Nintendo Wii Fanboy

The Wii is, at least to the generic public, a very multiplayer oriented system. You can't enjoy the flagship Wii Tennis without a second controller ... oh, wait, we need a nunchuk for boxing as well ... but man, three-player would be so cool! And so on and so forth. But Wiimotes are frakkin' expensive. Forty for the main, twenty for the add, you know the deal.

Sooooooo, where did you draw the line? Did you pick up an extra Wiimote with Wii Play? Do all of your Wiimotes have nunchucks? Did you drop the hundred and eighty dollars for the full complement, not including any Classic Controllers? And for the love of God, use rechargeable batteries. Mother nature and your wallet will thank you.

VGCharts, the "premier source for videogame sales charts on the internet", has totaled worldwide Wii sales now in excess of three million units. The same list has Xbox 360 at 7.74 million, and the PS3 at a rather stunted 1.18 million. By comparison, other-unofficial-internet-tallying site NexGenWars has the three consoles at 9.18 million for the 360, only 2 million for the Wii, and 800,000 for the PS3.

Which should you believe? We're inclined to roll with VGCharts, which seems to have a very meticulous method of gathering numerical data. The competition uses an arbitrary "unit sold every x seconds" formula until the site owner can alter the data manually after press releases and official data; in the first week of sales, the Wii inexplicably went from 700,000 to 400,000 in the blink of an eye.

We all know that Nintendo promised four million worldwide by year's end, but over 75% delivered isn't such a terrible let-down. And hey! There are still five days left! C'mon, Nintendo, you can do it!

[Thanks, Richard!]

[Update: we've added the trailer, YouTube style, after the break. Enjoy!]

We've heard about this mysterious "multiplayer" mode in Red Steel, but it was fraught with mystery and shroud ... till now. IGN has posted the official multiplayer trailer for the game, which you should probably go watch if for nothing else than the entertainment value of the trailer itself. When we play, we're totally ducking behind coffee tables for cover, and then climbing onto the ceiling only to drop down uselessly onto the couch we just left.

In any case, the split-screen looks serviceable enough, though very little swordplay was shown (we assume there will be a swords-only option in the final build). Why couldn't it have been online? Bah. Red Steel 2, we're talking to you.