Nintendo Wii Fanboy

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!

Fuji TV's Game Center CX has everything: exclusive developer interviews, looks at early versions of some of our favorite games, and, every episode, one man giving his very best to play a classic game to completion.

The first season of the show focused more on the interviews and features; from season 2 on, the focus of the show became the gaming-- suffering along with host Shinya Arino as he tries to play old games from start to finish. The games range from the classic (Metroid, Prince of Persia, Actraiser) to the classic-to-us (Kato-chan & Ken-chan) to the painful (Takeshi no Chousenjou, which seems to have been designed as a cynical joke against gamers). Of course, the show is edited to fit into its format, so you aren't stuck watching all twelve hours or however long it takes.

Crunk Games's Ray Barnholt is our hero for compiling this exhaustive episode guide. He has profiled the personalities and written detailed descriptions of each episode, including who is interviewed, what is discussed, and, most importantly, a play-by-play of the game sessions. Reading his descriptions is almost as good as watching the actual show. Speaking of the actual show, he's provided links to Japanese fanpages, at least one of which has Youtube links.

We're generally glad that the Virtual Console is raising awareness of old games in general. Now we're glad that the VC enables whole new generations to do what Arino is doing, and experience game history first hand, one complete game at a time.

Would you watch this kind of thing if it were on American TV? How about a similar show in English on the web? We wouldn't mind some personal narrative or gameplay videos on the Wii, to add value to the VC experience.

If you're one who hates to see spoilers, then this post isn't for you as the embedded video, which is available past the post break, takes us through the entire first level in the upcoming Prince of Persia: Rival Swords. A tutorial level, throughout you'll be introduced on how speed-killing works (you've already seen that though) and also shows us how to work the camera when jumping about the environment. Personally, this trailer has us pumped for the game.

At the end of the Montreal Internation Game Summit, Joystiq checked out the offices of many Montreal gaming studios. While checking out Ubisoft Montreal, Joystiq spoke with CEO Yannis Mallat about the upcoming Wii installment in the Prince of Persia franchise.

Turns out, the Wiimote will be used to handle jumping and other duties, while the nunchuk was used to toss the Prince's chain around. The game is still in the earlier stages of development, so one should assume that both the controls could change and a CEO of the company in charge of the game is hardly the objective source one should fully trust.

It wasn't long ago that Ubisoft announced what franchises they'd be bringing to the Wii, however one of their strongest franchises in Prince of Persia was strangely absent from that list. While we initially chalked it up to the trilogy of the environmental puzzle-solving Prince being complete, we're now happy to report that the Prince of Persia will in fact be hitting the Wii. While the spokesperson from Ubisoft relaying this information to IGN is nameless, we're going to take this one as truth at the moment.

So are we to assume that the console will be getting some sort of compilation title or perhaps an updated version of one of the trilogy's installments, much like Prince of Persia: Revelations was on the PSP? Personally, we'd like to see Prince of Persia: Sands of Time touched up with new content and controls. Actually, that's not so bad of an idea!

If you'll excuse us, we have some daydreaming to do, mostly involving deadly environmental traps and how we are going to cleverly avoid them.

[Via Joystiq]

According Cubed3, Ubisoft recently sent out a list containing 5 titles that would be released for the Wii within its launch window. The two biggest titles of note are Prince of Persia and Far Cry. Which version of each of these respected titles that would be represented on Nintendo's console was not stated, however. Also, a look over at Ubi's official web site does not show any press release to back up these claims, so take this all with a reasonably sized grain of salt.

[Thanks Exo!]