Nintendo Wii Fanboy

The day has come ladies and gentlemen. The list for the games that will be available on the Wii by December has arrived! Be warned that there have been a few modifications and we wouldn't be surprised to see more the closer we get to December. One of the games taken off is Blazing Angels. Judging from the list we can tell that many other games will make up for the gap.

We have divided the list by publisher to make it easier on your eyes. Check it out after the break!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

Go Nintendo has a list of purported Wii titles available for preorder from Game Crazy, and the fight over accuracy is in full swing. One commenter already blasted it as a fake, and another claims to be the source and says that many of the titles are placeholders only -- and the prices seem to be as well (I need my Wii Sports for less than $50!). But fake or not, the list is still enough to ratchet up some Wii excitement -- particularly regarding Sadness. From the comments at Go Nintendo, it seems the veil of utter secrecy surrounding the game's publisher remains firmly in place ... but we recommend studying the list itself. As a lineup, it doesn't seem too far off, so the cries that it's as fake as an Elmyr painting may be misdirection. But then again, maybe the fake cries of fakery -- uh. Right. So, there's a list. And it may or may not be fake.

Is it wrong to admit that I would probably play Duck Hunt until my hands cried out in protest? Ah, a return to the pure simplicity of blasting away waterfowl while an annoying dog laughs at your aim. Good times.

There's a list of Wii launch games traveling through the myriad computers, routers, cables and robotic gnomes that comprise the Internet, though it mostly amounts to a bunch of good guesses as opposed to official confirmations. No doubt obtained from retailers and not publishers, the list suggests that the following games will be available when Nintendo unleashes their Wii:

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
  
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
  
• Wii Sports
  
• Red Steel
  
• Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
  
• Madden NFL 2007
  
• Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors
  
• Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
  
• Metal Slug Anthology
  
• Trauma Center: Second Opinion
  
• Elebits
  
• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
  
• Blitz: The League
  
• Rayman Raving Rabbids
  
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
  
• Disney/Pixar's Cars

Since most of these games were playable at E3, it's not too much of a stretch to think that they'd fall within the system's launch. However, this could be another case of that mysterious launch window marketing nonsense messing with our calendars and drawing a distinction between games that launch on day one and games that release shortly afterwards. Atlus told us specifically that Trauma Center: Second Opinion was a "launch window" game and if Activision is serious about Tony Hawk, Downhill Jam will be one too (because people, that game still needs a lot of work).

Gamefront.de is reporting that Nintendo's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Elaborate Pie Charts, George Harrison, has stated (via an upcoming issue of Game Informer) that the Revolution will launch later this year with 20 games, a third of which will be Nintendo first-party titles. While that doesn't seem like an unlikely number, there are several reasons to be cautious about this somewhat vacuous information.

Nintendo, much like Microsoft, has made a distinction in the past between launch day and launch window, a sneaky marketing move which often renders gamers unsure as to whether or not a game will be available on the day of the console launch or within the first few weeks of the new machine hitting stores. The difference between getting 20 games on launch day and getting 20 within the launch window (however long that is) is a fairly large one.

The other point of interest revolves around the Virtual Console. If one considers a selection of Nintendo classics to be launch games (and why shouldn't you when the Xbox 360 launched with a bunch of current-gen ports?), surely the launch tally would be much, much higher than 20. A likely explanation is that Harrison was only referring to brand new Revolution titles (excluding Twilight Princess, of course), in which case 20 is more than enough to make us forget the Gamecube's meager launch selection.

And no, Luigi's Mansion 2: Even More Sucking has not been confirmed as a Revolution launch title.

[Via GamersReports]