WiiNintendo

I have the current reiease list for all DS, Cube, and Wii games:

August has some new titles for DS (Deep Labyrinth, Suite Life Zack and Cody, and Tenchu: Dark Secret).  September is a big DS RPG month, with Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, Contact, and Final Fantasy III all coming 9/12/06, along with Pokemon Mystery, Blue Rescue Team and Mage Knight: Destiny’s Soldier a week later.  October has at least 25 DS Titles, with Spectrobes and Spider-man: Origins.  Dynasty Warriors and Need for Speed:Carbon round up in November.  From Nintendo, Star Fox DS is coming August 28th whileMario vs. Donkey Kong is coming Sep. 25th and Legend of Zelda: PH in Nov.  There is no sign of Mario 3 by 3 Hoops, Yoshi’s Island 2, and Elite Beat Agents on the list yet.

For Gamecube, the only first-party games on the list are Legend of Zelda: TP in Sep. Super Paper Mario on October 9th.  There is no sign of Baten Kaitos 2, Donkey Konga: Jet Pack, and the new Mario Party 8.  October is Gamecube’s biggest month, with about 10 titles, from The Sims: Pet 2, Spongebob, and Flushed Away.

The Nintendo Wii currently has 10 titles on the list, and these are the same games that are on the Gamestop thread in the other section.  Nothin’ new yet.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is the latest sequel in the long running Castlevania franchise. Like its predecessor, Dawn of Sorrow, POR will be released on the Nintendo DS, and builds upon the series’ use of the DS stylus.

There are two main characters: Charlotte and Jonathan. Charlotte uses magic as her primary weapon, allowing her to perform actions such as shape-shifting and casting various spells. Jonathan is closer to the classic Castlevania protagonist, relying on strength and weapons.

The story takes place before Dawn of Sorrow, during World War II. Charlotte and Jonathan must infiltrate Dracula’s castle to stop a new bad guy, named the Devil Painter, and his two daughters from harnessing the powers of Dracula.

Players will be able to switch between Charlotte and Jonathan at any time. There will be times when both characters will be needed simultaneously to solve various puzzles or tag team enemies with attack combos. When both characters are on the screen at the same time, players will be able to control the movement of the active character with the D-pad, and use the stylus to control the movement of the sub-character by dragging it around the screen.

In an interview with IGN, series creator Koji Igarashi confirmed that POR will feature Wi-Fi co-op play. However, the co-op will only be for a special level, not the entire game.

While POR’s latest gameplay addition definitely adds a new twist in the always-evolving Castlevania franchise, there are still aspects of this sequel that are not yet clear, and could potentially effect the final product in a negative way. One of these is how the character-building system will work. For example - if Charlotte upgrades, will that upgrade also effect Jonathan in the same manner, or at all? Same with the object and weapon collection systems - will each character have a separate equipment/magic/item list, or will they be able to use each others if needed? With the design of POR pushing for players to use both characters throughout its entire length, aspects such as these could make the game very unbalanced if they are not implemented correctly.

Players will not have to wait much longer to find out, as Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is scheduled to release later this year. With Koji Igarshi at the helm of this title, though, I doubt players have anything to worry about.

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Nintendo has opened their official site for the upcoming DS puzzler Magnetica.

Visit the site to find out what the game is all about, and nab a couple exclusive wallpapers while you’re at it. By the way, I really dig the music on the site…and I am guessing we will find it in the game as well.

Thanks to Itsnymo for the heads up!

Magnetica site

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More here

According to an industry source speaking to Cubed³, the Nintendo Wii is set to launch in the “Thanksgiving period in the USA” (Thanksgiving falls on November 23rd this year), with Japanese and European launches set to be “in the same timeframe”. With Nintendo trying for a worldwide launch of their new system, this would probably lead to the system coming out marginally before in Japan and “a few weeks later in Europeâ€?.

Our source tells us that the Wii will be on sale in the USA “well in time for Thanksgiving and well in time for Christmas in Europe”. Details on the Japanese launch were not so clear, but our source did suggest that it would fall very close, if not before the American launch of the system.

So, we’re looking at an early November release for the system. This falls quite nicely in line with a recent announcement by Nintendo where they gave dates for their DS, GameCube and GBA titles for later this year. All titles stopped before November. With this information in hand, we pushed our source a bit further to see if they had an idea of a more exact date. Today, we were provided with the following information…

“So, at the moment Nintendo are aiming to launch the Wii on November 6th”

Our source emphasised that this date is correct at present, but pointed out: “Nintendo aren’t going to have an exact date in mind until they are sure they can meet the deadlines”. Take it as a guide then if you will, but “they are very keen to be ready in time”.

Obviously this shouldn’t be taken as gospel and we’re not about to shout from rooftops that we have the final Wii launch date, but we are confident that the information we have is correct; we wouldn’t share it with you if it wasn’t. Hopefully Nintendo will clear up all confusion very soon by confirming the launch details of the Wii. We’ll have more for you as and when it happens.

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Easy Nintendo: First i would like to thank you for this interview, it really means alot to us here at Easy Nintendo.
Red Steel got alot of attention at E3 this year, what is Ubisofts reaction to that?Xavier Poix: Well we are very happy that everyone got to experience it for themselves and that many of them came away pleased.

EN: How is the online multiplayer going to work? how many players, what sort of modes will it have?
XP: Unfortunately i cannot comment on anything new in regard to multiplayer at this time other than to say it will have most if not all of the standard modes you would expect from a first person shooter.

EN: Can you comment on the price?
XP: (laughs) Sorry.

EN: How about the Wii hardware? What are the specs?
XP: Although i cannot give you exact numbers at this time i can give you a rough idea about the power of the machine. I would compare the graphics chip to somewhere inbetween the ATI Radeon X1400 and the Radeon X1600, and the CPU to between the AthlonXP 2400+ and the AthlonXP 3000+.

EN: Can you tell us how much memory at what speed the Wii has?
XP: I cannot say how much memory the Wii has, but its running at 650mhz.

EN: As we saw in many current-gen titles, 480p can result in significant jaggies. Can we expect AA and AF from Ubisoft’s Wii titles?
XP: Red steel will have 4x Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering.

EN: What’s been your favorite thing about working on Red Steel?
XP: The controller, easily.

EN: What was the biggest challenge?
XP: Not telling the world about it back in january (laughs). Honestly the biggest challenge has been making sure the control is just right.

EN: Will Rayman on the Wii be a port of the current-gen game with new controls, or will it have new art assets for Wii?
XP: Its not a port, other than that i cannot say.

EN: We’ve been hearing a lot of consistent talk about 60fps at 480p widescreen from other developers. Is this something we’ll see a lot of on Wii?
XP: I believe so yes.

EN: Why is this target so easy to hit?
XP: The hardware is totally free of bottlenecks, nothing is slowing us down.

EN: For us graphics whores, what kind of sweet graphical effects will we see in Red Steel or Rayman that we haven’t
seen in Gamecube games?
XP: We have alot of self shadowing going on, also we will have some normal maps and bump maps things like that.

EN: Will there be any innovative uses of physics in Rayman?
XP: Quite a few interesting things with physics in both Red Steel and in Rayman. We’ve got ragdoll in Red Steel for
example.

EN: You said that you were using FEAR as inspiration for Red Steel’s AI. How is that shaping up?
XP: Yes, we loved FEAR and we tried to draw alot from it in terms of AI. In Red Steel the AI will throw grenades
back at you, it will duck for cover and also try to flank you. Many things.

EN: Will we see any sort of single disc network play like you have on the DS?
XP: No comment.

EN: Will Sam Fisher be making a return to Nintendo’s home console?
XP: At some point.

EN: Lost Magic was one of the first compelling 3rd-party games for the DS in a while. Does Ubisoft have any more big
plans for the handheld?
XP: We do, keep an eye on the Tokyo Gameshow.

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Following the initial confirmation of Tokyo Game Show 2006, to be held September 22nd to the 24th 2006 at the Makuhari Messe in Tokyo’s Chiba prefecture, the organizers have announced the theme for the show and goals for attendees.The 10th anniversary show’s theme, jointly announced by Japanese game industry trade body CESA and its chairman and Square Enix president Yoichi Wada, is ‘new stimulus, new feeling, new era’, according to a Japanese-language press statement released on the official Tokyo Game Show site. The theme, according to CESA, “is meant to reflect the changing and converging landscape, one in which consumer consoles, online games, mobile games and next-gen are all supported.”

The organizers of the show aim to repeat their success as an important international event in this anniversary year, and officially announced that Tokyo Game Show 2006 is anticipating 160,000 attendees (actually slightly reduced from 2005’s totals), and 140 exhibitors, with a rough total of 1,500 individual exhibits.

More information about the show is available on the English-language version of the official Tokyo Game Show website, and Gamasutra will be at TGS to bring detailed keynote and interview reports this year, as in previous years.

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War has been declared on lag, and it’s about goddamn time. After the resounding success of the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on war, we can expect to be free of the menace of lag any day now.We received the first glimpse of our impending liberation at this year’s GDC, where every street corner in a 50 block radius was manned by men wearing confidence inspiring white labcoats and bearing END LAG NOW signs. A quick look at the endlagnow.org website revealed an enlightened, altruistic movement to free us from the scourge of latency. Oh, and increase our awareness of Bigfoot’s Lag and Latency Reduction technology, which will take the form of a networky cardy thing that will eliminate lag with the power of unicorn farts and children’s dreams.

But that’s not all. This week they’ve unveiled the latest, greatest tool in the war against our invisible enemy, the LagMeter. This free utility tracks not only the usual statistics like ping time and FPS, but provides us with a “Lags per Second” statistic, which sounds much less intimidating than things like “packet loss” even though we have no idea what it’s actually measuring.

We took it for a spin on one of our office machines, revealing that hey, our office network kicks whole bunches of ass. In the interests of science, however, we decided to test the software by playing Enemy Territory with a dozen porn torrents running in the background. This caused the little bars to go up, which is probably bad. Disappointingly, this didn’t cause the meter to return a “Hey, knock off all that porning” message.

It did, however, summon some of 1UP’s tech people from their secret warrens, who then interrogated us about what we were using all that bandwidth for. We told them that it was okay because, after all, it was for research. We were likewise reassured that the multiple stab wounds to our torsos were okay, as they’re just part of their job.

Look for further updates in the future when we actually get our hands on LLR cards. Our editors will be testing them alongside more traditional lag-reduction technology like tinfoil hats, pennies under our tongues, and little glow in the dark plastic statues of Jesus on top of our monitors.

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The set list for Play! on Saturday is as follows:

• Fanfare — Nobuo Uematsu
• Liberi Fitali (Final Fantasy VII) — Nobuo Uematsu
• Super Mario Bros. (New Super Mario Bros.) — Koji Kondo
• Super Mario Bros. Suite (Super Mario Bros.) — Koji Kondo
• Shenmue Suite (Shenmue and Shenmue II) — Takenobu Mitsuyoshi
• Battlefield Suite (Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield II) — Joel Erickson, David Tallroth, Fredrik England, Bence Pajer
• Aeris’ Theme (Final Fantasy VII) — Nobuo Uematsu
• Sonic the Hedgehog Suite (Sonic the Hedgehog) — Masato Nakamura with Play! arrangement by Yuzo Koshiro
• Main Theme (Metal Gear Solid) — Tappy Iwase, Kazuki Muraoka
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Suite (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) — Jeremy Soule
• Swing de Chocobo (Final Fantasy series) — Nobuo Uematsu
• Chrono Suite (Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross) — Yasunori Mitsuda
• World of Warcraft Suite (World of Warcraft) — Jason Hayes
• Theme of Laura (Silent Hill 2) — Akira Yamaoka
• Halo Suite (Halo 1 and 2) — Marty O’Donnell, Mike Salvatori
• The Legend of Zelda Suite (The Legend of Zelda series) — Koji Kondo
• One Winged Angel (Final Fantasy VII) — Nobuo Uematsu

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With two forms of adult-related ratings — Japan’s new video game system seems so familiar. Kotaku and its correspondent in Japan (Brian Ashcraft) report that the Japanese will adopt a new rating system for video games.The Japanese ratings are A, B, C, D and Z. Games rated D have content for gamers above 17-years-old, while Z-rated games are for consumers above 18. This new rating system immediately should remind gamers stateside of our own ESRB’s rating system. Like our system, there’s only a distinction of one year between being able to purchase an M(or D across the sea)-rated game and an AO(Z)-rated game. Rather than get hung up on the semantics of whether or not there’s a real difference between a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old, the most important thing to glean from the ratings change is how effectively the rules will be enforced in Japan. Stateside, retailers (and parents alike) have had problems enforcing the ESRB rules (on both their customers and their children).Finally, what games were affected by the change? The Grand Theft Auto games, Driv3r, Killer 7 and both Getaway titles were lumped into the Z rating group. Titles like Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear Solid 3, Fable and Resident Evil 4 ended up in with D-ratings.
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Nintendo fans are known for their obsessive nature; it’s part of their lifeblood. Who knew such an infatuation with a fat, Italian plumber who can’t score with the chick he keeps saving would manifest itself into the conceptualization of an amusement park based on the principles of the platforming series: jumping, hitting blocks and destroying Goombas.That’s exactly what Dan Albritton, Noah Shibley and Quanya Chen have envisioned with the Nintendo Amusement Park, though; an idea that plans to harness mechanical technologies (how else will you jump so high?) to “give a player super powers which they must learn to control as they bound through a massive obstacle course in three-dimensional space.”

Ideally, they’d love to work with Nintendo and Disney to develop “an entirely new experience”, but they’re settling now on having a playable demonstration at someone’s booth at next year’s E3. Without branding, the three believe the quirky creation would cost somewhere in the range of $250,000, and they’re even willing to riff their own work for other characters and settings.

If you’re not exactly sure how this all works, we don’t blame you, and the best way to put it all together is to see it for yourself. Head over to Game Videos to see what we mean.

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