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Let's Tap along to a new trailer
We're quite excited that Let's Tap, Prope's "future tapping game," is in our immediate future (the next couple of months). Sega released a new trailer for the box-bopping game that presents Let's Tap as a family party game, much like a previous Japanese trailer did. This one adds visual "tap" effects that we wish could be real!Let's Tap is a natural for "casual" players, since you don't even have to convince them to touch a controller. But its forward-thinking design and outstanding, unique aesthetic (not to mention the music) make it a lot more interesting to people like us than the average waggle minigame-fest. We approve, Sega, of marketing Let's Tap to the general audience. We also approve of the music in this trailer, even if it isn't the familiar theme.%Gallery-33707%
See what you can do in Made in Ore
Nintendo of Japan just opened up a site for Made in Ore, featuring new screenshots and even video of the DIY minigame creator, including shots of the process of creation. Many of the 90 (!) included samples look just like real WarioWare minigames, which speaks highly of either the creation tools or the staff at Intelligent Systems. In fact, it's basically as if there were a full WarioWare game included in the package. The sample minigames, like those in other Wares, are divided into groups based on which WarioWare employee "created" them. Mona's games are "Strange," like in the original GBA game. Jimmy T's theme is "Sports," Ashley's is "Food," Orbulon's games are "IQ" themed, and 9-Volt is "Nintendo."Not only can you play these sample minigames, you can open them up and mess with them! You can alter the art and music (and look at, but not alter the base gameplay) in the samples, as well as games that you get from your friends.
Iwata: Wii Sports Resort out in Japan this June, overseas in July
Satoru Iwata has announced both Japanese and Western release windows for Wii Sports Resort, and thus we can assume for the required MotionPlus peripheral as well. The sequel to the Wii launch title will be out in Japan this June, with an "overseas" release the following month, according to Reuters' account of statements made at a lunch meeting. No pricing was announced. The July release is completely in line with the rumored European date called "rumor and speculation" by NoE.The Nintendo president named Wii Sports Resort as a measure to combat the Japanese Wii market's current slowdown (a situation he described as "the most unhealthy situation since its launch in Japan.") He denied that Nintendo would cut Wii prices in order to increase sales, saying, "If our products are not much different from competitors', price cuts would generate significant fresh demand. But video games are just not that kind of product."%Gallery-27741%
A few details on Made in Ore, the DIY WarioWare
We've heard very little about one of Nintendo's most promising DS titles for this year, Made in Ore, which is essentially a toolkit for making your own WarioWare minigames. The April 23 Japanese release is totally sneaking up on us! As the unexpectedly close release approaches, a bit more info has started coming out about the game.According to 1up, Made in Ore is divided into three sections: "My House," the portion of the game in which you make minigames, "WarioWare," presumably Wario's game company, which contains tutorials, and "My Shop," in which you line up your microgames into a game. There are also utilities to create music and four-panel ("yon-koma") comics -- and all of this can be uploaded to Nintendo "for contest purposes." The Asobu Made in Ore WiiWare player is still on the way, as well!%Gallery-33443%
Balance Board Bobsledding with Mario & Sonic
Eurogamer recently got a hands-on session with both the Wii and DS Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games, at an event in Vancouver during which Sega tried to soften up the journalists with free curling. The absolute best news gleaned from the session? Every game will have multiplayer unlocked from the start. Locking multiplayer is the worst possible design decision for a party game, and it's good to see that Sega picked up on that extremely obvious fact.Also potentially fun: the new game supports the Balance Board for events like skiing and bobsledding. We haven't had a reason to sit down on the Balance Board since Raving Rabbids TV Party! Well, a reason other than exhaustion.[Screenshot via ONM]
Drill Sergeant Mindstrong brings all the fun of math to boot camp
Confirmed: XSEED's Drill Sergeant Mindstrong is not Marvelous's Discipline. It lacks the subtly beautiful illustration, prison-escape plot, and freaky alien Wiimote analogue. Mindstrong substitutes an ugly cartoon drill sergeant and ape-armed avatars for all of those things.Drill Sergeant Mindstrong puts players into a brain-training boot camp, divided into "Focus Training" and "Basic Training" modes. In either mode, performing well increases a player's rank, and performing poorly increases the drill sergeant's anger level. When he can't stand your failures anymore, he will "embarrass players by making them do punishments right there on the spot." Maybe it automatically notifies friends that you're playing Drill Sergeant Mindstrong.The game is scheduled to come out on WiiWare next month.%Gallery-48851%
XSEED unleashing Drill Sergeant MindStrong on WiiWare
The ESRB ratings database has revealed the first WiiWare game from publisher XSEED: Drill Sergeant Mindstrong, which is, uh, a brain-training minigame collection. A weird one.The description of the game mentions minigames "in which players train and compete in math, rhythm, and reflex/timing drills guided by a trainer named Sergeant Mindstrong." The whole thing has a military theme, including a saluting minigame and one about marching in time. All the minigames will have "Hell" at the beginning of the title, like "Hell Roll Call." Siliconera speculates, because of the XSEED/Marvelous connection, that this is Discipline, the WiiWare game announced last year. The title fits, as well. However, Discipline is a sort of adventure about escaping from prison, and this is military brain training.
Cooking Mama developer trademarks 'Crafting Mama'
The surprisingly popular Cooking Mama series branches out this month with Gardening Mama, and it seems developer Cooking Mama Ltd. has more planned. The company just trademarked Crafting Mama for use with almost anything game-related.This trademark doesn't guarantee a new game, but certainly suggests that one is in the works. Cooking Mama Ltd. will seemingly not be satisfied until every domestic activity is playable as a stylus (or remote, or finger) controlled minigame under the watchful eye of a friendly virtual Japanese lady. We're on board -- right up until Giving the Cat a Bath Mama.[Via Kotaku]
Come look at Go Play City Sports
These screens of Majesco's Go Play City Sports, part of the series that also includes Go Play Lumberjacks, provide an unintentionally hilarious counterpoint to all the news related to the "Change4Life" ad campaign. That print ad decries gaming as a harmfully sedentary activity; this game simulates going outside and playing.Of course, Go Play City Sports isn't just a "sit on the couch" experience: the collection, which includes stickball, kickball, handball, jump rope, shootout soccer, and rooftop hockey, supports the Balance Board, in addition to the usual frantic hand-waving. Four players will be able to pretend to go out into the street this fall.%Gallery-47304%
North Americans will drum along to original Let's Tap soundtrack
While the concept was intriguing, what really drew our continued attention to Prope's Let's Tap was the promise of a free cardboard box the music. The super-bouncy, catchy soundtrack, most notably the theme song, makes us extremely happy that Prope decided to include a Taiko no Tatsujin-like music game among the lineup of minigames. When Sega announced a North American release, we feared that it would record new music or license popular tunes for the Rhythm Tap mode -- even if we didn't think Sega would drop that kind of money, we maintained a low-level dread regarding the possibility. Luckily, Sega confirmed via its blog that Let's Tap will stay "true to the Japanese feel of the game" and include all of the Japanese tracks! That includes "Kung Fu Disco," which just happens to be embedded after the break. Good call, Sega. It's good for us, and good for your budget. %Gallery-33707%
Enjoy some sunshine with Gardening Mama
Majesco has to make sure it keeps the Cooking Mama voice actress on its payroll. She is basically magical. We love the Cooking Mama games enough to be interested in Gardening Mama anyway, but Mama's encouraging, heavily-accented narration makes us really want to do some fake gardening in the "first gardening game on DS" (which must mean that Majesco doesn't count farming as gardening)! How great would it feel to be told you're "even better than Mama" at pouring water into the ground? Pretty great. We never get such an enthusiastic "Bravo!" when we spray stuff on plants. We could use more of that kind of feedback in our lives. %Gallery-35422%
DSi launch title: Rhythm Heaven dated April 5
Nintendo has the perfect companion piece for that DSi you'll probably end up buying on April 5: Rhythm Heaven! Coincidentally, Rhythm Heaven will also be the best way to console yourself if you walk into a store and find DSi systems sold out. In either case, the rhythm microgame collection from the WarioWare team will be available in North America on April 5, exactly as "predicted" by retailers, and is compatible with all DS hardware models. Nintendo is seemingly putting a lot of confidence in a very strange game by positioning it as the DSi's "launch title." This is an especially surprising move considering that Nintendo never released the Game Boy Advance predecessor, Rhythm Tengoku, in North America, despite its hit status in Japan. %Gallery-26615%
Majesco encourages Wii owners to Go Play its new games
Majesco has announced a new branding initiative for Wii games: the "Go Play" line. Three games in the lineup of "energetic, motion based Wii games" are planned for release this year. The first, Go Play Lumberjax, is a collection of logging-based minigames (seriously!) due out in "late spring." Go Play City Sports will follow in summer, and Go Play Circus Star is planned for fall.Go Play Lumberjax allows players to use the Wii Remote to "chop, climb, saw, and logroll" in a series of competitive multiplayer events. Go Play City Sports could be retitled Go Play in the Street, with "six classic games played on street "courts" filled with manhole covers and parked cars." Go Play Circus Star features 15 different games simulating circus attractions. We're ... vaguely interested in playing a lumberjack game, for some reason.
The Daily Grind: Would you craft more if it didn't bore you?
The announcement of streamlining and clarification of crafting coming to Warhammer Online has us thinking: what do you think of crafting in MMOs? Most AAA games offer some sort of non-combat opportunities, but generally they're far less engaging than the combat component of the gameworld. There are exceptions, of course, such as the minigame offerings of Puzzle Pirates or the elaborate tiers of pre-NGE Star Wars Galaxies. EverQuest 2 has made enormous improvements on its simple design by adding vibrant rewards and unique non-combat instances into the mix.The popularity of World of Warcraft has made their simple one-click crafting schema the 'defacto' standard, and a lot of players seem to enjoy that. What about you, though? If crafting was offered in a radically different way or was a central component to an MMO, would you be more inclined to participate? If it wasn't as simple as grinding through simple point-and-click recipes, would you join the noble ranks of the crafting elite?
Nintendo hopes to redefine 'hit game' with search engine-based Kensax
Nintendo of Japan revealed a ton of new games at its fall media conference, and it's just now getting around to talking about some of them. Kensax was one of the many first-party games buried in the avalanche of news, with nothing released but three baffling, context-free screenshots and a few seconds of video.IGN has translated an article from the latest issue of Famitsu revealing the first information about Kensax, which, as it turns out, is about ... search engines? The minigames in Kensax all revolve around putting words into a search engine and using the resulting hit count as a measure of progress and as the focus of multiplayer competition.For example, "Battle! Search Panel 9" tasks up to four players with combining words from a "stock" with words from a 3x3 board to conduct search terms. The player with the highest hit count steals a panel from another player. At the end, the game tabulates the panels in each player's possession, as well as the total hit count, to assign a winner. In "Fastest! Search Shooter", players shoot moving words to create high-hit-count combinations with their stock words.Kensax includes 3,000 words and their estimated hit counts, but players can go online to bolster the game's vocabulary. Famitsu didn't offer a release date beyond "2009", and, of course, there is no word on a release outside of Japan. We hope to hear more about the other stealth Nintendo announcements soon, like Cosmic Walker. Gallery: Kensax
Atlus announces Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor and some random minigame collection
Atlus is addicted to Nintendo DS game announcements. It's basically up to one a day at this point! The latest set to be revealed by the niche publisher includes one game that we knew was coming, and 101 that completely blindsided us.Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is a strategy RPG in which players control a team of teenagers who collect and fuse demons and battle on a hexagonal grid. This was one of the game announcements revealed early via Amazon.ca. It's out June 23 for $30.101 in 1 Explosive Megamix is a minigame collection from European publisher Nordcurrent. It comprises various sports, puzzle, and action minigames, and it doesn't really look like much. It's an extremely bizarre game for Atlus to pick up. Maybe it knows something we don't, and the game is actually awesome. We'll find out when it comes out April 21, at a price of $20.%Gallery-44068%%Gallery-44067%
Sega: Let's confirm Let's Tap for Europe, North America
Let's consider, for a moment, the immense and stalwart dedication exhibited by one Jem Alexander, our man at an ongoing Sega event in a snow-encased London. Despite being in the magnificent company of games featuring a certain sword-wielding hedgehog, this blogger deliberately looked away from the screen (reminder: featuring a hedgehog wielding a sword!) to send us an important email from his iPhone. Which he briefly confused with his iPod Touch -- a notable hazard for those eccentric and loaded enough to own both. What's up with that, Jem?Anyway, he says Sega's rhythmic finger bash, Let's Tap, has been announced for European release. With the party game's undoubtedly arduous localization confirmed, it probably won't take too long for Sega of America to drum up a press release of its own. We'll point out (and at) any updates as we receive them.Update: Sega has confirmed a North American Summer release.%Gallery-33341%
Let's Tap on tap for North America this summer [update]
We don't think 61FPS's John Constantine would lie about Sega planning to release Let's Tap in North America, but, well, there hasn't been an announcement yet, so we're going to label this a rumor for now. Sega has previously shown definite interest in localizing the title, for what it's worth. According to Constantine, Sega is indeed taking the risk and localizing Prope's bizarre minigame collection, which is controlled by tapping a box onto which a Wii Remote has been placed. The North American version will contain the same four modes found in Japan: Tap Runner, a multiplayer race across an obstacle course; Bubble Voyager, an abstract sidescrolling shooter; Silent Blocks, a tap-controlled Jenga-type game; Visualizer, which displays imagery that responds to your tapping; and Rhythm Tap, a rhythm game similar to Taiko Drum Master or Donkey Konga.It may be another minigame collection on the Wii, but, well, we've been humming the theme music for months. Add the unique hands-off controls and the involvement of Yuji Naka, and we are thrilled to have a chance to play this. If this announcement is real.Update: Sega sent out a press release confirming the game for this summer!%Gallery-33341%[Via NeoGAF]
Game Center CX 2: New screens of new old games
Retro Game Challenge comes out in North America next week, but Japan is already one game ahead of us -- the sequel, Game Center CX: Arino no Chousenjou 2, comes out there on the 26th. Famitsu has screenshots of two brand-new games in the sequel, and four ... kind of new games.Guadia Quest Saga is a sequel to the original game's Dragon Quest-like RPG, released late-ish in the (fake) Famicom's lifetime, in 1991. GunDuel, the sequel to StarPrince, is a vertical shmup with much more detailed backgrounds.Four "rare" games are only available in the (in-game) game shop, presumably because your character can't afford to buy them! Cosmic Gate: MASA-X version is a port of the first game's Galaxian-like shooter, made in the style of MSX computer games. Rally King EX is a special "time trial" version of the original's racer, and StarPrince SA is a special version of StarPrince in which players have just a few minutes to accrue a high score. Perhaps weirdest of all is Karakuri Ninja Haguruman: Koume Version, which was (in the alternate universe of the game) a special release of Haguruman with the hero sprite swapped out for his sister Koume, given to members of that character's fan club!
Water saplings! Add soil! Dilute serum!: Gardening Mama dishes out the orders
Wiiz has another six screens of Gardening Mama, Majesco's game for people who, like us, think gardening is a bit rubbish and not really worth our time. Naturally, we think simulating this activity through our DSes is perfectly fine, mainly because it doesn't involve getting wet feet and cold hands. So we're massive hypocrites. Sue us.These new screenshots deal with some of the new tasks we'll face as virtual gardeners. We're told to "Add more soil!" "Water the sapling!" "Dilute the serum!" "Squash those viruses!" No matter what she or her garden is going through, Mama greets all of these challenges with the same reaction: that calm (yet determined) smile. We doubt we'll manage to be quite as composed.%Gallery-35422%
