Nintendo Wii price drop on the radar?
Following Sony’s lead, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has made it pretty clear that a price cut won’t be coming for the Wii anytime soon, and definitely not this holiday season.
“This is my personal thinking, but when the model’s price-tag drops over time, manufacturers are telling consumers it’s better to wait, and I’ve always thought that was a mistake,” Iwata said. “This seems to be an opinion one has the luxury of holding when their console is entering its third holiday season, and they still can’t meet demand.”
However, Iwata claims he is keeping Nintendo Wii fans in mind, claiming it wouldn’t be fair to people who were quick to buy a Wii to drop the price on them. Call us cynics… but…
Source: Touch-DS
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In 1996, Sega released a unique game for their short-lived console, the Saturn called NiGHTS into Dreams. The game saw the release of one of the early analogue control pads, the 3D controller for the Saturn. Positive reviews started coming in, people got hooked to the feeling of freedom that hadn’t been felt in a game before and a cult classic was born.
To begin the game you take control of two children (Will and Helen) who have two different stories in the game, which actually gives it alot of depth. Once you complete one of the childs stories, you can move onto the other to get a different experience. The basic idea is that once you select your child, you’re thrown into their dream world (or Nightopia) where they meet NiGHTS and go on their adventures. For a big chunk of the game though, you’ll be controlling NiGHTS, which is good because the kids game can be a bit dull.
NiGHTS has full voice acting, which in this case may be a bad thing. Suprisingly, the accents for all the characters are British, and are pretty poorly done. Alot of things said are cheesy, poorly delivered, and can be quite cringeworthy. However, one may argue this adds to the charm of the game. This brings us to another downfall, being that you cannot skip the cut scenes. Add to this the fact that you have to repeat entire chapters when you die at the boss at the end (sometimes 5-10 minutes of work) and NiGHTS can be viewed as a pretty frusrating experience.
Multiplayer mode isn’t something that was overlooked. NiGHTS gives you the option of racing or battling someone locally or over the Nintendo Wi-Fi network. Unfortunatly, the only time I found someone to play online it seemed to be a five year old, as I’d complete two laps in no huge hurry only for my opponent to be a quarter of the way through the first lap. There is a bit of lag, but you can seen where your opponent on the map and that’s the main thing, since half the time they’ll be off your screen anyway.
Or should that be, free game with your Wii Remote? Anyway, Nintendo brings us Wii Play. Another bunch of mini games slapped together to show us what the Wii Remote can do. Typically, the game comes in a bundle with a Wii Remote, so keep in mind this isn’t a full priced game, the difference between a Wii Remote alone and Wii Play with a Wii Remote is very slight, so the game is cheap.
Wii Play provides us with another Wii Table Tennis mini game. Yay rejoice! Table Tennis on Wii Play doesn’t require you to beat your computer opponent, but have a rally with it for as long as possible. The computer opponent can’t be beaten and each shot you make is counted, when you miss you’re given your score and progress to the next mini game. It’s done well, but once you get to the max of 100 you never really want to go back to it too often, even though it lets you go over 100 the second time.
Laser Hockey is essentially a bright video game version of air hockey. Your paddle can be tiled either way to direct the ball in certain directions to try and score a goal.
Fishing is good fun albeit simple. You dangle your line in a pond and once a fish bites you pull up to catch it. The bigger the fish the harder they are to catch and more points you get. During the game in the top of the screen is a display which will show you the “Bonus Fish.” If you catch this fish while it’s displayed you get double points.
The final game and probably most impressive in terms of shelf life is Tanks. Tanks is the only mini game in Wii Play that uses the nunchuk add on. To say Tanks is fun with a friend is an understatement. The game appears to be designed to be played against each other, but co-op is just as fun. The nunchuk is used to control your tank and the Wii Remote pointed at the screen aims your bullet at computer tanks. If you wipe out all the computer tanks before they get you, you progress onto the next levels with more powerful computer tanks being added the further you progress. Two player mode has 20 levels, but one player mode has a huge 100 levels to play through, so you can spend quite a while on this one.
Game used to test this product was Ghost Squad.
Nintendo are hitting us up again with one of their classics. It’s fair to say the The Mario Kart franchise has gone through it’s ups and downs. The Super Nintendo version was loved by many but the N64 version was widely thought of being a poor follow up. The following Gamecube and DS versions however have set the series back on track. It all leads to this though, Mario Kart on the Wii is taking a new direction adopting the consoles motion sensor controls. So, does it suit this series?
Mario Kart Wii’s controls are pretty simple. 2 is your gas and moving the remote from left to right with the front of the remote facing you turns your vehicle. Holding down B while turning a corner enables you to skid and take the corner tighter. This is all fine, but it’s the items that have always made Mario Kart games interesting. Sporadically throughout the courses there’s a line of item boxes that have nifty little goodies in them. There are various items but they all do one of a few things: speed you up, attack an opponent or both. In the item boxes lies my one major issue with the game, and that is some items are just way too powerful and whether or not you get them depends on your position at the time of picking it up. For example, you can be in first for the whole race, making absolutely no mistakes, but as you turn onto the final straight the dude that has been sitting in last for the whole race gets an item which propels him into first and wins the race. Racing Video Games have made a habit out of helping the person in last in the past, but this just seems to be taking it too far. There are a few challenging courses which separate the skillful players from the lucky ones, but unfortunately they are few and far between.
A lot of the replay value of Mario Kart Wii lies in the online mode. Here you can race against people from around the world in Battle or Race mode, and it offers an extra challenge once you’ve mastered the single player mode. There is also a tournament option which gives you a certain challenge which you compete in and then upload your score to compare with others.
On face value, the Wii might not seem to offer as much as it’s competitors offer when it comes to a complete entertainment device. Sony and Microsoft market their machines as not only being a games console, but they also make sure the public know of the Blu Ray playing capabilities or the various internet features.
Well with the Beijing olympics being just around the corner I figured it would be fitting to review a game released last year from Sega called Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games.
Long jump, triple jump, javelin and high jump are all very similar. You run as fast as you can and lift the remote to jump at the right time. However if you lift too fast, you overjump and won’t go very far or high. Hammer throw is a little different, requiring you to swing the remote around as you would in the event and let go at the right time.