Nintendophiles 04.17.08

Posted by Theo Fraser on 04.17.2008

It’s a glorious day for Nintendophiles across the globe as Nibris’ Sadness hasn’t been cancelled after all! Don’t miss that top story, plus Capcom’s venture into WiiWare territory, cheating in Mario Kart Wii, a price tag set for Wii Fit and the five exclusive tracks for Wii Rock Band have been revealed. Check out all that and more inside the latest edition of Nintendophiles!





This past Friday, Mario Kart Wii launched in the UK and let me tell you right now…IT…IS…AWESOME! I'm going back to Uni this coming weekend, where they block online gaming (for what reason I have no idea. They want to stop procrastination? Uh…ever heard of a little something called alcohol?), so it's been a tough call; do I go straight for the online races and get thrown into a bunch of courses I've never played before? Or try and train up a little bit and orient myself with the new tracks? I've tried to do a little bit of both, but it's not such a big deal seeing as you're pitted against people of a similar skill level. Just this morning I had a 12-man race, with players from England, Wales, France, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands. For some reason it just seems even more cool than normal; most likely because you're introduced to each player's Mii on the World Map before each online session begins.

It's very interesting to note at this stage the mix of gamers using the Wii Wheel vs using standard control. You can see whether or not people are using the wheel in the rankings screen before/after an online match, and it's very mixed right now. I'll be interested to see in a couple of month's time if people have found a legitimately superior method of control. Personally, I've been having great fun with the Wheel and haven't actually tried the standard controls with a Gamecube controller, but I'll give it a go soon and see if there's a noticeable difference.

OK, well I'll try and put all thoughts of Mario Kart out of my mind for the time being and get on with the report. So what have I got for you today? Read on!




Rejoice for the Sadness news a.k.a. IT'S NOT CANCELLED!
Credit: Cubed3

It was back at the end of January that a Nintendo spokesperson revealed that Nibris' survival-thriller Sadness wasn't "recognised as a future Wii release" any longer. This was taken by many, including myself, as confirmation of the game's cancellation. Having been a big fan of Sadness since its conception, I was enormously upset about this and immediately…uh…bitched about its cancellation in that week's Nintendophiles. Anyway, seemingly out of the blue, it was announced that Sadness was indeed still in development (and yes, still exclusively for the Wii), with Nibris concentrating solely on the project at this time. In exciting news, Nibris officially confirmed the following screen as being from Sadness, from the in-game engine. The screen had been leaked a short while ago, but was only rumored to be associated with Sadness, so it's pleasing to finally get proper confirmation. So let's take a look at the screen in question:





The interesting thing to note from that screen is what looks like blood splatters (obviously in grayscale) to the right side of the player's head. Is this the equivalent of an on-screen health bar? We know that Nibris wanted to do away with the usual HUD that you'd find in your average third person action game, so perhaps this is their answer? I haven't seen any reports to back up my theory, but if it's not splatters of blood, I'm very perplexed as to what it actually is.

Sadness was again in the news the day after it was revealed to still be in development, as Emergent Game Technologies delivered a press release stating that their Gamebryo Engine was being utilised for the title! To some, that might not mean much. But those in the know are likely very excited about this, seeing as how the Gamebyro Engine has been used for some fantastic-looking titles such as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Civilisation IV. The full press release from Emergent and Nibris gives you the lowdown.


Emergent CEO, Geoffrey Selzer:

"From the early stages of pre-production with Sadness, Nibris realized that they would need development technology that allowed for an extreme amount of flexibility in the creative process, which is a cornerstone of the Gamebryo framework. Sadness is designed to push the bounds of Wii technically and creatively. †We are thrilled to be a part of Nibris' ground-breaking product. We're really looking forward to playing Sadness on Wii."


Project Manager for Nibris, Tomasz Wisniowski

"Without a doubt, Gamebryo is the most powerful engine available for the Wii. After getting familiar with the engine several months ago we made the decision to choose Gamebryo. Since then, our team has been working on Sadness and we are quite impressed. We will have quite a few graphical effects in our game, which some believe are impossible to attain on the Wii. Gamebryo helped make it possible. We are firmly convinced we made the right choice."


I never like to believe a developer's self-hype, but it really sounds like Nibris are trying to push the boundaries on what people think the Wii is capable of graphically. Super Mario Galaxy still looks astounding and nothing has come even remotely close to matching it in the visual department, so they've got their work cut out for them, but with the Gamebryo Engine, they may very well be onto a winner.

A release date for Sadness is not known at this point, but it has more than likely slipped well into 2009. Nibris are taking their sweet time releasing any info, drip-feeding the media with gaps of a whole year in between updates! With the first screen confirmed and now the lid being opened on the game's engine, perhaps now, finally, Nibris are ready to talk. We can only hope.




Capcom venture into WiiWare territory
Credit: Gamasutra, CVG

Capcom fans will definitely want to take note of this, so listen up! It would seem that Capcom are in the planning stages of bringing a WiiWare title to Nintendo's download service in the near future…in the West, at least. In an interview with Gamasutra, the Vice President of strategic planning & business development for Capcom USA, Christian Svensson, was asked about the company's future plans for all the various different platforms out there, and naturally the concept of a Capcom WiiWare title was brought up. Svensson's reply was extremely interesting.



Gamasutra: I haven't heard much about WiiWare yet -- how much have you thought about it?

Svensson: I'm going to lump WiiWare in with PSP e-distribution, in that we're looking for the right content first -- a lot of the content we have now isn't quite right in value or approach or interface for WiiWare. I fully expect us to be doing some WiiWare titles very shortly in the west. I won't speak for Japan on that particular issue, but there are interesting things happening at some point there, maybe.

WiiWare has some interesting challenges in terms of interface. I shouldn't say challenges: both challenges and benefits. The controls are different and frankly we'd like to make good use of the Wii Remote. We have a couple of concepts internally that I think would be perfect for Wii, as well as other platforms.

The other part of this is we're trying to get a better handle on the online services that are going to be available to us on WiiWare. One of our hot buttons here across PC, PS3, and 360 is that we're trying for feature parity across all platforms. That's not a trivial task, especially when it comes down to user-created content.

Let's say at some time we get into clan and guild support, or other aspects of user-created content propagation, that becomes a more interesting challenge on the Wii. Does that mean we couldn't do WiiWare stuff that doesn't have feature parity? Yeah, we could do that, but we have a couple of things where we might not have to cut anything. Let's talk again next year about that.



It's clearly already been given a lot of thought, and I actually wouldn't be surprised to see something show up at E3. The focus on the Western market is interesting [related to Capcom's refocus on the Western market after Lost Planet sold 1.6 million units worldwide, only 300,000 of which were in Japan], and helps to rule out some of the possibilities. Despite finding previous success on the Nintendo format, I'd say we can discount the Ace Attorney series, as it's a massively popular Japanese franchise, and it would be foolish only to release it in the West. Similarly, popular Western franchises like Resident Evil or Street Fighter would again be an odd choice considering their success in the motherland.

Of course, there's nothing to say the WiiWare project will be a familiar franchise; WiiWare is a perfect platform to try out something new for very little risk, due to the relatively low cost involved. Svensson was careful with what he said, not letting anything of note slip, so we'll likely be in the dark for a little while longer. Perhaps you guys might like to leave your ideas in the comments section below? Whatever the case, it's great to see a developer the calibre of Capcom on board to develop for WiiWare, helping to raise the prestige of the service. As soon as we hear more on this mysterious project, we'll let you know.




Cheating scum!
Credit: CVG




OK, so I did say I'd put all thoughts of Mario Kart out of my mind, but I have to go back on that here, as we've received word of some issues regarding online cheating since the UK launch 6 days ago. As with almost all competitive online titles, someone somewhere always manages to find a way to exploit some kind of loophole or glitch in order to get ahead without having the requisite skill to do so. It would seem that Mario Kart Wii is no exception.

The cheating is in regards to Time Trial mode, where players are establishing unbeatable (and practically impossible) times. This is apparently done by only driving one of the three laps, and then turning around to face the wrong way, where some kind of glitch can be taken advantage of. If we were dealing with a regular, single-player Time Trial, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But these Time Trial times can be submitted to the worldwide rankings system, meaning that right now all the top contenders are cheating scum, ruining it for gamers who want to show off their mAd sKillZ!

Nintendo have been alerted to the problem, but are currently just "looking into it," seeing as the trouble only surfaced a few days ago. Apparently, Nintendo are going through the Time Trial database and are deleting any dodgy looking-times…one by one. Wow, I hope that guy gets paid by the hour.

So the money question right now is, how will Nintendo properly combat this? It would be a painstaking chore to patrol the rankings each and every day, on the lookout for suspicious results, so something more decisive needs to be done. But with the Wii's limited storage capacity, an official patch is unlikely, so what other options are there? User-banning could be implemented, but again, moderators would need to be on hand 24/7. It's anyone's guess right now, but hopefully Nintendo won't take too long to come up with a solution.

It should be noted, however, that Nintendo have taken many other precautions as it relates to dickhead gamers trying to spoil everyone else's fun. For example, I was particularly impressed to find out that players would be booted from a game for interfering in a race, such as staying in a stationary spot and taking out other racers. So basically, if you play like an ass, you'll get booted! Nintendo naturally want online Mario Kart Wii to be a fun experience, and they're doing everything they can to ensure that stays true, which I why I'm sure they'll get this current Time Trial predicament sorted out in a jiffy.




2K Games' Boxing title to utilise the Balance Board
Credit: CVG

A few smaller announcements before we finish up this week. First up is 2K's announcement of Don King Presents: Prizefighter for the Nintendo Wii, brought to you by Venom Games (who were responsible for the Rocky titles). As you might expect from the developer in question, it's a boxing title BUT! This is no ordinary boxing game, oh no. This particular title will utilise the Balance Board!

"Top boxing trainers" have apparently been drafted in to formulate a proper training mode in the style of Wii Fit, which means you'll likely get a good workout whilst pummelling an opponent in the face. So far, the full list of features isn't complete, but executive producer Matthew Seymour did reveal that a jump rope exercise would be included, which will be carried out on the Balance Board and instruct you to carry the Wii remote in your back pocket. Sounds pretty involved; if they can pull this off and get some variety in there, this could be tremendous fun indeed.

Prizefighter is due out on the Wii in late 2008, and I'd expect a hands-on version to appear at E3, so that's definitely something to look forward to.




$89.99 Price tag set for Wii Fit
Credit:

It's probably a bit much to dedicate a whole section to this, but seeing as Nintendo have reportedly set aside "one of the largest marketing budgets in company history" to promote the package, I think it's deemed worthy enough of a mention.

So yes, the official announcement: Wii Fit, along with the Balance Board, will cost $89.99 upon its release on May 19th. For those keeping score, that's a little bit higher than the Japanese version, which is sold at around $83, but staggeringly lower than the UK price, which is £70. At the current exchange rate, that equates to a whopping $138!! Spare a thought for us ripped-off Brits, eh?




Rock Band on Wii: The 5 Exclusive Tracks
Credit: IGN, Cubed3

I've spoken quite a lot about Rock Band on the Wii in recent weeks, and not all of it positive after it was revealed that the Wii version would not support downloadable content or online play of any kind. That was quite a downer, but developer Harmonix were quick to come to the game's aid, touting 5 exclusive tracks that won't feature on any other platform, which were revealed at the Nintendo Media Summit and are handily listed for you below. The question remains, however, do they really make up for the lack of DLC? Can the Wii iteration stand up to the next-gen big boys? You decide.

• Dirty Little Secret - The All-American Rejects
  
• Don't Look Back in Anger - Oasis
  
• Roam - The B-52's
  
• Rockaway Beach - The Ramones
  
• Roxanne - The Police

Certainly, those are some classic tunes and a nice addition to the game, but it's just not enough to compete with the competition on 360 and PS3. If you only own a Wii, sure, it'll be worth a look, as the gameplay's still awesome, but if you can play the game in another format, you're probably best doing that instead.

Rock Band is released on the Nintendo Wii across North America on June 22nd.




LostWinds gameplay trailer finds its way

I was intrigued by this WiiWare title when it was first announced, and now I can safely say I am hooked after watching this brand new gameplay teaser trailer, which made its way onto the net last week. Never mind being pitted against other WiiWare titles; the visuals could give most standard Wii games a run for their money! It looks fantastic and the gameplay looks really quirky to boot…and that's quirky in a good way! I'm really hoping we get to see more of this in the near future. Check it out for yourself.








The 411 Games Crew

WiiWare enthusiasts will want to check out Vincent Chiucchi's Select and Start News Report, which features a look at one of the latest WiiWare titles to be announced, Homestar Runner.

B3yond the Report by Mark Salmela has details on the MGS4 bundle deals, so Snake fans will definitely want to check it out. And don't miss Mark's countdown of the Top 10 PS3 games so far!

Chris Evans brings you the PC Centric Extravaganza, and his computer is on the brink, so you better check out this week's report just in case he has to take a short technological hiatus from 411!

John Curry explains why console game developers should revive Heaven vs Hell with a Battle for Middle Earth RTS format in this week's edition of The Checkpoint


Right, well, Mario Kart Wii beckons! Time for some Battle Mode carnage I think. Europe, prepare to feel the wrath of a Koopa on a scooter! See you next time, folks!

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