Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Starting tomorrow and lasting until Saturday, Toys R Us will be offering select Wii games at 50% off. These games are actually some quality titles, too. None of that burning through their stock of Anubis II or anything, we're talking top-notch games. So what's on offer?

• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
• Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
• BWii: Battalion Wars 2
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

Not bad, right? So be sure to check their site first thing tomorrow. Who's planning on picking up a game? And what game would that be?

[Thanks, TheResidentEvil!]

This is the week for Japanese gamers who like RPGs with long battles. Two classic, somewhat rare strategy RPG sequels are now available on the Virtual Console. Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is a quite late release in the Fire Emblem series, having been released as a download for a Super Famicom flash cartridge in 1999, when the Nintendo 64 was already out and tanking in Japan. Shining Force II was released on a plain old cartridge back in 1994, but it's interesting mostly for being a good SRPG. It's also got a better chance of being released outside of Japan, having been released in the U.S. and Europe as a cartridge.

Also there's one shooter. It's still the Virtual Console, after all. It's a good shooter, though!

• Fire Emblem Thracia 776 (Super Famicom, 1 player, 800 Wii Points)
  
• Shining Force II (Mega Drive, 1 player, 700 Wii Points)
  
• Darius Plus (PC Engine, 1 player, 600 Wii Points)
  

Nintendo has updated their Japanese Virtual Console site with a list of fifteen games coming out in July. That's nine more than we got last month. Even if we don't believe that the MSX games are actually going to come out (Eggy? Released?) that's a lot of games for Japan to enjoy.

One of the more interesting titles is Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, which was released on the Super Famicom game download service called "Nintendo Power." Much like the rewritable Famicom Disk System disks, the "Nintendo Power" cartridge was a rewritable flash cartridge that could accept games downloaded from store kiosks. A cartridge version of the game came out later.

A couple of retro-tastic Taito games show up this month: Chack 'n Pop is a direct precursor to Bubble Bobble (even including the same Monsta creatures), and Kiki KaiKai is the original Pocky & Rocky (also an ancestor of the recent Heavenly Guardian). The full list of releases is after the break.

When it comes to game delays in PAL regions, there are delays and then there are DELAYS. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, in case you didn't realize, falls squarely in the latter category. Japan received Intelligent Systems' strategy title back in February 2007, which is not much more than a faint dot in our memories. Almost one year later, and Europe is still waiting, while Australia will have to put its feet up until April.

Remarkably, there's been a breakthrough on a European date, with Nintendo confirming that the game will ship in the region on March 14th, a.k.a thirteen months after Japan.

If you live in Australia, the chances are high that you haven't had the pleasure of playing the Wii's year-old Fire Emblem game, Radiant Dawn. Released last year in Japan and last November in North America, Radiant Dawn will finally be heading down under.

According to Nintendo Australia's website, Aussies can expect to get the title on April 10th. Unfortunately, there's still no word on a European date. We're hoping that translating the game into an additional few languages won't hold it up for too long, and that Europeans can enjoy the title around the same time as Australians. We'll let you know when we hear something tangible, though.

[Via GoNintendo]

Today's spoiler is a biggie folks, so if you have any interest in playing Brawl with fresh, untainted eyes, you'll want to not head past the post break.

With the end of 2007 approaching at near lightning-fast speed, we thought it would be nice to check out what you, the excellent reader, thought about the games of this year. First up, we have the obvious: first-party games. We have a good idea which game you're going to say, but in the name of healthy debate, check out all of the choices past the break.

When it comes to RPG franchises, a new entry in a series often introduces a different storyline with different characters, effectively providing a clean slate for the player. While Fire Emblem normally follows this tried and true formula, the creators decided to shake things up and make Radiant Dawn a direct sequel to the game that came before it, Path of Radiance.

Whenever a sequel to a game comes out, it's important to know whether the game can stand on its own or if newcomers will be completely lost without playing the previous title. In the case of Radiant Dawn, however, this concern can't be fully answered in simple one-word terms.

One neat feature in the Wii's Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is that you can import a save file from the game's GameCube prequel, Path of Radiance. This will give some of your characters stat boosts, not to mention a few other nice perks.

For anyone who just rolled through PoR on easy mode in order to beat the game quickly and pump their characters full of bonus experience, however, Radiant Dawn will laugh at you and then slap you in the face for good measure. See, easy mode files don't transfer over to Radiant Dawn because (as you'll know if you've played the game), the word "easy" isn't in its vocabulary. Even if you try to transfer a normal or hard mode file while having any easy mode PoR files saved somewhere else on your card, Radiant Dawn will have none of that.

Christian from The Tanooki decided to contact Nintendo on the issue, and it seems that Nintendo will have a fix ready by mid-December. In order to get your disc repaired (or possibly get a completely new disc), you have to contact Nintendo about the issue, give them your name, address, and phone number, and then send your disc to them when prompted.

So, what lesson have we learned from all this? Well, that Fire Emblem is for badasses only, of course.

Everyone has an opinion about what makes a good game. You've got one, we've got one (or several, as there are several of us here), and the reviewers, they all have their own preferences, too. Sometimes, however, those opinions all just seem to coincide, and then we know a game is truly something special.

As part of our celebration of the first year of the Wii, we thought we would do a comparison of the best-reviewed games released for the system alongside our picks for the top games. Sometimes they overlap, but we slipped in a few extras that we feel just might be worth your time.