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The situation with Disaster: Day of Crisis grows increasingly bizarre. Hot on the heels of the announcement of an October 24th European release date out of nowhere, word hits of a Japanese release set for September 25th. WTF, just three weeks from now? The game's going to end up on Japanese shelves with almost no marketing whatsoever given that kind of timetable. Is Nintendo just trying to get a bad game out the door in as much of a low-key fashion as possible?

At this point, we really should have heard something about a North American release from somebody. Is it even coming out here? There's a growing number of games that see Japanese and European releases while skipping over America completely, like Tingle's Rosy-Colored Rupeeland. Is Disaster: Day of Crisis going to be another one? Here's hoping Nintendo of America drops some sort of information for us, ASAP, or it may time for Disaster's fans to learn how Wii importing works.

As you may remember, we took a real shine to N+ when we got to play it hands-on at Atari's booth on the E3 show floor. It shipped for the DS on August 26 and should be sitting on the shelves of your favorite game retailer now. So, now it's time to ask the question: is it worth your $30? How'd it turn out? Is it worth buying over, say, the 800 point XBLA version or the totally free browser game version?

As always, we'll turn to a sampling of the game's highest and lowest review scores as aggregated by Metacritic. With its overall average sitting at 81%, it looks like N+ has acquitted itself quite well on this platform. Do note before we get started, though, that a lot of outlets reviewed the PSP and DS SKUs of N+ together despite the two games offering different level and feature selections. For our purposes, we'll try to focus parts of the reviews that are specific to the DS version.

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CrunchGear got some hands-on time with the recently announced Nyko Wing classic controller at a press event in San Francisco, and the prognosis thus far is good. Nyko had demo stations running Super Ghouls and Ghosts, Street Fighter II, and even Mega Man 9 going.

It connects via a little attachment for your wiimote which theyre saying will work with the Wii MotionPlus. When I started it from zero it synced up instantly and with no issues. The unit on Mega Man 9 had some desyncing issues, but the others didnt and Chris, the Nyko guy I was talking to, said that the drivers were still being finalized and they were squashing those desyncs as we speak.

The D-pad is a little slippery, and while I may not be a wizard at Street Fighter, I know how to do a Shoryuken and I was having a little trouble. Nothing that wasnt alleviated by a little practice, but it reminds me of the Dreamcasts D-pad, which could have been better. They say theyre modifying the D-pad to give it a little more texture.

I decided I wanted to play NES Metroid today. Once that would've meant pirating a ROM, firing up an emulator, and wrestling with my lousy USB controller. Now, in the era of Wii-- hey! I can just go download it all legal-like.

So I fire up the Shopping Channel to buy me some Metroid, and ... oh, look! I can't download it, because Wii needs 95 blocks of internal system free. Back to the Wii menu, into data management...

First I delete some stuff I bought for review purposes that sucked. That takes me to... 92 blocks free. Magnificent. So, I yank my SD HD card out of my camera, a bad boy with 4 gigs of storage space.

Oh, but wait! My Wii can't recognize SD HD cards! I'd have to go out and buy, presumably, a small crappy $20 SD card for Wii use. Awesome! Nintendo is penalizing me for not liking low-capacity storage media.

The SD cards Nintendo seems to insist are the cheap and easy way to store Wii DLs are already lousy out-of-date technology I'm not interested in owning. Give us a real storage solution, Nintendo, an external hard drive or SDHD support or something practical.

Now here's a case of IGN using their powers for good. IGN's teamed up with D3 Publisher and a bunch of professional game designers to craft nine custom levels for Treasure's Bangai-O Spirits. The levels are all up here to be freely downloaded (like all Bangai-O Spirits custom levels), and include submissions from the likes of Infinity Ward, Naughty Dog, the creator of Deus Ex, Vicious Cycle, and Infinite Interactive. After you've played all the levels, vote for your favorites in IGN's poll. Why bother, you ask?

The level that wins the most votes from fans will earn a $10,000 gift from D3Publisher in the level designer's name, to be awarded to a graduate student at The Guildhall at SMU for tuition assistance. Voting ends September 8, 2008.

That's right, one of these levels is worth $10,000. I can't begin to guess which one, as I must guiltily confess to not having nabbed a copy of Bangai-O yet. Maybe I can rectify that later today...

The Homebrew Channel has brought much good to the fan who likes to mod his/her Wii, but it's also unleashed something fairly horrible on the Mario Kart Wii online community. Right now a hacking code for the Wii homebrew program Ocarina is doing the rounds. It enables infinite items of any type in Mario Kart Wii online play - Bullet Bills, Lightning Bolts, Blue Shells, whatever. The video above shows a game played with the code in action, and the main player using infinite Blue Shells. It's like a vision of hell.

No official word from Nintendo about this, but I've seen a few reports of people using the hack disappearing from races in the early laps. Obviously that doesn't always happen, or the video above wouldn't be possible.

Things are looking good for fans of the Conduit. From its display booth at PAX comes the promising revelation from High Voltage's Rob Nicholls that The Conduit has found a publisher and is definitely going to be able to ship in Q1 2009, with a full singleplayer campaign and both online and offline multiplayer, possibly with LAN support. High Voltage isn't ready to announce the publishing company's name yet, but promises an announcement within the next month.

The new info about controls and gameplay is stunning. Some weapons have projectiles you can control with the Wii Remote, either by pointing or tilting. GameSpot revealed in their hands-on that the Conduit will support Wii MotionPlus as an aiming option and WiiSpeak for voice chat. Cursor sensitivity and turning speed are all customizable, along with mapping of all buttons. Single-player campaign is set to run roughly 10 hours with nine missions, and plenty of bonus secrets to find.

I left the house to have lunch with my husband today, and on the way home decided to stop at GameStop and say hi to a friend who works there.

After I chatted with my friend a bit I went to look at games, and then another woman stepped up to him and asked a truly mind-blowing question.

"Do y'all carry Super Mario for X-Box?"

My friend handled this far more gracefully than I would have.

"Oh, no... I'm sorry, you can only play Mario games on Nintendo."

She was not to be discouraged so easily. "How about for PlayStation?"

My friend tried again to communicate. "No... Nintendo owns Mario, it has to be a Nintendo."

The woman walked away, dissatisfied. I heard her grumble to what seemed like her husband. "He's lying," she said. "We play Super Mario on Wii all the time."

This is what's wrong with the video game industry.

Dropcast is a cute little puzzle game THQ saw fit to send my way. The premise is fairly similar to Puzzle Planet League, but with an emphasis on competition. Touch blocks on the touchscreen to make groups of two or more of the same color disappear. If you touch a group of six or more, then you cast a spell on your opponent with some sort of deleterious effect. The bigger the group of blocks, the more potent the spell.

Generally, each of the eight characters you can use has a selection of four spells, each keyed to a different color block. One of those spells is always a counterspell, always triggered by the blocks with dashes in the middle. Gameplay is basically a risk-reward dealie where you want to build up enough blocks onscreen to get big combo spells out, but don't want your blocks to build up so much they exceed the top of the screen. Keeping track of this and what your opponent is doing (displayed on the other screen) is actually pretty hard.

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Renegade Kid's done two DS games in seemingly impossible genres: survival horror in Dementium: The War, and then sci-fi FPS Moon. Now they're coming back with some sort of horror-themed new project for the Wii and DS, set to be published through GameCock. There's not much to go on for this besides the tantalizing art you see above and this enigmatic text from the press release:

The completely new title changes things up from past Renegade Kid projects in terms of gameplay, genre and style. While their development philosophy of building a solid graphics and gameplay foundation first and expanding the games features and world later in the process remains the same, the design they are tackling this time around promises a fresh experience for gamers.

Our first venture with Gamecock, Dementium, was an ideal partnership for us, said Jools Watsham, Owner and Creative Director of Renegade Kid. Our new game has been a pet project of ours for a while now and it not only felt natural but necessary that we team up with Gamecock again. Were really looking forward to working with these talented folks again."