Nintendo Wii Fanboy

There are further rumors about Nintendo Power, Nintendo's official gaming magazine, but the rumblings have changed slightly. The latest word is that the publication will continue, just with a new publisher working things behind the scenes, which is how the European Nintendo magazine is handled.

It's a good time to to relive some nostalgic moments with the magazine, and Infendo recently clued us in on a shiny new set of covers courtesy of Flickr user kocojim. Go forth and bask, and let's hope this version of the rumor is true.

Back in the day, so to speak, we brought you news of a homebrew project using the Wiimote called "WiiJ"ing, in which one (or two) Wiimotes were used to control various functions of popular mixing software (Traktor). We're convinced the technology is indeed real at this point, but according to the WiiJ creator and head-honcho, Nintendo has come forward and straight-up purchased the website and concept from him for release in a future game.

Sounds cool, and certainly in line with Nintendo's strategy, but color us a bit skeptical. A quick WHOIS shows domain registration as unchanged in the site's history, and in addition, the front page news post regarding the deal has a bazillion-word long actual game description. It's unlikely that Nintendo would simply allow the creator of WiiJing to simply dictate the full design of a videogame, and at this point, certainly, little to no actual development has been completed.

What say you? Even if it isn't real, would you enjoy or look forward to an application like this?

[Thanks, Jason!]

Supposedly, ONM (Official Nintendo Magazine UK) was holding out on a pretty big exclusive set to grace the cover of their next issue, set to release in September. They hyped up that this was something we'd yet to see, so the fact that it turned out their "secret exclusive" was none other than Battalion Wars 2, a game revealed at Leipzig, is equal parts laughable and pathetic.

We haven't been following the coverage of this rumor as it snowballed on various message boards and blogs because it isn't in our nature to be a gossip rag. We respect our readers and even though ONM hyped this "secret exclusive" up for some time, we felt it did not need to be commented on. We'd let the guys at ONM handle their business. And handle it, they have.

Go Nintendo has an interesting snippet taken from issue #6 of the UK Official Nintendo Magazine where Sonic Wildfire is discussed. Apparently in development for two years, the game is based off of Arabian Nights and will follow Sonic as he adventures through a book and looks to go back to the roots of the title by instilling that sense of speed once again. The game also will see the return of Dr. Robotnik Eggman and is to feature even more ways to use the Wiimote than were presented in the E3 demo.

Yojiro Ogawa also expressed some interest in bringing another franchise to the Wii in the article. Thinking that it is "fantastic hardware," he would like to bring a new franchise, completely unrelated to Sonic, to the console, utilizing the entire spectrum of capabilities the Wiimote offers.

The Nintendo-specific Sonic the Hedgehog game has been rumored for awhile, picking up a bit more steam thanks to the union of the two companies to offer games through the Revolution's Virtual Console service. According to gex's nintendo news, an upcoming issue of the Official Nintendo Magazine will divulge some info on Sega's upcoming Revolution games. The article also promises a look at Activision's hushed-about project and Ubisoft's groundbreaking Revolution title. Another page seems to hint at a finalized date for the release of the Revolution of around the 27th of October. This would fall in line with Iwata's comments about launching before Thanksgiving.