KDR_11k

i wanna say Dynamic Slash?

Was thinking that for a moment but the perspective doesn't match up, the smaller thing on the right does not seem to be the back of the woman you control in DS (it has giant enemies so only reaching up to the knees of the enemy wouldn't be strange). Of course more Dynamic Slash information would be nice but I doubt this is it.

Made me think Zeno Clash a bit, the eye glow on the thing on the left reminds me of Father-Mother.

Oh, didn't notice there was a "most popular" option for DSiWare...

1 Nintendo DSi Browser
2 MoI Express Funny Face
3 Dr Mario Express
4 Wario Ware Snapped
5 MoI Express Deep Psyche
6 Real Football 2009
7 Paper Plane
8 Pyoro
9 Mixed Messages
10 Art Style CODE
11 Art Style AQUITE

Wow, that looks horrible but what else can we expect with that game selection...

Germany:
(1) 1 Texas Hold'em Tournament
(2) 2 My Aquarium
(3) 3 World of Goo
(7) 4 Bit Trip Beat
(4) 5 Onslaught
(5) 6 TV Show King
(9) 7 Fun Fun Minigolf
(8) 8 Equilibrio
(12) 9 My Pokemon Ranch
(10) 10 Tetris Party
(13) 11 Bomberman Blast
(6) 12 Crystal Defenders R1
(14) 13 Brain Challenge
(11) 14 Adventure Island
(16) 15 Snowboard Riot
(18) 16 LostWinds
(17) 17 Pop-Up Pirate
(15) 18 Bubble Bobble Plus
(-) 19 FFCCMLaaK
(19) 20 Defend Your Castle

FFCCMLaaK pushed Midnight Bowling out. BTB went up to 4. Crystal Defenders, Adventure Island and Bubble Bobble all took drops.

The list is based off sales data, review aggregate scores and "instinctual elements" like reputation, publisher relations and that twinkle in their eye.

i.e. BS.

I think the Wii doesn't store the game time for that long so games that were released a long time before the Nintendo Channel probably won't register.

I haven't even seen it in stores yet...

Screw DMC so hard its retarded camera falls off, give us Gotcha Force!

Random information: Kunio-kun is the name of the franchise that River City Ransom comes from.

PvZ gets faster and harder later on though the really hard parts are after the credits (minigames, survival modes)

Yay! Been wondering, when it would come. I do think people are a bit too fast to throw 10/10s at it though, we have no idea how it actually turned out.

PvZ is indeed awesome and I wonder if they could put it on WiiWare, after all it's point & click, runs at a fairly low resolution (800x600 though, not 640x480), takes about 25MB, costs 10€ and would fit the Wii's audience.

It's released in Europe first because it was created by Dutch people, which are Europeans.

That means nothing. I've seen European-made games appear first in the US quite often.

Dunno, I liked the 8bit Contras more since the levels felt less convoluted. I hope this'll be easier than Hard Corps or 4, never got anywhere in those.

Er, that has been known for a while.

Germany:
(1) 1 Texas Hold'em Tournament
(2) 2 My Aquarium
(4) 3 World of Goo
(3) 4 Onslaught
(7) 5 TV Show King
(12) 6 Crystal Defenders R1
(-) 7 Bit Trip Beat
(5) 8 Equilibrio
(6) 9 Fun Fun Minigolf
(8) 10 Tetris Party
(14) 11 Adventure Island The Beginning
(9) 12 My Pokemon Ranch
(11) 13 Bomberman Blast
(13) 14 Brain Challenge
(10) 15 Buble Bobble Plus
(15) 16 Snowboard Riot
(16) 17 Pop-Up Pirate
(20) 18 LostWinds
(18) 19 Defend Your Castle
(19) 20 Midnight Bowling

Eliminated: Family & Friends Party

Poker holds, WoG climbs another bit, Bubble Bobble continues its descent (4 to 10 to 15), BTB debuts fairly high and Crystal Defenders rises big. Adventure Island seems to have settled into its position.

I don't think Zelda can get any easier, at most they might cut down on the complexity of the whole thing (especially the 3d Zeldas have terribly complex combat) but then again PH already did enough of that so it should be fairly easy to learn. The dead wood they SHOULD cut is the complexity of the story scripts and stuff, enough people have complained about the starting village in TP and PH also had tons of unnecessary crap like forcing you to yell into the microphone (which is a complete gamebreaker for something you're supposed to play in public).

Richard, do you think everyone has only one console?

By now I'm convinced that Nibris is just some troll pretending to make games and hyping everyone up.

Didn't Sony recently claim that MS sucks for giving out so many moneyhats for exclusives?

They know casual doesnt work on japan as much as Mario and Zelda and Pokemon.

Wii Sports is the best selling game for the Wii in Japan despite being sold separately.

Compile a list of all "casual" games Nintendo (not third parties!) have released on the Wii, now compile a list of core games from them. Count the entries. When I did that I ended up with a core list that's twice as long as the "casual" list, others say they've ended up with a 5:1 ratio of core to "casual".

Some people apparently thought that the drought was caused by Nintendo focussing on "casual" gamers but games dried up for them too. Others declare any game that's not to their personal liking shovelware or casual.

I'm serious, I can see a use for having the DS turn into a calculator though I think they should've made it at least on par with the Windows Calculator (that can be set to scientific mode), my cellphone only does basic math AFAIK and my scientific calculator is really bulky. Of course 2€ for a basic calculator is lame and you can get unit conversions from google (just type something like 3 EUR in USD) wherever you have internet access but the idea of a paid-for calculator application in itself is not wrong.

Everybody may have a calculator but few people carry one around so turning the DS into one can be useful. Then again most people have cellphones that can calculate, however clumsily they do that.

Now if it were a scientific calculator app, that would be pretty much a must-have as most built-in calculators are pretty limited. The unit conversion might be useful eough though.

You're tempted to buy an iPhone? I just remember the pricetag (especially that of the associated contract, my phone runs on one 15€ prepaid card for a whole year) and think it's for people with way too much money.

Kerry Ganofsky

Oh crap, I hope you brought your master sword and silver arrows!

Motion controls aren't intended to be as precise as an analog stick. It's more precise to hit the A button 2-3 times for a golf swing than to swing the remote, it's even more precise to simply enter the angle and power, even better with computer targetting assistance where you just input the target location and it computes the trajectory for you. However that's not the point of golfing.

You're far too hard on analog control sticks. They do provide real and superior control for 3D games. For movement, they allow you to move at a wide variety of angles rather than being stuck to the 8 standard directions.

Just turn the camera.

They also allow for precision movement, something that is important in most First Person Shooters.

Not enough of it, FPSes on consoles are either slow paced, have barn-sized enemies or plain suck.

LittleBigPlanet, God Of War, Buzz!, Resistance, Singstar, Killzone -- It's my opinion but I'd argue Sony's exclusive line-up is much more varied than any of their competitors.

Let me dissect that a bit...
LBP is the sole entry into its genre on the system. It's a nice game to have in addition to other stuff but if it's your primary genre the PS3 is still too lacking as there's nothing else (while the DS has a TON of games that are similar).
GoW somewhat but since it's not a new franchise it's already seeing tons of imitators on all systems so the uniqueness of it is lost somewhat and it doesn't stand out anymore.
Buzz and Singstar were on the PS2 and don't benefit from the PS3 transition at all so Sony's fiercest competitor for that userbase is itself. A PS2 costs 100€, a PS3 400, there's practically no difference for these games, which would you pick?
Resistance and Killzone are just yet another xPS, there's plenty of those both cross platform and 360 exclusive, some better than R and KZ.

I think overall Sony's exclusives end up being aimed too much at existing PS3 owners already and not doing enough to get new PS3 owners. Especially considering the genre variety in general has been reduced heavily on the HD systems and most of the big exclusives are within the few genres that remain (and are overcrowded).

warioswoods: VGChartz is notorious for pulling numbers out of their ass, they aren't a valid source for anything and they get no insider information, any actual data they post was posted on another site first.

Yeah, I recall being one of those A-stick luddites and I still don't see a point in the damn thing for most games (of course it did help a lot in Kururin Squash!) but at least having the cap move with your thumb instead of sliding all over the thing reduces the development of thumb pain (meanwhile Sony designed their dpad to maximize the pain...).

I do agree that the motion should be limited to rarer actions (like, say, reloading a weapon or super attacks), constant shaking is like the joystick waggle needed to play Track & Field. If you want to test the player's endurance, fine, just don't expect him to do much else or play for a prolonged period of time then.

One advantage of the motion sensor is that it's analog, few games use that though. The way you do the swing motion in Wii sports greatly affects the outcome, it's not just like hitting a button, there's variations to the input that a button cannot permit (yes, I know, technically the other consoles have analog buttons but I've seen exactly one game use that in my huge PS2 library and it did nothing but frustrate).

Maybe they figured that fighting games on WiiWare are rare enough that the game will have appeal even in areas who don't recognize the characters. Of course I'd say that Werner would be more fitting for a fighting game than the Ottifanten .

A2: Hm, I recall Singles getting rated 16 and that had full nudity including visible gentials IIRC.

It's too late now, if they wanted to have any success with a Wiimote knockoff they should've revealed that in 2008 at latest. Of course then they'd still have gotten owned by the WMP.

I don't think Nintendo will go into counter mode now, Sony is moving too late and has already lost.

How fitting, on the exact same day...

Also... is that a legal move? Oh and why are the Russians Soviets?

I doubt it'll be good, fighting games are extremely easy to mess up.

What's an Ottifants? A cross between an otter and ant?

A cross between Otto (the guy who draws them) and an elephant.

Rather than speculate how explicit it is shouldn't we look at the rating it got? That part seems to be missing in this article.

I recall hearing that WiiWare updates are allowed (and I definitely recall downloading a VC update once),

Some shmups have a practice mode so you can practice the hard sections (it ends after the selected section) without playing the full game and only play the whole thing when you want to get serious about progressing. That way you need to master it but you can focus on the parts you actually need to master still without spending much time on the ones you already have mastered.

Well, that is interesting. On one hand, BTB, on the other hand, they've started with the retarded Express crap now.

The only one I've played was Empire of Dreams but that was a pretty good game.

Hey! This is Chris, BIT.TRIP BEAT's very own programmer. Srsly folks, does anyone have any idea why we're dropping so fast in the charts? If you haven't bought BEAT, post here and let us know why!

I haven't decided against buying it myself (it's simply not out in Europe) but seeing the sales of other games it looks to me that BTB's primary appeal was to the hardcore gamers who read the gaming news regularly and thus know when a new game comes out, rush to buy it and all interested customers got it by the time the first few weeks are over (this pattern can regularly be seen on on other systems).

The titles with long-term sales tend to be the ones that you don't have to read the gaming news to appreciate, many of them were practically sold before they were even developed by being something the customers wanted beforehand, not only after the game was there and reviews came in. The local charts here show huge success for Texas Hold 'em Tournament, a game that's not very good but that was something people knew they wanted before it was even released: They love poker, after all. My Aquarium, possibly the biggest seller on the whole service, sold by catering to the people who buy those aquarium DVDs. Onslaught sold because FPSes are popular and somehow underserved on the Wii so people looking for a Wii FPS grabbed it. I'm honestly not sure about the sales of WoG though (yes, Bridge Builder and its ilk were awesome but I'm not sure how many people were exposed to that), maybe that one's spreading by word of mouth and people demonstrating it to their friends or something.

Anyway, I don't think anyone was thinking "yeah, singleplayer Pong with music is exactly what I need", in fact I doubt most of the people who look at the service ever played Pong or remember it fondly. Most likely they prefer Wii Sports Tennis because they can relate to that more. People without 8 bit nostalgia see the abstract art style as a negative, they simply cannot connect to a simple bar that moves up and down and they probably don't even know why the graphics are simple lines when even flash games and such have at least functional sprite designs for these elements.

Then there are the people who were adults when they first encountered the 2600 so they didn't develop the association of 2600 = childhood that nostalgia works on, someone who doesn't associate the system with a "better" time will just prefer more modern replacements.

Hm, looks like BTB had the spike and drop of a hardcore game though it wasn't quite as fast as LIT.

Germany
(1) 1 Texas Hold'Em Tournament
(2) 2 My Aquarium
(3) 3 Onslaught
(5) 4 World of Goo
(6) 5 Equilibrio
(7) 6 FUN FUN Minigolf
(8) 7 TV Show King
(11) 8 Tetris Party
(9) 9 My Pokemon Ranch
(4) 10 Bubble Bobble Plus!
(10) 11 Bomberman Blast
(-) 12 Crystal Defensers R1
(13) 13 Brain Challenge
(-) 14 Adventure Island The Beginning
(14) 15 Snowboard Riot
(15) 16 Pop-Up Pirate!
(12) 17 Family & Friends Party
(19) 18 Defend Your Castle
(16) 19 Midnight Bowling
(17) 20 LostWinds

The top sees some movement as Bubble Booble drops dramatically while Equilibrio stays. Tower defense with Final Fantasy proves more popular than Wonder Boy with Master Higgins and Tetris sees a resurgence due to the tournament announcement. Family & Friends Party didn't keep our interest well either, losing quite a few spots too. Completely missing this time are FFCCMLaaK and SAMEGAME.

I'm pretty sure they announced they will not charge in the west and they haven't done it in the past (they charged for the previous MH games in Japan but not the west).

cr00mz: Only in Japan, they won't charge for it in the west.

They better improve it a LOT.

Hm... Cowboys... Swords... Will there be a guest appearance by the Oneechanbara characters?

Bit.Trip Tone

Yeah, the idea was to have a bunch of different games with a few shared themes that tell the story of "Commander Video".

Yeah, yeah, we don't care, just GET TATSUNOKO HERE ALREADY!

Yeah, I still die plenty of times. Bosses aren't hard so far but the levels can still kill you easily. Still wish the manual would explain things like the different weapons and possibly even the water melons (I presume they're for fast traversal of a level?).

Tempest? Hm, no, probably not. 3D Tetris?

I'll retain my pessimism due to past experiences. Considering we've seen incorrect announcements before I wouldn't be surprised if NOE simply quoted the date wrong though more fluid WW releases would be nice (with bi-weekly WW releases there's the threat of ending up with too few released or periodical releases getting delayed for one batch and having to wait very long before the next slot opens).

RGVEDA: But that was VC games added to a WW week, not the other way around IIRC.

No solid reason has been given at present, but it's been rumoured that sales in the North America and Europe haven't been amazing.

Wait, sales in EUROPE? I've never seen the game, Amazon doesn't know about it, etc and I'm pretty sure it's not one of those games that got blocked for excessive violence.

Maybe they just won't release SSB because there's no point in having SSB and SSBB on the same system?

I wonder why third parties have no problem releasing endless numbers of rail shooters but remain reluctant towards everything else.