Nintendo Wii Fanboy

The Conduit, The Conduit, The Conduit -- that's all we media types bang on about when it comes to High Voltage. But the Illinois-based studio also has a WiiWare game in the pipeline: the scarcely covered Animales de la Muerte, a bloodthirsty shooter set in a Mexican zoo that has been overrun by zombie animals. Let's say that again, shall we: a Mexican zoo that has been overrun by zombie animals. It looks a bit like Samba de Amigo crossed with the gore of MadWorld, and if that's not potential GOTY material, we have no idea what is.

And it gets better. High Voltage's Micah Skaritka just confirmed to WiiWare World that Animales would feature Classic Controller support, allowing players to move with the left analog stick and fire with the right, a configuration that Skaritka compares to Smash TV (but which also reminded us of Geometry Wars or Robotron: 2084). Meanwhile, actions that would usually require a shake of the Wiimote (Whip, Throw, Rescue, and Activate) have been mapped to buttons. A welcome addition!


[Via Go Nintendo]

It generally doesn't take much more than a "zombie" descriptor to pique our interest in a game, but High Voltage Software (the folks behind The Conduit) went even further than that for Animales de la Muerte. Not only are they making a WiiWare game about the undead, which they aim to release in September, but even better (or at least, different) -- it's about zombie animals in a Mexican zoo.

High Voltage summed up the premise of this cartoonishly zany game more cleverly than we could by saying, "Now, wandering freely through the zoo, the rotting beasts are no longer content with eating visitor scraps they get tossed into their cages -- instead they prefer to eat the whole visitor."

Not only do you have to kill the zombified animals, but you also have to save the poor creatures that have not yet succumbed to the outbreak. Funnily enough, the undead animals drop pesos when you kill them, which can be used to upgrade your weapons. As for the controls, the game is essentially a point-and-shoot action title, putting the Wiimote to good use. There's also a co-op mode where you can play with up to four people, if you're not shut-ins like us.

We posted some goodies after the break, including a hilarious trailer, so make sure to take a look.

Amazing Animals may sound like another slice of god-awful Wii shovelware, but the first screens hint at something more promising. Based on a Japanese TV show about animal tricks, Amazing Animals (or Doubutsu Kisou Tengai as it's known in its homeland) sees players don their best khaki and take to the plains of a freshly discovered, totally uncharted island near to Japan, accompanied by a robot as a guide (visible in the screens after the break).

Things become a bit murky from this point onwards, though Siliconera recently speculated that photography could be involved, or that players become the animals in a series of minigames. That last one sounds a little too close to Wild Earth: African Safari for our liking, and there's only room for one totally ludicrous animal-themed minigame series in our collection! Follow the post-break trail for more shots.