Nintendo Wii Fanboy

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.

Development time on the Wii is already fairly quick, due to its architectural similarities to the Gamecube and general lack of difficult-to-corral horsepower hidden within magic-seal cores (you have to unlock them with the level 7 key). Takeshi Shimada, a Nintendo employee who works on toll packages for developers, spoke about some of the upcoming projects he had in mind.

In addition to updated handwriting and speech recognition software for the DS, Shimada is working on a host of tools for the Wii. First off is a Wii emulating technology for high-end PCs to mitigate the slow "loading time" of putting recent code and assets onto a Wii unit itself (if this ever gets leaked ... ). He's working on some "fur-shaders" (which might apply also to grass or carpet textures) and other graphical tools, and finally, an advanced text-to-speech system that seems to be all the rage these days.

What does this mean to you? Hopefully, prettier fur. We salute you, Shimada-san!