I’m bored of doing these Virtual Console updates, so we’re doing something different this week. Let me introduce a whole team of very special guests who will be going through the latest retro releases with me in a round table discussion. Without further ado, please welcome Marcel Marceaux, Sooty, Jason Vorhees, and Link. Gentlemen, hello.

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Anyway, two offerings this week, and not a one from either Nintendo or Sega. The Turbografx gives us The Dynastic Hero for 600 Points, which isn’t, as you may think, a tedious Romance of the Three Kingdoms spin-off, but a reskinning of Wonder Boy In Monster World, the cartoon fantasy platformer. And for those of you thinking, “hold on, didn’t they release Wonder Boy In Monster World for the Mega Drive already?”, well, yes, you’d be right. While the Turbo CD version is pretty rare, it’s not worth getting it again if you’ve already got it on VC. But if you don’t have it, this one may slightly edge it for the more discerning gamer.

Second up is Baseball Stars 2 for the Neo Geo for 900 Points. It’s a baseball arcade game, naturally. It looks like every other baseball game I’ve played, and that isn’t many. Admittedly, I know nothing about baseball games, and this doesn’t interest me, so I’m going to leave the last word to our guests. Take it away.

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Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. So yet another story about Nintendo selling a hell of a lot of hardware is bound to make us yawn disinterestedly, punch our stuffed Pikachu, then flick over to see what else is on.

We can’t go on like that. Not with a blog with a name like WiiWii - so good we copied and pasted it once. We need some pep. We need to go into this with a bit of wow and show our fanboy support. We wouldn’t want to come across as blasé. Here we go, then. Three average stories. Look at how we spice them up.

MEGA NEWS ONE:

Oh my God! I cannot breathe. Nintendo have managed to sell a stunning twenty million (count ‘em - count ‘em ALL!) DS handhelds in Japan. That is stunning. That is amazing. To put that into perspective, that’s almost as many as the number of people who had their child benefit details lost in the UK. Except, the uproar would be a lot, lot worse if everybody lost their Pokemon data all at once in a freak bout of Nintendo incompetence.

MEGA NEWS TWO:

A stupendous 650 000 Wiis were sold in the United States of America in two weeks. WHOOP! That’s the best month for Nintendo since launch. Astonishing. We’re a thousand times more excited than the miserable family who won’t be playing Wii Sports this Christmas because they’re all sold out. And when we say ‘more excited’ we hope they still contain a modicum of excitement within themselves, otherwise the law of mathematics will cancel our own excitement out. We think. Um…FANTASTIC NEWS!

MEGA NEWS THREE:

I can’t take it anymore! Back to Japan, and the DS version of Dragon Quest IV has been flying off the shelves. 360 000 have supposedly been snatched up by gamers eager to play through a remake of a game they just remade five minutes ago. The Dragon Quest series is currently up to number nine, which will also soon be selling out on DS. Coincidentally, nine is the number of Japanese people who bought Super Mario Galaxy. AMAZING!

How did we do? We hope you’re buoyed on by our excitement and didn’t, perhaps, notice that we just wrote normal news stories and them pasted in unnecessary superlatives. Really, we’d do ourselves an injury with all that excitement.

Source: C&VG

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Not long after the scandal concerning Nintendo’s green credentials, a mysterious black dossier was delivered to our offices here at WiiWii Towers. After blowing off the dust and cracking open the seal, we learned even more shocking details about Nintendo’s nefarious practices. We’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching these past few days, and we can’t sit on this information any longer. Here are the high (or low) points in all their gory detail:

5) Secret conspiracy

Shigeru Miyamoto is the grandmaster of a secret society whose sole purpose is the downfall of Western Civilisation through videogames. Rockstar Games are a lower echelon in the same society, but Miyamoto is the one pulling the strings. Only a select few are aware of this plot, including football coaches who complain that kids are spending too much time indoors, disgraced American lawyer Jack Thompson, and British MP (and part-time Penfold impersonator) Keith Vaz.

4) Experiments on puppies

To make Nintendogs more of a realistic experience, Nintendo have taken stray puppies and downloaded their brainwaves into each copy of the game. Unfortunately, the poor creatures don’t survive the ordeal, so their bodies are sold on to a leading manufacturer of toothpaste. Just remember, the next time you feed or bathe little Snoopy, that’s the electronic ghost of a real live puppy forever trapped in your DS. Plus, your breath smells like a dog.

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We live in a surveillance society, that much is true. The websites you surf, the streets you walk along, the things you buy, all of it is recorded and traced by… THEM. It’s no surprise that a game based on this same premise is coming to the Wii and DS. Well, not exactly the same. According to the blurb by Nikitova games:

“Starting as a lowly shopping mall guard, the player can rise to International head of security as he travels the world’s most famous shops and art galleries scrutinizing car parks, trains and airports in a bid to capture the thieves, smugglers, vandals and other low life littering the world’s streets and bang them to rights.”

Interesting bit: the game is designed by Jon Hare, formerly of Sensible Software, and co-designer of Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Mega Lo Mania. He’s got some pedigree at this games development lark, so we’ll be following this one with interest. We’re wondering though, does CCTV allow you to work the voyeur-cam like a sleazy perv?

Tentative release date is Christmas 2008.

Via Nikitova Games

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Nintendo finally got round to the next stage of giving us what the 360 and PS3 have had since the start, and launched the Everybody’s Nintendo Channel in Japan yesterday. The title’s slightly communist undertone is merely a gateway to providing trailers, listings, interviews, promotional material, etc. to eager gamers who can’t get enough hype.

Best of all, though, this is the way we’ll be downloading demos to our DS. That means less time hanging around in game stores getting harrumphed at by the man, and more time lounging at home. Let’s hope they’re not stingy with how much you can try out. A person could probably live on Xbox Live demos for a few months if they were really poor - Geometry Wars’ five minute trial lasted us longer than most full-price games. We pray Nintendo’s demo service lets us do the same.

When will it arrive over here? Buggered if we know. In the meantime, here’s a link to Wired’s video demonstration of the Channel. It’s looking pretty bland at the moment. We hope the majority of the content is spicier than the menu.

Source: 1UP

Related posts: Ask WiiWii: How can I connect my DS to my Wii?

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Today we’ve made a minor technical improvement and added Gravatar support to the comments thread. That means you can now have a snazzy identifying icon next to your name every time you comment on WiiWii.tv. Pretty cool, huh?

If you wondering how it works and how to get an icon of your own, it’s very simple. Go to the official Gravatar site and set up a free account. As part of the registration process, you’ll be required to upload a small icon of your choosing and associate it with your email address. Make sure - and this is the important bit - that the email address you register is the same as the one you use for commenting on this site.

If you can’t be bothered with all this Gravatar jiggery pokery then don’t worry, we’ve installed a little Mario head as a default. But the option to personalise your comments is there if you want it. And it makes you so much easier to distinguish from the usual gibberish we get for comments…

To help you along the way, we’ve also found a website with a huuuuuge selection of Nintendo related icons that are perfect for use as a Gravatar. Once you’re all set up, go ahead and post in the comments thread below so we can all see it. Don’t be shy!

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Switch off the space heater and listen up, this a serious matter people. We’re not just talking about gaming here, we’re talking about the ENVIRONMENT. Greenpeace has ranked Nintendo at the bottom of their green consumer electronics chart (which is updated every three months), giving them zero points for refusing to disclose details about the chemical substances they use to manufacture their product line.

As if the ignominy wasn’t deep enough, Nintendo came below Microsoft in the ratings, who cooperated fully and pledged to clean up their act by 2011. It’s the first time that games companies have been included in Greenpeace’s assessment, which previously focused only on mobile phones and computers, and is some indication of gaming’s importance to culture, business, and the environment.

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A Japanese game accessory manufacturer called Cyber Gadget has just unveiled the Familator, a device which can be attached to the DS Lite and enables original Famicom cartridges to be played on Nintendo’s ubiquitous handheld. As well as the option to play 8-bit classics (or 8-bit disasters, if you’re so inclined) on the DS Lite’s top screen, the Familator comes with AV cables so that you can play Famicom games on a TV via the DS Lite. Don’t count on the image quality being as good as NES titles on the Virtual Console, though — invariably unofficial console hardware outputs an image of grainy hell.

This piece of kit reminds me a little of the Game Axe, which was an odd little machine, only with the Familator there’s no obvious possibility of being able to play NES games, so you’ll need a supply of Japanese Famicom cartridges to get anything out of it. Still, for curio value alone the Familator might be worth a look.

Source: Cyber Gadget

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Oh dear. Our best friend and moustache owner, Super Mario, appears to have been the victim of a prank pulled by fans of Halo, the guns-and-sci-fi-and-all-that-sort-of-stuff Xbox series: check Super Mario’s Wikipedia page right now and you’ll find an image of the dreadfully dull Master Chief in lieu of our rightful Galaxy-conquering hero, Super Mario. There’s something deeply immoral about this.

We’re not sure who is responsible for this act of mindless vandalism, but Mario is bound to eat a 1-Up mushroom and return with a fireball to get rid of the invading Master Chief any moment now.

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Of course they could just have got that figure from a random number generator, or perhaps they only employ the most capable of fortune-tellers, but somehow London-based media analyst Screen Digest reckons on Nintendo shifting 52.1 million Wiis around the world by 2009. Which is almost one Wii for every person in the UK, if you want to think about it like that.

Interestingly, the people from the future at Screen Digest think 42.3 million PS3s will have been sold by 2009, while Microsoft will only have managed to sell 30.4 million Xbox 360s by that point. In other words, according to Screen Digest’s visionaries, “Wii FTW” — and Microsoft had better beware of a Sony comeback. That sounds like quite a plausible forecast, actually.

But more importantly, which format do you think will be leading the way in 2009? Place your bets… now. (In the comments section.)

Source: Screen Digest, by way of The Guardian

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