Gadling's resident pilot explains what life in the cockpit is like
Posts with tag PilotWings

Top 5: Activities that Need Waggle


Hardcore gamers sure do hate tacked-on waggle. Indeed, no one likes to flail their arms around like they're trying to signal aircraft when a simple button press will do. And the guys on the other sides seem to be under the impression that the Wii is nothing but a PS2 that replaces thumb pressing with wrist flicking. So when a new title or an iteration of an existing franchise gets announced for the Wii, the non-believers tend to thumb their snooty noses and prattle amongst themselves with ingenious statements like "Dead Rising on the Wii? More like Waggle Rising. YEAH! HIGH FIVE, BRAH!" All right, maybe they're not quite as neanderthalic, but the sentiment remains: the use of waggle is often met with skepticism from the core.

To ignore the importance of waggle would be to forget what makes the Wii so awesome. Sure, some games have no real need for motion-based controls, but let us not forget the joy and immersion experienced by the non-gamer who first picked up a Wiimote and found themselves instantly engaged in a lively tennis match. To downplay motion controls would be to forget what made the Wii so successful in the first place. Without it, the Wii would be just a beefed-up GameCube. (THERE, I said it!) Just for a moment, let us forget about why Super Mario RPG has yet to be released on the North American Virtual Console and go back to the flood of imagination we felt when the Wiimote was first unveiled. Here are the activities we wish were made into games on the Wii.



The Top 5 is a weekly feature that provides us with a forum to share our opinions on various aspects of the video game culture, and provides you with a forum to tell us how wrong we are. To further voice your opinions, submit a vote in the Wii Fanboy Poll, and take part in the daily discussions of Wii Warm Up.

Wii Fanboy E308 Poll: What games series needs Wii MotionPlus?



You've had several years to complain about the missed potential for immersive applications with a Wii Remote supporting true 1:1 response; now that Nintendo has announced the Wii MotionPlus accessory, enabling games to track your movements faster and more accurately, we want to know which game series you feel would benefit the most from the new technology

Are you hoping for the most obvious pick -- compelling lightsaber duels in a Star Wars game? Or are you looking for Wii Sports 2 with support for more subtle movements? If you don't see your preferred series in our list of poll choices, make sure to leave a comment and let us know what game you think needs Wii MotionPlus!

What game series needs Wii MotionPlus?

Nintendo Power asks for your VC wishlists



We get to have our say about what we'd like to see on the Virtual Console every single week, and now Nintendo Power is giving its readers the chance to do the same. At first, we thought Nintendo Power just might be able to turn Nintendo's head to what the fans want (it is, after all, the official Nintendo tome for the U.S.). And then, we read the disclaimer: "This is for polling purposes only, and will in no way determine future Virtual Console releases." But we don't believe them. Actually, we kind of do believe them, but it's worth a shot, right? Right?

If you want to take part and push your game up the list, just drop a line to vcpoll@futureus.com, and the magazine will do the rest, totting up the votes and publishing the top 100 most requested not-yet-Virtual Console games in a future issue. It'd be nice if you put in a shout for some of our favorites as well. Not that we're Secret of Mana suggesting you Pilotwings 64 do anything Alf untoward like rigging the results.

Wii Warm Up: Your dream mod



This Clerks Wii case mod from serial modder Ramon Stokes came straight out of left field, and its sheer randomness delighted us, even though the Metroid Wii above (also by the same chap) remains this blogger's all-time favorite. Alas, yours truly lacks Ramon's mad skillz (Pritt Stick remains a considerable challenge), meaning I'm limited to daydreaming about how my awesome Pilotwings Wii case mod would look. Reader, in my head, it is majestic.

What about you lot, though? If you could modify your Wii's tidy, white exterior in any way you liked, regardless of cost or a lack of talent, how would you want it to look?

Nintendo serving up Pilotwings, ping pong?


Mysterious games have shown up in the far reaches of the no-man's-land known as GameStop's "Coming Soon" list. We've speculated that a Pilotwings game was on the way forever, and now it looks like ... GameStop is also speculating that a Pilotwings game is on the way. The release date is listed as March 6, 2009, but that's likely just a placeholder date, especially since the whole entry is just a placeholder anyway. Depressingly, the fake release date is five days after the listed release date for Sadness.

Another interesting new game with a less distant fake release date: a game simply called Ping Pong, published by Nintendo. Its December 31, 2008 release date is most likely also a placeholder, but the very possibility of a new, full-size ping pong game from Nintendo should be great news for fans of Wii Play, Rockstar Table Tennis and/or Balls of Fury. (Somebody's probably a fan of Balls of Fury, right?)

We don't mean to get your hopes up, since the further out into the future you go, the less accurate the GameStop "Coming Soon" list is. Thus, we are calling these rumors at best.

Number of weekly VC games to increase?



Reggie's recent address in New York failed to tell us much that we didn't already know, though it did throw up the slide you see above, indicating that Nintendo is promising us 200 Virtual Console games in the US by the end of this year. We can probably all agree that the world would be a better place if Pilotwings 64 and River City Ransom were included in that number.

But we digress. See, the folks over at Game|Life did the math, and discovered that would mean Nintendo has only eight Mondays left in 2007 to deliver 34 games. Average that out, and you get 4.25 games a week. Currently, of course, we only get three titles every Monday. So, is this a genuine miscalculation on Ninty's part, naughty marketing hyperbole, or will we really be seeing more retro goodness than normal pumped down our tubes in the coming weeks?

Either way, Nintendo, we are now absolutely holding you to this. 200 by December 31st or you're ripped from our BFF collage. And we do not make such threats lightly.

[Via The Tanooki]

New Virtual Console games on the horizon [update 1]

No more Mike.Yes, the U.S. Virtual Console launch line-up is a bit ... anemic. We know, it hurts. However, one has to consider why it doesn't really matter: 1) We'll all be too busy playing Twilight Princess to bother with the Virtual Console immediately, and 2) Nintendo has promised ten new Virtual Console releases per month. That's quite a bit, especially looking at how often Xbox Live Arcade is updated, but the question then becomes: what's on the horizon?

Well, thanks to the ESRB, we've got a clue. The ESRB requires that games be rated before release, which obviously means that companies need to send in their product quite a bit in advance. Since they publish their ratings, we've managed to score a list of eight potentials, and quite an eight they are (all rated E for Everyone):
  • Duck Hunt
  • Hogan's Alley
  • Kid Icarus
  • Kirby's Adventure
  • PilotWings
  • Pro Wrestling
  • Punch-Out
  • Wild Gunman
Kid Icarus, Duck Hunt, and Punch-Out? Holy hell. The Virtual Console is awesome.

[via Joystiq]

[Thanks, Zeke!]

[Update 1: Legal issues?]

Claim: Revolution Pilotwings developed by Hudson

In an innocent little e-mail sent to all members of the press attending E3, the expo's media relations team provide a list of some of the games that will debut at that annual nexus of flashing lights, blaring noise and ludicrously dressed women. Hudson Entertainment happens to be on the list, along with a brief description of their Revolution game, cleverly entitled "Flight Game".

"Flight Game"  - Nintendo Revolution - Take to the skies in a way never before experienced on any home console. Using the Revolution's "Gesture System" built into their innovative controller, Hudson's new "Flight Game" allows total plane        control as players pilot their planes through various acrobatic flight maneuvers ranging from sky artistry to bomb drops.

My claim? Flight Game is actually Pilotwings. The evidence? Well, it isn't difficult to make a connection between the above description, the Pilotwings rumors of the last few weeks and the recently announced relationship between Nintendo and Hudson regarding Virtual Console games. Add that to Nintendo's past habit of handing classic franchises to other Japanese developers (see: Sega and F-Zero GX), and it becomes a fairly reasonable claim to make.

EGM to confirm Pilotwings sequel for the Revolution?

Speak Dutch? If not, then the link isn't going to mean much to you aside from the sporadic words of Revolution and Pilotwings. Apparently they are saying the latest issue of EGM confirms that a sequel to the series is to appear on the Revolution, yet photographic proof of such is scarce. Now if any of our readers found some snapshots and would like to share, that would be most appreciated.

Some of the parts that create the sum of the Pilotwings experience would be an interesting fit for the Revolution control scheme as skydiving and pilotting a bi-plane through rings would be a difficult challenge to adapt to the remote. We're confident that if this rumor is true, Nintendo will not only do it, but do it so well it'll literally impress your pants right off of your body, fold them neatly, and tuck them away into a drawer.

[Via Go Nintendo]

[Update: Dutch looked very German to me, but thanks to the wonderful readers, I've been corrected.]

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