Nintendo Wii Fanboy

This week brings plenty of videos for you to watch on the Everyone's Nintendo Channel. From a look at how All-Play works in Tiger Woods 09, right down to another video of Alyson with Wii Fit. So, check out the list below, situated in handy bullet-point form:

• Get Wii Fit with Alyson: Balance Games
• Major League Eating info video
• MLB Power Pros 2008 info video
• Carnival Games info video (DS)
• Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility info video
• Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness info video (DS)
  
• The Sims 2 Apartment Pets info video (DS)
• Tiger Woods: PGA Tour 09 All-Play Video 2

One of the most well-known development tools in the world has been secured by 2K Games for some upoming titles. The Havok physics engine is used in squillions of high-profile games like Halo 3, Oblivion, BioShock and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Naturally, 2K wanted to acquire the license for none other than Carnival Games: Mini-Golf.

Before crying shovelware, the original Carnival Games sold over a million copies, so 2K is doing the right thing by wanting to get the best software for improving the series. A few other titles are also in line to use Havok, but no word on specific names as yet.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! You there, the big winner with the pretty lady! How about taking a shot at our fantastic Take-Em-Out game -- where everybody wins! The rules are simple -- grab your wallet, skillfully dig deep and take out $40! Hand it over to the smiling gentleman, and you have scored a great prize for your girlfriend! It's true, Take-Em-Out is the easiest way to have fun!

If there wasn't any reason to pick up Carnival Games before, is the promise of a free t-shirt going to tip the scales in Wal-Mart's favor? Well, probably - Carnival Games is one popular piece of software, free T-shirt or not. If you buy (and wear) this, hundreds of Wii owners are sure to point and nod approvingly. Best of all, there's even more opportunities on the horizon to become popular with the Carnies.

[Via GoNintendo]

Still hunting for a Wii? If so, Circuit City's online store has them in around about ... now.

Think supplies are going to last long? Hell no! Even though Circuit City is selling the things with an extra Wiimote, nunchuk and two of the titles listed below, we estimate these puppies will be gone soon. We'd usually criticize the practice of forcing customers to buy bundles, but we estimate that at least three or four of the six games being offered are must-haves:

• Super Mario Galaxy
• Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
• Wii Play
• Carnival Games
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl

You're still here!? Go! Go! Go!

[Via Go Nintendo]

Update: Well, that was fast. Sorry folks, looks like it's sold out.

Sad to say, but it's the truth. You can order a Wii right now from Circuit City, but you're going to have to bundle some stuff with the console. When looking over what you have to buy, however, it's really not that bad of a deal because you should be expecting to buy these games anyway.

So what do you need to purchase? Well, the Wii console (duh), an extra Wiimote and two or more of the following games and/or accessories:

• Wii Zapper
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Wii Play
• Carnival Games
• Mario Party 8
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Considering that you were going to pick up Super Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros. Brawl anyway (if you weren't planning on it, may we ask if you're insane?), it's not that bad of a deal. And, for those of you still desperate to get a console, this might be the best solution.

[Via Go Nintendo]

Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of Wii lovers.

While yours truly had trouble tracking down a copy of Mario Kart Wii on the high street (for our review), it appears plenty of others around Europe had no such problem.

Bar Denmark (where it has now dropped to fifth), the title sits at the top of every European chart, and we suspect it might even be influencing the sales of other games. Surely the rise of Mario Kart DS to 8th in Ireland, 8th in France, and 7th in Germany can't all be a mere coincidence? By our reckoning, Mario Kart Wii has ramped up Europe's interest in Mario Kart generally. Fortunately, Mario Kart DS is the bee's knees!

Finally, this week's overachiever award goes to Sega Superstars Tennis -- despite the Wii version's lack of online play, Sega's tennis/blue skies extravaganza climbed to fourth in the UK. Head beyond the break for more European chartage, and please accept our humble apologies for the lack of a Spanish top ten -- that should be back next week.

Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of Wii lovers.

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue dominates Europe this week, and only plucky little Sweden (where the game lies second) prevented it from being top dog in every single European chart.

In many cases, however, it's being hotly pursued by Wii software. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 is still holding its own (rising to 3rd in the UK, 4th in Ireland, and keeping fifth place in Spain), Mario & Sonic continues to grip to the higher positions like a particularly stubborn limpet, Germany is the usual Nintendo lovefest, and Sweden finally has a Wii game that isn't Guitar Hero III in its top ten. It's a good one, as well.

As far as new games go, there's just the one, with Dancing Stage Hottest Party strutting its stuff and grabbing its crotch at 7th in the Dutch charts. Finally, Game Party and Carnival: Funfair Games continue to plummet down the UK charts. Muahahaha.

Next week: some racing game.

News of GameStop's trade-in offer on Mario Kart Wii may well have had some of you sifting through your collections for those barely used copies of Cabela's Big Game Hunter and Carnival Games, but is trading in your games a regular thing for you kids? This blogger has always been something of an anti-hoarder, and consequently I've become a serial trader in the last year or two, after discovering that reasonable deals could be had on the high street, if you look in the right places.

Featuring charts from across the region, Another Week in Europe documents the buying habits and quirky tastes of a whole continent of Wii lovers.

Unlike reigning full beard freestyle world champion Elmar Weisser of Germany (who we admire fiercely), we have mixed feelings about this week's European sales charts.

For example, while we're heartened by the success of debutant Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 (5th in the UK, and the Wii edition supplemented sales of other versions across Europe -- not bad for a game that appeared on every other console last October), we're irked by the flat performance of House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return (15th in Britain, and nowhere to be seen in the charts of mainland Europe).

Europe, if you're reading, stop buying Game Party (7th in UK), Smarty Pants (10th in Spain), and Mario & bleeding Sonic (high everywhere) and let's get something half-decent up there for a change. Sega Bass Fishing should make next week's chart, so that'd be a good place to start -- let's have that top ten somewhere, please. Sigh. At least Elmar will never fail to impress us. Click on for the charts.

Ah, how we all knowingly chuckled when Sega predicted it would sell four million copies of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games across the Wii and DS. Like a drunken, rowdy friend boasting of sexual conquests that never actually occurred, Sega's strutting came across as the stuff of fantasy.

And then the news came through. They'd sold five million. D'oh!

We were reminded of our misplaced Mario & Sonic cynicism again today, after That Videogame Blog listed the third-party games that have shifted one million units on the Wii. Sure enough, the plumber and the hedgehog taunted us from the top of the pile (with 3.4 million sales), while Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (1.8 million), Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (1.6 million), Rayman Raving Rabbids, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Carnival Games (all 1.2 million), and Red Steel (1 million) sat beneath it.

Helpfully, author Ashutosh Chhibbar has also listed those titles that are nearing the magical seven-digit landmark, with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, MySims, or LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga just needing one last push.

Because Carnival Games was such a success (the title has sold over one million copies worldwide), it was only inevitable that 2K would make another game utilizing a similar formula. This newest creation is essentially a miniature golf version of its predecessor, titled Carnival Games: Mini-Golf.

We have nothing against a mini-golf game that could very possibly be fun. We are, however, very against the press release calling this title "a hole in fun." It's no secret that we've subjected our readers to some terrible punnery over the years, but there's some lines that you just don't cross.

The game supports up to four players, and will feature characters that were "made popular" from the original Carnival Games. So, if you've missed Carnival Bob so much that it hurt, you'll be able to see him again soon.

Also, if and when this game succeeds, you can bet it won't be the last Carnival output on the Wii from 2K.

GameSetWatch had an interesting discussion post up today about review scores and their utility for mainstream gamers. This especially applies to Wii games, for which the "mainstream" is significantly more mainstream, consisting of a lot of new gamers with totally different expectations for a good game.

Reviews tend to be written by jerks like me who have been playing games every day for 20+ years and expect not only innovation, but quality relative to that whole history of gaming. We may require a lot more out of our games: replayability, novelty, graphics, etc. More casual gamers, on the other hand, don't care about the same things we do. They just want a fun game, whether it's nice looking, short, or even licensed. Easily-understood controls and goals seem to be of utmost importance. Seemingly, so does a basis in real-world activities, like, for example, Carnival Games. So do our reviews, written as they are from our own perspectives, really serve the expanded Wii audience? And how do we tailor our impressions to their needs?

What is even more interesting to us than that aspect of the discussion is that even within "casual" games, what we see as a bad game often becomes very popular. The balancing act for reviewers is to make sure we judge casual games accurately as casual games, and try to realistically gauge whether the problems we have with them would be problems for, say, Grandma. Long-standing series are an interesting issue, as brought up by Simon Carless in regards to Bust-a-Move Bash! Is it a bad game because it fails to improve upon previous games? If so, that realistically would not matter to someone who just got their first game system.

The Wii was the highest-reviewed console of the year according to customer reviews aggregated by Reevoo. Compare that to every games-of-the-year list you've seen on any multiplatform site to get an idea of the disconnect between reviewer and fan opinions.

As we've seen throughout the first year of its existence, the Wii isn't exactly lacking system-selling software. There is one big-selling franchise that looks highly unlikely to appear on Nintendo's all-conquering platform, however: Take-Two and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto.

Admittedly, we always suspected a Wii version of the epic crime series was highly unlikely, but now Take-Two chief Strauss Zelnick has seen fit to bang the final nail into the coffin, and altogether rule out bringing GTA to the Wii. Speaking in a conference call earlier today, Zelnick concluded that "there are other titles better suited to the Wii than Grand Theft Auto." You know, like Carnival Games.

We're curious about Zelnick's statement, simply because we think GTA could work on the Wii. If the PlayStation 2 had the technical muscle to support numerous GTA games, then the Wii would surely cope just fine. It's not a question of audience taste, either -- let's not forget how Resident Evil 4 shifted a cool million copies earlier this year. Honestly, Strauss, if you didn't have such a rad name, we'd be pretty miffed.

Sometimes, it's interesting to compare what's popular in different regions. Of course, release dates come into play, as various parts of the world get games at different times, but there's a surprising amount of crossover when we look at what's big among Wii owners around the world.

Not everything is surprising: Guitar Hero III is shredding most of the competition in the US, Metroid Prime 3 is clinging to a top spot in the UK, and Super Mario Galaxy is muscling out other titles in Japan. But with the sales the various minigame collections are boasting, is it any wonder we've seen so many? Even the lackluster Carnival Games is raking in the money in multiple regions. Hit the jump for the top five sellers to see for yourself.