In case you hadn’t heard (which is likely judging by sales), a brand new Rayman game subtitled Origins was recently released across all 3 home platforms. Now what the hell is a “Rayman” you may be asking yourself? Well, it’s a long running series of mostly action/adventure platform games starring an armless, legless Frenchman as he runs and jumps around beautifully designed worlds killing bad guys and collecting stuff. If the thought of that doesn’t rivet you, then I guess you probably wouldn’t be reading this website to begin with. I’m sorry for making things awkward. READ MORE
This is it. Nintendo’s long awaited eShop for the 3DS goes live this evening! Kicking off the service, owners of the new portable can now download several vintage Game Boy games as well as a (free for the next month) 3-D enhanced version of Excitebike for the NES. If that weren’t enough, there’s also access to most (but not all) DSi Ware games, an internet browser and even a fancy (and also free) interactive Pokémon character and stat viewer.
Oh yeah, and tonight also happens to be the eve of that tiny little E3 press conference thingie. Y’know, that event where a new Nintendo home console and all of their major software for the next year will be announced. It starts tomorrow bright and early at 9am PDT, so go ahead and save this link to finally see an end put to all of this bitching/speculation about the new controller.
Or at least all of the cash that I’ve been tossing into your backyard for just about my entire life. After buying and downloading a ridiculous amount of games over the past year (and sometimes even playing them), my reward from Club Nintendo arrived in the mail today! The big surprise was the slick question block box that it was shipped in. That’s just fucking awesome. Also, I’m not gonna lie. I’m curious how much this bad boy ends up going for on Ebay.
Even after resolving only to talk about the releases I personally find interesting (because, after all, the news itselfisn’t that hard to find,) and even with the Virtual Console actually seeing a new old title released last week, I failed to mention anything at all. I could blame the shock of Nintendo’s stellar E3 lineup, but their conference didn’t take place until Tuesday. (I’ll blame Microsoft’s blatant Wii-cloning audacity instead.) Here’s a look at the downloadable games that caught my eye for the last two weeks. READ MORE
VB Wario Land manual scan by Planet Virtual Boy, http://www.planetvb.com
Blame Wario for turning MBF into WBF.
That’s a joke, you see. Really I’m just lazy, and no Virtual Console game came out this week, and regardless of what else may have come out that’s always a quick way to get me to not care.
Anyway, here are the things that caught my eye on DSiWare and WiiWare this week:
In a lovely coincidence with today’s airing on Turner Classic Movies of a bunch of Clint Eastwood films, the Virtual Console sees the re-release of the SNES game Wild Guns, an Old West With Robots-themed third person shooting gallery game that I’d never heard of before but looks quite appealing. Somewhat like the Base levels from the original Contra, and similar to the arcade games Cabal and Blood Brothers. I can definitely dig it. It’s also 2 player simultaneous, with the two player characters being “Clint” and “Annie”- no prizes for guessing where those names came from.
And then there’s a whole mess of DSi- and WiiWare, and I’m going to talk about some of them but not all because that’s how I roll and the press release will be linked if you really care and okay hit the jump already.
Art Style: light trax is definitely the highlight this week, as the first Art Style game to come out on WiiWare in a while it seems. It’s a remake/update of Dotstream from the progenitor bit Generations series of games on the GBA, with the slight twist of the playfield moving around in 3D. Basically it’s a racing game with a couple different styles of play, and I came in dead last just now on my first try so I’m looking at the operations guide. It’s 600 points like the previous Art Style games, unlike Bit.Trip Runner which I mistakenly assumed was 600 because the previous Bit.Trip games were 600. BTR is actually 800. My bad.
Once again, no Virtual Console releases this week, although that doesn’t mean no old games came out. “Wait, what?” you might have just said. What I meant is: highlights this week include one port on WiiWare and one on DSi Ware of previously released games.
“In the world of downloadable video games, this week’s forecast calls for nonstop showers of awesomeness.” So begins the weekly downloadable game news release from Nintendo. So, you think so, do ya NoA? We’ll just see about that. READ MORE
Mega Man IV came out in Europe on Friday, and the real version came out yesterday here in North America. That’s the highlight this week, though I don’t care since I have the Anniversary Collection and have grown accustomed to the backwards controls. In case anyone forgot, this is the one that introduced the charge shot, which by Mega Man V largely made the special weapons obsolete, as it handled all the bosses quite handily. I’d also like to say that I love this intro, and it was pretty impressive to me as a kid. You get to see Mega Man being created!
Yesterday, I finally got Ninja Five-O! For five-O dollars! It was a good day. I managed to beat it on Normal via a Gamefly rental a couple years ago, and I’m having a lot of fun going through it again and dying a lot because it is difficult, but seldom-if-ever in a frustrating or cheap way. It’s one of those perfectly executed games with a strong vision, with a handful of neat mechanics that are married to great level design that squeezes the mechanics for their full potential. Tight stuff.
Oh, hey, I guess downloadable games came out today.
WarioWare D.I.Y. hits the DS this week, and with it comes WarioWare, D.I.Y. Showcase for WiiWare. Featuring 72 premade microgames (different from the 90 included in the DS game…. I think,) the real focus is on using Showcase to… well, showcase microgames made with the full DS game on a larger screen, which also makes sharing creations with a group of friends in your living room a bit more sociable than huddling around a DS or handing it off from person to person. It also lets lazy bastards who don’t think they’ll ever take the time to create microgames spend 8 bucks to be able to play the ones made by friends and whatever ones Nintendo decides to make available, rather than plunk down $35 for the cartridge. Right now there’s not much to it since the DS game isn’t technically even out yet, but it should be worth the 800 points in the near future when people start making things.
