Nintendo’s Japanese site has details of the new DSi software which will be available to download next Wednesday, February 25th.

For 200 points you can get a Nintendo-themed calculator, with Super Mario Bros. and Animal Crossing skins among others, while there’s also a slightly unfathomable app which Google Translate suggests is a ‘clock software dictionary’. Erm.

Thankfully, the remainder of the games are a little more understandable. For 500 points you can get one of two new Art Style games - Nalaku is a faintly nightmarish isometric puzzler which sees your stickman avatar climbing and pushing to reach the top of a cube while trying to avoid being crushed by falling blocks. Hacolife seems a little more relaxing, requiring you to cut out and fold together cubes from flat grids of squares - sometimes needing to ensure you’ve packed away an item within your created box before it’s lifted away by some omnipotent crane thing.  Also for 500 points is a collection of table games (chess, reversi, connect five and two more) and a stripped down version of that 100 Classic Book Collection, offering twenty titles to read on the move.

800 points gets you a Mahjong game and a new Mr. Driller title, the latter looking a little more interesting than the former.

It seems that Nintendo has settled into a rhythm with DSiWare - updating the range once a month with a mixture of games and applications at very reasonable prices. It’s good to see the Art Style series continuing to thrive on the service - and what we’ve seen so far seems to be a good indication of the sort of games we’ll see when DSi hits the west in April (so we’ll probably have to wait until June to see Hacolife and Nalaku unless Nintendo chops and changes the release order.

Excitingly, according to Offworld, next month sees a Katamari game come to DSiWare - though rather than the ball-rolling exploits the series is famous for, it’s a block-puzzler set in Takahashi-san’s esoteric universe.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 1:35 pm by Chris Schilling
DSiWare, Forthcoming titles, Japan.