Nintendo Wii Fanboy

In its first year, the Wii has changed the video game landscape. It's brought people in who never thought they would care about video games. New methods of interacting with onscreen events have been invented. The image of the video game has started swinging away from the nerd-basement stereotype and toward a more family-friendly, even trendy experience.

But the Wii is still a game console, and it can't be completely different from every other console. It's a universal rule that all video game systems must be populated by a bunch of really terrible games, and the Wii has certainly done an admirable job of attracting cheaply-made, ill-conceived, untested, embarrassing garbage. It's really a mark of a system's popularity that so many publishers have come running with their shovels. It's a mark of the Wii's strength as a platform, as well, that it has managed to survive despite the existence of some of these games.

We decided to celebrate this aspect of the Wii by highlighting the five lowest-scoring games on Metacritic's list of reviewed Wii games. The bottom five epitomizes pretty much everything that is terrible about games: hastily thrown-together licensed games, cash-in ports, and games whose ambition far outweighs their budgets. And Chicken Shoot. The worst part? In ten years, every single one of these games will be an extremely rare collectors' item, drawing several times its retail price on eBay, or whatever the future space version of eBay is. And you will want to buy them.

Reviews for Tamagotchi: Party On! haven't been favorable, but if you've ever wanted to compete against your friends in an election for the Sparkling President of Tamagotchi planet, have we got a deal for you! Amazon is selling Namco Bandai's minigame collection at a bargain price of $17.99, shipping them out for free with orders totaling over $25, as usual. The deal ends today, and we don't expect the game to stay in stock for long, so snatch up a copy now, while you can!

[Via CAG]

Can you believe it? This week, we have a list of Wii releases -- an actual list, which means more than one title. Brilliant! At least, it seems that way until we head out to the shops and peer into our wallets, which immediately shrivel in the face of the epic list of games we want to buy. But we're greedy like that.

So what's it for you this week? Will you bear the brunt of multiple game purchases? Are you going to wait awhile before making any decisions?

• Mario Party 8
• Mortal Kombat: Armageddon
• Surf's Up
• Tamagotchi: Party On!

We've had both screens and video to look at for Namco Bandai's upcoming Tamagotchi Party On! and it's likely many of you have made up your minds about whether this is a game for you or not. Regardless, we receive word today that the company's first title for the Wii has gone gold and will be making its expected release to retail late in May. The game will have a suggested MSRP of $39.99.

Tamagotchi Party On! is a 3D party game that features multiplayer with up to four different players. The game has players competing in a campaign race to become the president of Tamagotchi Planet. In competing through a series of minigames, players will earn Pupularity Points and Gotchi, the official currency of Tamagotchi Planet.

[Via press release]

If any Wii games have been lacking in vibrant color, it's because Tamagotchi: Party On! took all the color from a year's worth of games. Seriously, this game more than cancels out Sadness in mood and, especially, in color saturation. In these screens, we can see what looks like a game board-- we would guess it connects the minigames, in the style of another well-known minigame collection.

This is, at least in terms of visuals, the most charming minigame collection we've seen since Incredible Crisis. Will it be as much fun? At least minigames have the potential to be more interesting with unique control schemes like the Wiimote provides. Check out some screens after the break!

Why didn't anyone tell us that Tamagotchi: Party On! was so adorable? We could have been staring dreamily at it since the Japanese Wii launch. What a missed opportunity.

Party On! is a minigame collection about trying to become the president of Tamagotchi Planet, and is full of edgy political satire cute competitive games that involve shaking hands, opening kind-of-unsettling animated doors, and directing traffic, from what we see so far. We love the appearance of this game, which recalls Parappa the Rapper without actually being flat.

Speaking of Parappa, the Tamagotchi DS games were developed by Parappa creators Nana-On-Sha, but this one seems to be the work of an internal Namco Bandai team. If we ever hear confirmation that Nana-On-Sha is developing for the Wii, you will hear about it immediately. We will interrupt your regularly scheduled websites. Enjoy some videos after the break!

[Via GoNintendo]

Nintendo of Japan's website offers a list of those purported sixteen launch titles...and they're not all necessarily what you would have expected. Take a look!

• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Wii Sports (including boxing and bowling to round out tennis, golf, and baseball)
  
• WarioWare
• Wii Play
  
• Red Steel
• SD Gundam Revolution
• Tamagotchi
• Ennichi no Tastsujin (a drum game, along the lines of Taiko Drum Master)
• Trauma Center: Second Opinion
• Elebits
• Necro-nesia
• Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
• Super Swing Golf Pangya
• Wing Island (demoed at E3 2006, the "plane game")
  
• Kororinpa (a Marble Madness-type game of some sort)
• Machariku Domino (a domino game)

Interesting! It's good to see a rhythm/music game so early, and we'll post details on some of the more mysterious entries as we receive information.