Tetris Party is out soon, which means we get to dust off our Balance Boards and play Tetris the way Tetris was always supposed to be played: by leaning and squatting. Tetris Party producer and cool hat-wearer Tony Tran has generously demoed the Balance Board mode, which looks straightforward enough: you lean to steer your tetrominoes across the screen, and squat to rotate them. The playing field is drastically reduced to allow for the imprecision of balance-based controls.
It looks quite fun, though this video did miss one thing: footage of Tony playing this mother on level 20. We suspect our own knees, weakened by a lack of exercise due to a life spent blogging, would struggle to get beyond level 5 with all that squatting.
If spending $100 on a new plastic instrument and Guitar Hero: World Tour isn't enough, Red Octane is offering up a deluxe bundle for those that need to lose that extra cash, but don't want to go in for the entire band kit. For $109.99, fans will get a custom guitar bag for their new plastic axe, as well as a Guitar Hero keychain. We're not sure if that's worthy of an extra $10, but for those of you who are really worried about scuffing up their new Guitar Hero guitar, it's an option.
Remember when we reported on a $69.99 price tag on the Animal Crossing/WiiSpeak bundle? Well, it turns out that price was off, by $10. Yes, the bundle will in fact retail for $59.99. That brings WiiSpeak down to $10, with the purchase of Animal Crossing: City Folk.
Animal Crossing: City Folk and WiiSpeak will be out in North America on November 16th.
In the midst of the seemingly-endless avalanche of Nintendo news in the latter half of this week, the tiniest of precious jewels appeared. Is it as important as Club Nintendo in the U.S. or new games? No, but it's damned neat, and it's the Taiko no Tatsujin Wii bundle. The game, which is slated for Japan on December 12, will be bundled with a wireless drum. Now that's a big ol' Wii accessory we could really get behind. The bundle retails for ¥7,980 ($75), and additional drums can be purchased for ¥3,990 ($38).
Here's why this news isn't even cooler: we'll probably never see it, unless you want to go to the trouble of importing everything necessary to bang your drum in your living room. Rats!
Mito Securities analyst Yoichiro Watanabe has weighed in on the buzz surrounding tomorrow's Nintendo Media Summit, suggesting that a Wii price cut is unlikely. Frankly, it's hard to disagree with the man. As Watanabe points out, demand is still through the roof, and the Holiday season is only going to ramp up Wii fever to ridiculous, hair-pulling levels.
More controversially, Watanabe thinks Nintendo should force us all to add to our growing collection of plastic doohickeys and controller shells, on the basis that adding new peripherals to the Wii has worked well for the company. That's not exactly a move we're in favor of (our living rooms are now mostly plastic), and Iwata has already stated that new add-ons are unlikely.
Could this simple, lozenge-shaped device be what we're all talking about come Thursday morning? Currently, all the evidence points to a souped-up DS being unveiled during Nintendo's Media Summit, but NeoGAFfer Shiggy spotted this on the site of European trademark body OAMI.
It was registered by Nintendo in late-August, and is apparently a pedometer. This being related to Wii Fit in some way seems like an obvious first guess, but any speculation we indulge in is just that for now. Like most companies, Nintendo is always registering stuff, some of which it never uses, or some of which doesn't get officially announced until months or years later. This post could just be a really, really early preview for ... some gadget Nintendo releases three years from now!
And here we thought the othersolutions on the market were good enough. Turns out, that isn't the case, because Thrustmaster has come in and totally set the bar really high. One of the big problems with these lightsaber knock-offs is that most have been fairly short. Well, it appears Thrustmaster's Glow Saber Duo Pack overcomes that and succeeds in many ways:
Those of you looking for a rechargeable solution to your Wiimote's power needs, manufacturer MeWe has just come up with a new device: the Quad Charger. As you can see above, it includes LEDs to let you know the power status of your recharging Wiimotes, as well as the capacity to charge four simultaneously. And, of course, it comes with four rechargeable packs (Ni-MH).
The MeWe Quad Charger is currently available and costs $49.95.
Game controllers have come a long way since we were holding a box with a protruding stick and tapping a single button. Now they're so packed full of cutting edge (yet inexpensive) tech, I'd half expect to see a Wii Remote and Nunchuk in the cockpit of the space shuttle* as a cost-cutting measure. As advanced as the Wiimote is, a lot of us have found a thing or two that could be revised about its design. I've gone to the most extreme reaches of my imagination, and come up with a design concept that I believe is about as radical a step beyond our current Wiimote, as that controller is beyond every console controller that came before it. And just like Nintendo's own design, my perfect controller would be based around technology that is already being used today in different applications.
*Warning: The Wii Remote and Nunchuk's accelerometers will not work in space. NASA engineers, be advised to wait for the MotionPlus.
Nick Hager, producer on de Blob, isn't too jazzed at the idea of MotionPlus. It's not that he doesn't like the tech, he just has a problem seeing the majority of people that enjoy Wii on a regular basis want to play with the new peripheral.
"While it's definitely intellectually stimulating from a development perspective to play with those ideas - and I think it does appeal to a set of gamers out there - I think the majority of people that play on the Wii want something very simple that they can just immediately get their heads around," Hagger said. Does he mean the casual crowd that bought Wii Fit and played it once? Is he talking about the people that nabbed the system only for Wii Sports?
Is 1:1 movement really that much of a leap for the casual crowd that are looking for a simple experience? We'd think not, because it's basically the same deal: moving the Wiimote to afftect things in-game. That's what got most into the console in the first place, so if the tech works a bit better, how is it deterring the extremely casual crowd away from the system?
Teknocreations has unveiled their InCharge battery pack and charge stand for Wiimotes. The new stand uses a set of lithium polymer batteries, which, according to the press release, are half as heavy as other rechargeables and work over hundreds of charges. Each charge provides 25 hours of gameplay. The stand can charge two Wiimotes side-by-side.
But all of that is just a leadup to the real magic trick that separates this thing from other chargers: it charges without any metal contacts, and will charge a battery through a silicone cover. If you actually use your Wii Remote Jackets, you can leave them on when you dock your Wiimotes to charge. That is really, really cool. No word on whether or not this charger will melt your controllers.
We've spent a little of our time in this space lately discussing essential accessories, and plans to buy accessories, but what all do you own now? Even if it's totally useless (or just plain weird), we want to know ... even down to remote gloves from the pre-jacket era. Go forth and compare notes! We want to count how many Wii Wheels are out there.
How many times in your history as a gamer have you felt that your console's controller couldn't be any better? Every time I've gotten my hands on a new game controller, there's been something I wished could be different. The NES controller could have been rounder. The SNES controller could have used some more face buttons for Street Fighter. The N64 controller needed speedier room service.
The Wii controller is built with expansion, flexibility, and upgrades in mind, and with the addition of a third party accessory, I've been able to mate the Wiimote with the Classic Controller to form a Voltronic gestalt of a controller that should be capable of great things. But is it perfect?
WiiSpeak isn't the kind of thing we can imagine selling in Wii Fitquantities, but it's getting hard to tell nowadays. Maybe the microphone add-on and Animal Crossing: City Folk will be overshadowed by the otherbig first-party release of November, and supplies will be plentiful, but why take the risk? You can now preorder your own WiiSpeak at Amazon, and rest assured that you'll be able to bitch behind Nook's back with your Wii Friends from day one. Hang around now, and you may be confined to the keyboard.
Our faces lit up this morning after seeing this image on Famitsu's site. Surely, this was it: Nintendo's long-awaited solution to the storage woes of every Wii-owning geek and otaku on the planet. Alas, no. After scrambling for a machine translation of the accompanying kanji, our hopes were emphatically mangled. This is no HDD unit, but a portable air conditioner the "Nintendo WiFi Network Adapter." Once again, life had thrown us a cruel curveball. Happy Monday morning, us.
Anyway, if you struggle to get your Wii or DS online (and we know from experience that it can be fiddly), then this dinky wireless LAN router is for you. It can be used with the Wii, the DS, your PC, and other devices, and will be available on Nintendo's Japanese homepage from September 18th, priced at ¥5,800 (US$53). There's no news yet on a launch outside Japan, though as the Nintendo WiFi USB Connector was discontinued late last year, a western release would be a safe bet.
Hit the break for three more images, one of which depicts the adapter's three modes: "Router," "Bridge" (for connecting to your Wii or DS via another router), and "Auto" (which automatically switches your network). As for our ongoing storage issues, we're still waiting, Shiggy/Reggie/Satoru ...
