Nintendo-Scene

Team Xtender announced today their “I-Case Crystal” a crystal clear case for Wii that includes built in LEDs. not much else to say, I’ll let the picture speak for themselves.

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Super Mario Strikers Charged Football by Next Level Games is going to have some online functionality as seen in this very descriptive video. There is lots of info about how it is all setup.

I really like the “positive” point system talked about in the video. Allegedly, you get points for scoring, winning, finishing a game, etc. The only real way to lose points is by dropping out. Obviously, this is setup to encourage players to not drop out when falling behind. I am getting excited for some online action. The time is getting closer.

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In response to Todd Mitchell’s assesrtion that the Wii’s success could prove problematic, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Patcher calls that claim “naive”.

“Going forward, the publishers are all trying to be largely platform agnostic. The success of the Wii and DS means that virtually every mainstream title will appear on both platforms,” he said.

“If consumers have a choice of all games on the Wii and DS, and Nintendo’s offering remains constant, Nintendo must lose share. That is a good thing for the third party publishers.”

Ah, the musings of the neoclassical economist.

Read more of the interview at gameindustry.biz.

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Despite the increase in Wii ownership worldwide, sales and downloads of virtual console games have slowed a bit in recent months.

On January 24 of this year, Nintendo announced that sales on the Wii’s downloadable retro games service had topped 1.5 million; today’s news means that sales have more than doubled in the three months since. However, since Wii launched in November, this means that sales are actually dropping off, month on month, as the userbase increases.

1.5 million in two months is not a bad number. 1.8 million in the three months that follow, when the userbase is exploding, is not necessarily a good follow-up.

Maybe the release of some new, fresh titles, along with some more real classics, will boost sales in the next quarter?

See the report at wired.com.

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The OpenWii team has released a full an unadulterated dump of the NAND flash from a PAL Wii. Not much information is provided and it’s unclear which method they used to dump the data or even if they dumped it themselves.¬† It’s important to note that the data is encrypted and it is speculated that the encryption is based on a unique key stored elsewhere in the Wii; meaning this data will only work on the Wii it was taken from. Even still It’s now available for anyone to look at who wants to.

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For all you Wii hunters, there may be good news in your future. The President of Nintendo promises to boost production to meet the unexpected demand, as reported by The Seattle Times.

Nintendo’s president acknowledged today that the shortage of the hit Wii game machine was “abnormal,” and promised production was being boosted to increase deliveries by next month.
 
“We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of stock,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters. “We have not been able to properly foresee demand.”
 
The comments came a day after the Japanese manufacturer of the Wii — which comes with a wand that can be used as a sword, tennis racket or fishing rod depending on the game — reported that sales nearly doubled for the fiscal year, lifted by robust sales of the Wii and the DS portable, a handheld video game.

Read more at The Seattle Times

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Bloomberg is reporting that Nintendo is currently developing 124 total games for their Wii and DS.

Nintendo Co., the world’s biggest maker of handheld game players, said it’s developing 45 software titles for the Wii console, a device that helped drive profit sevenfold in the past quarter.The company is also developing 79 games for the two-year-old DS portable player, President Satoru Iwata said at news conference in Tokyo today. The next batch of games will be introduced to the market at the end of “summer,” he said.
 
Nintendo yesterday posted a net income of 42.4 billion yen ($354 million) in the three months ended March 31, as sales almost tripled. The Wii console, equipped with a motion-sensor controller that can be swung like a bat or tennis racquet, is forecast to sell 14 million units this fiscal year, more than three times the number sold in the five months it was introduced, the Kyoto-based company said yesterday.

Just because they are being developed does not mean they are going to be completed. But, it is good to know that a whole slew of games is in the future. The Wii definitely needs them, and although the DS has a lot already, it cannot hurt to have some more. :)

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Is Nintendo’s rebirth at the top of the video game industry bad for gaming?¬† One industry analyst says, “Yes”.

¬†”Nintendo has not only increased the size of the market, but it has also re-segmented it in its own favor, in our view,‚Äù Mitchell wrote. ‚ÄúNintendo is dominating software sales on its popular hardware platforms, leaving the publishers with a smaller slice of an only somewhat incrementally larger pie.”

He continued, ‚ÄúMoreover, we feel that the likely shorter product cycles of Nintendo’s platforms puts the publishers in a permanent catch-up mode. We think the upcoming releases of Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption will highlight this phenomena [sic] this holiday season.‚Äù

See the full story at www.next-gen.biz.

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Brakken at tehskeen.com posted an update on DarkFader’s work regarding the Wii TSOP/BIOS.

DarkFader, the hacker known for his work on the Nintendo DS console has shared with me a few pictures of his Nintendo Wii work. He’s managed to desolder and create a socket for the Nintendo Wii’s BIOS allowing him to dump it’s contents and reprogram it at will. With this advancement and WAB’s previous one it’s only a matter of time before we see a custom BIOS.

See more, including some stills at tehskeen.com.

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Chad over on WindMeadow.com has a guide up discussing how you can build your own Wii Remote peripherial.¬† Essentially the port on the bottom of the Wii Remote is nothing more then an I2C interface. Zudini at wiire.org is the one who actually figured out the protocol that the Wii Remote uses. Chad based his work off of Zundini’s but offers some interesting ideas about how it could be used including leveraging the Wii Remote as nothing more then a bluetooth interface for linking your custom device to a PC since there are a number of homebrew PC drivers available for the Wii Remote. As of right now they only know how to send data to the remote. It is unclear if it is possible to receive data from the remote using it’s I2C interface.

If anything this opens up the potential for someone to build an adapter to use original NES and SNES pads with the Wii Remote.

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