Two more WiiWare games, and just the one Virtual Console release - it’s a schedule which has become fairly familiar to US Wii owners, but this week looks like the best in a little while.

High Voltage, arguably Wii’s hardest-working third-party developer, has yet another game for release, this time in the form of High Voltage Hot Rod Show, a multiplayer-focused racer which offers a nod towards top-down classic Micro Machines, but features stunts, boosts, power slides and more to keep things interesting. With four-player split-screen play and online leaderboards, it’s another feature-packed WiiWare release from the developer, and it costs 1000 points. It’s over 300 blocks, though - can I really bear to (temporarily) delete the Art Style games to make room? I’m not so sure. Get that storage solution sorted, Nintendo - and quickly.

Meanwhile, Aksys Games offers Family Glide Hockey for 500 points - glide hockey being air hockey to you and I. The same four cel-shaded characters which popped up in Aksys’ earlier table-tennis title on WiiWare make a reappearance here, and compete in one of four different environments, with a basic single and multiplayer mode bolstered by three minigames. And on the Virtual Console is Genesis/MegaDrive favourite MUSHA - 800 points’ worth of old-school blasting, which appears to be a popular choice with hardcore shmuppers.

Nothing hugely inspiring, then, but we’re still getting a fairly regular flow of downloadable content on the Wii, which will make that storage issue even more of an irritant before too long. SD card access isn’t the most elegant solution, but it’s certainly preferable to the current situation. Fingers crossed we’re offered some kind of alternative before too long.

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Coming across very much like a blend of the official Classic Controller and a PSP, the Blaze Classic Wii Controller is an alternative option if you’re looking for ways to play your old GameCube games or those classics from yesteryear on the Virtual Console.

Weighing in at £14.99, however, it costs the same as the official model, and in my experience I’ve never used a third-party pad on a Nintendo console that’s bettered the official versions. Which doesn’t necessarily make it a bad purchase, but it seems as if it’ll only benefit those unable to get hold of the in-short-supply Nintendo controller. It does remind me that Nintendo should release a wireless version of their own Classic Controller, though. Will we see anything like that next year, or does Nintendo not quite care enough about the core gamer to bother? With MotionPlus on the way in the spring, it might just be an official peripheral too many for Nintendo, particularly given Satoru Iwata’s insistence that the company wasn’t planning on releasing any more new controllers.

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Wow. Americans have clearly done something right - or Nintendo is overcompensating for the lack of Disaster: Day of Crisis - because it’s got a cracking week of WiiWare and Virtual Console goodies. Besides Art Style: CUBELLO (mentioned in the post below this one), the much-hyped World of Goo is on there, as is classic SNES adventure Secret of Mana.

The latter’s one of the most eagerly-awaited retro games on VC, and given Square-Enix’s predilection for re-releasing enhanced versions of its old games, it’s a bit of a surprise to see it at all. Meanwhile World of Goo is almost certainly the highest-profile WiiWare release since the service launched - it’s 1500 points and a whopping 321 blocks, but early word is absolutely stellar. I’ll be giving it a go tomorrow, so expect some more impressions then. SoM will just have to wait until silly season is over, I’m afraid.

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It’s impossible to link today’s Virtual Console releases together in any meaningful way, so let’s just lay them out one by one. There are three games available for your delectation, each of them weighing in at 500 Wii Points (£3.50).

First off, there’s Sonic the Hedgehog from his Sega Master System incarnation. This game is more for Sonic completists, to be honest, and the more casual fans should check out one of his flashier first three Megadrive outings. It’s a playable enough slice of Hog history, though, and knowing the current direction of the series, it’ll probably turn out to be better than Sonic Unleashed on 360 and PS3. It hasn’t got that blasted “WereHog” for a start.

Next up is Boulder Dash from the Commodore 64, which is a stone-cold classic. (Note to all groaners: that pun was unintentional, honest.) The game’s all about collecting diamonds while trying not to get crushed by boulders or killed by nasties, and while it’s a very early C64 title and certainly looks and sounds like it, Boulder Dash has the nostalgia factor in spades and remains quite charming.

Lastly we have Jumpman, also from the Commodore 64, which aside from the title referencing Mario’s original name in the Donkey Kong arcade game I don’t know much about, other than that it’s a well-regarded old platformer where you jump around defusing bombs. Surely “BombDefusingWhileJumpingMan”, then. This one evaded my childhood memories, I’m afraid, but it’s apparently quite good.

Not too bad a schedule this week overall, then. All three games are up on the Virtual Console for download right now.

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While perusing the Nintendo Shopping Channel on my Japanese Wii (latest WiiWare update: Pop and, er, that’s it) I noticed a bit of text which seemed to suggest what might be coming to the service in August. I managed to spot one title which caught my eye - mainly because it was in western script - which confirms that brilliant platformer Parasol Stars is coming to the Virtual Console next month (in Japan, at least) for 600 points.

Parasol Stars was never actually released in the arcades, making its debut on the PC Engine before being ported to computers like the Amiga - which is where I first played the game. It’s the sequel to Rainbow Islands and is every bit as good as its widely-respected predecessor. Something to get excited about, then. I can’t see this not making it to the west, it just remains to be seen how long we’ll end up waiting. Hopefully we’ll have this by the end of August.

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And about time too - it’s a pity it’s seemingly taken for it to be a ‘mainstream’ issue before Nintendo has acknowledged it in any meaningful way and suggested a storage solution might not be too far away.

In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Reggie claimed “We have a consumer base who loves virtual console. We have a userbase who really is enjoying WiiWare content. So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on a download basis? As we continue to have things…like ‘Mario Kart’ that has its own channel when you’re playing from an Internet perspective, we’re just making this challenge tougher and tougher. So in our view this is becoming much more of a mainstream problem, which is why we have a sense of urgency to solve it.”

So when it was an issue for the ‘geeks and otaku’ apparently it wasn’t on Nintendo’s agenda. You cut us, Nintendo. You cut us deep.

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Here’s where PAL Wii owners can look slightly smug. Toki Tori’s been available since WiiWare’s launch in Europe, but it’s only now hitting the US, and for 1000 points rather than 900 (although the exchange rate still makes it marginally cheaper for our Stateside brethren).

However, the American service is also getting Protothea, a top-down space shooter from Ubisoft, which again will be 1000 points. I’ll be downloading this as soon as it’s up, so I’ll post some brief impressions this evening, time permitting.

The Virtual Console offering for US gamers today is side-scrolling Neo Geo brawler, Ninja Combat. Absurdly literal game titles? Gotta love ‘em.  

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Remember last September when we got a month of Japanese games for the Virtual Console? A nice and unexpected present from Nintendo, the ‘Hanabi Festival’ was named after the Japanese holiday season, where they apparently set off loads of fireworks. Anyway, last time we got the likes of Treasure’s majestic Sin and Punishment and…er…oh yeah, Mario Picross, and the Super Mario Bros. Lost Levels. Guess which one of those three got the most playtime from me, readers.

Well, we’re getting another month of stuff, kicked off this week by the arrival of PC Engine shooters Gradius II Gofer No Yabou and Final Soldier, and Columns III: Revenge of Columns. The former’s probably the best of the bunch - Final Soldier is a bit hard, and if you’ve played one Columns, you’ve played them all. But there are some potential corkers coming up in the next few weeks, according to Nintendo’s press release.

Puyo Puyo 2 and Gley Lancer are on their way from SEGA, with Star Parodier arriving from Hudson Soft, alongside - and I had to rub my eyes and check I’d not misread this one - Cho Aniki.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically the first a series that gained a cult following in Japan (and the import scene in the West) for being a bit rubbish, but in an amusingly homoerotic way, with the franchise’s two mascots being two musclebound men clad in nothing but skimpy Speedos. The original is perhaps the least risque, but it’s still quite a shock to see it coming to the Virtual Console.

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Several thugs round on a woman in an alley. One of them throws her over his shoulder and they walk away. Moments later, a garage door opens and two brothers dressed in pearl-white knee-high boots and waistcoats mince onto the cobbles. Billy starts thumping the air. Jimmy does a flying kick. He accidentally clips Billy and Billy doubles over. After a stand off, Billy punches Jimmy once, then they carry walking on to the left. They meet a couple of milling thugs, dozens more catch the scent, and it all goes off. Fists fly, feet swing, knees crunch into septums, victims slump and vanish.

Then, the weapons come out. People are lashed, bludgeoned, stabbed, shot, dynamited, shoved into holes, knocked onto conveyor belts and crushed by machinery. Eventually, after unlawfully killing dozens of criminals, Billy and Jimmy turn on one another and fight to the death, after which Marian runs into the arms of either Billy, her boyfriend, or Jimmy, her boyfriend’s murderer. It’s all the same to her.

Yep, it’s Double Dragon, and it’s come to Virtual Console.

Going on the press release, it sounds like this version is different from the arcade original. For one thing, it claims that Billy will “gain experience by using different fighting techniques to obtain more hearts, which will unlock more powerful techniques to use against his enemies,” which doesn’t ring a bell.

For another, it “contains mild violence.” Doesn’t sound like the Double Dragon I grew up with. Is nothing sacred?

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Confession time: I never had a SNES as a kid. I was an Amiga boy back in the day, and I had to nip to Gaz and Kev’s house down the road whenever I fancied a bit of a Nintendo love-in. Super Mario World took up a lot of our gaming time, as did Street Fighter II.

Which has led me to the realisation of exactly why I spend too much of my own money on importing classic controllers that I’ll probably use once for the novelty and never again (because they don’t work with the other Virtual Console games or Wii games which use the ‘proper’ classic controller). I’m giving myself the childhood I never had. As an adult, I’m now able to afford to make my childhood dreams come true. (Well, all apart from the one about going to the moon, anyway.)

So I present to you, the Club Nintendo-only Super Famicom classic controller. Which is a thing of beauty, if little use other than to play your Virtual Console SNES games exactly as they were intended. Hit the jump for two shots of the lovely, lovely box that I spent a full five minutes stroking when it arrived this afternoon.

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