Nintendo's DS and Wii release schedule for the rest of 2009 is here and it's pretty promising. On Wii we have New Super Mario Bros Wii coming... uh, in the "Holiday" window and Wii Fit Plus coming on October 4. Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks will be hitting DS just in time for Christmas on December 7. Girl gamers get Style Savvy on November and Pokefans get Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Sky on October 12.

For third parties, the picture over the next four months is pretty rosy. Noteworthy upcoming Wii releases include Spyborgs on September 22, Dead Space Extraction on September 29, and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers on December 26. In addition, WiiWare games promised to hit before 2009's done include Nintendo's Pokemon Rumble and the last three chapters of Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island.

On DS players can look forward to Cooking Mama 3: Shop and Chop, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, and Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter.  Noteworthy DSiWare slated for the rest of the year includes 10 new games based on Electroplankton and Shantae: Risky's Revenge. For a full list of games separated by category and publisher, though, just hit the jump. What are you looking forward to? 

 

I hope you DS owners have finished up Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box by now, because this is a big week for DS fans. Two long-awaited heavyweight games have hit DS in Scribblenauts and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, among a flood of lesser releases for DS and Wii. As it happens, Wii doesn't get anything incredibly interesting this week, but there's a multiplatform release that may deserve a little attention from comics fans.

Now, for fans on a tight budget, the big question is going to be "Should I buy Scribblenauts or Mario & Luigi?" I can only answer that with "Sell old games or mug people until you can afford both," because they're both equally great games that no DS collection is going to be complete without. Both games do have their own strong and weak points, though, so gamers who know their own tastes may be able to prioritize with a little information.

Whenever people say that video games are a waste of time, I inevitably find myself thinking about stuff like the Mario AI Competition. The goal of the competition is simple: design an AI using one of many different methods that can successfully play through segments of Marks Persson's open source Java-based Infinite Mario Bros, a clone that generates infinite randomized Mario levels that grow progressively more difficult over time. Since there's no way for the program to anticipate level designs, it'll have to make decisions in an intelligent fashion.

The video you see above displays the winning program from the Mario AI Competition in action, playing through a randomly-generated Mario sequence that would probably kill most human players instantly. The program was written by Robin Baumgarten using the A* algorithm to help the program make decisions about which of many possible decisions it should make regarding how Mario should behave. The result is an AI that could probably complete any extant Mario game with ease, possibly better than many human players.

 

It's likely to be a quiet week out of Nintendo of America. As you may have heard, some bright spark did not let the fact that he was half-dead from swine flu stop him from attending this year's Penny Arcade Expo, here in beautiful downtown Seattle. As a result, most if not all of the attendees are coming down with it now, which includes many people at the nearby headquarters of NoA; I believe the word that my source used was "ravaged," as if the swine flu actually attacked the building with axes and fire.

Thus, we have no official Download press release for today, and honestly, I wouldn't expect one. They're probably real busy with fluids and bed rest right about now.

Fortunately, Nintendo Raw woke up much earlier than I did today, and slapped a list of today's releases together from the ESRB's website. For WiiWare, we're looking at Mart Racer, which is kind of a clever concept if nothing else; future techno handball simulator Spaceball: Revolution; and Gameloft porting a Texas Hold 'Em Poker game from cell phones.

 The Virtual Console release of the week is, um, well, this. Crash 'n' the Boys is part of the Japanese series Kunio-kun, named after the president of Technos. By the time any of the games had made it over to North America, they'd been thrown into the translation grinder and came out as River City Ransom and Super Dodgeball. Looking at it, though, I think Crash 'n' the Boys might have gotten the worst end of that deal by a damn sight. Basically, if you were challenging the gang members in River City Ransom to some kind of illegal freestyle Olympics where you're allowed to hurricane-kick the other contenders, you'd get Crash 'n' the Boys.

There is no press release after the cut. Get well soon, Nintendo of America.

Welcome to the Contra Experience. You are going to die. You are going to die a lot. Be prepared for that and you can handle what this game offers.

Following repeated, underwhelming, performances after the end of the 16-Bit Era, it seemed as if Contra was doomed to fade away like many of its side-scrolling brethren. Konami’s attempts to adapt the series to more modern sensibilities only seemed to distance the games from what made them fun. Then Contra 4 on the Nintendo DS was a rousing success and Konami realized that letting the game stay close to its roots was not a bad thing at all.

Now we have Contra Rebirth for WiiWare, and, aside from a few minor quibbles, it stays true to form and can serve as a good introduction for those unfamiliar with the series.

Scribblenauts is due to be one of the big game releases for this week, but somehow a copy leaked earlier this weekend. One enterprising hacker got hold of the ROM and ripped out the full list of words it recognized... and it's [i]long[/i], to the tune of 22,802 words. You can browse a full list here, but beware spoilers (and some rough language from the uploader).

This list by itself could prove that Scribblenauts is going to be one of the year's must-buys. Here's just a very small sample of the frankly insane terms you can still enter into the game in order to create objects that help you solve a wide and crazy variety of puzzles.

  • Chicken Nugget
  • Dyoplosaurus
  • Encephalographer
  • Flugelhorn
  • Jump Rope
  • Miniature Bull Terrier
  • Nutritionist
  • Parachute Pants
  • Registered Nurse

The ESRB is the gift that keeps on giving! Right now the site is hosting a description and ratings information for a game called Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth. At the very least, we know a 2D Castlevania action game is heading to WiiWare in all of the series' gothic glory.

This is a side-scrolling action game in which players battle against monsters in Dracula's castle. Players use a chained whip to fight their way through halls and dungeons filled with zombies, skeletons, flying eyeballs, and bats. The enemy creatures frequently shoot projectiles and attack players in hand-to-hand combat.

Now, that description could really apply to any of the early 2D Castlevania games, but the title hints that this may actually be a revamp of one of the oft-forgotten Game Boy entries in the Castlevania series. The Castlevania Adventure shipped in December 1989 and stars Christopher Belmont, who unsurprisingly spends the game hacking at monsters with an upgradable whip.

Despite the game's slow character movement and atrocious graphics, Castlevania Adventure still has a fan-following based in part on how it leads in to the excellent Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge. If it seems a little weird as a candidate for a remake with shiny modern graphics, consider that Christopher Belmont was chosen to star in IDW's 2005 Castlevania: The Belmont Legacy comics. There's clearly some long-standing fan interest in the character, but his game is otherwise forgotten-- making it perfectfor a modern revisit.

Just two weeks ago, Denise Kaigler told gamers that Nintendo would not drop the North American Wii price for the holidays... but evidence to the contrary may have already surfaced. An alleged early versiion of a Wal-Mart ad circular to be distributed later this month promises a "new low price" for the Nintendo Wii. The outlet that obtained (but didn't post) the leaked ad, Kotaku, didn't find out the new Wii price but could say that the price drop would be effective in the first week of October.

If early October seems like a strange time for a price drop, think again. Tokyo Game Show is coming up later this month and it's a perfect venue for announcing a price drop that would probably apply to Japan as well as North America. Nintendo is specifically participating in the Kyoto Cross Media Experience, a show that runs concurrent with TGS and usually plays host to major product announcements.

While Nintendo President Satoru Iwata was also singing the "no price drop" tune in August, since then we've seen sales of the PS3 soar dramatically in Japan while North American Wii sales have almost fallen to PS3 and 360 levels. The Wii's original $250 price point is pretty long in the tooth by now and Nintendo may have good reason to think it won't be competitive with $299 360s and PS3s as the system goes into its fourth holiday season.

 

 

Amazon tends to offer gamers some ludicrously sweet deals, but this goes above and beyond all previous expectations. Through September 30, anyone who purchases a new DSi or DS Lite through Amazon gets their choice of free game or accessory from a list of options.

Ah, now I can guess what you're thinking-- "Clearly, the games and accessories are all either ancient or crappy." No, go check that link! Amazon's list of giveaway games includes truly awesome stuff like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and Rhythm Heaven (among other, more casual games).

The accessories are mostly lame, but note that one of the DSes you can buy to quality for the deal is the Lime Green DS Lite with Personal Trainer: Cooking that came out earlier this year. So you could snag that and then quality for another free game besides! 

Dead Space was originally conceived as a three-part multimedia blitz, with the game launching alongside a full-length animated movie and a six-issue comic book from Image.

Part of the reason that I was initially somewhat dismissive of Dead Space: Extraction is that the series needs an explanatory prequel like a fish needs a bicycle. Between the game's constant filmstrips and audio diaries, the game itself, the original comic series, and the animated series, the very simple storyline of Dead Space - planet miners find an ancient artifact on a deserted world and zombie-themed wackiness ensues - is approaching a level of exhaustive detail that it truly does not need.

That said, the comic books are actually pretty good. Antony Johnston wrote pretty much all things Dead Space, so everything dovetails fairly neatly, and EA and Image went so far as to stick Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night, Fell) on the art. While the coloring does Templesmith's art no real favors, he's an excellent visual storyteller, and elevates the material well beyond what it'd otherwise be.

Extraction the comic is a single-issue story concerning Nicole Brennan, a doctor aboard the Ishimura and the woman you spend most of the original Dead Space searching for. The comic is basically Nicole's story with a bunch of cameos from the game, filling in some blanks from the first game.

Should you pick up the comic? Well, yes and no. It's a decent comic, with okay art and a solid enough script, but it's utterly inessential. It exists for page six, then goes off on a booklong tangent involving the final fate of a woman whose final fate we already knew. It answers no questions and contains no suspense unless you never played the original game... and if that's the case, there's very little reason to want to read the book in the first place.

Like a lot of these tie-ins, Extraction the comic book seems to be written for some hypothetical audience of Dead Space fanatics, who are hanging on every detail of the game's story and want clarification on the fate of even the most minor extra. It's like an artifact from an alternate universe where Dead Space actually was what some people think Metal Gear Solid is.