Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there!  Is your Mom a gamer?

“I have an idea for an Infendo post you should do…” — Sean Malstrom

And so began this simple post on an extraordinary idea. Perhaps a bit crazy too, but then again all disruptive technologies are labeled as such before they’re accepted en masse.

The idea? That the Balance Board packaged with Wii Fit isn’t an accessory at all. It’s a console, just the like Wii or even the PlayStation 3.

You were wondering when Nintendo would update the Wii? Unveil a Wii 2? Good news: The Wii Balance Board is it.

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Remember that damning New York Times piece about Wii, low attach rates and how the system is anathema to “hardcore gamers?”

It’s been pretty much summarily attacked all week long as an example of poor reporting (believe me, I can relate), but this article from Ars Technica–and a response from VGChartz, from which the NYT compiled its data–pretty much smothered the article’s weakened husk as it slept.

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Tough day at the office? Boss on your back? Being overwhelmed by Goombas? Just need a break? Simply hit the button on the back of this Super Mario Bros. Singing Invincibility Star and sit back. You’ll be protected from harm as the Singing Star plays the Invincibility Theme from Super Mario Bros. and you become an office hero.

The Singing Star goes for $18 at ThinkGeek.

A Harvest Moon Wii tractor pull? A real-life F-Zero supersonic racing circuit at the Bonneville Salt Flats? Mario juicing for his upcoming Super Mario Sluggers baseball promotion?

Nintendo will hold a pretty cool marketing promotion in NYC tomorrow as a man dressed as Mario hails cabs for Manhattanites, free of charge. What follows are just a few of the wild new Nintendo marketing promotion ideas I would like to see the Big N implement for some of their other first party games in 2008.

See what I mean after the jump and add one of your own.

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Racketboy has a .pdf up today of the very first Electronic Gaming Monthly. The issue, conveniently for us, is a preview of the “HOT NEW Nintendo games” coming soon (in 1989). You can see them in the pic above next to the insanely retro boxart from timeless classic, Mega Man 2.

It’s a pretty eclectic list, which got me thinking. Operation Wolf? Shooter. Bubble Bobble? Action puzzler. Ultima? One-of-a-kind RPG. Super Sprint? Retro racer. Mega Man 2? Power-up platformer. These games cover many genres and appeal to many tastes. That’s a pretty hardcore list, wouldn’t you say?

What I started thinking about, thanks to the NES, is that it is never the player that’s hardcore, or even the games. It’s the system they’re played on (”hardcore” is a marketing myth). The NES was the hardcore system of the late 1980’s. No player was more hardcore than any other, because every player had their likes and dislikes, and could find them all in one spot and excel at them. This post is brought to by backward thinking consoles and history repeats.

Epic Games doesn’t like Wii. Here’s what president Mike Capps had to say in a gang-bang interview with IGN.

“Pffffffffft…[when asked by reporter Nate Ahearn what the chief officer thought of Wii, to which Ahearn replied, “I think the same thing!”] It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, ‘Oh my God that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it’. So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then goes out and buys it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on.”

Capps then proceeds to call Wii a great business investment but that his company will not be investing. “We go forward, not back,” he said, suggesting that any company that develops Wii games are digressing the medium, not progressing it.

Sounds like someone is scared Nintendo will eat into their lucrative middleware business, which makes its money selling pretty graphics tech to game developers. It’s one thing to dislike Wii for what it is, but another to dislike it due to conflict of interest.

Beware of anyone who brags about buyer’s remorse.

You may have seen the Zelda garment I was drooling over a couple days ago, but now Shirt.Woot! has another great shirt, commemorating Duck Hunt. Check out the pic above. This one sold out, in only 20 minutes too! Did you snag one?

You may be familiar with Woot.com and their tactic of selling one product a day at a cheap price until it is sold out. They have a shirt site too and you can see above what today’s shirt was all about. Pretty hot .. did you snag one? They sold out in less than 90 minutes.

[UPDATE: It’s now available again]

Today I went ahead and took advantage of a $5 credit on my Amazon account — as well as the lack of sales tax on Internet transactions and Free Super Saver shipping — and pre-ordered Wii Fit.

All the signs and portents say this thing is going to be huge, and I didn’t want to miss out while my neighbors, parents and sisters got their fitness on without me. Some game-related reporting I did elsewhere on the Net today says that the fitness peripheral is already sold out in the UK at no less than five major retailers, and I highly doubt that fad-crazed Americas will be any different. Japan already fell in love, selling 1.4 million in roughly four months. Early previews from the blogs read something like this: “I was meh, then I tried it hands-on. It was actually kind of interesting.” Sounds like something else from the recent past, no? (more…)

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The ol’ “too much time on your hands” versus “wow, that’s pretty intense” debate rears its ugly head again with this clip of an RC car playing the Mario theme on wine bottles.

[Gizmodo via Boing Boing Break]

David Cole, associate editor at Infendo World Industries, is currently on vaca in Deutschland. But that hasn’t stopped him from geeking out over all things Nintendo and envying our European friends that can already purchase Mario Kart Wii.

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I know what you’re saying. “All of Mario’s power-ups are necessary and awesome, and there’s no way you could possibly whittle away such goodness to come up with a top 10 Mario power-ups list.”

To which I would reply nay, you are incorrect — there are certainly many, many useless and easily forgettable power-ups, and truly there are ten amazing ones that deserve a list.

That list, my friends, is as follows — from least amazing to most amazing: (more…)

Every time I watch the 1989 classic film The Wizard, I can’t help but wonder what the guys from Infendo Radio would have to say about it. Now my wish has been granted, and yours can, too! I am proud to present Infendo Radio’s first ever movie commentary track:

• The Wizard MP3 [91.4 MB]

Just download it, queue up the movie, and hit play on the MP3 when you see the Universal logo finish its zoom in.

Maybe it’s just me, but the new Legend of Zelda movie trailer looks low-budget and goofy. Yet another story that should have remained a video game. Good luck with those real-world tights, Link. Hopefully it’s just a lame IGN April Fool’s joke.

See also: CD-i Zelda [Wired]