Tag Archives: wii music

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said he sees three titles being released this year – Wii Sports Resort, New Super Mario Bros Wii and Wii Fit Plus – to sell over ten million units.

“I believe each of these three software titles have the potential to surpass 10 million copies worldwide in the whole fiscal year,” said the exec, speaking in an investor Q&A released by Nintendo yesterday.

He added: “We recognise this Q1 result is not the strongest and closer to the lower parameters of our expectations, but we expect we can reverse the situation through the full-fiscal year and therefore did not revise out forecast.”

Mario Galaxy 2 to sell a billion units at launch? Bet on it.

The Wii Music Program is expected to be in 50 different cities across the country soon, and a Washington, DC elementary school is one of the first to implement the program.

The initiative is not meant to “teach” music, but to get students interested in arts and music by way of interaction.

The new program is being supported by the Washington DC School Chancellor’s policy of making sure every school has a music teacher.

There’s a nice little video of this after the jump, straight from Fox News of all things.

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Nintendo has announced that thanks to what it calls “newly formed collaborations with select schools and educators,” its Wii console together with Wii Music will be part of the curriculum in some schools in America.

“The goal of Wii Music is to inspire people of all ages to enjoy music,” said NoA executive VP, Cammie Dunaway.

“By partnering with educators and bringing Wii Music into their classrooms, we hope to give students a memorable, hands-on experience that helps them discover their own creative voice.”

Some teachers are already well behind the idea:

“Wii Music has brought a renewed excitement to music class for students from first grade to fifth, myself and even some of the classroom teachers,” said Helen A. Krofchick, a music teacher at Doby’s Mill Elementary School in South Carolina.

“I love how many music standards can be covered in such a short time. Students also have to use language skills, spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination.

“We have a school very supportive of the arts and Wii Music has empowered our program even more. Any system that is educational and can add a love of music to children’s lives should be in every classroom,” she added.

Wii Music has received mixed reviews so far and has amassed 63/100 score on Metacritic.

Full release after the break.

By Mike Bowden

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While NPD figures showed today that Wii Music had an 81k sell through in America in October – just a tenth of Wii Fit in its launch month – Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway said the company wasn’t worried and predicted that the game would be a Wii “an evergreen title”.

“You’ll see in [the NPD sales] that it did about somewhere [like] 65 or 66,000 based on our internal numbers for the two weeks that was reported,” the Nintendo executive vice president of sales and marketing told MTV.

“We’re predicting that it’s going to be an evergreen title. And if you look at titles like Brain Age, it’s about the same as what ‘Brain Age’ did during it’s first few weeks and went on to sell 2.5 million copies. Wii Fit certainly had a larger launch than that. But I think that people are starting to understand Wii Music.

“People have a box in their head of what music genre games are all about,” she went on, “and we’re doing something that is a complete departure from that.

“As people start to experience that and tell other people about it, I have no doubt that Wii Music is going to be a long-selling, top-selling game for us.”

By Mike Bowden

Speaking to Rolling Stone, Nintendo super-chief Shigeru Miyamoto’s claimed that the development of Wii Music was a doddle. Well, we didn’t want to say anything, but…

“I just turned the game on one day and all of a sudden there was a cheerleader,” he said.

“From that sense I would say that Wii Music was a relatively easy development project for me.”

Not much to say, really. Via Kotaku and GoNintendo.

After the break. It shows four people standing in front of a telly have the time of their lives, despite the opinions of IGN.

Go watch.

By Mike Bowden

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VideogamesBlogger has it. There are 48 titles in total including such classics as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Over the Waves by Juventino Rosas and
La Cucaracha.

We can’t wait.

Find out all 48 songs through there.

By Mike Bowden

IGN’s reviewed Wii Music to a 5/10 score, as you can see here. Not that it’ll make a blind bit of difference to its sales, but there we are. Snip:

I think most adults will quickly recognize that Wii Music is little more than a noise maker tied to a series of gestures and grow bored of the experience in a matter of hours, if not minutes. The controls aren’t particularly intuitive , but gimmicky, and the selection of music is fundamentally flawed with both dated public domain songs rendered in equally dated MIDI. That Guitar Hero World Tour’s complementary modes — namely Mii Freestyle and advanced studio — completely obliterate the entire Wii Music package is proof just how much Nintendo’s game either doesn’t do or doesn’t do well.

Sounds amazing. Full thing through the link.

This Variety report details Wii Music’s 14 licensed tracks, taken from the instruction manual. Let’s hope there’s nothing religiously sensitive in there.

And the line-up is:

• “Chariots of Fire” theme song by Vangelis
• “Daydream Believer” by John Stewart (made famous by The Monkees)
• “Every Breath You Take” by Sting
• “I’ll be There,” originally performed by The Jackson 5
• “I’ve Never Been to Me,” the classic Motown hit
• “Material Girl,” as in the Madonna track
• “Please Mr. Postman,” the debut single from the Marvellettes from way back in the early ’60s
• “September,” from Earth, Wind and Fire
• “Suriyaki,” a Japanese song popular in the ’60s performed by Kyu Sakamoto
• “The Loco-Motion”
• John Lennon’s “Woman”
• “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by George Michael
• “Jingle Bell Rock.”
• “Do-Re-Mi” by Rogers and Hammerstein from “The Sound of Music.”

Wii Music is out next month.

After the break. We’re not quite sure what to say about this, really. Watch out for the men in dog suits and the rainbows, and all.

Wii Music’s out in November in Europe. Thanks, GoNintendo.

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Here it comes. Nintendo of America has posted up a ton of videos of what Wii Music’s like to play. Check out the “marching snare”.

It’s out on November 14 in Europe.

Siliconera has taken a look at the Wii Music Japanese site and unearthed the first few confirmed tracks for the game.

There’s six of them in all:

• My Grandfather’s Clock
• Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
• Ode to Joy
• Super Mario Brothers Theme
• The Legend of Zelda
• Animal Crossing Wild World

Awesome. Game launches in Japan in a couple days by the way.

By Mike Bowden

Speaking to VentureBeat at the US Nintendo Media Summit last week, NoA boss Reggie Fils-Aime slapped down talk of Wii Music being an simple game, saying it’s difficult to master and the title’s E3 debut made it look too easy.

“What’s powerful in Wii Music is this juxtaposition of something that looks so simple but is wonderfully difficult to master,” he said.

“We may have done that title an injustice at E3 by showing something that looked so easy. We made it appear too simple.

“Now we’re showing the tremendous variety of instruments and tones and how challenging it is to make music that sounds good.”

The exec added that the game is expected to be in the company’s upper bracket for sales, presumably along the lines of Wii Fit.

“We don’t publicly talk about sales targets but our expectation is it will be one of our top sellers,” he said.

Lots more through there.

Nintendo’s released details of its fourth quarter line-up, dating Wii Music for the UK in the process.

Miyamoto’s latest will release on November 14.

The full list’s on Electronic Theatre, including the previously reported December date for Animal Crossing.

According to a ton of reports, Nintendo’s dates Wii Music for October 20, presumably in the US.

Nothing specific for Europe yet, but we’ll give Nintendo a shout this morning.

We missed these last night through an extreme case of bleary-eye. Nintendo’s put out some new shots of Wii Music, as you can see on Eurogamer. No date for Miyamoto’s latest yet.

GameDaily has published a top ten of “games that will probably suck,” and LittleBigPlanet leads the charge at number one.

“Despite the cute characters, this is nothing more than a glorified version of PowerPoint fuelled by gamers hoping to make their own ‘presentations’,” says the piece.

“Talented players will create interesting and perhaps fun designs. Everyone else will make horrible levels.

“If you could design several stages, string them together and make your own platform game, that’d be cool, but for now, all we foresee is tons of crap content.”

Other notables include Wii Music and Silent Hill: Homecoming. Genius.

Full thing through the link, obviously.

By Mike Bowden

Nintendo may have said it was rumour, but according to this Kotaku piece Wii Music will release in Japan on October 16.

The game will feature over 50 songs and over 60 musical instruments. Still no official word on this from Nintendo.

Nintendo’s branded a NeoGAF thread saying Wii Music had been dated in Japan today as chatter.

“Purely rumour and speculation,” a spokesperson told VG247 this afternoon.

It was claimed that Nintendo’s casual title was given an October 16 release.

Still no official information on Wii Music, other than what was seen at E3.

According to this NeoGAF post, Nintendo’s just dated Wii Music as an October 16 release in Japan.

There’s nothing official yet. Just checking with Nintendo now.

Thanks, Hero of Canton.