John covered the news that Sega’s upcoming NiGHTS: Journey Of Dreams game will grab data from Wii’s Forecast Channel to set the in-game weather earlier. It’s worth a big cheer too: at last the channel is doing something useful.

Come on, you’re all thinking it. The only times I fire up Nintendo’s weather channel is when showing Wii off to friends who haven’t had a go on the console before. They like spinning the globe too. For a couple of minutes. Then they get bored and ask me to load up Wii Sports again.

However, now the channel is being incorporated into NiGHTS, I’m properly excited. And why stop there? There are plenty of Wii games that could benefit from a spot of real-world weather, from Twilight Princess to Wii Sports to SSX Blur. And surely the time is right for Sega to use the feature in a re-release of Sega Bass Fishing…
Of course, you wouldn’t want the weather to affect the gameplay too much – or to be forced into having local weather in your game. For example, it’d be rubbish if you have to play 90% of your Mario Strikers Charged matches amid torrential downpours just because you live in Manchester.

What about the other channels? Take the News Channel, for example, which at the moment is still a bit rubbish. Could real-life news headlines  be incorporated into games in some way? I can’t think of an obvious demand for it, but you can bet there are some imaginative developers out there racking their brains for a few ideas.

The overall point, though, is that NiGHTS is a great example of developers thinking laterally about next-gen console connectivity. It’s not JUST about multiplayer, or even high-score tables and buddy lists. Putting real-world weather into games is, like Sony’s planned PlayStation Home virtual world, a sign that once a console is hooked up to a broadband connection, there are plenty of new ways to make use of that connectivity.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 3:59 pm by Stuart Dredge
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