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New Nintendo eShop releases: It's raining nintendogs + cats
Among all the big games Nintendo chucks at the Q4 window is the weekly eShop cluster grenade, ready to spread just about everything across your Wii U and 3DS. This week there's plenty of stuff to pick and mix, from platform-puzzler The Swapper where you can create clones of yourself and swap (ah!) between them, to the GBA Super Mario Advance remake of Super Mario Bros. 2 which also features a Mario Bros. remake. Or you could garden-gander at Shigeru Miyamoto's Pikmin Short Movies animations on 3DS and Wii U, and then try out the new Pikmin 3 demo. If you'd prefer something spikier and scarf-ier, there are Sonic Boom demos for both 3DS and Wii U ahead of next week's retail releases. Keeping the animal theme but travelling back in time, out of nowhere there are eShop versions of the three-year-old nintendogs + cats 3DS games, complete with a free theme when you buy one of them. A bit out of the blue, yes. On the other hand... d'awwww. It's one of those weeks where it might be easier to digest a full list of new releases, so it's handy you'll find one of those below the break. Bargain hunters, we refer you to Nintendo's press release for a list of this week's sales and permanent price reductions.
Disney taps Kinect 2.0 for kid-focused promotional campaign
Alongside its latest Cars spinoff, Planes: Fire & Rescue, Disney plans to unveil a promotional campaign powered by Microsoft's Kinect 3D camera peripheral. According to Dan Radford, head of digital marketing at Disney's UK office, the campaign will allow two children to control their own animated planes by extending their arms, bending their knees and leaning in various directions. That sounds simple, but similar, previous attempts using the original Kinect forced Radford to pair the peripheral with a high-definition camera capable of capturing real-time video at a quality suitable for big screens. That's no longer an issue, thanks to the high-definition camera found in the Kinect 2.0. "When you had a four-year-old kid interacting with [the Kinect] there had to be a certain distance [between the camera and the player], but it didn't always pick them up as well as we would have hoped," Radford told the BBC. "With this camera it just feels like the opportunity is there to create a more stable experience." Planes: Fire & Rescue stars the vocal talents of Dane Cook and Ed Harris, and will be released on July 18. Radford's promotional campaign kicks off "at the end of this week," though Disney has yet to reveal where this campaign will appear. [Image: Disney]
