Earlier I reported word that Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Alan Greenblat were working on a new music game for the Wii. Now, thanks to a Majesco press release, we finally have some details!
Major Minor's Majestic March turns the Wii Remote into a special baton that the bandleader, Major Minor, uses to keep tempo, recruit new band members and pick up valuable items. While marching through eight whimsical locations that contain various hair-raising events, Major Minor strives to create the most impressive parade ever. Players can add up to 15 different instruments to their dynamic procession--including brass, woodwinds, and percussion-- to alter its composition and resulting performance. Players are scored on how well their band maintains its rhythm and manages obstacles that could otherwise throw the procession into disarray. The band keeps tempo to more than 25 popular marching band songs from around the world, composed into original medleys for each stage.
Wired's Game|Life also has a nice huge gallery of Greenblat's designs for the game up. It sounds promising!
One of the traditional Wii criticisms is that it doesn't have many games worth buying, and then when something good does come out Wii owners don't bother to pick it up. They just sit around playing Wii Sports all day, with little idea that you can feed other discs into the magic little white machine.
This is apparently pretty far from the truth. NPD data for December hit and shows that the attach rate for the Wii exploded in December, with new Wii owners buying an average of 8 games to go along with their new consoles.
Now, this only bumps the lifetime attach rate for the Wii up to 4.6 games per console, which is still not bad. The 360's attach rate, generally considered astronomically high, is hovering around a 7. What it definitely means is that nobody can really claim Wii owners don't buy games anymore-- they apparently just buy them in big rushes, rather than heading out to the store whenever something new hits.
Personally, I own something like eighteen Wii games, but I expect most people's collections are going to be a lot smaller. Me, I wish mine was bigger.
There are so many articles about how, gee whiz, that Wii sure is popular! that I skip most of them because they're boring. The Telegraph is running one now that has something incredibly interesting embedded in the flood of text about things you already know. It's a quote from Nomura Securities analyst Yuta Sakurai, who frequently weighs in on the future of game console sales and is a little closer to reality than most.
Sakurai at Nomura has no doubts about the long-term popularity of the console. He believes that by 2012 Nintendo could have sold 100m Wii's around the world.
"Around 80 per cent of Wii consoles are in family living rooms. The company has managed to embed the system in people's lifestyles."
This is, effectively, calling for the Wii to displace the PS2 as the world's most popular video game system in the foreseeable future. Normally I'd call "no way" on something like that, but if the Wii software library keeps expanding, Nintendo just might be able to pull it off.
The name of the patent is "Hand Held Computer Input Apparatus and Method". Copper Innovations Group claim that they own it, and that Nintendo and Sony are infringing upon it with the Wii Remote, Wii Nunchuk, SIXAXIS controller, and Blu-Ray Remote Control. So, Copper Innovations Group is suing both Sony and Nintendo.
This is a really strange case. Copper Innovations Group is otherwise a company that never appears to have done anything else and doesn't respond to requests for comment on the suit. The internet says nothing about them (other than they're suing Nintendo and Sony). The devices singled out by the lawsuit use relatively common bluetooth protocols to make connections, which leaves me to wonder what Copper Innovations is trying to accomplish with the suit (besides $$$).
What I suspect is happening here is that you have someone trying to take advantage of an overly-vague technology patent that shouldn't have been granted in the first place.
Old? Perhaps. Awesome? Undoubtedly. Portable Video Gamer serves up a list of DS trivia facts that are actually... well, full of trivia you probably didn't know. Frankly, I'm embarrassed by how much of this list I did already know, but here are some gems.
- Although everyone knows it as the Nintendo DS, at one time the system was code-named Nitro . The name was later changed back to Nintendo DS. [Lynx's Note: The Nitro name has, to a degree, survived. The name of the Nintendo-produced gadget you have to use for taking DS screen caps is the IS Nitro Capture.]
- The Nintendo DS is available in China and is known as the iQue DS, which features a larger firmware to accommodate Chinese character glyph images.
- The virtual gap between the systems screens equates to about 92 hidden lines of pixels.
This is really a few days old by now, but since I reported on the initial screw-up that left Gabe and Tycho feeling like jerks, I should follow-up with how the situationended.
We were able to fish the signed DS out of the UPS bin in advance of the pickup, so that tender collectible will go up in an eBay auction on Wednesday - acting as a coda to this year's Child's Play. It's been replaced by a common, absolutely ordinary Nintendo DS, which isn't as cool, but what do you do? ...
If someone involved in the promotion of a game sends me a DS that may be used either as a personal gift or as a donation to charity - as was the case here, according to the letter - does the latter negate the former? ...
There are people in the games industry whose job it is, literally, to befriend you - and you must constantly correct for it. I don't apologize for this process.
He's quite right. I am a journalist of essentially no standing, but I still get free games showing up at my house with alarming regularly, and left the last E3 with some ridiculous swag.
While not illegal, scalping can present long-term problems for markets. It tempts retailers to sell their wares illegally, and enables large-scale smuggling operations like the one Shuji Matsushita discusses in this Mobile Ojisan post.
When the gate was raised, they were quietly and orderly swallowed into the shop. After a few minutes, they emerged one by one, each of them carrying a large paper shopping bag. Sure, the Wii Fit package with its logo.
They marched to a street corner behind the shop. There, a couple of nondescript vans were parking, their rear doors flapped open. Shoppers delivered the Wii Fit package to an attendant of the van, and received some cash from him. A quick and passionless transaction.
This is something a Nintendo fan should read. Black market sales like this have always figured big in Nintendo's corporate policy, and are apparently responsible for getting 20,000 illegal Wiis into China.
Wii Fit
This is an interesting story that's been evolving quite a bit over the past few days. It began when Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog broke the news that Midwestern games and music chain Slackers was reportedly scalping every Wii Nintendo sent to the store for retail sale via e-bay. Note that the three Wiis up for sale in Slackers' e-bay store at the time the story was posted have since been yanked.
Gizmodo has reported that Slackers initially scalped Wiis online for the higher price of $499.99, but lowered it when some units went unsold. Gizmodo also reports that doing this at all breaks the store's terms of sale with Nintendo, which would allow the manufacturer to deny Slackers any future Wii shipments.
More behind the cut.
Okay, settle down and get a drink. The way this story has complicated itself over the past day is both elaborate and hilarious. It was about a month ago that Greenpeace castigated Nintendo's environmental policies in its Guide to Greener Electronics, which this blog duly covered.
This was such a high priority for Nintendo that it took about a month for the company to issue a statement on the matter, through major industry news site GameDaily. That's right, it didn't actually merit its own press release, and Nintendo seems to have no idea what the Guide to Greener Electronics even is.
Perhaps this implied dismissal infuriated Greenpeace a bit...
Things looked pretty bad for Nintendo during the N64 and GameCube years. The success of the Wii and DS mark a tremendous comeback for a publisher a lot of gamers were ready to write off completely. Reggie Fils-Aime talks about the revolution from Nintendo's point of view in this Globe and Mail article. A lot of this story you probably know... but you'd be surprised at what got Nintendo to thinking about making machines to court casual gamers. Check behind the cut if you want to see, or just go read the article.
