July 6, 2009

Another year of American independence isn’t the only thing we’re celebrating this week. With new releases, including the hotly anticipated game BIT.TRIP CORE, Nintendo crosses the 100-game mark in its ever-growing WiiWare™ game library, a milestone that ought to keep fans ooh-ing and ahh-ing long after the Fourth of July. Other WiiWare offerings this week will have players bursting bubbles and racing in chariots, whether solo or with friends. Nintendo DSiWare™ welcomes a new Art Style™ title and a unique auto racing game, while a classic Commodore 64 title will have Virtual Console™ users tearing it up California style.

WiiWare

BIT.TRIP CORE
Publisher: Aksys Games
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 600 Wii Points™
Description: BIT.TRIP CORE continues the BIT.TRIP saga in this retro-arcade-style game. BIT.TRIP CORE adds up to an exciting action/rhythm game that’s best played while zoning out on the tunes and letting the visuals swallow you whole. The experience is inspired by games from the ’80s, but with a modern twist. The game play is entirely new to the series, leaving the single-axis controls of BIT.TRIP BEAT behind in favor of the ability to control two axes. If the difficulty gets you down, grab a friend and play cooperatively with two-player multiplayer. Make it to the end and you’ll have journeyed one step further to completing your BIT.TRIP.

BUST-A-MOVE Plus!
Publisher: TAITO
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 600 Wii Points
Description: BUST-A-MOVE Plus! is a simple but hugely addictive puzzle game in which you must try to burst a multi-colored mass of bubbles with your very own bubble launcher. Every time you make a group of three or more bubbles of the same color, they pop. There are two game modes available: 1P Puzzle (players tackle the game’s 135 stages in pursuit of a new high score or best time) and Battle (players take on friends or computer-controlled opponents). If that doesn’t satisfy your passion for popping, there are a total of 270 extra stages waiting for you in the two add-on-content packs, available for purchase on the Wii™ Shop Channel. BUST-A-MOVE Plus! is simple to get into and deep enough to keep you coming back for more.

Heracles Chariot Racing
Publisher: Neko Entertainment
Players: 1-4
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Comic Mischief
Price: 800 Wii Points
Description: The famous Heracles has taken on a challenge like none he has ever faced. Our hero will have to beat his opponents in a race across mythological kingdoms and be the first to reach the top of Mount Olympus. You can play as Heracles and help him return the sacred trophy, or play as one of the other varied mythological characters from Satyr to Poseidon and claim the prize for yourself. Race through three racing cups across 10 courses set in five mythic landscapes. Use awesome fantasy weaponry to defeat your opponents: tridents, fireballs, Zeus’s lightning rods and more. Get your friends together for intense two-to-four-player split-screen multiplayer action in Championship, Single Race or Battle mode.

Virtual Console

California Games
Original platform: Commodore 64
Publisher: Commodore Gaming
Players: 1-5
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: Welcome to California, home of the most radical sports in the world. You’re about to hit the beaches, parks and streets of the Golden State to go for trophies in everything from surfing to bike racing. California Games gives you the hottest sports and the most aggro competition. You even have to pick your own sponsor. So pull on those kneepads – you’re about to get into the most fun you’ve had since Mom hid your skateboard. California Games is going to take you from surf to the turf, from the pipe to the parks.

This video shows off one of the activities I have my doubts about, basketball. I still question how the Wii Remote will detect your shot, but these dudes sure look like they’re having fun.

Now, there is a report coming from website Aeropause that Miyamoto has made another statement concerning the development of Zelda. The statement was made in the latest issue of Nintendo Power, so you can double check its validity when it hits newsstands.

Oh, and about that new Legend of Zelda for Wii? Great quote from the master: “I don’t think it’s going to be that radically different.” Have fun with that one, gang.

Something to take away from this is that “radically different” is a highly subjective term. Miyamoto could have just meant that there won’t be any zombie Tingles running around biting at your ankles. Or that Princess Zelda decides to quit her monarchy driven life to become a stripper. See, ‘radically different’ could mean all sorts of things.

Grasshopper CEO, Goichi Suda, spoke with Edge Magazine and mentioned that there’s a good possibility the third NMH game will be on another system.

“I think this is the last NMH that is going to be developed on Wii,” he added. “To expand NMH to new possibilities, we need a new platform. Wii is a great platform, but we’ve done everything we can with it now.”

All you Wii owning No More Heroes lovers, sound off in the comment section below.

If you’ve been patiently waiting for the sequel to Red Steel since its release during the Wii’s hardware launch — then you still have awhile to wait. While waiting though, Ubisoft was kind enough to take questions from fans on their website forum. There’s a good amount of information to soak in. If you’d like to read the entire Q&A, click here.

Here are a few of the more interesting questions I found…

Why did you not continue the game where the Red Steel ended?

Well, it was certainly a tough call. The fans and the team had a lot of affection for the setting and characters of the first Red Steel, and it was certainly tempting to pick up where the first game left off.

However, as we developed our gameplay and art style for Red Steel 2, it became clear that what we were doing would work much better in a new setting: a setting that was built around this new type of combat we had built, and a setting that better fit what we wanted to do with the game visually.

So, we took a good hard look at what was really cool about the first Red Steel (guided by a mix of our own gaming tastes and our quite passionate feedback from the fanbase). From this, it became clear that the strong Asian-style setting and the mix of modern action gun combat plus katana-based sword fighting is something that resonates with a lot of people, us included, but that there was room to take the franchise in a new direction while still keeping that “Red Steel” core.

So, we started there. Then, we began to build what would become an entirely new world, story, characters, and visual style around those core concepts. What you see is the result.

What is more important to the dev team: smoother controls or better graphics/art style?

This is less a question of what is more important to the team than it is a question of what is important to the game. A first-person game with quick, exciting melee-attacks and precise shooting gameplay simply must run at 60fps, and that’s what we have. Thus, every decision we make is colored by the requirement to keep the gameplay smooth and responsive.

But, of course, we all also want the game to look spectacular. Paradoxically, by having agreement about the 60fps principle from the beginning has liberated the art team: it has allowed them to focus 100% of their effort on getting the absolute most they can out of that 1/60th of a second, instead of looking for other compromises. As a result, Stephane Bachelet and his team have developed a look that is exciting, suits our gameplay, runs very well on the Wii.

So, to the team, both are important. But we all know that for a first-person action title, gameplay comes first.

In the E3 video interview when Jason talks about the difficulty settings he says that beating the game on Ninja difficulty is going to be an achievement, does that mean that there’s going to be an achievement system like on the Xbox or is it just unlocking something in-game?

Well, in that specific case, I was using the word “achievement” in its literal sense of “having done something incredibly challenging”. I was trying to convey the idea that I want give players who can beat this game on the hardest setting a sense of real accomplishment, both in the sense of gaming and in the sense of physical motion and dexterity. Being able to swing a sword around with skill and accuracy is something a lot of people think is pretty cool, and I want our best players to have something to be proud of.

As far as an actual system of achievement goes, we like the concept of rewarding the player for pushing themselves to attain difficult goals, so you never know what you might see. Stay tuned for more info on that.

It’s an adventure/puzzle game where in order to advance you generally have to solve a set of puzzles to see the story unfold. It’s a simple formula that banks on the quality of the puzzles, and the humor of the writing. Here’s hoping that TellTale Games can pull it off.

The game is set for release on WiiWare and PC on July 7th, so be sure you have plenty of Wii Points saved up.

(Skip to 1:25 for Doris Roberts Shoryuken action)