Wii Sale

A port of the Resident Evil will be released on the Wii according to various sites.

It will be released on December 25 exclusively in Japan. Players would use the Wiimote and Nunchuck to perform action moves. However, they could also play the game by using Gamecube or a classic controllers. A horizontal 8-bit position for the Wiimote is being developed by Capcom for this game.

In the Capcom official forums, Christian Svensson of Capcom says, “In Japan, Zero sold well, indicating that many people have never played the title and there is demand for it. This project is a reaction to the sale of Zero. Like Zero, think of this as a Greatest Hits re-introduction that just happens to be on a new platform. At the moment, like Zero, this is Japan only. That could change but that’s the current situation.”

13 new images were posted at worthplaying.com about an upcoming rythm game for the Wii called PopStar guitar.

All the images are similar to each other. The only exceptions are the camera angles and characters which appear different on each screen shot. The first five does not show any overlay statistics or interface and they are probably shown during musical breaks.

The music interface where you need to time your button presses are on the left. On the top right corner, it shows a heart with a meter and this probably shows how much the fans love your performance. In some of the screen shots, they are red, others are pink.

The feature list notes that there are 12 playable characters and the songs include from artist such as Miley Cyrus and Maroon 5. There will be a single player mode which is called Career Mode and a multi-player mode called Co-operative Mode. There will also be mini-games for both single and multi-players.

An interview with the co-founder of Rockstar, maker of Grand Theft Auto video games, has been published on the official Nintendo magazine which is Nintendo Power.

Dan Houser made a response on why the new GTA game was made for the DS, not for the Wii. His response was, “It didn’t feel natural to us, I guess. It really was that the DS felt like it had a lot of interesting challenges that would be totally different from what we’d done in the past. The stylus and the chance to use mini-games in that way was really interesting and exciting to us, and we thought we could integrate seamlessly between those two modes. And it would be the chance to make something really good on a handheld with our handheld-focused team. That was really why we went that way. We haven’t really done any concrete, major thinking about the Wii, one way or another. They’re sort of separate issues.”

Tomshardware.com has posted a news that a chip-less mod tool has been invented for the Wii.

There are only 6 steps that are involved in the process which are:

1. Patch the ISO with the .EXE that comes in the download.
2. Install the CIOS on your Wii.
3. Install DVDX.  Go to Advance and choose 249.
4. Install Wii loader
5. Use a software called ImgBurn to record the patched ISO.
6. Run the loader.

The author of the tool announced that he has dropped the project and he will no longer continue on working with it. The author for the article at tomshardware.com, Aaron Heibert, notes that he (the tool author) has demonstrated that this process could be made. Hiebert also notes that someone will continue on working with the tool.

The links on where to download the tools has been shut down but Heibert do not know whether a company has shut it down or the links are just getting so many hits.

Nintendo has released a press release on their upcoming music game for the Nintendo Wii called Wii Music.

The press release lists the following details:
1. The release date is Oct 20.
2. Players can use over 60 instruments.
3. The instruments include electric guitar, trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, steel drums, marimba, and sitar.
4. Both the Wii Remote and Nunchuk will be used to play the music tracks.
5. Players could enjoy the game even if they have not played an instrument before.
6. Over 50 songs will be included. Not only will they be Nintendo songs, but there will also be classical, popular, and licensed music.
7. Players could edit the songs by adding new beats to them.
8. Players could post their songs in the Message Board to forward it to their friends. By doing this process, their friends could reproduced their created songs and then pass it back to them.

Hillcrest Laboratories submitted a lawsuit against Nintendo on infringing four patents that were included to the development of the Nintendo Wii and the International Trade Commision (ITC) has agreed to look at the situation. The ITC has the power to bar products that are made with infringed technology to be sold in the United States according to the article at Reuters. The article was posted earlier today at Reuters.com.

The company also filed a similar lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Maryland last month. Their patents include technology that allows users to select items on a screen by making a waving motion using a handheld device. Some companies had licensed their technology including  Eastman Kodak.

Both Nintendo and Hillcrest were not available to give an immediate comment on the issue.

If Nintendo lose this case, they would probably settle a deal with Hillcrest rather than letting the ITC ban all Nintendo Wii systems from being sold in the U.S.A.

Kotaku.com was able to get ahold of David Nathannielsz of Vicarious Visions. The interview is mainly about the upcoming game for the Wii titled Guitar Hero: World Tour.

He said, “We’re excited to stay with Nintendo. And we like developing for the Wii.”

He told the interviewer about a story of a fan who thank him for making the game. This is due to the fact that the fan’s son is crippled and could barely use one side of his body. In the Wii game, the son could use the nunchuck-Wiimote combo for imitating the drumming movements, unlike playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero on the other console systems.

When he was asked about his favorites in the game, he said he like to drum on Foo fighters songs, play guitar to Assassin, and sing the Rebel Yell song by Billy Idol.

The article at Kotaku notes that each feature on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions are included in the Wii version. However, the graphics do not look as good as the versions of those two systems.

Two WiiWare games and one virtual console game was released today.

The title of the first WiiWare game is Strong Bad Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free. It is a game that is designed for 1-player and it features all-new achievements, costumes, and Teen Girl Squad comics according to the article at punchjump.com. Gamers could buy the game at the Wii Shopping Channel for $1,000 Wii Points which is approximately $10.

The other game is called Potpourri. This is a multi-player game for up to two players. It costs 200 Wii points less than the first game. The goal of the players is to defeat an evil wizard.

Capcom’s Mega Man 2 was released today as the lone virtual console game. It was released in the NES era and gamers could buy it for 500 Wii Points just like other NES games on the Wii Shopping Channel.

The Nintendo Wii has some exclusive unique games such as Boom Blox. Today, a new game was announced by Konami that they will release a sandcastle-building game that will be exclusive for the Wii.

The title of this upcoming game is Sandy Beach and players would use their Wii Remotes to build complex sand castles. When they have finished making them, they can capture images of their sandcastles and save them to their photo gallery.

The challenge in this game is that they must watch out for crabs in Crab Battle mode since they can destroy the sandcastles that they are making. In order to counter-attack the crabs, they can use cannons to fire on them.

Players could also add decorations to their castles by adding treasures to them. These treasures are found by using a metal detector which could also find additional cannons.

Sandy Beach will be a downloadable WiiWare game and it is scheduled to be released in Fall of this year.

The total sales of video game software and hardware has been released by the NPD Group. Their data is based only on video game items sold in North America in the month of August.

As usual, the Nintendo DS and Wii leads the hardware sales category. A total of 518.3K units of DSs were sold while 453K Wii units were sold last month.

As for video game software, the top three games are the same game that was released into several versions. The title is Madden NFL 09 which is the latest NFL game from EA Sports. The top game is the Xbox 360 version which sold 1 million copies. The Wii version only sold 15% of the sales compared to the Xbox 360 version.

The top-selling Wii game is Wii Fit which is in fourth place. The total sales of this game is 394.9K units according to the article at aussie-nintendo.com.