WiiBits

The Wii’s September 29 prequel to last year’s Dead Space has a control scheme EA’s Visceral Games couldn’t put on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. A new EA trailer shows how it works.
Dead Space Extraction will be out September 29. As you watch, remember, EA calls this a “guided first-person experience.” Different platform. Different style of game. Do you like what you see?

Original post by Stephen Totilo

Never mind what’s at the bottom of this barrel, here’s a list of 29 Wii games from Nintendo and the amount of hours people play them, per gamer.
(The following stats are pulled from the usage data shared by more than two million Wii users through the system’s Nintendo Channel. For more information about how we calculate these total playtimes, check out this week’s earlier Wii stats post)
Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Nintendo’s First-Party Wii Games (as of July 1)
(Release Dates in Parentheses)
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (March 2008) — 68 hours, 51 minutes
Animal Crossing: City Folk (November 2008) — 54 hours, 16 minutes
Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn (November 2007) – 46 hours, 40 minutes
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (November 2006) — 46 hours, 9 minutes
Wii Sports (November 2006) — 35 hours, 47 minutes
Mario Kart Wii (April 2008) – 31 hours, 40 minutes
Super Mario Galaxy (November 2007) — 27 hours, 37 minutes
Super […]

Original post by Stephen Totilo

According to figures released by GfK-ChartTrack, there are now 24 million current-generation consoles in the UK. Let’s see how those numbers break down.
The numbers can be found in the latest report from European retailer GAME, and reveal that each console has sold the following:
DS - 9.1 million
Wii - 5.4 million
Xbox 360 - 3.9 million
PSP - 3.3 million
PS3 - 2.2 million
Not many surprises there. There’s a few surprises in the sales figures for just the past 12 months, however, with PSP sales falling through the floor (and PS3 sales dropping as well), while the 360 seems to be picking up steam.
DS - 2.7 million
Wii - 2.3 million
Xbox 360 - 1.7 million
PS3 - 900,000
PSP - 500,000
UK console installed base tops 24m [MCV]

Original post by Luke Plunkett

Something is clearly amiss, to put it lightly, at GameStop corporate, as evidenced by the game retailers latest Wii promotional bundles. One comes with a squirt gun, the other with a rubber ducky. You know, for… bathing, maybe?
Whether GameStop has simply found itself with a few thousand squirt guns and plastic ducks unexpectedly, or its simply trying to score a post on Kotaku pointing out how batshit insane this is, these two bundles are of questionable purpose. Value, yes, as you’re essentially getting a rubber ducky for free. But the Nintendo Wii Summer Fun Bundle and the far more suggestive Nintendo Wii Take a Bath with a Buddy Bundle are curious in their need to exist.
Oh, and there’s another Wii bundle with a pirate tattoo sleeve. What.
Remember, there is a strict limit of two per household!
Nintendo Wii Systems [GameStop - thanks, Grant!]

Original post by Michael McWhertor

So I’m on my way home from an evening with Ubisoft and I happen across these new Fly Oakland tourism ads on the Bay Area Rapid Transit.
Each ad features an adult doing something silly — like a dude in a kufi Xeroxing his face — with the catch phrase “Fly Oakland… What You Do With The Extra Hours is up to you. But this one here depicts a grandma playing the Wii with her grandchildren.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it after a late night with developers, but it seems to me like this ad is saying something about the Wii. Either that it’s a frivolous thing that you can do in your spare time… or that only old people and young children play the Wii.
Huh.

Original post by AJ Glasser

Japanese publisher Marvelous Entertainment hasn’t seen the success on the Wii that it might have envisioned. Releases like No More Heroes, Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Arc Rise Fantasia haven’t captured the Wii audiences attention just yet. What to do?
How about porting some of your Wii misses to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, hoping for high-definition hits? That’s what Marvelous is considering, according to a financial presentation poked at by Siliconera. That means Wii up-ports and a renewed focus on Microsoft and Sony’s now-gen platforms, an attempt to lure in the underboob crowd with better looking underboob.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade seems like a natural fit for a higher-resolution port, given its relatively simple 2D transition to more graphically capable consoles. Perhaps some Odin Sphere fans will latch on to the non-Wii version of Muramasa, still due to hit North America this year.
And, given Grasshopper Manufacture’s Goichi Suda’s latest comments, […]

Original post by Michael McWhertor

The Wii version of the next Astro Boy game showed up in New York a couple of weeks ago. As of July, we can cover it. Click the thumbnails. Look at the screens. Read my notes. All at once.
(Really, click to expand. I’m trying something new here by doing a preview as a series of captions.)
The next Astro Boy game, developed by High Voltage and published by DS, is coming to the Wii (the version I saw), the PS2, PSP and DS in October timed to the release of the Japanse icon’s new computer-animated movie…
…Astro Boy hasn’t starred in many video games, for a variety of reasons pondered by our own AJ Glasser in May. But he did star in one cult classic, the Treasure-developed Game Boy Advance game Astro Boy: Omega Factor….
The Treasure game inspired the developers of the new Astro Boy, a D3 producer told me as he […]

Original post by Stephen Totilo

HIgh Voltage an Sega seek to take on the mantle of the Nintendo Wii’s signature first-person shooter with The Conduit. Have they succeeded?
The Conduit has everything going for it. It’s an exclusive first-person shooter for a console that generally only sees second-rate ports. It features a compelling story of conspiracy, betrayal, and alien invasion on the streets of Washington D.C. And it also delivers a robust multiplayer experience on a platform that isn’t exactly known for its only capabilities. What could possibly go wrong?
Let us channel the assembled game critics through The Conduit and see what comes out the other end.

Giant Bomb
The game’s story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn’t really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to […]

Original post by Mike Fahey

Two new lists today: the hours logged by Wii users in each Wii Sonic game. And another showing play times for Rock Bands, Guitar Heroes and the like.
(The following stats are pulled from the usage data shared by more than two million Wii users through the system’s Nintendo Channel. For more information about how we calculate these total playtimes, check out yesterday’s Wii stats post)
Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Wii Sonic Games (as of July 1)
(Release Dates in Parentheses)
Sonic Unleashed (November 2008) – 14 hours, 16 minutes
Sonic and the Black Knight (March 2009) – 12 hours, 3 minutes
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (November 2007): 11 hours, 25 minutes
Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity (January 2008) – 11 hours, 1 minute
Sonic and the Secret Rings (February 2007) – 10 hours, 24 minutes
Average Per-Gamer Playing Time For Wii Music Games (as of July 1)
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (October 2007) — […]

Original post by Stephen Totilo

If you’ve been diligently registering your Nintendo DS and Wii games with Club Nintendo, enough to receive Gold or Platinum status, you’ll be getting a free gift from the company. When? Some time before January 1, 2010.
North American Club Nintendo members of “Elite” standing, like myself, will be notified about the opportunity to claim prizes in July. But those free goodies might not ship for a while after that. Official word from Nintendo says that the freebies will be distributed to members “before the end of the calendar year.” That could mean months of painful waiting!
Club Nintendo of Japan members were most recently treated to a trio of goods—a gold painted Mario Kart Wii wheel, a Club Nintendo calendar for 2009 and a plush-looking Mario hat—something we hope Nintendo of America will one-up for its American fans. May I suggest something, anything, in Wario purple and gold? Or this?
Incidentally, the […]

Original post by Michael McWhertor