Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Some of you may not be fond of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World's fighting-with-monsters scheme, but we think it looks pretty neat. Spencer Yip from Siliconera gives us an even more in-depth look into the system than before, reporting that you can ditch your entire party (with the exception of the main character Emil, of course), for a party full of monsters, like in the screen shown above.

After you battle monsters, you'll often have a chance to negotiate with them and have them fight for you. It's not as simple as "catching" them all, though, since some monsters will refuse to join your party if they have a grudge against one of your other allied creatures. Since the game provides 200 different species of monster that you can fight with, which we think this can add a lot of depth to this Tales rendition. As long as you don't become obsessed with collecting them, that is, because then you might as well be playing something else.

Drawing more similarities from Pokemon, these monsters also evolve. However, you can cause their evolutions by serving them certain foods, so the cooking system in the game should be pretty interesting. We're not sure yet, though, whether these are true, outward-and-inward evolutions, or just stat alterations (as we reported before).

Those of you who are looking forward to this title still have a long wait ahead of you. The RPG is set to hit North America in Q4 of this year.

There aren't many details about Daikaiju Battle Ultra Coliseum, but Namco Bandai is bringing the game to Japan this summer. All we know is that it's a fighting game, involving giant monsters. While that's not much to go on, it sounds pretty fun to us -- taking a giant robot (like the weird guy pictured to the right) and beating up on a Godzilla-like character or other monster would be too cool.

Hopefully we'll see some trailer footage soon. Thanks to the freeloader and the nature of fighting games, if this one incorporates just the right amount of cheesiness, it might be worth the import.

[Via Siliconera]

Backbone Entertainment, the developers of the Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Super Street Fighter II remakes, as well as the DS Death Jr. game and various other projects, have announced a new original Wii game to be published by Eidos. Monster Lab takes place in the hilariously-named Uncanny Valley, in which the player, as a mad scientist's apprentice, mixes and matches monster parts to create original creations. The gameplay involves finding parts out in the wild, then taking them back to the lab and performing alchemical, mechanical, and biological experiments on them to augment them.

Once you've built a monster, you then take it out into the world and control it in battles! Monster Lab even features online battling and trading. With millions of possible combinations, this game could have some serious long-term replayability. Or you could just make monsters over and over.


[Via press release]

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, speaking to Spiegel magazine, candidly (yet indirectly) revealed that he believed that some of his company's Wii releases were less than perfect. No, not Red Steel. Guillemot was referring to the spate of ports that Ubisoft released to fill out their lineup.

Regarding the hasty ports (games such as Prince of Persia: Rival Swords, Far Cry: Vengeance, and Monster 4x4 World Circuit), Guillemot said that "We made mistakes." Ubisoft admitting to overporting? Between this and weird releases like My Word Coach, Ubi seems like a whole new company!

We had heard about Monster Cable's plans to sell Wii component cables several weeks ago, but we held off on announcing the product until its inevitable boutique pricing was revealed. Amazon now has the item available for sale, listing the 10' cables at $59.99. That's double what Nintendo charges for its official component cable and six times the cost of other third-party solutions.

Now that component cables for the Wii are in good supply, are prices like that justifiable? We understand that Monster is aiming for the high-end market, but how different can its product be from what others are selling for much cheaper? Does the quality actually match the pricing?

We hear a lot about mainstream coverage of the Wii, but what about non-mainstream coverage? The Mii Channel is so much fun that even indie cartoonist James Kochalka wants in on the "HEY LOOK AT MY MIIS" fun, posting a series of Mii creations to his diary comic American Elf .

His Mii creations veer toward the monsterish, which we enjoy. So many people limit their Mii designs to themselves, their grandparents, and celebrities. Unless these Miis are meant to represent Kochalka's family, in which case we're very, very sorry.

We also love how the Mii Channel has resurrected the practice of sharing photographs of TV screens. It makes us nostalgic for magazine high-score columns.

There have been a lot of sales to report lately! If you picked up a Wii at Toys R Us yesterday, you now have an opportunity to get some relatively good games for a decent price, from now until the 10th.

Toys R Us is offering three Ubisoft-published Wii games for the price of two. Your choices are GT Pro Series, Open Season, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, Red Steel, and Monster 4x4: World Circuit. This offer is valid online, but we aren't sure about its status in TRU stores. If there are three games in that list you're interested in, or two games you're interested in and one you think you could get a decent price for on eBay, then you are in luck!

[Via QJ.net]