Today saw the Japanese launch of the new Wii no Ma service - basically, TV programming made especially for Wii owners. And any Japanese users lucky enough to own a DSi too will get the opportunity to take their favourite shows with them on the move by downloading them to their handheld via a piece of software available on the DSiWare service.
Above - hopefully - is a YouTube video showing you how to download a (very short) cookery show to the SD card in your DSi. And that’s pretty much that.
There’s every chance this is going to be outdated by the time it’s posted, but what the hey.
Japanese owners have received the first piece of downloadable Animal Crossing content - in the form of a Pikmin hat (or helmet, depending on how you look at it). It’s a red juvenile Pikmin - evidenced by the fact that there’s a leaf at the top rather than a flower. Perhaps it’ll grow if you bob into The Roost for a cup of java - assuming Brewster adds a bit of nectar extract, that is.
Anyway, the reason this might be outdated is that the DLC may well be available to Europeans and Americans very soon - if not already. After all, it’d make a very nice Christmas present. Hint hint, Nintendo…
Is anyone still playing Mario Kart? I ask because almost everyone on my Friends list (admittedly, that’s only about 12 people) has failed to compete in the last two online tournaments. Which makes me, by default, the best among my circle of friends at Mario Kart. Which - if you’ve seen me play - is all kinds of wrong.
Anyway, while the first two tournaments have hardly been enjoyable but hardly inspired, the third looks to be a real treat. Running from the 1st to the 10th of June, it appears to take place in a brand new battle arena featuring Topman from Super Mario Galaxy. The translation of the Japanese Mario Kart site (below) doesn’t make it entirely clear what you have to do, but it may be simply a case of trying to bash him off the side in the fastest time possible. Maybe.
“Super Mario Galaxy” for the well-known, TOGEBEGOMAN “Mario Kart Wii” tournament in going to war!
Mushroom IKIOI often clash in the dash, TOGEBEGOMAN extrusion into the ring to please.”
Good old Google Translate. I’m going to try and use the phrase “clash in the dash” in conversation today.
The Wii version of Samba de Amigo is something I’m looking forward to, but perhaps with less excitement than when it was announced. All reports I’ve read so far have suggested there’s work to be done with the controls, and getting this spot on is key to whether the game will succeed in a big way or be an almighty flop. I’m personally hoping there’s the option to play the game with two remotes, as I’m certain that’ll be more accurate than using the nunchuk as the left maraca. But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, I’m in danger of wandering miles away from the point here, so to get back on track: Samba de Amigo is the first third-party title (indeed the first Wii game full stop) to carry the ‘Pay To Play’ sticker on its boxart. Which very much suggests that there will be downloadable content for the game, almost certainly in the form of new tracks to shake along to.
Hit the jump for a small pic of the boxart - the red logo on the top left is what you’re looking for.
Yep, the first challenge on the Mario Kart Wii Channel is up. And it’s a fairly straightforward one, with a nice little twist perhaps hinting that these tasks could well get more inventive in future.
Simply record the best possible time in a Vs. Race on Mario Circuit - you’ll be racing against AI opponents, and the slight difference between this and your average race comes in the form of the Chain Chomp, which has been let off its leash.
To add a bit of spice to proceedings, I’ve posted a time for you all to beat - and you all probably will. In fairness, it was my first go, and my opponents were in particularly nasty form. And I’d rather set something that’s beatable rather than attempting to prove my gaming prowess (which is a pretty pointless exercise anyway, unless you’re talking Ouendan or Rhythm Tengoku).
Hit the jump for a screenshot of my time, and what you have to do to prove you beat me. Read the rest of this entry »
While Mario Kart Wii remains a frustrating dilution of the series’ prior greatness offline, online it fair sings. True, I write this having recently secured a stunning last-ditch victory on Coconut Mall, but it’s not just in winning that Mario Kart Wii feels good.
Downloading random ghost times to race against is a brilliant idea that only suffers from offering slightly-too-easy rivals to have a go at beating. Perhaps I need to win a few more before I get some trickier opponents but still - it’s an addictive pursuit.
But it’s the online races that really make this. With twelve human players, the power-ups no longer seem so brutally unfair (and, weirdly, they seem to be balanced out much better than in solo mode), the tracks don’t seem so wide when you’re all jostling for position, it all somehow seems faster and more frantic, and those stunts, the mad bikes, vehicles, Miis and ace unlockable characters - now how do I get Rosalina? - all make for a wonderfully chaotic online racer. No voice chat, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter too much.
So, Mario Kart Wii, almost all is forgiven, if not forgotten. Not that one lap where I was hit with four blue shells - that’s a permanent black spot. But most of that other stuff…well, I’ll let you off just this once.
Good lord, this is an exciting development. From TODAY (!) it won’t just be Xbox 360 and PS3 owners that can boast about their console’s media powers - Wii will have full access to the BBC’s iPlayer service.
iPlayer, in case you didn’t know, lets anyone in the UK stream and watch the full archive of BBC TV shows from the last seven days. Currently you can do it on a PC, with Firefox or Internet Explorer, on iPhone - pretty much everywhere. And a test iPlayer Channel is apparently going live on Wii today.
News that it’s coming to Wii is HUGE - and potentially devastating for the UK’s poor internet service providers, who are already whining that iPlayer’s a huge burden on their creaking networks. When a few million Wii owners start watching episodes of Countryfile all day, it could well bring about the death of the internet as we know it.
Now apologies if we didn’t post this earlier, but we’ve been too busy sobbing into our Tesco Value hankies to type anything meaningful about this. During a presentation by the company’s Takashi Aoyama on the Wii’s front end at last week’s Game Developers Conference, Nintendo surprised us all by whipping the friendly, smiling face off the Wii’s free WiFi, to reveal the horrific, devastating sight of a payment service for online gaming. Aieee!
Aptly called Pay & Play, the new service will potentially offer a higher quality experience and content delivery for those who shell out their hard-earned. In typical fashion, though, the announcement was rather vague, leading to the Internet to burst into frenzied speculation about what this would entail: OMG! Mario Kart Wii - £12 a month!
The cooler head predicts that Pay & Play is the name for the payment model behind massively multiplayer games like Monster Hunter (probably not Animal Crossing (sob!)), and may also cover future downloadable content or Wii Ware games. Those that do require payment will carry a red sticker on the box to indicate you’ll have to dig deep. No price plan has been announced yet, but rest assured that knowing Nintendo, the price will be inexplicably high enough to seem a little bit pricey, yet low enough to be reasonable in the scheme of things. Everybody’s also unsure as to whether these will take the form of one-off payments on a game-by-game basis, or a yearly subscription like Xbox Live.
Again, from what we can gather, Nintendo won’t be abandoning us freeloaders. Nintendo’s current online experience isn’t exactly robust and user-friendly enough to expect us to put money down for what’s already there, and certain WiFi games will still be available without paying. You can keep your overlong Friend Codes for a game of Super Mario Strikers Charged as far as we know. And yes, you won’t have to pay to play with other people on Mario Kart Wii. We think. We hope.
David Braben has been speaking with Gamasutra about the WiiWare launch title LostWinds, currently in production at his studio Frontier Developments. Not surprisingly, he’s very positive about both.
If you haven’t been following its progress, LostWinds puts you in control of a boy called Toku and a wind spirit called Enril, with the thumbstick controlling the former and the Wii-mote the latter. Toku, a fragile slip of a boy, needs Enril to help him glide and pick-up heavy objects, a mechanic that studio director describes as “single-player cooperative”.
Apparently a “lot of love” has gone into it. It’s certainly looking nice.
On WiiWare, Braben wears his business hat, discussing the problems of market price sensitivity in digital distribution, before signing off on a business-like high note. Although he’s prepared to entertain the idea of releasing LostWinds as a disc-based product, he thinks WiiWare “will do really well.”
Nooooooooo! Just when we thought it was really happening, Nintendo have irrefutably shot down the prospect of an Animal Crossing MMO. It’s just not worth the time and hassle, they reckon. Don’t expect any kind of avatar-based equivalent to PlayStation Home, either. Your Miis are going to remain firmly rooted in their little prison of a Plaza.
Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata made his reasoning pretty clear:
“The first question I would ask is whether the service is fun if you’re 5 or 95, if you’re tech-savvy and if you’re computer illiterate. If that’s not a hurdle we can get past, it’s not something Nintendo is going to pursue.”
But wait! There’s more!
“…In that respect, the virtual-world services out there now still aren’t at a place where we’d like to join in – and certainly not to the point that we’d want to jump into competition with everybody else. We’d rather focus on doing things that nobody else would do… even if we were to make a virtual-world-like product, we’d be sure to make it something that nobody would call it a product similar to another company’s offering.â€Â
Blimey. Dunno about you, but that’s what I’d call a negative response. Perhaps Iwata has a point. Aside from the obvious success stories like World of Warcraft and Second Life, the smaller MMOs are getting shitcanned left, right and centre. The most recent casualty was Marvel Comics’ MMO collaboration with Microsoft.
That said, Nintendo is foolish to turn a blind eye to the possibilities. Animal Crossing or Pokemon would be perfect for reaching out to a wider demographic. Someone should picket the offices of the Big N, if only to make them reconsider.
 
 
 
 
 
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