Kooloo-Limpah! Steal Tingle’s Magic words and he’ll cut you! Image courtesy of 1up Anyone who ever doubted the wisdom of Nintendo’s friend codes needs to take a look at the latest issue of Famitsu (via 1up). Within, you can see that disturbing fairy wannabe Tingle has returned to darken your doorstep. So lock up your [...]

Blizzard’s success with games bearing the suffix “-craft” has had some unintended consequences outside the occasional dead man in an internet cafe. Among them is the onset of genre myopia. Take strategy as an example: list off all the strategy games you can think of off the top of your head. You certainly listed off Warcraft and Starcraft, but how far down the list did you get before you reached a tower defense game? Blizzard’s runaway success redefined not only what strategy games are, but what they can be. So you mightn’t necessarily think of other takes on the genre like Dyson, Pikmin, or 5th Cell’s most recent title, Lock’s Quest. Here’s what it is and why you should.

As Nintendo has passed from the Gamecube, through the DS, and to the Wii, they’ve gotten better at bridging the gap between developers and Nintendo’s constantly fluctuating vision of interactivity. Nobody ever really figured out how to make good use of the Gamecube-GBA connectivity, and it took a year and Canvas Curse before anybody really did anything with the DS’s touch controls. It took still less lead time before Wii waggle started catching on. The incredible shrinking lead time derives partly from increasing developer interest as Nintendo’s market presence grows, but it’s also because Nintendo has learned something that authors figured out centuries ago: show don’t tell. If there’s a series that’s as much tech demo as it is video game, it has to be Warioware, and guess what? Warioware: Snapped accompanies the newly camera-enriched DSi as a downloadable game. Read on for our impressions.

It turns out that it’s cheaper to develop games for hardware that’s little more than two Gamecubes taped together (does anyone even remember that slur for the Wii any more?). Seriously though, according to gamesindustry.biz, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata recently said in a conference call that Nintendo is being courted by third parties as they try to develop affordable games in tough economic times. Said Iwata, “Some are reportedly saying that they bet on the wrong horse or that they need to change course.” Nintendo has always been the primary supporter of its own hardware, especially during the N64 and Gamecube generations when third parties flocked en masse to Sony’s consoles.

Although the console has been criticized for a glut of poor-quality bargain bin games, Iwata was optimistic about future support, saying, “Overall, we recognise that our relationships with the software manufacturers are shaping up better than before. So, in the mid-term, we believe that more attractive titles will be launched by them for our platforms.”

A rising tide may lift all boats, but a falling tide won’t sink Nintendo.

The latest in a long stream of Symphony of the Night clones, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia transplants the core gameplay tenets of that venerable PS1 game without rocking the boat too hard. Unfortunately, the sense of place that used to reward exploration gameplay has been replaced with a more homogeneous world, so there isn’t as much to see, even if there is plenty to do.

It looks like Nintendo is getting a case of the ‘me toos’. Gamasutra reports that the casual console maker is following suit with Microsoft and Sony’s Netflix partnerships.

Of course, Nintendo still marches to its own drummer, and it appears that the new partnership will actially be with an advertising company, Dentsu, to provide original streaming content instead of the Netflix video rental model. Although this announcement only applies to japan for the time being, Nintendo hopes to extend the service to the west in 2009.

This announcement follows an earlier one that the Wii would soon see a theater channel. Whether this means that Nintendo plans to offer both movies and television remains to be seen. How long can it be before the Omni-Leisure 5000 graces our living rooms?

Console sales have long been a painful exercise where the manufacturer takes a monetary hit on every unit sold. They then cross their fingers and hope to make up the difference on first party software titles and licensing fees–not a bad bet considering the low cost of printing and distributing games and the high cost at the point of sale.

The gaming press has long portrayed Nintendo as the exception to this rule, but only just recently has Forbes placed its money at its media mouth and estimated the Wii’s console profit margin at $6. Given that the Wii has a comparable market penetration to Sony’s Playstation 3 and about half that of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo must be sitting pretty on that profit margin.

This news comes at about the same time as a gamesindustry.biz observation that the Wii is the hottest thing on Ebay since the terms of use made it illegal to sell and ship fire. The console is currently asking $100 over its MSRP on the popular auctioneering site. It’s almost as though Nintendo is stepping on its own long tail by starving the American market so close to the holiday sales season.

Persistent readers may recall that we reported on David Braben’s declaration of war against the used-games market. In case it’s just too hard to click the link, the short version was that he recommended tying purchases to particular consumers so they couldn’t be passed from person to person.

Although Baben hasn’t been heard from since then in gaming news, Nintendo seems to have listened. The upcoming Wii Speak peripheral will come with a “Wii download ticket number.” The peripheral amounts to a glorified speaker phone, but will at last bring voice chat to the Wii. The catch is that the peripheral won’t interact with most games except through the new Wii Speak Channel.

The more cynical among you will already have worked out that, without this number, Wii Speak owners won’t be able to download the Wii Speak channel for free. However you may not have guessed that the channel won’t be for sale at all, so that download number is your only access to the essential software.

Even if the download number doesn’t tie itself to a particular console once used, secondhand buyers will need to ensure that they’re getting the number with the peripheral. Otherwise it’ll be a useless hunk of plastic.

Just when you thought consoles were safe from intrusive DRM.

Edit: Gamesindustry.biz is reporting that the code is consumed by a single use.

Not content to mine old content from two or more generations ago, Nintendo has added part of the Gamecube’s lineup to the list of games that will give your wallet Déjà vu. It sounds ridiculous to buy $10 Ebay games at retail, especially since the Wii is already backward compatible with the Gamecube, but Nintendo is justifying the purchase by retrofitting the games with gestural controls. With that in mind, most of the list makes sense:

• Chibi Robo
• Mario Tennis
• Metroid Prime
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
• Pikmin
• Pikmin 2

When the Wii first announced, many gamers’ first thoughts were of how to improve existing games with motion controls. If the Nintendo sees success with these games at the expected $35 mark, your fanboy dreams may just come true.

Nintendo’s Tokyo press conference revealed quite a bit of news from the usually tight-lipped company, but the DS hardware update, the DSi, has dominated the industry chatter. Unfortunately for Nintendo, not much of it has been positive.

The new device will feature a 0.3 megapixel camera, a bigger screen, the ability to play AAC files, and a new SD slot to load those files up. The SD card will also function as a storage device for a new download service that will bring digital distribution to the handheld. Heck, slap telecommunications in there and it’s a cheap iPhone.

All the new functionality occupies space, though, and the GBA slot has been removed to make room. Fans of Guitar Hero: On Tour and backwards-compatible gaming at large will be disappointed by the loss. The price of entry has risen as well, and the whole package is being promised to Japan at the equivalent of $180, just $70 cheaper than a Wii.

Investors were not impressed by Nintendo’s announcement, and the company’s stock dropped by nearly 9% after the announcement. Adding to these troubles, developer Martyn Brown criticized the SD slot, warning that it would make the device more susceptible to piracy.

The handheld is scheduled to appear sometime in late 2009. With all the criticism flying around, Nintendo will be burdened with either changing the handheld or trying to demonstrate its worth.