Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Xbox 360 Fanboy found some super secret info about Microsoft's plans for a Mii-like avatar on the site of market survey firm Intellisponse. The X3F story was posted on NeoGAF, whose members then began messing around with the Intellisponse URL. And that's when Internet Magic happened. A wealth of unannounced Microsoft, Activision, and Disney games were revealed in .swf files containing game descriptions.

Some of these are clearly just pitches -- see the five million Spidey games -- but given the evidence of Ultimate Band (which we already knew about), some of them are definitely on the way. There aren't any massive megatons like the Xbox got, but unannounced games are always news! Until they're announced! We're marking it all as rumor for now, because we don't know what's real, what's proposed, and what could be some kind of elaborate trap!

The site has since been taken down, but we've got most of the text, and you can fill in the gaps with Joystiq's posts on the subject, as well as the NeoGAF thread. Kotaku has a roundup of the Spidey-related titles.

The full list follows after the break. Highlights include a touch-sensitive Guitar Hero World Tour (referred to here as Guitar Hero IV) guitar, a Marvel Ultimate Alliance sequel, a Spidey game built around the Balance Board, and -- perhaps most exciting -- a Bill Nye the Science Guy science minigame collection. Weirdest of all, and least likely to be as exciting as it sounds, is Trioxide, some kind of system for playing Wii, PS3, and 360 games on the PC with their original controllers? Streaming video, maybe?

Fans of the latest Marvel dungeon crawler, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, know that a sequel to your beloved game is inbound, however it's going to take a bit longer than you might like. You see, the sequel to the first game isn't going to be on shelves until next year. Here, cry on our shoulder. Go ahead, let it all out!

Our cruel overlords at Joystiq seem to think that the new Spider-Man: Web of Shadows game could have something to do with the delay. As for us, well, we're not complaining if the time is put to good use. The first game was a boatload of fun, so we hope the sequel is just as good, if not better.

[Via Joystiq]

Keep in mind, this is not the Wii version
Take note, webheads: a new Spidey game is being made for the Wii (along with those other systems nobody cares about). It's called Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and will once again feature the tried-and-true sandbox mechanic of a fully-explorable New York City. Other than that, we know that the game is being worked on by Treyarch and Shaba Games and will feature some kind of system that allows for customizable superpowers. Also, players will have some control in determining whether they want to be the boyscout do-gooder or a more selfish anti-hero type.

Perhaps even cooler than the news of there being a new game is word that Activision will be holding auditions for folks to do the voiceover work in the game at their booth at the upcoming New York Comic-Con. The winner will be determined by open voting, which will go down at the game's official website here.

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

I am aware of how terrible licensed games are. This has always been true, from E.T. on. Just about every time a Spider-Man game has come out, I've been suckered into at least renting it (until around Spider-Man 3 this generation -- I'm not stupid.) I'm not like a huge Spidey fan or anything. What keeps me coming back?

In my estimation, there is only one important aspect in a Spider-Man game. It's not a variety of missions and objectives. It's not an accurately-modeled city. It's not the number of classic Spidey villains that make their appearance. And it's not the fighting mechanics. The only thing that matters at all can be summed up in this question:

Can he swing from a web?

No wonder Spider-Man 3 got such mixed reviews on the Wii version of the game -- someone forgot to finish the graphics. We can't think of any other possible explanation for something this atrocious.

What's going on here? How can this be considered acceptable ... and how can anyone bestow even a middling-good score on such a sight? We love us some Spider-Man and all, but this game would have to be the best thing ever (moreso even than sliced bread) to wrangle an 83%. Maybe we're just pickier than most, but this looks like a sign that not only is there something wrong with how some third-party Wii games are being handled, but maybe the review system isn't all it's cracked up to be, either.

[Via Digg]

With this week's releases sitting on store shelves and waiting for your eager hands to whisk them away to a land of ecstasy and wonder, we're pretty sure there's just one title beeping on your radar. That game is none other than Spider-Man 3. While we can honestly say we'll be seeing the movie before we play the game, we're fairly certain that upon leaving the theater, we'll want to swing around a virtual New York.

Will you be joining us? If not, what do you plan on playing this weekend?

Previous posts: What were you playing?

Chris Archer, producer on the upcoming game based on the film Spider-Man 3, recently conducted another interview, this time with Gamespot. This interview is in video form and was taken during an event in San Francisco where the first game footage was shown. The interview talks about how Treyarch is looking to make everything bigger this time around (bigger environments, bigger dramatic moment, bigger boss battles etc.) and the difficulties of handling an IP with such an incredible fan base.

Chris also reveals that the game will have ten different possible story lines, with one being the actual movie story line. The game is slated for a May release on all major consoles.

Treyarch's last outing with your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man provided a great fan service in digitally recreating Manhatten and letting players swing about the city to their heart's content. The other stuff ... well, nobody really cared that much. Treyarch looks to recreate the fun of swinging about the city, but also provide more value to the gamer this time around. In speaking with IGN, they talked about the game across all platforms, providing a small glimpse into how it will control on the Wii.

Executive Producer Chris Archer reveals "The Wii controller, we literally use it to swing. Both hands. You're using it to swing and do web attacks and hand-to-hand combat and things like that. It seems really cool." Wow, that actually sounds like a lot of fun, wouldn't you say? Before, in Spider-Man 2, the web-slinging felt so good, maybe it'll even be more immersive and fun this time around. What say you all?

Though the many Marvel characters duking it out in Ultimate Alliance frequently find themselves doing somersaults, hurling punches and generally super-spazzing out, it's not an accurate expectation for the players of the game to perform similar feats. Speaking at the recently concluded Comic-Con, Activision's Chris Palmisano commented that the Wii version of the game would not have major changes implemented to its control system.

"The basic game controls like the camera and the movement and stuff like that -- you can do that on the Wii with left side in most cases. Then there are standard combo moves, which you can also do with the Wii controller." After this rather vague statement (do combo moves with the controller, you say?!), Palmisano goes on to curtail the level of input you might have expected from a Wii game. "I don't know how many games you're going to see where people are jumping around -- our game is an RPG so it's really hard to require that much physical energy to play a game for 30 hours."

Though we have yet to think of any Wii game that actively requires you to jump around, we suspect the lack of physical energy required to play Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is tied into a lack of mental energy when attempting to explain why your game will have a bog-standard control scheme. This is an issue that will come up again and again: a multi-platform game that fails to take advantage of the Wii's controller risks not only being surpassed by graphically superior versions (why buy the Wii version?), but the rest of the games in the Wii lineup (why buy this game that doesn't use my system fully?). Of course, shoehorning a game into an inappropriate controller scheme is just as undesirable, as is certainly the case with an action RPG largely built upon repetition. We'd rather just press the A-button, thanks.