If you live in North America and have been to the Wii Shop channel over the past couple of days, you may have noticed a couple of arrows pointing to the left and right on the opening page before you "start shopping". Whatever could they mean?
A simple press of Left and Right buttons on your Wii Remote's D-Pad will slide the screen across, showing some more recommended titles, over four other categories.
First up is "Girls Have Fun!", with Super Mario Bros. for the NES as one of the recommended titles, showing it's not just games made specifically for females but games that reach both genders. Currently we've seen Bonsai Barber, Frogger Returns and The Amazing Brain Train!, games which all garnered a score of 7 or more from our team, so they come recommended.
Next up is"Family Party Games", with a focus for multiplayer mayhem. Titles recommended in this category are Tetris Party, TV Show King 2, Bomberman Blast, and Fun! Fun! Minigolf, which are four very fun multiplayer games indeed.
We've also got "Sports Fever!", for games. Like, you know, sporting ones. Another four nice titles have been recommended here, with Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, Excitebike: World Rally, Baseball Stars 2, and Reel Fishing Challenge.
Lastly, come the "Critically Acclaimed" titles, and unsurprisingly feature a who's who of the WiiWare world, with World of Goo, Cave Story, Max and the Magic Marker, and Rage of the Gladiator, definitely four games that don't need any introduction!
It seems Nintendo have found a need to advertise some great WiiWare and Virtual Console titles that may not be getting as much attention as they deserve, which can only come as great news for the independent community, with some of the recommended titles being ones that came out over a year ago.
Comments 21
The same goes for Europe, according to NoEs web page
edit: whoops, didn't see it's a top 5 list.
here in europe is it also updated!!
Really nice that Cave Story has gained recognition from Nintendo. Is there any data on how many downloads Cave Story has sold? It's become a special interest to me seeing as how the game had humble beginnings as a one-man project for freeware.
It would be nice if the platform owners like NIntendo released actual download numbers, but that's not the case so far.
Dollars to donuts says Nintendo doesn't release download numbers so they can screw with the developers payments. Not by not paying them but maybe saying not counting some one period so they can have more revenue for a quarter but make it up the next by adding those in. I don't know, it just feels like the kind of thing Nintendo would do to 3rd party publishers and developers.
I like the new reccomendation system.
It has been theorized that these listings make some use of Shop Channel info, particularly for the girls section. No idea if that's true, but it would certainly account for the surprisingly good range of games across all lists. Either way, this is a really cool idea, though I can't help but question how many people will actually notice and make use of it. After all, it was first reported on the forums at least a couple weeks ago, and I wouldn't have had a clue otherwise.
Crap! I forgot that the Nintendo Channel could display download/gameplay stats. Turning on my Wii to check Cave Story's stats...
Crap again! The Nintendo Channel used to display stats such as total hours played by the number of gamers who download certain titles but it's gone (or I can't find it). Could this be because there's been a lot of mediocre press regarding WiiWare sales and lack of promotion of some (or most) titles?
On a somewhat related note, the "Publisher" category for VC was updated also. The logos were removed and the buttons were made smaller as well as more silvery in colour.
@Wolfcoyote It's still there, I checked a couple of days ago.
good thing that Tetris Party and Bomberman Blast are on the family recommended section. i was afraid that games that were actually GOOD wouldn't be in there.
and gratz to Cave Story
I hope this will help parents and kids who don't know what to buy.
Silly Nintendo, girls don't play video games.
Max and the Magic Marker = "critically acclaimed"?
Pfft. That was one of the most boring games I've ever played.
It's something I guess, but they need to promote the service itself more as well.
Also the best thing they could do would be to have users rate the games they own, similar to how Apple does it, with a 1 to 5 star system. I bet that would filter out the crap cause I can't imagine anyone giving games like Cave Story lower than a 4 star.
I noticed this change weeks ago.
I reported this WAY before you guys did. (|3
Hooray for you TwilightV
A reader notified me of it and it hadn't been reported yet, so I put it up for those who weren't aware as I wasn't aware myself!
I was wondering why this didn't get mentioned, since this update was described in the EU press release posted by Sean last week: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2010/04/nintendo_download_23rd_april_2010_eu=
Seems it got overlooked.
I checked and the UK topics and recommendations are different from what you posted ("For the whole family", "Hidden Gems", "Brain Teasers", "New Game, Old School"). Also about 10 VC titles are included in the lists here (clicked on the page title and there were more listed). The press thing and the news on the shop said it will be updated weekly... maybe NL could look into this?
@TwilightV:
Do you have a page of your own?
It has been updated on April 9, so you guys are a bit late mentioning this. Nonetheless, it's good that it is getting attention
In all honesty I never even noticed the arrows until one of our readers mentioned it to us!
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