Wii Warm Up: Mii Audition
Not long ago, we posted about Nintendo's newest trademarks (in Japan), and today, we'd like to focus on one: Mii Audition. What could it be? We have a few (off-the-wall) ideas, and we'd like to hear yours as well. The first is an idea we've been kicking around for a while: the idea of a dedicated karaoke channel featuring performing Miis and downloadable songs. We just can't help but think this would be a blast, though the Wii's small hard drive may be a detriment. On the one hand, that could be a way to get people not interested in the Virtual Console to get into downloadable content. On the other hand, it could be a really good argument in favor of a hard drive, and with the increasing popularity of flash drives (we're even required to have them for college classes these days), the idea of an external hard drive may not be as complicated as some people make it out to be. But 512 mb isn't an unreasonable size for downloading enough songs for a decent karaoke mix; after all, the first iPod Shuffle was that size in the low end model, and it held over one hundred songs. So, say, twenty-five or so, priced at maybe two bucks per song? Seems reasonable. And the content available could be region-specific.
We'd love to see something like this. We're not the first people to line up to buy karaoke games, usually due to the selection of songs. But if we were allowed to choose songs that appealed to us? That's a whole new ballgame, and one that would really make us want to whip the Wii out to tempt even the most staunchly opposed nongamers.
But that's just us dreaming. Our second notion is probably much more likely: perhaps this could be an expanded form of Stage Debut, the application that was demoed every now and then, but never came to light. Stage Debut incorporated the GBA camera for face-mapping your likeness onto a character you could then personalize through a quiz. Replace the GBA camera and face-mapping portion of Stage Debut with your own Miis, but keep the other elements, which feature your character doing a bunch of random things. This has the benefit of being already designed and would need only to be adapted, and could even link in with the Check Mii Out/Mii Contest Channel.
Enough about our ideas -- what do you see coming with this intriguing trademark?
