VC and WiiWare for the Week of July 14th

Wiikly WiiWare Releases For 6-16-08

Block Breaker Deluxe™ (Gameloft, 1-2 players, Rated E for Everyone-Mild Suggestive Themes, 800 Wii Points): Prepare for the frenzy of the coolest block-breaker game ever. Block Breaker Deluxe is a reinvention of the classic arcade brick-breaker game with a trendy graphical style, fun atmosphere and an exclusive multiplayer mode. Lively characters and amazing graphics provide distinctive settings of the jet-set nightlife, including a cool bar, dance club, casino and more. Special bricks, multiple bonuses, secret weapons, paddle size options and ball-speed variations make this fascinating game even more challenging. The Block Breaker Deluxe rage has arrived.

Cocoto Fishing Master (Neko Entertainment, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 700 Wii Points): Welcome to the adventures of Cocoto, Fishing Master. Get ready for a completely new experience on Wii. Play the role of Cocoto and travel the world to find five millennial fish. Only they can stop the magic cauldron from overflowing with lava and prevent the world from being destroyed. Thanks to Cocoto Fishing Master for Wii, fishing has never been such fun. Use the Wii Remote™ and Nunchuk™ controllers like a real fishing rod to catch more than 30 different fish. Discover five enchanted lakes in five different worlds from Cocoto’s universe. Confront gigantic bosses to collect each fragment of the statuette that will allow you to wake the great god Geo from his slumber. Meet Cocoto’s friends, sell your fish to Baggy and buy new fishing equipment from Neuro’s shop.

Wiikly WiiWare Releases For 6-1-08

Protöthea™ (UbiSoft, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone-Fantasy Violence, 1,000 Wii Points): Protöthea is a top-down scrolling shooter game with free movement that puts players in complete control of a last-generation spaceship. The mission is to destroy the asteroid called Maqno 01 and finish with the plans of The Core. UbiSoft’s Protöthea introduces new concepts to a beloved, classic game style while mixing genres and utilizing the full capabilities of the Wii console, from graphics to controls. Players of all ages and experience levels will enjoy taking command of their ship, blasting through four different worlds in 10 challenging missions. Use your weapons arsenal and the special bonus items to help you accomplish your mission, and don’t forget to slow down time and take an edge over the enemy.

Toki Tori (Two Tribes, 1-2 players, Rated E for Everyone, 1,000 Wii Points): Toki Tori is his name, and collecting eggs is his game. In this puzzle/platform game, players use a variety of items such as the Telewarp, InstantRock™ and Slug Sucker. Clever use and combination of these items are needed to solve all the game’s levels, of which there are more than 70. Levels range from easy to brain-teasingly hard, resulting in dozens of hours of puzzle play time. Toki Tori makes the most of what Wii has to offer. It uses the Wii Remote™ for a unique control scheme, which offers players a new and more relaxing play style. A second player can help you out by drawing hints while you are playing. The game even uses the Wii Message Board in a unique way.

Wiikly WiiWare Releases For 5-26-08

Dr. Mario® Online Rx (Nintendo, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone, 1,000 Wii Points): The doctor is in! Mario™ takes a break from his adventuring ways and once again dons his stethoscope for a new generation of germ-battling mayhem. In addition to the classic mode of using vitamins to exterminate viruses, you’ll find two battle modes and an online multiplayer mode where you can hone your skills against players from around the world. Feel like challenging a friend who doesn’t have Dr. Mario Online Rx? Then the WiiWare-exclusive Friend Battle Demo is just what the doctor ordered. Or maybe you’d like some help taking on those nasty viruses? Try out Virus Buster, where four players can simultaneously move capsules simply by pointing at them with a Wii Remote™ controller. Any way you look at it, Dr. Mario Online Rx is a prescription for fun that everyone can enjoy.

Family Table Tennis (Aksys Games, 1-2 players, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Wii Points): It’s time for some good old family fun, and what’s more fun than table tennis? Just like a real family, choose your character from a cast of four, which includes Daddy, Mommy, Sarah and Billy. There are four table tennis-tastic stages where it doesn’t matter if you’re an indoors or outdoors table-tennis player. Pick your poison from a gymnasium, a forest park, a beach or even an amusement park. Choose from Single or Versus mode, or select a minigame to play. In Versus mode, you and a friend can play against each other to see who is the better table-tennis player. And if Single and Versus modes aren’t enough, select between three minigames, which include Target Table Tennis, Thrilling Table Tennis and Matching Table Tennis. The appealing cell-shaded graphics and endearing music, on top of the super-fun game play, will have you and your family playing from morning till night. Get your paddles ready.

Capcom to Make WiiWare Games….Eventually

In recent interview  with Gamasutra, Capcom’s Vice President of Strategic Planning and Business Development, Christian Svensson, made the exciting announcement that Capcom has future plans to bring new games to Nintendo’s upcoming WiiWare service. But not just yet. Capcom currently has a plethora of games coming out for Xbox Live and PSN and aren’t quite ready to start churning extra games for the Wii. Svensson explains it as such:

I’m going to lump WiiWare in with PSP e-distribution, in that we’re looking for the right content first — a lot of the content we have now isn’t quite right in value or approach or interface for WiiWare.

I fully expect us to be doing some WiiWare titles very shortly in the west. I won’t speak for Japan on that particular issue, but there are interesting things happening at some point there, maybe.

WiiWare has some interesting challenges in terms of interface. I shouldn’t say challenges: both challenges and benefits. The controls are different and frankly we’d like to make good use of the Wii Remote. We have a couple of concepts internally that I think would be perfect for Wii, as well as other platforms.

The other part of this is we’re trying to get a better handle on the online services that are going to be available to us on WiiWare. One of our hot buttons here across PC, PS3, and 360 is that we’re trying for feature parity across all platforms. That’s not a trivial task, especially when it comes down to user-created content.

Let’s say at some time we get into clan and guild support, or other aspects of user-created content propagation, that becomes a more interesting challenge on the Wii. Does that mean we couldn’t do WiiWare stuff that doesn’t have feature parity? Yeah, we could do that, but we have a couple of things where we might not have to cut anything. Let’s talk again next year about that.

Svensson’s thoughts on the challenges and benefits for WiiWare remind us that companies really need to think about what they are doing. I only wish he had gone a bit further and discussed what he really thought all the problems with WiiWare were. One of the most obvious problems so far is that no one really has a clue where WiiWare is currently going. If it’s in line with the rest of the Wii’s online services, it’ll be functional but not fantastic, which could definitely scare some of the big developers away. I’m guessing the biggest fear Capcom could have, like Svensson said, is that they won’t be able to do everything they want to with downloadable content on the Wii.

Many of us around here absolutely agree that time needs to be spent deciding what games to release for the Wii, but hasn’t Capcom already had a good chunk of time to prepare already? It would seem like the WiiWare service isn’t exactly coming out of the blue and surprising anyone. Either way, it’s good to see that they’re putting some thought into their WiiWare games, especially since Capcom has put out some of the best third-party titles for the Wii so far (Zack and Wiki, Okami, etc.).