Jackreyes' Gaming Blog

Wii Music:

Wii Music is supposed to be released in Japan on the 16th of October. Not long to go.

It is a music game, but instead of doing something at the right time, you have to pretend you’re playing the instrument by moving the Wii Remote. This game also makes use of the Balance Board for use when using the drums. Over 40 instruments are said to be available.

USA release: 20th October

PAL release: 14th November

This, looks to me like if done well, it could be a very entertaining game.

Review coming soon.

On October 2nd Nintendo announced a new handheld. The DSi, which is really what the DS Lite is to the original DS. The new features are:

• Gameboy Advance Slot taken out.
• SD Card reader
• Music player (reads from SD)
• 2 Built in Camera’s, one 3 mega-pixel, the other 0.3 mega-pixel
• Both screens are now 3.25 inches rather than 3 inches
• 12% thinner than the DS Lite
• Built-in web browser
• Downloadable DS Ware (Games and Applications)(Some costing Nintendo Points, some free)
• Internal Memory (unknown amount)

Pictures:

Personally I think this product is a bit of a waste of time. It doesn’t really add any ‘key’ features. Sure all this stuff is useful perhaps, but its not exactly revolutionary. This seems like a slightly more worthwhile update that the DS Phat to the DS Lite but, as far as I can tell it will make some games such as; Guitar Hero: On Tour obselete because of the lack of a GBA Slot. The DS Ware features of the DSi WILL be region locked. Which means anyone who imports a Japanese DSi most probably won’t be able to get any English DS Ware titles onto their DSi.

Either way, I won’t be buying a DSi unless some really groundbreaking stuff is released as DS Ware. Even then, £100+ is a lot of money to pay for an upgrade that doesn’t really add much if you have an MP3 player and camera already.

- Jackreyes

The Nintendo Conference was quite eventful this year, mostly because of the announcement of the DSi which I will preview in my next post.

Other points were:

• To address the lack of storage space on the Wii, Nintendo will make it possible from Spring 2009 to download WiiWare or Virtual Console games straight onto an SD card from the Wii Shopping Channel, and presumably then loading them from the SD card.
• Nintendo plan to re-release Gamecube games on the Wii as a new series of Play on Wii Selection. One game included will be Pikmin.
• Punch Out will be receiving a Wii title soon.
• Miyamoto showed Wii Music again.

For all the full details of the conference I suggest looking here.