Nintendo has been a busy little company today, with a release schedule following its DSi details into the hands of the press. It’s not that heavy on new stuff, though we all now have a little more info about when we can expect some of the games it showcased at its pre-TGS event.

On the DS, Japan gets Tomodachi Collection, Famicom Wars DS 2, Mario and Luigi RPG 3, Made in Ore, Rittai Picross and DS Uranai Seikatsu all down for ‘2009′.

Wii-wise, the likes of Another Code: R Kioku no Tobira, Sin and Punishment 2, Punch Out!!, 100 Go de Start! Eikaiwa, Hoshi no Kirby, and the Wiimakes of Pikmin 2 and Mario Tennis GC will all be appearing next year, with Wii Sports Resort given the slightly more specific date of Spring 2009.

In western territories there’s a little less to chew on. The first half of 2009 sees Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Personal Trainer: Walking, and Rhythm Heaven hit the shelves, with Mario and Luigi RPG 3 coming along at some point in 2009, with Pokemon Platinum still ‘TBA’.

As for the Wii,  it’s Wii Sports Resort in the Spring, Punch-Out!! in the first half of the year, Sin and Punishment in 2009 and Mario Tennis and Pikmin (the original) pencilled in but still with dates to be announced.

Plenty more dates have been announced for third party titles, and they - along with the above - can be found at Kotaku.

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With the DSi launching in Japan tomorrow, us westerners face a bit of a wait for it to arrive in Europe and the US. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed today that the DSi would likely launch in the west before summer’s over.

Reuters is reporting that Iwata told an assembled group of market analysts and reporters today that “specific plans will be unveiled by our local subsidiaries, but an autumn or year-end launch would probably be too late.”

So nothing concrete, but it looks like we’ll be waiting seven months at the very most.

Which is obviously still way too long - hell, seven weeks would have been too - but at least it’s not likely to slip any further into 2009.

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I had my heart set on resisting the temptation to import a DSi, but seeing the line-up of software Nintendo has planned for the handheld’s own download service has changed my mind.

Today, Nintendo issued a financial report briefing which also happened to provide info on the software available for the forthcoming service. Software that just about turns the console from ‘expensive luxury’ to ‘essential purchase’. DSiWare starts up in December and the line-up is looking very tasty indeed.

First up, there’s going to be some Art Style games - in the vein of the ones on Wii, but probably even simpler if that’s possible. There are six of them in all, one of which looks rather like Art Style CUBELLO, and they’ll cost 500 yen.

Next up are some of the individual minigames from the Wario Ware series, like Paper Plane. Not the microgames but the longer unlockable ones. They’ll cost 200 yen each, which seems a bit steep. But still: Paper Plane!

More excitingly, Utsusu! Made in Wario (MIW being the Japanese name for Wario Ware) uses the DSi’s camera to take shots of the player, whose silhouette is then used to control the minigames, in a kind of micro-EyeToy style. Intriguing.

Best of all, though, is Made in Ore - here you’ll be able to make your own Wario Ware minigames, designing the sprites, the music and even the conditions for winning a level all by yourself. Brilliantly, this will connect to WiiWare game Asobu! Made in Ore, whereby you can upload your own minigames and play them on the big screen with friends. Amazing.

So, the indie spirit is still alive and well within Nintendo. It’s just residing in Japan (temporarily, at least) at the moment.

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Disaster: Day of Crisis apparently didn’t even reach the top 50 Wii games on release week, let alone the all-formats charts. Hardly surprising, seeing as Nintendo didn’t seem to want anyone to know it existed. I’ve already given my opinion on the game, but in case you don’t trust my ravings, a couple of big sites have reviewed the game today.

First up is Eurogamer’s review, an excellent critique by the reliable John Walker. It only gets 6/10, but the review’s well worth reading because it’s almost as hilarious as the game. Except this time it’s intentional.

Second up is a less amusing but no less effective analysis, this time from IGN. Has to be said that this one is closer to my own opinion - the game gets 8/10, with reviewer Matt Wales concluding thusly:

“Like the disaster movies it takes inspiration from though, Day of Crisis is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. When it works, it’s a relentless, thrilling assault on your senses; a huge grin of game. And when it doesn’t, when it starts to wobble precariously on its own flimsy parts, it’s still compulsive in its creativity, inexplicable in its uniqueness and, most importantly, one thoroughly fun ride.”

He’s right - for all its faults, you can’t say that Disaster isn’t fun, because it really, really is. While other games have pretensions towards art, Monolith’s crazy actioner is just content with entertaining its players. And there should always be room for games which do that.

Played Disaster? Let me know your thoughts in the comments thread below.

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Female fashionistas have been out in force in Japanese game shops this week if the software sales charts are anything to go by. The Nintendo-published Wagamama Fashion Girls Mode - nothing to do with the noodle bar chain of the same name as far as I’m aware - knocked Wii Music off the top slot, which disappointingly fell to number five. Evidently its appeal is narrower than Nintendo’s other Wii- branded titles, though I expect it to sell steadily for a while yet. You might think that’s not a particularly good week for Castlevania, but that opening week should mean it easily beats the totals for both Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow, the series remaining fairly niche in Japan at least.

• 01. [NDS] Wagamama Fashion Girls Mode (Nintendo) 76,000 / NEW
• 02. [PS2] Devil Summoner: Kuzunoha Raido tai Abaddon o (Atlus) 63,000 / NEW
• 03. [NDS] Pokémon Platinum (Pokémon) 53,000 / 1,810,000
• 04. [WII] Rhythm Tengoku Gold (Nintendo) 44,000 / 1,051,000
• 05. [WII] Wii Music (Nintendo) 38,000 / 129,000
• 06. [PSP] Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida Or 2 (SCE) 27,000 / 86,000
• 07. [PS2] Devil Summoner: Kuzunoha Raido tai Abaddon o Plus (Atlus) 25,000 / NEW
• 08. [NDS] Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Konami) 19,000 / NEW
• 09. [PSP] Bleach: Soul Carnival (SCE) 18,000 / NEW
• 10. [WII] Wii Fit (Nintendo) 15,000 / 2,756,000

Thanks to Game | Life for the charts, provided by Media Create.

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Complaining about the quality of Wii releases over this fourth quarter? Well, hush your mouths, because next week sees the release of two Wii games which are not only core-friendly, but also pretty damn excellent, all told.

The first is Trauma Center: New Blood, which is the Wii follow-up to Trauma Center: Second Opinion, continuing the trend for thrillingly tough medical procedures and excellent sequel titles. It has a co-operative mode which is one of the most interesting two-player experiences you’ll ever have, and is almost certainly deserving of your forty notes. Nintendo is publishing - not that you’d know it from the lack of promotion - and arriving in the same week as Gears of War 2 and the delayed LittleBIGPlanet (not to mention Guitar Hero World Tour) means it won’t trouble the chart compilers.

The second is Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, a roguelike which offers some old-school dungeon-crawling fun with typically excellent Square-Enix presentation, including a particularly fabulous soundtrack which remixes plenty of familiar FF tracks from games gone by. This was due to be released this Friday but has been put back a week, so make sure you buy a copy - you’ll certainly get your money’s worth out of this lengthy role-player.

Alternatively, you might just be able to win a copy of the latter in the competition I’m running on Monday.

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Title says it all, really. Sega has today announced it will be publishing High Voltage’s much-hyped Wii FPS early next year.

For my money, The Conduit looks quite nice, if a little generic, but I’m not sure it’s pushing the Wii as hard as, say, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Still, it seems to be a high graphical watermark for third-party titles, and it’s great to see a developer really making the effort to make the most of the console’s capabilities. Early reports suggest that the controls are just about spot-on, and with MotionPlus and Wii Speak support for online play, it’s going to be even better for those who own the appropriate peripherals.

Spring 2009 is the ‘date’. Let’s hope we get something a little more concrete soon.

Thanks, Game | Life.

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Shigsy’s gone mad with common sense! In an - excellent, please read it - interview with MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo, the Shigmeister claims that both Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy could have been more revolutionary, incredibly asserting that the latter was - in places - conservative.

“What I’ve been saying to our development teams recently is that Twilight Princess was not a bad game, by any means,” Miyamoto begins. “But, still, it felt like there was something missing. And while, personally, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy was able to do some things that were very new and were very unique, at the same time, from another perspective, certain elements of it do feel somewhat conservative in terms of how far we branched out with design. And so this is something I’ve been talking to both of those teams about.”

“Of course, as is customary with Nintendo, it’s very rare that we are able to announce any games until they’re ready for release,” he continues, “but I can say that these are themes that both of those teams are taking into account and the hope is that for both of those franchises, when we do release the next installments of the Zelda [franchise] or maybe the next Galaxy, hopefully they will feel newer and fresher than their most recent versions.”

The thought of the next Mario game being less conservative, fresher and presumably, thus, more inventive than Mario Galaxy, to use the parlance of one Noel Gallagher, “bends me’ ‘ead”. Another thing to note - Miyamoto says “the next Galaxy” rather than “the next Mario”. Interesting. Could we be seeing a direct sequel? And, if so, does that mean we could be getting it sooner than expected? Gasp.

He also rather likes Portal and apparently Punch-Out!! is going to be great, and will have a more compelling story than the original.  Good news all round, then.

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Wii Music, then. It has its pros, it has its cons. It has its supporters, and it has its detractors. Quite a lot of the latter, truth be told. But then there are some people willing to post impassioned defences of Wii Music, while remaining sensible enough to acknowledge its flaws.

For ’some people’, read: 1Up.com’s Jeremy Parish and Jennifer Tsao. And you know who else? Me. Yep, that’s right - thanks to the delightful Keith Stuart, editor of the Guardian games blog, I’ve been given a soapbox to stand on and holler my opinion at anyone who happens to be browsing the Guardian’s website.

Quoting myself feels a bit (okay, a lot) weird, but here goes:

“Ostensibly all too simplistic, Wii Music is undoubtedly a product with significant hidden depths. When you consider that each and every song needs to cater for any potential controller input at any time, you begin to realise that this is no throwaway plaything, but an elegantly designed creative tool that just happens to be a lot of fun. Far from the disaster some were predicting, and clearly worthy of a more substantial time investment than some critics are willing to give, Wii Music might not achieve the sales success of Wii Sports, Play and Fit, but it deserves to be treated with respect as a superior example of a mass market-friendly play experience that offers rich rewards to those prepared to give it a chance.”

The rest of it’s here. Feel free to have a gander if you’ve a spare five minutes. Thanks, readers.

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Castlevania: Judgment predictably brought with it a chorus of disapproval from braying fanboys, disgusted that ‘their’ franchise had  been turned into a one-on-one beat-em-up. To a degree, I can understand their whining - it’s rare that a series spin-off (particularly one of an entirely different genre) turns out any good, but perhaps Judgment can buck that trend.

It certainly looks the part, for starters - vaguely resembling something like Soul Calibur but set in the ‘Vaniaverse. Its controls - using the nunchuk and remote’s unique capabilities, apparently - may not seem ideal for a 3D scrapper, but I’m prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. No word on a release date as yet, but the game will feature some kind of connectivity with DS title Order of Ecclesia, which I’ll hopefully be playing a bit of tomorrow and will bring you impressions of just as soon as I can. Linking the two up reportedly unlocks “a surprising bonus”. Intriguing…

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