Nintendo Wii Fanboy

For our international readers, the fourth of July is nothing more than another day. But, for us in the United States, it's a fairly important holiday that demands we light fireworks and enjoy an assortment of meats prepared on the grill. More importantly, though, we get some free time.

Free time to play games.

We'll likely be spending a majority of the day plowing through Resident Evil 4. Will you be playing any games? If not, how will you be spending the holiday?

From all of Wii Fanboy, have a safe and happy holiday and, as always, thank you for reading!

Feeling that Super Mario Bros. lacked in user-generated content, the folks over at SelectButton decided to start randomly inserting text into the Mario ROM (yarrr) and see what happens. Apparently the game is stable enough to run decently with junk added to it, and the results are ... playable and strangely beautiful. Random invisible blocks, palette changes, bizarre sprites, Mario's freaking head is on upside-down, etc.

It's pretty significant that some minor shot-in-the-dark hacking can end up generating new Mario levels that instantly make a near-perfect game infinitely more fun. They should be doing this at I am 8-Bit. If only we could do this kind of user-generated level design on the Virtual Console,we'd have a compelling answer to Sony's LittleBigPlanet. Go ahead and argue with us on that point. We <3 Hacked Mario.

Wii Fanboy does not endorse the use of copyrighted ROM images. Just go gawk at the screenshots for a while; that should be enough entertainment.

... or, in the case of this blogger, lack thereof? With Nintendo boasting the intuitive, easy motion-sensing control scheme allowing all types of people to game with ease, we wondered if the control scheme was realistic enough to favor those who excel in these sports in the real world to do the same on the Wii. Sadly, we're all gamers and not a one of us can protest to be great at golf out in the real world. As such, we decided to document our trials in a couple of games to see if we could get the hang of the game, with the future goal being dominating anyone we come across.

Can we step up and own the links right away? Is the game more realistic and challenging than its presentation would have you believe? Read on and find out!

Well, it had to happen eventually. Like having a prized rattle torn away from the hands of a baby, we had to let go of "Revolution", Nintendo's codename for their next-generation console. As you might expect, there was plenty of kicking and screaming involved, but in the end, we all have to grow out of our comforts.

We were happy with our joint E3 coverage with Joystiq and we hope to continue and improve upon our Wii content in the future (terrible Wii puns excluded). Watch out for some notable changes in the future, especially once the system launches and the news floodgates open. In the meantime, please continue to share with us your comments, rants and diabolical schemes.

Thanks for reading Revo Wii Fanboy.