Nintendo Wii Fanboy

We know that Wii owners are social animals, busting out the Wii Sports, Mario and Sonic, Raving Rabbids, and other favorites during parties and gatherings. The Wii has helped us all party harder (using our working definition of "partying hard," anyway) but it also has the capability to help us party smarter.

Are you using any of the Wii's extended functionality to improve your party experience? The Fletcher home is going to be the venue for a New Year's Eve gathering, and I'm planning to stream some music to the Wii to provide a soundtrack. It's a good way to get some music coming into the living room, and, uh, researching it is a good way to stop myself from worrying about the apartment and stuff.

How does your Wii enhance your atmosphere?

Radio Allergy, Milestone's "Wii Compatible" shooter for the Gamecube, has finally been canned by publisher O3 Interactive after months of delays. We like cel-shading, and we like shooters, so we're a little sad. In a statement to Cubed3, O3 said that there was a hope of putting Radio Allergy on the Wii. No plan, but a hope.

Aeropause then speculated that this hypothetical Wii release would be bundled with Karous, the current "last Dreamcast game ever" from Milestone, or-- even better, both Karous and Chaos Field, Milestone's first "last Dreamcast game ever." We do like the idea of more games, but we don't have any evidence of that right now. All we know is that we aren't getting Radio Allergy any time soon. At least we can all download the papercraft patterns from the Japanese website! Video game papercraft beats actual video games every time.

So we're pretty happy with the Wii browser, and apparently you guys are too. Still, it's not a PC, and there are sites out there with whom our Opera browser doesn't play happily. It only features Flash 7.0, after all, and Java is a no-go. Still, can it handle some of the most popular sites out there? Games Digest takes the Wii browser on a spin through fifteen of the most popular sites in today's intertubes, and compares its performance with the PS3's built-in browser. We won't spoil the outcome.

We're actually quite surprised at the Wii's performance at Last.fm, essentially radio over the internet. If you've got a killer sound system hooked up to your TV, you can set the jams on high and rock out. Just like we do. Check out which sites are Wii-friendly, and which not! You might be surprised.

Bad news for both of the people that preordered this one. O3 have delayed the US release of Milestone's shmup Radio Allergy until March 30th. The game, known as Radilgy in Japan, was released on the Gamecube in May of last year. We understand the delay-- shooting games have so much text to translate. Or maybe they didn't want to bring the game out in the midst of a busy Gamecube release season.

Also (and this is what makes this news item explicitly appropriate for Wii Fanboy) O3 have deployed the "Rhythm Tengoku trick" in marketing their game-- there's a little "Wii Compatible" icon on the box. They might as well use every tactic they can think of; we get the feeling that selling a shmup for the Gamecube in 2007 is harder than, well, a certain kind of frantic videogame that is notorious for difficulty.

We'd actually like to see the "Wii Compatible" tactic used by other developers to sell localized versions of obscure titles from the Gamecube back catalog at budget prices, but we think it would take a more popular game to start a trend. What do you think?

The defining use for the Wii Opera browser, is, of course, watching all the insanity of YouTube on your fancy-big TV. The site, however, is not quite conducive to the low-resolution viewing conditions found on the Wii, and is thus rather inconvenient to browse effectively.

Enter: SofaTube. A website dedicated to the perusing of not only YouTube but also the Revver library of videos, using a convenient drag-and-drop interface and large text for easy reading. So sit back, relax, and enjoy that Opie and Anthony video one more time ... it's that easy.

(That link involves some NSFW and rather gross comedy, though we can't seem to take our eyes off it. Click at your own risk.)

[via Joystiq]

Canadian internet radio station Radio-Talbot recently spoke with Nintendo of Canada's Director of Marketing Pierre-Paul Trepanier in an interview centered around the Revolution. Two major points, force feedback and how the system will be able to measure the movement of the remote, were discussed.

In response to the query of force feedback being a possibility with the remote, Pierre said "Yes there's feedback in it even though it is wireless, we will show more at E3. Before in our wireless controllers, we didn't put feedback because of battery life problems but now we have found a way to do it without lowering the battery life of the remote."

[Via Go Nintendo]