Well, time to make a megaton post about a little company called High Voltage Software. Never heard of ‘em? Yeah, I hadn’t either until the last week when IGN decided to reveal three Wii exclusive games from them. And get this… they all look good.

Anyways, enough about that, you probably want to hear about the games. Let’s start with The Conduit. It’s a futuristic FPS built from the ground up for Wii using High Voltage’s own 3D engine (which looks pretty nice). As of yet it doesn’t have a publisher, but after IGN revealed it last week they apparently got calls from ten different interested companies. Cool beans. High Voltage is taking a nod from games like Metroid Prime 3 and Medal of Honor Heroes 2 when it comes to the controls. Nice inspiration, since both of those games played like butter on a warm biscuit. I’ll throw down a couple screens, but you can check out the article at IGN for more. Yeah, they’re water-marked, but that’s okay because we’re linking to them.

Now we move onto the two WiiWare games. First up is a title called Gyrostarr. It’s a neat little shooter with some cool gameplay ideas backing it up. Fifty levels, four player competitive/co-opeartive multiplayer, nice graphics, techno beats, and it’ll only set you back $7. The gameplay itself is a little hard to explain so I’ll let the video below do the talking. Check it out when it comes for WiiWare launch on May 12th.

And finally, the last of the trifecta, another WiiWare game called Animales de la Muerte. Yes, that’s spanish, and it stands for ‘Animals of the Dead’. You’re the son of a zookeeper, and all the zoo’s animals have turned into zombies. Naturally, you jump out to rain down some gore-filled destruction. Interested? You should be! Co-operative multi-player and tons of weapons round at what looks to be another awesome title for WiiWare. It’s due out sometime this September.

object width=”425″ height=”355″>

There you go… Wii fans, praise High Voltage Software for actually going out and giving us games instead of shovelware mini-game crap. All their stuff looks great, and if you buy it, that’s a good sign for publishers scared to put out real games on our favorite console. Hopefully other third parties will follow High Voltage’s lead.

For those readers that have yet to check out the forums, I’ve started a photoshop (or MSPaint, if that’s more your style or if you don’t have photoshop) contest regarding Wii Fit. The official box art is pretty bland. Let’s make it kick-ass!

Draw, Paint, composite, or whatever, as long as there’s a postable image of your interpretation of what a really awesome Wii Fit box/case would look like. It doesn’t even need to have anything to do with Fitness or Nintendo. Just as long as it has “Wii Fit” on it, and kicks ass. You can all find the details in the thread here.

Contest closes whenever I decide, probably in two weeks or something reasonable like that. I guess it depends on the response to this. I hope you all give it a shot. You can make the excuse “Oh, I suck at photoshop” or whatever, but I don’t care. It’s the idea that counts, not the skills.

Good luck! and have a blast!

It’s that time of year. The time when Time allows us time to elect the 100 most influential people of our time (or at least the past year). In times past (I’m looking back in time at last year’s Time), Time showed nowhere near a ti(m)e as time and time again, Koreans completely decimate any online polls. Perhaps they have a lot of time on their hands, or maybe the patience to vote, time after time after time.

Alright, that’s it. I was trying to see how often I could use the word “time” in this story (if you hadn’t guessed that already) but now after writing the above paragraph, it’s too irritating. Even to me. I’ll start over.

Once again, Time magazine has opened the floodgates by allowing the Internet to vote for the top 100 most influential people of the year. I don’t know who’s idea it was to allow the Internet to vote on such matters, since (as I mentioned above, if you were able to understand that) it’s looking like the Koreans have bombed the poll (as they did last year, resulting in a landslide victory) up-voting their pop-sensation Rain. I’ve never heard of this guy, but I guess he’s huge in Korea.

Once again, Miyamoto has made the list, and it looks like there are quite a few diehard Nintendo fans trying to beat Rain, up-voting Miyamoto and down-voting Rain. As of this moment, Rain has the number one spot, but followed closely by Miyamoto in second place. Stephen Colbert is currently in third, but who knows what could happen as far as his place is concerned, what with his millions of loyal followers (myself included, but Miyamoto bests him in my personal list) and what they’re capable of.

As you can guess, this isn’t really a contest in the most influential people of the year. It may be advertised as such, but it’s actually a contest of who has the most fans willing to repeatedly up-vote them, and down-vote the competition.

Vote if you like, I’ve already voted a few dozen times myself, and hopefully we can show up the Koreans and the Colbert Nation how Nintendo fans do things.

Time

Shaan had a very nice summary of the rumour surrounding MK vs DC, but now that it’s all out in the open, it’s time to finally digest things a bit. First of all, Shaan jumped the gun a little bit, since at the time there wasn’t any mention of the game hitting a Nintendo system (shame on you for posting non-Nintendo related news, Shaan. Shame on you.) but now in an interview by The Realm of Mortal Kombat with the Ed Boon gives us some hope that a Wii version isn’t out of the equation just yet.

TRMK: Will the game be only for the Xbox 360 and PS3 or will there be a possibility of a Wii port?
EB: I don’t know for sure. It’s kind of like it was with Armageddon. We did an Xbox version and a PS2 version and a Wii version followed. We didn’t know it was going to follow. The Wii is selling so huge it would almost be difficult to ignore it. But at the same time, there’s no Unreal Engine for the Wii.

TRMK: I think one company has got it working, but Epic is not supporting it.
EB: Right, so it would be a challenge. I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with it. Armageddon actually did pretty well on the Wii. So it makes some sense.

So there you have it. It’s not completely denied. So we can all cross our fingers that we can fight as Superman against Scorpion on the Wii. Until then, I don’t think we need to worry about what’s going on on lesser consoles.

I’ll leave that to the forums. (Join them or perish.)

TRMK via GoNintendo

The WiiFit boxart pretty much encompasses Nintendo’s whole idea behind the Wii and this “new age of gaming”. I’m pretty sure the meeting of designers went something like this:

1) “Apple’s pretty much got a monopoly on their plain simple box designs. Let’s give ‘em a run for their money. Make it look appealing to those simpletons who are easily sucked in by this whole Zen/Yoga thing, and by packaging that doesn’t really explain anything. White is good.”

2) “In addition to white being good, let’s mix things up with some sort of eye-melting green colour. Kids love bright colours. So do old people. They eat that shit up like mushed yams. It just sort of sucks your eye to the box. You know, you’ve got Joe Eighty-Something cruisin’ the game aisle looking at a shelf of games and nothing catches his eye but then he’s like ‘Oh wow! Look at that big friendly white box that’s bright green! I have to buy that!’ … yeah that’s perfect.”

3) “Let’s pack on some pictures of attractive people in ridiculously pristine white clothing. That way their bodies seem invisible against the white box. Oh yeah, and we have to make sure there’s a little black girl on there… and give her bizarre hair like Pippi Longstocking. People will see the box and be all ‘Hey, I fit into one of these categories! Be it an attractive twenty-something yuppie female who likes yoga, a little black girl that likes to surf, an old fogie with a tan doing squats betwixt shuffleboard sessions, or a generic young male that enjoys boxing. They’re all having a blast!”

Actually, reading that over makes me laugh at what the Wii Fit boxart could have been. You know, with like, explosions and stuff going on the background. That would be flippin’ badass.

There’s a lot of confusion regarding the big “Worlds Collide” story. Basically, there’s a very convincing site featuring a pre-rendered image of Mortal Kombat’s Sub-Zero and the Dark Knight himself, Batman, facing off with one another. Currently, the site isn’t CONFIRMED to be real, but who knows?

On the sidelines though is another story. Long-time followers of the Mortal Kombat franchise will remember noob.com, MK-creator Ed Boon’s personal site. Boon has had teasers of upcoming titles on his site before it went down for a good long while. Well noob.com is back up and running, and after a month-long countdown with nothing else on the site, we finally have an update… kinda.

Now all the site has is a very blurred image with jumbled-up letters at the bottom. So far, the only thing I’ve been able to decipher (I think) is that the second word is ‘lifts’. Chances are, this is in fact a tease of the next Mortal Kombat fighter, but what does it all mean? One more interesting note. Upon trying to save the image, the file was already named ‘rain02′. Could this be the purple ninja Rain? If you look at the image, you can kinda see an arm, as well as a figure that appears to be MK-favorite Scorpion, but maybe it’s just me.

From previous interviews, Ed Boon has said that the franchise’s step onto the current-gen of consoles will be as much as a revamp from MK4 to MK: Deadly Alliance, wiping the slate clean and starting anew. Other than the fact that we know it’ll be running on the Unreal 3 Engine, there’s not much else we know now. But expect some updates soon! I know I’m excited…

UPDATE - Worldscollide.com has now updated with a trailer and a downloadable wallpaper. The teaser shows off Sub-Zero and Batman beatin’ the crap out of one another.  There is no viewable hub or anything, but the fighting itself looks like an update from the previous games’ fight mechanics.  Batman knocks Sub-Zero through a wall and the two of them fall to an arena below, continuing the idea of changing environments presented in the last games.  However there is one new aspect to the combat.  As the two of them fall, they get into a mid-air brawl.  Chances are, this is a new mechanic in the game. 

Overall, it appears that the game will revolve around the idea of Mortal Kombat vs. DC.  Imagine doing Scorpion’s spear on Robin… oooh that’d be sweet.  Now you may want to complain or go “WTF?!” but don’t forget about Marvel vs. Capcom, one of the best and strangest fighting games ever.  Don’t you think some people were confused to see Cyclops and Chun Li on the same screen?  So I guess a Mortal Kombat vs. DC seems warranted.

See Noob.com here

See the teaser here 

So Zelda/Mario creator, Shigeru Miyamoto has been saying some words….yo…  Okay, so my attempts at being gangster just don’t work… anyways.  Miyamoto has stated in a recent interview with 1UP that the Zelda team has come back together.

“I think we’d gotten to a point where videogames were something that everyone could no longer enjoy. As a designer, I’m always focusing on what is fun — ideas that people can enjoy. For me, I’m trying to entertain as many people as I can, creating games that the widest number of people can enjoy. Of course, that being said, we do have the existing teams at Nintendo working on the kinds of products we’ve always made over the years. The Zelda team is forming again to work on new games! But to me, it’s about finding these new interactive experiences and bringing them to people.” - Shigeru Miyamoto

Maybe it’s just me, but if the Zelda team is just coming together NOW… does that mean we have to wait ANOTHER three years for another Zelda game?!  SON OF A… IF I EVER… BARBARA STREISAND… BAAAHHHH!!!! *cough*

Okay, well now that that is out of my system, it isn’t clear if he means they’re coming together to make another Zelda game, or a new IP altogether.  Whatever the case, we’ll see in a matter of months what Nintendo has ready for us to see…  I don’t care what you all say, I still feel that a new Zelda could be teased at E3.  But we’ll see.

The rest of the interview mostly discusses Nintendo’s stance on the casual/hardcore audiences, the upcoming title, WiiFit, as well as Miyamoto’s role in the company.  Check it out at the link below!

1UP

If you’ve worked really hard on something, and somebody doesn’t absolutely love it, how much does it hurt? Enough to be bitter and write a sarcastic letter? Perhaps, if you’re a disgruntled Majesco employee, and the “something” in question is a game that’s part of a franchise that is the only thing keeping your company afloat.

To be fair, the email’s quote of a quote “not worth while” is taken out of context. The actual review reads “…But if you already played last year’s game or just couldn’t quite get into it, Cooking Mama 2 probably isn’t worth your while.”

That seems fair. Mind you, who cares what GameSpot thinks?

Joystiq

…and it looks like all it’s going to take is $89.99 to make you “more aware of your body”.

That’s the American price, of course, but we can all expect the Canadian price to be similar to that ($99.99 at most), now that the prices of games have gone down to reflect our stronger dollar. Will you still buy it now that you know how much it’ll cost you?

I plan on it. Of course, I’m just a sheep that follows my shepherd Miyamoto wherever he wants to take me. I don’t actually think for myself.