Monthly Archives: March 2009

Joystiq has cupped its hands beneath the first trickle of Zelda: Spirit Tracks eye-candy dripping forth from Nintendo’s pinata, and things are looking pretty nice.

The screens show Link on a train, clad in an adorable conductor’s outfit. The train also fires cannon balls, in case you were afraid that Link had lost some of his tenacious pirate spirit while making the jump into the Industrial Age.

Click through the link to see them all.

There’s a video after the break of Rock N’ Roll Climber being demoed in the Iwata keynote at GDC this morning.

It shows a badly realised man scaling a wall. A person controls the hands and feet of said man using a Wiimote, a Nunchuck and a Balance Board.

It’s not pretty. See for yourself.

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Nintendo just press released Virtual Console Arcade, the new Wii feature announced in this morning’s Iwata keynote.

Gaplus, Mappy, The Tower of Druaga and STARFORCE are the channel’s first games.

Get the full thing, with prices, after the break.

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The DS officially has its You’re in the Movies-killer.

At today’s GDC keynote, Nintendo gave conference-goers a look at WarioWare: Snapped for the DSi.

The game requires that you line up your head and hands for the camera before catapulting you through a, er, typical WarioWare gauntlet so that it can then play back recorded footage of you playing the game after you’re done.

Sounds like the kids’ll soon have a new set of questionable tapes to innocently stumble onto. God help us all if the game has multiple save files.

Nintendo just released the first proper details of The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, following this morning’s showing of the DSi game in GDC’s Iwata keynote.

Via press release:

The new The Legend of Zelda™: Spirit Tracks game that Iwata announced will utilise the intuitive touch control of Phantom Hourglass in an all new adventure that will please longtime Zelda™ fans while keeping the game accessible to all DS owners. The concept behind this Zelda game includes utilising a steam locomotive to travel around the world, switching Phantom and Link to explore the dungeons, and solving puzzles using new items.

It’s out this year. There’s pics on Joystiq, if you’re interested.

During today’s Nintendo GDC keynote, Satoru Iwata demonstrated a title called Rock and Roll Climber for WiiWare.

Apparently, it allows players to defy virtual gravity by scaling rockfaces using the Wii Balance Board in conjunction with the Wii-mote and Nunchuck.

Then, when you reach the top of your craggy adversary, you’re given the ability to spit in gravity’s face with a rockin’ guitar jam session. Space travel doesn’t have anything on this.

We can’t wait until the inevitable volcano level. Guitars, rockfaces, and hot lava. Sign us up.

The Iwata keynote may be over, but don’t you dare touch that dial. We’ll be liveblogging the Luminaries Lunch at 1pm PST today, and the line-up’s stellar.

Will Wright, Warren Spector, Nolan Bushnell, Rob Pardo and David Perry will all be on the panel: you’re guaranteed to get some monster quotes.

That’s 1.00pm PST, 8.00pm GMT and 9.00pm CET. See you then!

Nintendo just announced a new Legend of Zelda title for the DS. It’s called Spirit Tracks, and will be out later this year!

A quick video showed Link on a train “conducting it,” according to our lady on the scene, and then him fighting a monster thing “like an owl.”

There was nothing else shown. We’ll have plenty more soon, with any luck.

Get the full liveblog of Iwata’s keynote here.

Straight from Nintendo’s GDC keynote, the company just announced that a WiiWare version of Final Fantasy IV’s cell phone-based sequel, The After Years, as well as a sequel to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, are on the way.

Get the full liveblog of the speech here.

Nintendo just announced that SD cards working in collaboration with its brand new SD storage solution can store up to 240 games.

That’s a large number. Nintendo’s been liking the large numbers pretty well lately.

Do you even have 240 games? We don’t. And no, those cheap NES rip-off collections don’t count.

Get the full liveblog of Iwata’s keynote here.

Hard drive? No, but it’s still a storage solution, and it’ll have to do.

According to a report by Eurogamer, Nintendo recently updated the Wii system software to run games from all channels — Virtual Console, WiiWare, you name it — straight from an SD card.

Save games, however, must still be stored in the Wii’s system memory. Bummer. But not really.

Get the full liveblog of Iwata’s keynote here.

Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata just confirmed that the Wii has reached 50 million sales globally. The news comes from Nintendo’s GDC keynote.

Watch our liveblog for more.

UPDATE – We are now live! Get a constant stream of updates from the keynote through the link!

This is it! Steph’s in line for Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s keynote at GDC in San Francisco, which will starting at 9.00am PST. That’s 4.00pm GMT.

Hit the link for our liveblog. Remember: don’t hammer F5. The CoverItLive window will update automatically.

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Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter just issued a note saying he believes OnLive will impact both console sales and games retail, and will be a hugely attractive proposition to publishers.

The full thing:

• Tuesday night at the Game Developers Conference, Rearden Labs introduced OnLive, a new cloud computing service that will allow consumers to play console quality games without a PC or a console.
• No business model was announced, and in our view, the success or failure of the service will ride on whether it is priced low enough to induce a large number of consumers to “subscribe”, in turn driving a greater number of games available from the publishers.
• In our view, the OnLive model will appeal immensely to publishers, who will likely derive greater revenue per sale than is derived through conventional retail distribution.
• We think that the adoption of a service like OnLive will impact console sales.
• Similarly, we think that the adoption of a service like OnLive will impact retail

OnLive, the upcoming Cloud gaming service, was announced at GDC earlier this week.

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter told a panel at GDC last night that he believes this is the last of the console generation.

“I think we’ve seen the last generation of consoles,” he said.

“[Third party publishers] are not going to support a PS4 or Xbox 720,” he added.

“The content is not going to change in any meaningful ways because the publishers can’t afford it.”

Pachter’s comments resonated with the general overriding theme of GDC so far, that of console-less Cloud gaming.

He went on to say that companies like Sony simply aren’t in a position to launch new machines.

“Sony is not going to put out a console until they make a profit on this generation, and my math puts that at around 2015,” Pachter said.

More on 1UP.

Engadget’s posted a supposed questionnaire about PS3 and Netflix, which asks punters how likely they’d be to spend $10 a month on the service if it did make its way to the console.

This looks to be highly similar to the recently shown Netflix Wii survey.

Will it happen? Probably. Why wouldn’t it? Can we have it in Europe, please?

Newly-announced Cloud-based gaming service OnLive has put up its beta sign-up form here.

The beta is scheduled to take place this summer. To get involved, “You need to be at least 18, based in the US and have a broadband-connected PC running Windows Vista/XP, or an Intel-based Mac.”

OnLive is aiming for a late 2009 launch.

Eurogamer’s just posted a story based on two different dev sources that says PS3 Firmware 2.70 will launch in April, not this week as we were told last night.

Sony’s made no official statement on the matter as yet.

We were told that developers now have the update and it would launch “this week”.

Resistance 2 developer James Stevenson said overnight that his shooter’s latest patch wouldn’t work without the Firmware release. The patch was supposed to hit on March 26, tomorrow.

There’s no clear indication as to what the update contains as yet, but Stevenson said dual PSN log-ins was the feature needed for the Resistance 2 patch.

Atari just confirmed it’s to release Namco’s Tales of Vesperia in all PAL territories this June.

The game – the first HD instalment in the revered RPG series – casts players as “former Imperial Knight Yuri Lowell” in an adventure involving an ancient technology known as “blastia”.

Good news. Press release after the break.

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Alienware is to close both of its manufacturing plants, based in Miami and Ireland

Production will be moved to parent company Dell’s facilities.

The news comes from an internal memo, cited in this ExtremeTech report.

Alienware spokeswoman Winnie Wong has apparently confirmed the memo as authentic, but would not say how many employees would be affected.

The memo said that the changes, including the layoffs, would be completed by the end of Dell’s third fiscal quarter, which ends October 31.

More through there.