Throwing in Balance Board support with a waggle fest should make for some hilarious stuff.

Question: When will Rayman be taken out of the title?

In a GDC interview with GameDaily this afternoon, Ubisoft Montreal CEO Yannis Mallat discussed Wii development and revealed some of the surprising praise Ubisoft received from Nintendo for its Nov. 2007 Wii release, My Word Coach.

“We were working in secret on a game called My Word Coach…and we had the chance to show the game to (Nintendo of America President) Reggie Fils-Aime, and he saw the game and said, ‘You got it. You guys got exactly the type of game we want for this machine,’” said Mallat.

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GoNintendo has the scan, and it’s apparent that Assassin’s Creed for the DS will be a prequel of sorts for everyone’s favorite man in white. Rules out a card game, so I was wrong, but there’s obviously a lot more to learn about what this title is all about.

The first step on the path to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

So those of you with self-destructive penchants for flamboyant assassinations and slicing your foes in half with crude glowing lightsabers should probably stop reading.

Really, it would be for the best. (more…)

The differences between Assasin’s Creed on the PS3 and what it will eventually look like on the DS sometime in 2008 are legion, I’m sure.

Graphics? Take whatever comparisons and trash talking were made between the PS3 and Wii in 2006 and add a healthy dose of HGH. The sound? The DS might as well be a Game & Watch in this situation, no offense to the great Gunpei Yokoi. Controls? Hmm. Debatable. Touch could provide an edge, but PS3 sorta kinda has rumble and neutered tilt, maybe, so we’ll call that one a wash. Sheer processing power? In this scenario the DS be powered by a wee hamster, I’m afraid to say.

Luckily, the blokes at Penny Arcade have an idea, and they’re pretty sure it’s the right one. On a more serious side, I’m wondering aloud today whether Assassin’s Creed will be one of two things: A card game, which could be cool; or a Ninja Gaiden DS title with Phantom Hourglass controls.

Regardless of what it becomes however, I just hope the enemy AI isn’t as atrociously awful as it is on the PS3 title.

To call Jam Sessions for the DS a game does is a disservice.

It is contained in the charcoal plastic covering of a game, yes, and has the copper-colored connectors that are a marquee feature of all cartridges since the days of the Commodore 64, sure, but this particular foray into the DS’s now exhaustive library is indeed a toy in every sense of the word.

However, Jam Sessions is not a toy in the negative sense; not at all. It is not some lead-laden Made in China Thomas the Tank Engine toy that will poison your body and heighten your sense of buyer’s remorse for plunking down 30 clams ten minutes after you tear open the packaging. It’s a toy in the sense that when you play it, it is in bursts that are far shorter than any cas-core game you’ve played in the past. Indeed, if you choose to invest in the quirkiness of Jam Sessions, I’ll bet serious money that you’ll open it from time to time — during one of the plethora of Nissan Rogue commercials played during a Monday evening screening of Heroes, perhaps — strum a few chords randomly, and then put it away. (more…)

I don’t know how many of you out there are Killer 7 fanatics, but if you are then prepare yourself for a new level of excitement. Like the kind where you pee your pants a little. What, you don’t? Me neither.

Anyway, Wii-obsessed Ubisoft just informed IGN’s Matt Casamassina that No More Heroes will be coming Stateside in February 2008.

Ubisoft on Wednesday revealed exclusively to IGN that it has picked up the rights to publish the anticipated Wii action game No More Heroes in North America. The title will release stateside next February, just two months after the Japanese ship date.

I don’t know about you, but with all the No More Heroes stuff I’ve seen in the Intertubes these past few months, this feels like a pretty big deal. Ubisoft is going to clean up once again, thanks to the Wii.

Video gaming, alive and well?

That’s what I thought when I saw Jam Session’s mini-amp today anyway. It’s also what I thought when I played Guitar Hero 2 for the first time a few months ago. And it’s what I think when I pick up my Wiimote/nunchuck combo and play Metroid Prime 3 (on advanced settings, obviously).

Mini amps? Revolutionary FPS controls? Family rooms packed with people — playing video games!? Truly, this is an exciting time for everyone, and this holiday season might cause the world to implode with fits of joy.

Regardless, Jam Sessions has just been added to what is already a jam-packed video game-heavy Christmas list (pun intended).

Ingenius. Brilliant. Hilarious.

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan launched in 2005 in the land of the rising sun to critical acclaim and lukewarm sales. A sizeable import market for the game facilitated the release of Elite Beat Agents in the United States in 2006, resulting in less than half of its predicted sales. How can a game that everybody loves do so poorly in the market?

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Games Radar has a feature today on Nintendo’s seven deadly sins (or mistakes). It’s almost as hot as Blake’s new Infendo header. Almost.

The feature is a nostalgic walk through of the absolute worst of Nintendo’s storied history. The Virtual Boy; strong arming third parties to the point that the U.S. government had to get involved; all but a handful of games on the Nintendo 64; and the now infamous backstabbing that Nintendo did to Sony over a “new” technology called CD-ROMs. You know the result of that video game history debacle: the PlayStation. “Nintendo effectively created its own worst enemy,” says Games Radar features writer Brett Elston. And he’s right. Mostly.

All those things I mentioned above, they all happened and they’re an embarrassment. Especially for a Japanese company. There’s no honor in slapping a company across the face the day after you sign a huge console deal with them. Even if it was Sony (I kid Phil Harrison, honestly). Absolute power corrupts absolutely and Nintendo was a poster child for that cliche.

But placing the Wii as #7 in this list is just a foolish way to garner page views.

Can the same magic that made the DS an international phenomenon happen with a console? Nintendo’s betting on it. Betting it all, really. Because what do you do next? Five years from now, when the PS4 and NextBox show up, they’re going to jump in hardware power again. And then Nintendo’s left with a machine that looks two generations old instead of one. The motion controls, now considered somewhere in between “the best damn thing that’s ever happened in the world” to “gimmicky stupid childish nonsense,” will be super played out and exploited. Unless there’s some other gameplay innovation on the horizon, Wii could be viewed as a fad, susceptible to the same fickle emotions that killed snap bracelets, pet rocks and Sega. And if Nintendo bites the bullet and gives the machine a visual kick in the pants, well there goes its whole mantra that graphics don’t matter. There’s just enough steam with this idea to last one generation, and none after that. Today, the Wii is insanely popular with almost every audience. But if this wave of good vibes ever ends, Nintendo’s gonna be stranded.

So true! And “if” this atmosphere thing covering our planet ever ends, we all gonna die.

It’s a good thing we established this is a Games Radar column, because a lot of what I’m seeing here is baseless hyperbole and opinion based on assumption. A PS4? Says who? A visual kick in the pants would be hypocritical if it was for a completely new system four years down the line? How so? Last I checked, every Nintendo system was different from the last, and no one cried foul on that. And if the Wii really takes off, and I mean like the DS has, then who’s to say Microsoft makes an even more powerful system next time around? Why would they or Sony waste their money when the Wii/DS model was so wildly successful?

What this column is, really, is another example of someone or some company that has no clue how to respond to Nintendo’s new chosen path. Even if PS4 hits store shelves in five years, do you really think Nintendo cares? Do you think its customers — and I’m talking the people having a blast right now with dated technology — will care? I’m going to throw Brett Elston a bone on this one, and assume (*gasp!*) that this colum was written before Blake’s Ubisoft/EA post yesterday. You know, the one where EA said it missed out on millions of dollars because it was too slow to act on Wii development? The one where Ubisoft made an additional $405 million because of the Wii? The quality of some of these games be damned for now, because money talks, and developers are shifting resources to confirm that.

Even the six other mistakes listed in the article are just a history lesson of how the gaming industry WAS, not how it is GOING TO BE if Nintendo’s strategy with the Wii takes hold in a year or two. The Virtual Boy? CD-ROMs? Hiroshi Yamauchi? Are you kidding me? These are the skeletons in Nintendo’s closet, to be sure, but if you as a gaming journalist cannot see that the past 2-3 years have been a major restructuring and about face at Nintendo you need to start looking for work. Like with Sony’s PlayStation marketing department.

In many ways, the Wii launch has been MORE successful than the DS, and some people are STILL calling it a gimmick. For someone who wrote a fairly detailed history lesson on Nintendo’s foibles and repeating its mistakes, Mr. Elston himself seems incapable of reviewing just the past two years. Unfortunately for columnists like this, they’re wrong, and like EA, they’re going to lose unless they start thinking differently. I think some turtleneck wearing guy named Steve told me that once. I wonder what happened to him.

[Inspired by roo_303]

Some savvy blogger over at Joystiq points out why digging deeper into a sales number can yield surprising results. The number in this case is the 78% surge Ubisoft saw in sales thanks to the Wii.

“I’m betting, however, that Ubisoft can thank the sheer amount of junk games it threw at Wii owners for the spike in sales as other conservative publishers offered little to no games. And though not the case with all of Ubi’s Wii games, a clear majority saw little to no effort during production. I mean, whoever released Far Cry on Wii (read: it was Ubisoft) should be stoned. That game was garbage”

So true, savvy Joystiq blogger. Ubisoft bet on the short term gains and won, but I worry that this approach is the antithesis of what the Wii needs right now. Is Ubisoft’s gain a loss for the Wii overall?