I'm neither fat nor thin and could not care less about how much I weigh, but I do care about my health. I'd also like to have more energy than I typically do. Unfortunately, I lead a very sedentary life. My art requires I sit down at a drawing table, my writing has me sitting at my computer, and my favorite pastimes of reading and gaming have me planted on my butt too. A while ago I decided that some how, some way, I was going to squeeze exercise into my schedule and stick to it. Of course, I've made such promises to myself before. So, what's a gamer to do? Why, whip out the Wii of course! Read More... Posted Oct 16 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with no comments Filed under: wii, dance dance revolution, amber ahlborn, wiiware, watcha playing, helix

• The Mathematical Guide to Mega Man

  If you've even thought about getting all of Mega Man 9's in-game achievements, then you're either a robot, or just plain crazy; and I commend you, you magnificent bastard. Unfortunately, I lack the fortitude to push myself through these optional challenges--and the time it would take me to train for them could be better spent learning another language or painting tiny things on grains of rice. Since the achievements of Mega Man 9 are practically built for being filmed and upoloaded to the Internet, I'm anticipating the hundreds of speed/challenge runs that will inevitably end up on YouTube (if they're not already there).  And if you're interested in shaving hundredths of a second off of your final time, then boy have I got a website for you.  TASvideos, a tool-assisted speedrun page, has a special section on the NES Mega Man games that provides more information than you'd ever want to know.  Here's an example:  In many platform games, you don’t need to be exactly positioned to grab a ladder. You can stand about 10 pixels beside the ladder and when you press up (or down), you’ll immediately grab the ladder. In Mega Man games, this means that by walking or jumping past a ladder you can grab the ladder for 1 frame and immediately release it in order to gain extra movement very quickly. Walking across the ladder would take about 12 frames, but by grabbing it from distance and releasing it you can shorten it to about 8 frames. I'm not sure how much of this material is compatible with Mega Man 9, but some brave soul out there has to have the free time and social disorder necessary to find out. Let's wait and watch. Read More... Posted Sep 25 2008, 03:30 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: mega man, speedrun, wiiware, mega man 9, autism, bob mackey

• My Last Mega Man 9 Post, I Swear

  Mega Man 9 is currently kicking my ass and making me rethink my status as a gamer; after a little over an hour of play, I've only seen a few robot bosses and nearly beat Splash Woman.  Needless to say, this is a time of crisis, and I need my friends more than ever.  So before you lose all respect for me and never read any of my posts again, I have a few substantive things to say about the game.  Thanks for your support. I'd like to begin by saying that, thanks to a self-imposed media blackout, I knew practically nothing about Mega Man 9 before I sat down to play it. Only later, after I had my fill of cursing at spikes, I sat down to read 1UP scribe and Mega Man fanatic Jeremy Parish's excellent review; it was the first source to inform me that Mega Man's slide and charge shot--established from the third and fourth entries in the series, respectively--were both missing from 9. This came as a bit of a shock, since I'd played the game for a while and hadn't even noticed.  Could this have been some very boring episode of The Twilight Zone? Read More... Posted Sep 23 2008, 02:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: mega man 2, wiiware, mega man 9, mega man 3, mega man 4, bob mackey

• Nintendo Fred's Sweet Revenge

  I have no idea who specifically makes the decisions about when certain games are released on the Virtual Console and WiiWare. For the purposes of this blog play, I'll refer to this entity as "Nintendo Fred." Likewise, I have no idea who's in charge over at Bplus studios. For the purposes of this blog play, I'll refer to him as Bplus Phil, since "Phil" is a proud Austrian name. Earlier today when I was sniffing around the Wii Shop Channel for my birthright, Mega Man 9, a drama played out in my head. It went a little like this. Read More... Posted Sep 22 2008, 06:16 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, wiiware, mega man 9, nadia oxford, plattchen Twist n Paint, bplus

• Mega Man 9: IT'S OUT NOW

  Barring some sort of life-altering world crisis, Mega Man 9 should be available on the Wii's Shopping Channel at this very moment. That's right; a new official Mega Man game now exists in the universe. What did you do to deserve this? Probably nothing; but I'm sure you have 10 bucks, and that certainly makes up for all of the karma. If you don't own a Wii, you're going to have to wait a few excruciating and interminable days before you can download Mega Man 9 on your XBox 360 or PS3.  But if you really think about it, the Wii is the best platform for Mega Man 9--and this has absolutely nothing to do with the typical snide commentary about the comparatively lackluster graphics of Nintendo's console.  Out of the big three home systems, only the Wii has a controller befitting of Mega Man's 2-D legacy. Read More... Posted Sep 22 2008, 11:00 AM by Bob Mackey with | with 12 comment(s) Filed under: wii, mega man, wiiware, mega man 9, retro, bob mackey

• Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say

  Amidst the cavalcade of blockbusters, handheld eccentricities, and Rock Band I’ve been indulging in over the summer, a grand season now a mere two weeks from being officially dead, I’ve been getting a crash course in one of gaming’s most respected and forbidding forms: the adventure game. Though I started playing games during the genre’s heyday, I’ve always been somewhat less than literate when it comes to the many point-and-click and text-commanded classics crafted by Sierra and Lucasarts. My only real experiences came from visiting my aunt Donna. At the ripe age of seven years-old, she introduced me to the wonders of Kings Quest and, er, Leisure Suit Larry. Yeah. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with these eye-openers – they certainly expanded my vocabulary – I was just more interested in walking from left to right, jumping, and shooting when it came to videogames. I always knew that I was missing out on something, listening to friends chortle over playing Space Quest and even later, as a teenager, looking at lush screens of Grim Fandango. I’ve only gotten around to them recently thanks to three conditions working in concert. One is that there are new, easy to access (read: on Wii) point-and-clickers being released with regularity by folks like Telltale Games. Two and three regard vintage software: Nerve is equipped with numerous PCs capable of running things machines in my home twenty years ago could not, but also (and most importantly) I have a guide. It’s easy to approach Telltale’s Strong Bad games because they move at a brisk pace and they work on a very simplified version of classic point-and-click language: see something, point at it to interact with it. Got an item? Point at it, click, then point the item at what you want to use it on. Repeat playings of King’s Quest V left me acclimated to both the process and the occasionally obtuse logic at work in these sorts of games, so it’s been a painless process and a reminder of the genre’s charms. Playing through the first two episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (more on Episode 2 when I’m allowed to talk about it) has, however, made it abundantly clear that adventure games are not inherently relaxing in comparison to more action oriented fare. Read More... Posted Sep 08 2008, 07:49 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, whatcha playing, PC, quest for glory, lucasarts, wiiware, sierra, adventure, strong bad, telltale games, conquests of Camelot, grim fandango, kings quest

• WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out

  Nintendo has been on my mind over the past few days. Not as a corporation in the business of making video games. More like a singular anthropomorphic entity. This is how Nintendo exists in my head these days, so when I see them making business decisions, my psychosis interprets those decision as being made by an individual. You know, as an affront against me personally. For example, I look at the abject madness that is Skip’s Captain Rainbow and then I remember that it will never come out in the US. Sure, WarioWare comes out, but do we get Mother 3? Tingle’s Rosy Rupee Land, a game that’s actually available in English? Nintendo doesn’t bring their weird games here, so Captain Rainbow, with its legion of obscure, z-list Nintendo characters, will flounder away on an island nation half the world away. Nintendo does things like this to spite me. Like my first experiences with WiiWare this past weekend. Read More... Posted Aug 25 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, wii, lost winds, wiiware, psn, earthbound, warioware, captain rainbow, strong bad, david braben, wii play, mother, live arcade

• Quickies: Homestar Ruiner

  While we were all ridiculously pumped for Bionic Commando: Rearmed last week, there was another highly-anticipated downloadable game to tide us over for the first half of the week: Telltale Games' point-and-click WiiWare adventure Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode One: Homestar Ruiner. Odds are good that if you're on the internet you're already somewhat familiar with the world of Homstar Runner and its brash luchador masked star Strong Bad, and, if you're anything like me, you were with them from fhqwhgads and quit right around Cheat Commandos. A quick glance through the Toons section of the site shows that, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, I'm probably better off for having missed the past few years of redundancy. How does this bode for the first official H*R video game? Read More... Posted Aug 18 2008, 05:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: derrick sanskrit, wiiware, adventure, eden, bionic commando rearmed, cartoon, homestar runner, strong bad, telltale games

• It's My Tetris Party And I Can Waggle If I Want To

  Named by Entertainment Weekly as the number 1 "new classic" video game of the past twenty-five years (almost all of video game history), it was never a question of if Tetris would grace Nintendo's wildly popular WiiWare digital distribution service, but when. While we still don't have a precise date, Official Nintendo Magazine has confirmed that the Hudson Soft developed Tetris Party will be released this autumn with a slew of Wii-specific features. Read More... Posted Jul 30 2008, 04:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: nintendo, nintendo ds, derrick sanskrit, wii, wii fit, wiiware, tetris, dr mario

• Watcha Playing: Lost Winds

  Lost Winds is my first and presently only WiiWare title, but it has already set the bar pretty high. When I first booted up this lovely little game and started playing with the wind, I was immediately put in mind of Okami. Directing the wind is a lot like drawing with the Celestial Brush, except the wind works in real time, rather than pausing the game while I draw. Lost Winds is a whimsical title and a promising start for WiiWare. Read More... Posted Jun 10 2008, 01:00 PM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: amber ahlborn, lost winds, okami, wiiware, nintendo wii, watcha playing