As Nintendo confirms the European release dates of its first two New Play Control GameCube Wii-makes, with Mario Power Tennis arriving on March 6th - exactly a month after Pikmin - I can’t help but wonder that it’s immediately shot itself in the foot with the pricing of the games.

GI.biz is reporting that retailers have the games down for a recommended retail price of £39.99 - exactly what they cost when released for the GameCube several years ago. Now the games aren’t just straightforward ports - Pikmin uses pointer-based cursor movement and a whole new save system, while Mario Power Tennis will benefit from splitscreen multiplayer as well as completely revamped motion controls - but compared to sequels and updates on rival consoles which offer significantly more than their last-gen counterparts, this seems, let’s be honest, like a total rip-off.

Nintendo has claimed that the titles will retail for an RRP of £29.99, while certain online retailers are offering further price cuts - Amazon currently has the game for £24.99, which would be a more realistic price. I still maintain that £19.99 would be ideal, but then perhaps these games aren’t aimed at those who owned the GameCube versions but those new consumers Nintendo might be trying to wean onto its more traditional IP. Yet if these are to be successful ‘bridge’ titles, surely the lower the price the more people are likely to pick them up?

A strange strategy, that’s for sure. I guess we’ll all see whether this was a wise decision soon after the games are released. With five more set to appear in the range, low sales for the first two may make Nintendo wary of bringing further New Play Control titles to Europe.

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This one’s called “Stadium Funky” (in Japanese, anyway) and requires you to collect the coins. There’s a very specific order to picking them up if you want to get the best possible time, and the official site informs you to check the map in the bottom-right corner to secure the best route.

Does anyone still bother with the online challenges? I’ve not attempted the last two or three, but it’s nice for Nintendo to consider DLC for at least one of their games, even if it’s really just allowing access to code which is already on the disk.

Meanwhile, Xbox 360 owners today got their hands on some downloadable content for Fable II in the form of an additional island - whose quests should take between two and four hours to complete. It’s 535Mb’s worth of extra stuff. Compare and contrast, folks. Compare and contrast.

Does Wii’s lack of storage space mean we’re getting short-changed when it comes to extra content? Should we expect more from Nintendo in this day and age? Or are you happy with just having a £40 game that’s never going to offer anything more than what’s in the box?

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Sigh. The official Japanese site for Another Code: R has opened - mere hours after I said news of its delay wasn’t worth a story of its own - and, besides some lovely relaxing music and a nice water ripple effect on its front page, there’s a bit of background about the characters and four gameplay videos.

Naturally, it looks completely brilliant and pretty much exactly how a modern-day point-and-clicker should look. The art style is delightful, the animation impressive, and the puzzles look to make excellent use of the Wii remote, much as the original DS adventure did with its host console (the stamp and mirror riddles in particular).

You’d think Nintendo, with its vast sums of money, might take the occasional chance with this sort of small title - a game which surely wouldn’t cost too much to bring to the west and could potentially be a surprise hit with a bit of decent marketing and good word of mouth. (Much in the way movie giant Miramax funds small critically-acclaimed indie titles with the profits from its bigger films.) But sadly, it’s likely the game will never be seen outside Japan.

Not only does Nintendo UK know nothing about the game - never a good sign - but a poster over on NeoGAF received an email from Nintendo of America that gave a pretty clear indication that the game wouldn’t be likely to see the light of day in the US, either.

So in all likelihood we’re not getting it. Which is hugely, hugely disappointing. I’ll import and hope for a GameFAQs translation guide, but it won’t be the same.

It could be worse, of course. If this does well in Japan, it makes a Wii Hotel Dusk sequel more likely. And if that remained Japanese-only…well, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions.

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Five weeks on, and I’m already getting a little bored of Animal Crossing: City Folk. Sure, it’s a relaxing way to wile away half an hour every day, but the more I play, the stronger the sense of deja vu gets. And the stronger that gets, the more irritating the omissions from the GameCube original get. It’s in danger of turning my general apathy into a sense of total injustice.

I’ve spoken already about one of the most obvious omissions. In the GameCube version, you could download a tool to your GameBoy Advance, allowing you to design t-shirts on the move, bring them home and upload them to your console. Despite the DS being perfect for this sort of thing, this feature is not available in the Wii game. Moreover, tailor Mabel always used to recommend the must-have fashions when you ventured in. Now you’re not given the option to find out what the must-have threads of the season are. The latter might only be a small issue, but it’s symptomatic of the often bizarre tweaks to the template that make it probably the weakest Crossing yet for fans.

Take the house expansion, for example. In the DS game, you can have a back room, and rooms to the left and right as well as an upstairs room. Granted, if other players were sharing your copy of the game they’d have to live in the same house too, but how few people will that have affected? The Wii game offers a larger first room, a second floor and a basement and that’s your lot.

Then there’s the city - it offers a change of scenery but little else, and makes certain tasks more of a chore. Getting your hair done now requires you to leave your village (you could always just pop into the salon in Nookington’s in the DS game) while expressions require you to sit through a hopelessly unfunny thirty seconds of dialogue. With Lyle now fronting the Happy Room Academy, there’s none of that amusing insurance banter, and no reward for getting yourself stung by bees. That had always been a nice little earner in Wild World, but it’s also gone.

As for the decision to allow the ground to wear away where you’ve been walking - well, how silly. A lot of people spend significant amounts of time beautifying their village, and yet they’re more likely than anyone to suffer the problem of grass and snow being eroded into dirt pathways, with every step potentially leaving their town looking less attractive than before. A barren area where a villager’s house used to be is supposed to evoke sadness at their departure, but in reality you’re more annoyed that there’s a big messy-looking patch in its place.

Couple that with the load times as you enter and exit each building - astonishing in this day and age where consoles can stream huge open-world landscapes - and the laggy menus, the occasionally clunky and inconsistent mechanics (I can sell several items at once, but only order one item at a time from my catalogue?) and you’ve arguably got one of Nintendo’s laziest releases ever. What makes it worse is Reggie Fils-Aime’s insistence that this was Nintendo’s big ‘hardcore’ release this winter. The true hardcore will be the ones most ill at-ease with City Folk - it’s only those newcomers that are enjoying the Animal Crossing experience from the first time who won’t feel let down or cheapened by Nintendo’s penny-pinching approach to one of its most novel creations of the past ten years.

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A clear attempt to do something a bit subtle and arty for this Wii sequel to one of the DS’s most underrated games, but for me this just doesn’t work. What kind of boxart has the main character cut in half at the top of the picture? Too much space reserved for the writing at the bottom, too. Bah. Let’s hope the Japanese public don’t judge a book by its cover - I’d like this to sell well, so CING can carry on making those compelling adventures I love so much.

Still, this obviously means it’s not long before Another Code: R - Kioku No Tobira is out in Japan - indeed, it’s due out on January 22nd - but with Nintendo’s PAL release schedule for the first-quarter of 2009 looking a little barren, it seems as if it’s going to be April at the earliest before we see this…if at all.

UPDATE: I’ve just heard from Nintendo UK - it has confirmed, indeed, that there’s “nothing announced at this time”. I’ll just have to cross my fingers that it’s being localised as I type this.

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Later, I’ll be posting the first half of my top ten DS games of 2008 list. One game which won’t be appearing is Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. And that’s one game I’m almost certain that, had I played it, would almost certainly be on there.

I’m a big fan of the Fire Emblem series - to me, it’s had the same strategic allure of the Advance Wars games, but with characters you genuinely care about. The franchise’s USP - that once your characters are dead, they stay dead - is part of what make it so great. It’s devastating to witness the death of someone you were particularly fond of, and many players have been known to restart battles as soon as they lose a valued fighter. It makes you more careful than you’d otherwise normally be with the often expendable troops found in most strategy titles, and the RPG-style levelling-up adds an extra layer of attachment to the bond you’ll form with your band of rebels.

So, it’s with great disappointment that I find myself unable to include said game in the list - mainly because I’ve not seen it available in a single shop I’ve been in. I’ve scoured the DS sections of Game, Gamestation, Gamestop, Zavvi, Tesco, Asda and other stockists near me, to no avail. In desperation, I asked my wife - who works in the centre of Manchester - if she’d be kind enough to buy me the game as a Christmas present. She hasn’t been able to locate the game either.

While Nintendo might say that this is down to ‘retail orders’ (as it suggested when I asked about the whereabouts of Professor Layton and the Curious Village) I can’t help but feel that the publisher is sending some of its more niche titles to almost certain retail death. Fire Emblem is a game that would benefit from some kind of advertising spend, but because it’s not geared towards a mainstream, mass-market audience, Nintendo just doesn’t bother. And as hardcore gamers become more and more disgruntled with the casual-focused titles on Wii and DS and start to gravitate towards other consoles, games like Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon are likely to sell less and less, the eventual result likely being that Europe won’t see the next game in the franchise.

It’s a great pity - Nintendo has sure-fire hits which will undoubtedly sell regardless of advertising, and it spends a small fortune on putting those games even more in the public eye. Then it has games of undeniable quality, but does so little to promote them that even many core gamers are unaware they are available. It’d be nice to see the company take a risk on one or two of these smaller games - give them some prime-time advertising slots, show a celeb or two (perhaps, you know, someone who actually tends to play games in their spare time) enjoying said titles, and see if they do any better. I’m sure that way we wouldn’t have this ridiculous - actually, let’s be honest, disgraceful - situation where a fan of a particular series can’t actually wander into his local games retailer and buy a copy of the game a week after its release.  

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Curious DS owners wishing to get their hands on D mystery-puzzler Professor Layton are finding this fantastic game particularly hard to come by at the moment. With store shelves empty, and copies on Amazon.com changing hands for a staggering £99  - heck, even Play.com’s cheapest copy weighs in at £48.95 - it seems that once again Nintendo has undershipped one of its key titles over the winter period.

I spoke to Nintendo UK PR guru Rob Saunders about the situation, and he insisted that Nintendo hadn’t underestimated how well the game would sell, saying “no, we don’t manufacture the same number of games for every title we release - we produce and bring to market quantities based on retail orders we receive”. So there you go: it’s the retailers’ fault, apparently.

Saunders also assured me that shops would be receiving more stocks before Christmas. “Yes, stock is coming in every week to all retailers across the UK,” he asserted.

Sadly, he was a little less forthcoming when asked whether we could expect the second and third games in the series to be localised for Europe. “We’ve not announced any plans at this time” was the rather predictable response.

So, your best bet if you wish to get your hands on a copy of the game before Christmas is to speak to your retailer of choice and ask whether they’d be prepared to reserve you a copy once stock arrives. It seems some shops may well offer this service (from anecdotal information), so ask around and you might just be able to get your hands on a title that’s going to be as rare as uncooked turkey this yuletide.

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Nintendo’s chart success continues, though it will be tempered with a little disappointment this week as Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City failed to break into the top ten, while Wii Music fell out of the top ten also.

Evergreen titles such as Wii Fit and Brain Training had sales boosts, with the former rising from 8 to 4, while the latter took the runner-up spot. Meanwhile, Nintendogs bounded up the charts like a hyperactive puppy, leaping from 22 to 12. Animal Crossing could only manage thirteenth place, though its ad campaign has only really started this week, and it could well be part of the second-week-sales-boost phenomenon which has affected most major Nintendo titles of late.

Heavy discounting on big titles from rival consoles - like Fable II and Fallout 3 - undoubtedly contributed to Wii Music dropping out of the top ten, though it seems as if it’s been comparatively successful in Europe against its mediocre sales in Japan and the US. But the big question is: can Nintendo hang onto top spot for a couple more weeks to get the Christmas number one? If it can keep Mario Kart in stock in the major game retailers, then it stands a good chance. And if not, then Dr. Kawashima is on hand should Nintendo’s Wii Wheel-enhanced racer start to slide.

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Subsonic has released info and pics of its latest two peripherals for Wii. The first is a lightsaber which no doubt due to copyright issues has to be referred to as a Laser Sword, which lights up either constantly or when you swing the remote. Nice idea, but to be frank the people who buy these things are imagination-free idiots. Though it’s maybe just about acceptable if you have kids. Maybe.

The second accessory is the Wireless Nunchuk Adaptor, which allows for “up to 50 hours of game autonomy” on 2 AAA batteries, which aren’t provided. It also makes your nunchuk about twice as big, so it’s a bit like holding two remotes. Considering half the appeal of the original nunchuk is in its ergonomic and lightweight design - and given that the cable between the two is plenty long enough for every game you’ll ever need it for (unless you’re doing some really bizarre and wrong movements while playing) - this has to be one of the most pointless peripherals I’ve seen.

Might be good for the one-handed control of Opoona, but then again you’ve got Nyko’s wireless adapter which is smaller and almost certainly better. Ah well.

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The internet is never going to let cold, hard facts get in the way of a good furore, so a Kotaku report (discussed on Casualgaming.biz) that Nintendo of Europe issued a press release politely asking “publications” not to use the old red logo, but the ‘new’, grey one is naturally causing some tears and tantrums before bedtime.

Of course, anyone who’s purchased a copy of the Official Nintendo Magazine in the last couple of years (or, indeed, any Nintendo-published game, though it’s marginally less obvious there) will be aware that the logo’s been grey for ages. It’s just that with this email it’s now sort of official, and it represents Nintendo making further steps towards the Dark Side in some people’s eyes.

While grey isn’t the most inspiring of colours, Nintendo has increasingly wished to position itself away from its previous ‘kiddie’ image towards something a little cooler and more sophisticated, so the abandonment of red makes sense, really. Of course, certain internet-goers see it as further evidence that Nintendo is neglecting its fanbase, who apparently adored the original colour so much that this move is akin to erasing the golden memories of their childhood. Boo frickin’ hoo.

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