Ah well - it was fun while it lasted, eh?

Turns out Edge’s Next Month page is extremely likely to be another game rather than Pikmin 3. Over the past couple of days, I’ve learned from a few journalistic pals that the game Edge is trailing for its next month issue does involve grass, but sadly not the creatures that reside therein.

It’d be a little unfair for me to say what the game is - and I’m pretty certain an embargo is in place to prevent it from being officially revealed - but suffice to say there’s a very strong chanceit’s not actually Pikmin 3.

So what is that tiny purple blob in the patch of grass, if not a Pikmin? It could be that I’ve happened upon an even more surprising revelation - that Pikmin live and walk among us. Either that or whoever took the shot was painting their ceiling a fetching shade of lilac with said photo catching an errant drip, but that’s not nearly as interesting.

And yes, there are still gremlins in the works which are preventing me from posting properly. Fingers crossed this place will be back to full strength, and all pictured up soon enough.

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It’s been a lot of fun, but unfortunately my time on WiiWii.tv has come to an all-too-premature end. The current economic climate has forced many media organisations to cut budgets as advertisers are reluctant to spend the sort of money they used to before the credit crunch started biting, and Shiny Media is no different. I’ve been told by my superiors that the site will be closing - temporarily, anyway - and so there won’t be any more updates save for an official announcement of a vaguely similar nature (but presumably with slightly more official language).

Basically, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to thank each and every reader who has spent time on here, whether you’ve just been browsing occasionally, visiting on a daily basis, or even commenting on my posts - seriously, you’re all great, and I really appreciate your support.

Hopefully this will just be a temporary measure, and Shiny will be able to reopen the site once more in the not-too-distant, but in the meantime I’ll be moving onto other things. I’ve enjoyed this so much that I might even start a new Nintendo blog of my own, but either way I’m sure you’ll see my name pop up on the internet every now and again, as there are a few other places I write for.

In the meantime, if for some bizarre reason you want to stay in touch, feel free to click the ‘contact’ tab at the top, and I’ll let you know what I’m up to and where you can find me.

Once again, thanks for your wonderful support which has helped make this one of the most purely enjoyable writing gigs I’ve ever had.

See you around,

Chris

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Gamasutra has an interesting article about the disappointing sales for two portable rhythm-action games - the PSP’s Patapon and terrific touchscreen tapper Elite Beat Agents on the DS.

While the former was a niche title which arguably overperformed - partly thanks to a low price point - EBA (based on the Japanese game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan) was always expected to do better, with Reggie Fils-Aime having confessed that he’d hoped for roughly 300,000 sales - the game limped out of the charts with a comparatively paltry 179,000.

Yet the feature’s comparisons with Guitar Hero: On Tour seem a little unfair - the latter being an established franchise backed with officially licensed songs and a strong marketing push. While EBA theoretically had the might of Nintendo behind it, the big N was comparatively reluctant to heavily trail the game - any title without immediately obvious mainstream appeal tends to fall foul of Nintendo’s timidity when it comes to promoting new core IP.

Anyway, the cost for procuring the licenses to cover the songs featured in EBA would have been a not insubstantial amount, and thus - despite the success of Ouendan 2 in Japan - a western sequel seems very unlikely. Shame.

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Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, the Wii-make of the critically-lauded 360 zombie actioner is released today in the US, yet bizarrely - at the time of writing, anyway - there’s not a single review up on aggregator site Metacritic. That’s never a good sign, and indeed, the suggestion that it might not be the world’s greatest port is borne out by the two magazine reviews which currently exist, but haven’t been added to Metacritic just yet.

UK magazines Official Nintendo Magazine and NGamer both carry reviews of Chop Till You Drop, the former awarding it a fairly average 68%, with the latter plumping for a measly 55%. Both suggest it’s an infuriating experience thanks to the addition of zombie parrots and poodles, but that the lack of enemies also disappoints - neither were problems in the 360 game whose mall was absolutely full of the undead. But as NGamer summarises, “a zombie-infested mall doesn’t make much sense without zombies to infest it. Poodles and parrots are among the most irritating substitutes imaginable.” Ouch.

In truth, Dead Rising never seemed like a good fit for Wii, and so this is hardly a surprise, although the addition of tiny flying and ground-based foes which are difficult to hit was a problem that simply didn’t need to exist. Perhaps EA had the right idea turning Dead Space: Extraction into an on-rails shooter, if an experienced developer like Capcom can struggle to port a third-person HD action game onto Wii.

Expect more reviews to roll in later this week, and expect them to follow suit. If you’ve still not been put off, Chop Till You Drop is released in Europe this Friday.

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I’m still playing Animal Crossing: City Folk (or Let’s Go To The City, if you prefer) but boy is it testing my patience. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for the game waned some time ago, but my three-year-old son loves it, and so I keep visiting my village more out of duty to entertain him than because I really want to. Yesterday, something happened which nearly made me snap the disc in half.

As those of you who play the game regularly will know, yesterday an event took place named Festivale. This new event brought with it a brand new visitor to my village - Pavé the peacock. Speaking in broken English, he was a feisty little chap, singing and dancing away to a samba-style beat and requesting candy of various different flavours. I’d read in my father-in-law’s strategy guide that it might have been wise to stockpile some from Hallowe’en, but seeing as the game wasn’t released until November and I’ve not been cheating by messing around with the dates, that was impossible. I was therefore heartened to find, when speaking to one of my animal neighbours, that I could win candy from them by playing a game, but that if I lost, I’d have to give them 500 Bells. Thus began a long, expensive and arduous few hours which I will never, ever get back.

My first test was a game of rock, paper, scissors - it’s the best of three rounds, and you have to shout out an answer rather than performing the gesture. I lost 500 bells on this game, and was then tested on my ESP by another villager. Soon after, I was another 500 Bells lighter. The third game had me guessing which hand my animal chum was holding some candy was in - I got this right, but it was the wrong colour candy. The fourth game was an entertaining and well-written exchange involving a penalty-shoot-out where I and my favourite villager Chrissy took it in turns to try to save a shot from the other. After several goals, Chrissy missed and I scored, and I got to choose a piece of candy. Upon returning to Pavé, I was told I’d need three pieces, not just the one.

Undeterred by this setback, I ploughed on with the games until I had three pieces of blue candy to pass on, at which point Pavé greedily munched down the lot and gave me a piece of Pavé furniture. I took it back to my house, and put it in the basement. It looked nice, and so I decided I’d try to get some more items. Big mistake.

My play session finished several hours later. I’d visited Pavé nineteen times for ten pieces of furniture (or eight plus a wallpaper and carpet). That’s nineteen lots of three pieces of candy, which means fifty-seven pieces of candy obtained from my villagers. If I’m being generous, my win percentage was approximately fifty percent, and I’m sure it was actually much lower. Which means I spoke to my villagers well over 114 times. God knows how many repeated lines of dialogue that involved, but it sucked absolutely every single bit of fun out of the Festivale, and made me swear that I’d never try and collect a set of furniture over one day again. Snowman or mushroom furniture, where it’s one piece a day and you’ve got plenty of time to get the lot? Fine. But with this and the Jingle debacle, Animal Crossing has made the simple collecting of items more of a rigmarole than level-grinding in an RPG. Of course, some people will claim that it’s not meant to be easy to get the lot. But there’s a difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘tiresomely random’. Had Pavé given me a different item each time, then that would have been something. The fact I had no idea whether or not he’d claim to give me a ‘new item’ and then pass me the table he’d provided not sixty seconds before was the final straw.

(I’m shy of a bed and a sofa, for the record.)

Tedious collectathons, eh - don’t you just love ‘em? Well, it’s a good job my son still loves Animal Crossing, because it’s firmly off my Christmas card list this year for that particular discretion.

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“Ha! We’re getting DSi on April 5th!” snort the Americans.”Ner ner ne ner ner!” retort the Europeans, thumbing their noses at their US counterparts as Nintendo announces a launch date of April 3rd in PAL territories the following day.

“We’re getting a blue model, though!” laugh the US residents.

“Ah, but we’ve got white!” is the response.

“Yeah, well ours only costs $179.99!”

“Oh.”

Yep, it’s going to be a penny shy of £150 for us UK residents, which for my money is £20 too much - but then Nintendo is marketing this as a premium option rather than a replacement for the Lite, so the price is hardly a shock. No pricing details have been announced for the rest of Europe as yet, and no further info regarding DSi software is yet available - expect more news in the coming weeks (though probably not from me, sob).

Will you be buying DSi, readers? Do let me know by posting a comment below.

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Oh dear. Early reports are suggesting that gorgeous adventure Another Code: R has sold very poorly in Japan. The talky adventure sold a paltry 10,000 copies according to data from Famitsu. Meanwhile, Wii’s fortunes seem to have taken a turn for the worse, too - the console struggling to 21,000 units in the week ending 8th February, outselling PS3 by just 5,000 units.

It seems that home consoles in general are struggling, but Wii has always bucked that particular trend and it must be worrying for Nintendo to see that PS3 is starting to catch up. You could argue that Nintendo hasn’t released any brand new first-party titles since the disappointing Animal Crossing - the Wii de Asobu range barely having any noticeable effect on hardware sales - but it’s sad to see games like Another Code: R perform so poorly. Perhaps that kind of adventure is better suited to DS, but whichever way you slice it, 10,000 sales for a new first-party title is pretty bad.

My import copy of Another Code: R arrives tomorrow, and I’ll bring you some brief impressions of the game’s early stages shortly afterwards. In the meantime just keep your fingers crossed that this doesn’t affect its chances of reaching Europe, though surely the localisation effort is at the stage where it wouldn’t make sense to abandon the project.

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A games industry source close to WiiWii.tv has revealed his frustration at Nintendo’s reluctance to hand out the Software Development Kit required to start development on MotionPlus controls for Wii games. “We are still unable to obtain the SDK,” says the source, “and until then we aren’t working on any Wii games.”

The source also suggested that other developers might well be in the same boat - it’s unclear whether or not they’re also halting progress of their Wii titles, but it seems that most companies are still to get their hands on the relevant kit.

With Satoru Iwata set to deliver an address on ‘Discovering New Development Opportunities’ at GDC in March, I wonder if Nintendo is holding off until then to let developers into the fold - in which case, it seems unlikely that any third-party games will employ MotionPlus until the third quarter of 2009 at the earliest.

On the one hand, I can understand Nintendo wanting to lead the way, with Wii Sports Resort set to show exactly what the new add-on can do. But on the other, making developers wait to add MotionPlus to their games is a dangerous strategy, particularly if more publishers postpone releases until they can support the enhanced controls.

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(WARNING: the above video may not be suitable for under 18s)

House of the Dead: Overkill is almost with us, and ahead of its launch next month, Sega has released a story trailer showing some more action from the grindhouse-themed rail shooter. For my money, it’s looking great, although it’s clear not everyone thinks so.

While previews have offered up some very favourable first impressions, the game’s first review isn’t entirely happy - Swedish magazine Level awarding Overkill a paltry 3/10. And particularly in an issue where the awful Lord of the Rings: Conquest gets 6/10, that’s not good news. Of course, it may be that Level aren’t fans of the lightgun shooter in general, or perhaps the game is a little short (but then aren’t all games in this genre?)

Either way, I’m still looking forward to Overkill, although perhaps a little more cautiously than I was. It’s due out on Friday 13th February in Europe, and the slightly less spooky date of the 10th in North America.

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IGN has an interesting feature about a Wii title from Geist creator n-Space named Winter - a game which, sad to say, is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

The concept seems to be a mix of Silent Hill-style survival horror, and the elemental obstacles of SOS: The Final Escape or even Disaster: Day of Crisis. It features a lone female protagonist battling against sub-zero temperatures and a host of otherworldly creatures, one of which - featured in the creepy trailer above - would look right at home in Silent Hill: Homecoming.

For a game developed in such a short time by a minuscule team, it looks pretty good - certainly comparable to Disaster, while the sections which see our heroine rummaging through drawers and cupboards aren’t a million miles away from Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse.

Of course, it’s no surprise to learn that, two years on from IGN taking a look at the game, it remains unpublished, even after a very positive critical reception to the game’s early demonstration. The studio’s creative director, Ted Newman, explains:

“We left GDC that year feeling very confident about placing the title quickly and on our terms. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. In almost every case we got hung up with the sales and marketing groups. They simply could not get behind a survival horror title on the Wii. In spite of great sales for Resident Evil 4 and the Umbrella Chronicles, these groups were unable to support the projections required to create a viable P&L for the title. The idea of an “adult” game on what they perceived to be a “kids” console was simply too big a leap for them, regardless of the enthusiastic support of the PD department and the Wii’s total domination in the marketplace.”

There’s a tiny silver lining in that n-Space has been offered plenty of work on other titles since then, purely off the back of that impressive initial demo. Hopefully IGN’s story might convince a third-party publisher that Winter is worth investing in, particularly given Newman’s insistence that they could make it look even better. But I’m not going to get my hopes up - until more than a couple of core titles sell in big numbers, no-one is going to take the risk on anything that’s not aimed at Wii’s expanded audience, particularly in the current economic climate.

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