Nintendo Wii Fanboy

We were tunneling out of our pile of press releases, and found something interesting: a game called Crow from O3 Entertainment with a release date of TBA. O3 Entertainment was the publisher of Chaos Field and the cancelled Radio Allergy, both of which are Milestone shooters. Milestone's followup, Karasu (often transliterated as Karous) has a title that means "Crow." Karasu was announced for the Wii in Japan.

Putting it together, we can only arrive at one conclusion: REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN. Wait, hold on. Stupid Magic 8-Ball. Oh, right-- O3 is localizing Karous for US release. That's better.

Radio Allergy, Milestone's "Wii Compatible" shooter for the Gamecube, has finally been canned by publisher O3 Interactive after months of delays. We like cel-shading, and we like shooters, so we're a little sad. In a statement to Cubed3, O3 said that there was a hope of putting Radio Allergy on the Wii. No plan, but a hope.

Aeropause then speculated that this hypothetical Wii release would be bundled with Karous, the current "last Dreamcast game ever" from Milestone, or-- even better, both Karous and Chaos Field, Milestone's first "last Dreamcast game ever." We do like the idea of more games, but we don't have any evidence of that right now. All we know is that we aren't getting Radio Allergy any time soon. At least we can all download the papercraft patterns from the Japanese website! Video game papercraft beats actual video games every time.

Bad news for both of the people that preordered this one. O3 have delayed the US release of Milestone's shmup Radio Allergy until March 30th. The game, known as Radilgy in Japan, was released on the Gamecube in May of last year. We understand the delay-- shooting games have so much text to translate. Or maybe they didn't want to bring the game out in the midst of a busy Gamecube release season.

Also (and this is what makes this news item explicitly appropriate for Wii Fanboy) O3 have deployed the "Rhythm Tengoku trick" in marketing their game-- there's a little "Wii Compatible" icon on the box. They might as well use every tactic they can think of; we get the feeling that selling a shmup for the Gamecube in 2007 is harder than, well, a certain kind of frantic videogame that is notorious for difficulty.

We'd actually like to see the "Wii Compatible" tactic used by other developers to sell localized versions of obscure titles from the Gamecube back catalog at budget prices, but we think it would take a more popular game to start a trend. What do you think?