The Wii’s had more than its fair share of dodgy ports. Simon M goes to find out if Pro Evo Soccer 2008 is one of them.

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Joy unconfined. This week, internet super-celeb Yahtzee tackles Suda 51’s brilliantly hatstand No More Heroes. And - despite about three minutes’ worth of caveats - he likes it.

Perhaps more noteworthy is his praise of Suda’s previous (and probably superior, certainly in my book) title, the equally bonkers GameCube mindf**k Killer 7.

Watch and learn, folks. You might even find out something interesting about Suda 51’s curious (and possibly illegal) origins.

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“INGRISH OF ZUH DED-OH!”

Need we say more? Okay then. It’s a new DS game from Japan, similar to the near-legendary Typing Of The Dead, only this requires Japanese speakers to input English words to destroy any encroaching zombies. It actually looks a bit nicer than the Wii version of House of the Dead 2, and…look, just watch the trailer, okay?

It looks like there might be a couple of rounds which can be played by those with zero Japanese skills, with words spoken out loud which players then have to write down. We’re just hoping that Sega sees fit to release a version of this that tests English gamers on their French or German skills. It’d certainly be more enjoyable than My Word Coach.

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Derek and Angie, together again! While we quite liked New Blood’s Vaughn and Blaylock, we’re thrilled to see our two favourite videogame medical types return in Trauma Center 2 on the DS, even if the footage so far doesn’t reveal an awful lot.

Caduceus is back, and the game’s look is very much in line with the Wii version - slightly crisper and cleaner than the original. I wonder whether we’ll get a bit more voice acting, as we did in the Wii sequel. Fingers crossed that the Easy mode means it’s actually possible to complete this one. And a co-operative mode using two DSes would be brilliant.

Enjoy the fifty three seconds of footage anyway - we’ll hopefully bring you more as and when it becomes available.

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You have cleverly used your wits and common sense not to fall for any April Fools’ joke this year. Well done, you! However, that’s not to say we can’t appreciate the lengths that some people went to in order to trick us. At it turns out, two of our favourites are Nintendo based offerings.

The first we like purely for its silliness, opting for the so stupid, it has to be true angle of approach. Think Geek, the online toys and gadgets store gave us Super Pii Pii Brothers. It’s a puerile Wii game in which you must angle a jet of urine into a waiting toilet. Watch out, though: obstacles abound and the lids keep opening and closing. Spill too much on the floor and it’s game over, to your eternal shame.

The game comes with a strap-on belt harness. We particularly like the way it resembles a pair of Y-fronts. What ardours us more, however, is the potential of a two-player mode. If only. If only…

Now, the second gag wins points just for the sheer effort that went into it. A Legend of Zelda movie trailer screams instant April Fools’, but to go to so much effort to make it believable impresses us mightily. This isn’t some hacked together job, this is done extremely well, with visibly high production values in place. Well, high enough for a TV movie, really. Yet the characters are all there and the fact that Link never says a word is right on the button. To spend that much time mocking up a convincing Zelda Story requires a big hand in IGN’s direction.

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Yes, believe it or not, professional grumpychops Yahtzee actually likes the game he’s reviewing this week - and why not, when it’s Capcom’s glorious Zack and Wiki? Dodgy spelling of the game’s title (and criticism of its Wiki’s high-pitched ‘Zakuuuu!’ squeals and insta-death puzzles) aside, the artist formerly known as Ben Croshaw finds it “fun and original”, admitting “it has a lot of charm”. Blimey. He reserves his most vitriolic outburst for the occasionally wonky motion controls, but the overall impression is an unusually positive one.

What, with this and Broken Sword, it appears to be National Old-School Adventure Day here on WiiWii, which is entirely unintentional, but sometimes fate moves in mysterious ways.

If, by some strange reason, you’ve still not bought Zack and Wiki, then you can’t really get a better recommendation than this. Someone who hates nearly all games likes it, ergo it is brilliant.

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Susi from shinyshiny.tv takes a quick play round with a preview version of Wii Fit.

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In a move that can only be a product of the generation engendered by Tom Green and the show Jackass, a brash gamer has taken it upon himself to demonstrate his dislike of shovelware by crushing a copy of Crazy Pigs with a mallet, placing the splinters in a blender along with several more palatable ingredients, and drinking the resulting fluid.

It looks fairly perilous, but you don’t actually see him swallowing any cart parts, and I’ve got a feeling he was careful to avoid ingesting any shards, if only because a man this deeply opposed to shovelware is unlikely to risk puncturing his stomach wall over it. Still, he probably paid for the game, which indicates a certain degree of misguidedness.

It’s a shame more people don’t take action over the nonsense that befouls Nintendo’s libraries. After all, it was the Nintendo Seal of Quality that rescued the videogame industry from its great depression in the 1980s, and now that company is the single biggest culprit of giving unsatisfactory games a platform. Perhaps if we all ask a friend to film us destroying a shovelware cart, the world will actually become a better place.

That said, I reviewed Crazy Pigs. It’s not that bad.

Gay Gamer

Related
Iwata: over a hundred WiiWare titles in development, WiiWare info reveals 40mb cap for games

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Not entirely sure what’s happening here, but it would appear to show the usually dignified Jon ‘Mr Cynical’ Stewart of Daily Show fame making a complete tool out of himself while leaping about on stage at last night’s Oscars playing Wii Tennis.

Always good to see “the mainstream” catching on to something, even if it is well over a year too late to be actually relevant. The big question is… did Nintendo pay for this staggering piece of global promotion?

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Our brave reviewer dons a virtual tin helmet and fights the good fight in Battalion Wars II. Does it earn a medal of honour? Or does it die screaming in agony, unmourned and unloved? Watch the video and find out.

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