Nintendo Wii Fanboy

For those of you that stop by our little corner of the internet every day, you know that a great deal of what's coming to the Virtual Console and WiiWare is found out via the ESRB's website. Well, it looks like things are about to change.

How? well, the ESRB are instituting a new policy for when publishers submit games for rating. These publishers will be able to designate a specific date when the title is revealed on the website, allowing both the ESRB and publishers to better keep a lid on hot titles. Like, say, Earthbound.

There's still hope for ESRB site perusers, however. If publishers leave the reveal date field blank on their submission forms, the ESRB will showcase the title on their site 30 days following the title's rating.

Following her report (which follows all of the Manhunt 2 ruckus), UK psychologist Dr. Tanya Byron sat down to discuss some things with Next-Gen. While we don't know much about her, what with us living across the pond and all, she does come off as kind of grounded and level-headed about all of this.

It seems that she's very much for adult content in games, just that the adult content in question should only be accessible by, you know, adults. "There's a huge moral debate around content in videogames," she says, "I'm very clear, that wasn't the remit of my review to pass judgment on that and I do believe that content for adults is content for adults. It should be rated that way."

She goes on further to add: "I can understand that gamers fear that there will be a 'you can't play these games anymore.' I've not said that, I'd never say that, and certainly if I heard people beginning to use my review to try and imply that I will be very quick to say that that was not and will not be a recommendation of mine."

While we're not resident of the UK, we're incredibly interested in where this is all going. Ratings improvements can be made worldwide, we're sure, and we'd like to see a world where it doesn't take an incredibly-long time to release a game because a bunch of uninformed people are too busy arguing about how it's going to train your kid to kill.

An executive with Japan's TBS station (which is Tokyo Broadcasting System, not the Turner one we have over here that shows 400 Friends reruns a day), must have been desperate for someone to receive the buck he was looking to pass.

Apparently there is somewhat of a crisis in the television industry over there right now. He blamed the decline in television viewing on other media: "There are outside factors at work. One is people watching TV on their cell phones where we can't track them, but the really big factor is the time people are spending on the Wii."

If this is true, why haven't Japanese television ratings been down for the last seven years, while the Playstation 2 has been out? After all, there are about 25 million of those over there-- surely someone in Japan thought to play theirs. And what of the 19 million Famicoms? How has television survived?

It's preposterous to think that 2 million Wiis hooked up to 2 million TVs have had a more widespread deleterious effect on TV watching than the enormous install base of the Playstation 2. This is just an example of grabbing something out of the news and blaming that for a problem. See also: Grand Theft Auto and real violence.

[Via NeoGAF; all sales estimates from VGChartz]

Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2 is now illegal to supply, according to the British Board of Film Classification due to its extreme violent content. David Cooke, the BBFC's director, said that they were unable to suggest changes that would make the game sufficient for release. "There is sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged, in the game," he said.

Paul Jackson of the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association said that this decision "demonstrates that we have a games ratings system in the UK that is effective." To editorialize a bit, we couldn't disagree more; ratings systems are designed to prevent censorship by ensuring that material goes to the proper age groups only.

Because the eight we just posted weren't good enough, we've got another ESRB confirmation ... this time for thirteen. We'll let the list do the talking for us:

NES:

• Excitebike
  
• Ice Climber
• Dr. Mario
• Mario Brothers
• Ice Hockey
• Soccer

Super Nintendo:

• Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• Kirby's Super Star
• Super Metroid
• Kirby's Dream Land 3

Nintendo 64:

• Mario Kart 64
• Starfox 64
• Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

"Mario Brothers", which is technically the name of the arcade title already coming to the VC at launch, is presumably the actual Super Mario Bros., which failed to make it across the Pacific in time for November 19th. The biggest name on this list is certainly Mario RPG, a collaborative effort between Nintendo and Squaresoft USA (now known as Square-Enix). Besides being an absolutely excellent game, it shows that Square-Enix is committed to bringing some of the very best of its SNES golden-era RPGs to the Virtual Console. We don't want to say it, we shouldn't, really ... but dammit, we need to ... Chrono Trigger?

[Thanks, Cian C.!]

[Update 1: Dammit, we can't count.]