Category: Games

Wii shortages will continue for six more months!
GameStop reports that Wii shortages will continue for at least the next six months. Is this 2007, or 2008?
Still looking for a Wii? Well keep looking, because video game retail giant GameStop revealed this week that it expects shortages of the console to persist until at least September.
You read that right. While GameStop executives said in a conference call this week that the company was seeing an end to the post-holiday shortages that affected the Xbox 360 and DS in January, the Wii was having no such luck.
GameStop COO Dan DeMatteo confirmed, saying that with the Wii, the company anticipated the console’s supply “won’t meet demand for the next 2 quarters,” at the very least. The estimate would put the duration of the Wii shortage at almost the two-year mark since its launch in November 2006.
Additionally, the GameStop call did not address what could happen to the Nintendo supply chain in the wake of the Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit US launches on April 27 and May 19, respectively. If they are successful, and early indications from Japan and US media circles say that they will be, the two quarter estimate could very well become much longer.
On a final note, GameStop CFO David Carlson said the company was still anticipating shortages with the PSP; was “not seeing any problems with PS3”; and expects “good [PS3] stock when GTA IV launches.”

Hey Jude, how about Guitar Hero: The Beatles?
A Guitar Hero: The Beatles title is music to the ears of the owner of the John Lennon- Paul McCartney song book copyrights.
It would appear as though this Guitar Hero thing is the real deal, because even the notoriously fickle folks behind The Beatles song catalogue have warmed to the idea of a themed GH game that features the mop topped musical machinations of one of the world’s most popular bands.
In an article over at the Los Angeles Times today, Martin N. “Marty” Bandier, the top executive at the music publishing company that owns the John Lennon- Paul McCartney copyrights, said he “liked the idea” of a dedicated Beatles edition of Guitar Hero.
“It’s something we have talked about and something I’d like to pursue,” Bandier said.
This is the second themed Guitar Hero spin off that has been announced in as many months. As was reported in GamePro last month, Activision revealed that Aerosmith would be the first act with a dedicated version of Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith will launch in June for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator dies at 69
MILWAUKEE – Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and is widely seen as the father of the role-playing games, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69. He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game’s legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family’s home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.
“It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them,” Gail Gygax said. “He really enjoyed that.”
Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that’s still growing in popularity.
Born Ernest Gary Gygax, he grew up in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. Gygax’s father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre, Gail Gygax said.
Gygax dropped out of high school but took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago for a while, she said. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s, when he began playing war-themed board games.
But Gygax wanted to create a game that involved more fantasy. To free up time to work on that, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman, she said.
Gygax also was a prolific writer and wrote dozens of fantasy books, including the Greyhawk series of adventure novels.
Gary Sandelin, 32, a Manhattan attorney, said his weekly Dungeons & Dragons game will be a bit sadder on Wednesday night because of Gygax’s passing. The beauty of the game is that it’s never quite the same, he said.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.

Rock Band knock-off announced for Wii, DS
Disney on Wednesday announced Ultimate Band for Wii and DS, no peripherals required (but isn’t that part of the fun?).
“Disney is working with some of the very biggest names in rock, alternative, popular, emo and indie rock music, allowing band mates to play sets from a broad selection of current hits and all-time rock favorites,” says a presser. “Friends and families can rock out on guitar, bass, drums or as the front man.”
Ultimate Band will exclusively use either the Wii remote or DS stylus when hitting on screen notes. Without the use of a microphone, however, we wonder if the “front man” will merely play the tambourine, or better still, the cowbell.
Sadly, a list of licensed tracks were missing from today’s announcement, but Disney says the included songs are “instantly-recognizable.. from every decade since the 60s.” The game is slated for a 2008 holiday release on Wii and DS.
More rhythm games can only be a good thing, but we’ll keep our expectations low until we learn more about Ultimate Band.

New Guitar Hero gives sweet emotion to Aerosmith fans
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Activision Inc on Friday unveiled a new “Guitar Hero” video game focusing on the rock band Aerosmith, taking the billion-dollar franchise in a new direction.
Called “Guitar Hero: Aerosmith,” the new game will arrive in stores this summer, a surprise to many analysts and fans who had expected the next title to come out closer to the year-end holiday shopping season.
Aerosmith, known for hits such as “Dream On” and “Sweet Emotion,” is the top-selling American rock band of all time, with sales of 66.5 million albums in the United States alone.
The game will feature about 30 Aerosmith songs as well as others from various acts that have opened for the band. The price has not yet been set.
“The premise is that it’s going to cover the 30-plus years of the band, from high school all the way through the rock superstardom of today,” Kai Huang, head of Activision’s RedOctane unit, which guides development of the franchise, told Reuters in an interview.
In the “Guitar Hero” games, players try to press colored buttons on a guitar-shaped controller in time with notes cascading down the screen. If the notes are hit, the song plays properly, and the player earns points.
Since the original “Guitar Hero” was released in late 2005, the series has gone on to sell more than $1 billion. Depending on the version, a bundle including the game and a controller costs from $80-$100, while the stand-alone game costs $40-$60.
When Activision reported quarterly earnings last week, analysts grilled the company on its plans for the franchise, expressing concern that sales would slow this year because many players who bought earlier versions with guitars would opt to buy the lower-price stand-alone game disks.
Huang said Activision had not yet decided whether it would offer a special controller with the Aerosmith game.
NEW DIRECTION
The focus on a single band marks a new twist for the franchise, whose three main titles featured dozens of artists spanning classic rock, grunge, metal, punk and other rock subgenres. Last year, Activision also released “Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s” with songs from that decade.
“It’s just a completely new way to interact with this music and with Aerosmith, and we think there’s more opportunity to do that in the future,” Huang said.
By spotlighting a single band, the company has also come up with a way to counter rival music game “Rock Band” from Viacom Inc unit MTV and Electronic Arts Inc, Activision’s top competitor.
“Rock Band,” which includes drums and a microphone as well as a guitar, each week has offered new songs that can be downloaded to consoles like Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360 and Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3.
The music industry is eyeing “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” as a way to revive flagging sales. “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero 3,” both launched last fall, have together sold millions of songs at about $2 each via download.
Speaking of Aerosmith’s willingness to work on the project, Huang said: “They recognize that it can deliver their music in an innovative and new way. It’s a new distribution platform for them.”
To recreate the sense of attending an Aerosmith concert, developers held motion-capture sessions with band members, including energetic frontman Steven Tyler and lead guitarist Joe Perry.
“As you play,” Huang said, “you’re going to be seeing Joe and Steven doing their moves onstage.”

Nintendo’s Miyamoto: Quitting smoking and gambling led me to Wii Fit
In a candid interview with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto talked about how his chain-smoking, pachinko-playing past led to the creation of Wii Fit.
Many Nintendo fans like to put Shigeru Miyamoto on a pedestal of perfection for the monumental contributions he’s made to video games over the past 20 years, but it wasn’t always Easy Street for the quirky developer.
In fact, during an interview with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata this week, the esteemed Miyamoto revealed he was plagued with poor eating habits, weight issues and a borderline pachinko addiction during his early years as a developer. What was bad for Miyamoto was good for gaming, however, as his subsequent desire to improve his health so many years ago led to one of the most popular peripherals in Japan: Wii Fit (one million sold in seven weeks).
“I used to play pachinko many years ago, but that stopped when I started swimming. Simply swimming without thinking about anything except how demanding it was had a similar effect to the stress relief I got from pachinko, which enabled me to escape the cycle of worries I had. Another thing I managed after quitting pachinko was to stop smoking, which also lead to better fitness,” Miyamoto said.
Miyamoto also talked about the challenges of working with a development team and outside hardware manufacturers that were wary of creating such a complicated, risky piece of technology.
“We subsequently decided that we’d just have to go ahead and make it ourselves, fully aware that if we just made it like an ordinary scale you could buy anywhere, it’d be just plain boring. That’s when, after a process of trial and error, we settled on the idea of making it so that you could balance on four points: front, back, left and right. This in turn lead us to the idea that we could also use it as an interface for a game,” he said.
Even the size of the Wii Fit balance board was meticulously vetted by the infamously fickle Miyamoto, who’s been known to make drastic changes to software and hardware at the last possible minute. A fan favorite from the US was brought in to test how the board responded to American feet.
“Since Reggie at [Nintendo of America] was scheduled to come to Japan to attend meetings of overseas executives, we had him get on the Wii Balance Board and even measured his shoulder width!” Miyamoto said. Suffice to say, the board passed the Regginator test.
In their four-page interview Iwata and Miyamoto also tackled one of the long standing criticisms of any accessory: you’d be hard pressed to find a 3rd party developer that would specifically design a game around one because of the risks involved. With WiiWare, Iwata thought Nintendo might have a solution.
“I think it’d be nice if some new, simpler software that used the Wii Balance Board came out through WiiWare,” Iwata said. “I think if you suddenly released new software for the Wii Balance Board at full price, the publishers would find it a bit difficult to market as packaged software to be sold in shops. That’s why I think it’d be good if you could download less expensive software onto your Wii instead of just relying on boxed games.”

EA confirms Rock Band for Wii
In a third quarter conference call on Thursday, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello confirmed the “coming launch” of Rock Band for Nintendo Wii.
Unfortunately, details on pricing, a ship date, and downloadable content were not disclosed, though it should be expected sometime this year.
Speculation of Rock Band on Wii began last April, when Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos said, “We will, at some time, bring Rock Band to every [important] platform,” adding that “the Wiimote is something that holds enormous promise.”
Rock Band has been heavily lauded by critics and gamers alike for taking the formula of what Guitar Hero does so well (rocking out) and adding to it with drums, vocals, and digital band chemistry.

Nintendo reveals its top selling Wii, DS games
On Monday Nintendo announced its platinum-selling first-party games, those with more than 1 million copies sold.
In their latest financial report, the company disclosed the following worldwide best-sellers in total units sold (including bundles):
Wii
Wii Sports – 17,850,000
Wii Play – 9,230,000
Super Mario Galaxy – 5,190,000
Mario Party 8 – 4,350,000
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – 4,300,000
Super Paper Mario – 2,160,000
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree – 2,000,000
Mario Strikers Charged – 1,650,000
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption – 1,140,000
Link’s Crossbow Training – 1,070,000
Wii Fit – 1,050,000
Nintendo DS
Nintendogs – 17,790,000
Pokemon Diamond & Pearl – 14,170,000
New Super Mario Bros. – 13,140,000
Brain Age – 11,710,000
Brain Age 2 – 9,840,000
Mario Kart DS – 9,670,000
Animal Crossing Wild World – 9,200,000
Super Mario 64 DS – 5,780,000
Big Brain Academy – 4,610,000
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass – 3,820,000
Pokemon Ranger – 2,610,000
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon – 1,540,000
The report also quietly confirmed a 2008 release for Kirby and Animal Crossing on Wii. As always, Nintendo’s first-party sales are impressive. The same cannot be said of third-party sales, however.

“Rock Band,” “Guitar Hero” drive digital song sales
DENVER (Billboard) – In the two months since MTV Networks and Harmonix released the music-based videogame “Rock Band,” players have purchased and downloaded more than 2.5 million additional songs made available after the game’s initial distribution.
Activision, meanwhile, said it has sold more than 5 million new songs via download for “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” since it began adding downloadable content in early November.
By comparison, it took wireless operator Sprint four months to sell 1 million songs on its over-the-air full-song download service. While new digital music services competing with iTunes and free peer-to-peer services have struggled to convince music fans to pay $1 for a single, downloadable tracks for games like “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” are flying off the digital shelves.
“With such a low installation base, we didn’t think that there’d be 2 million songs sold in eight weeks,” MTVN Music Group/Logo/Films division president Van Toffler said. “We live in a rough time around music where our audience struggles to pay $20 for a CD but don’t hesitate to pay $50 for a game. The notion to pay 99 cents or $1.99 to have a song and repeatedly play with it apparently isn’t a big hurdle.”
The original “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” games shipped with more than 50 licensed songs each, a mix of master recordings and covers. Since then, “Rock Band” has made new music available every week as either singles or in three-pack bundles that can be added as new playable levels for between 99 cents and $5.50. “Guitar Hero III” did the same, focusing on three-song bundles of new music and music featured in previous versions of the game.
Although MTV is not providing specific numbers, it did say that the majority of the downloaded songs were purchased by Xbox 360 as opposed to PlayStation 3 users. According to the NPD Group, “Rock Band” sold 775,000 copies for the Xbox 360 through the end of 2007, compared with 250,000 on the PS3.
METALLICA SHINES
The game’s impact on song sales for participating artists, however, remains unclear. While not providing exact sales figures, MTV did say that the Metallica three-pack of “Ride the Lightning,” “Blackened” and “And Justice for All” is the best-selling “Rock Band” download.
According to Nielsen SoundScan data, those same songs saw digital download sales spikes of 31 percent, 39 percent and 48 percent, respectively, for the month after they were featured as a “Rock Band” download, over the previous month.
But those increased sales numbered only in the hundreds, while the “Rock Band” downloads numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Still, label executives are thrilled with the results.
MTVN already has plans to expand its outreach to artists, creating additional game expansions — as both physical products and downloadable content — around specific music genres and even artists.
“We are talking to tons of bands, from indie to the most established … to release not necessarily their entire catalog, but maybe some of their classic albums and do special packages around that,” Toffler said.
What’s more, there’s no reason for “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” to be the only videogames that sell music. It’s only a matter of time before other games begin offering new downloadable soundtracks as well.
Titles like the “Madden” football series, the Tony Hawk skateboarding franchise and the venerable “Grand Theft Auto” games are well known for their extensive soundtracks. Offering gamers the ability to replace their soundtracks every few months after the initial release is not only technically possible with today’s new-generation consoles, but also on the horizon.
“That’s certainly something we’re interested in,” Electronic Arts worldwide head of music Steve Schnur said earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show.

British boy pees on brother’s Wii for spite
Four-year-old Ellis Emsley from Fleetwood, England desecrated his brother’s newly gifted Wii with liquid discharge after the latter refused to play together.
“It seems Ellis got fed up with Danny being obsessed with the Wii and refusing to play with him,” said Mrs. Emsley, courtesy of the Metro. “He was told it was his turn on the Wii next, but he took it a bit too literally and used his secret weapon to sabotage the machine.”
Indeed, the humiliated Wii was left water-logged and out of order after the incident. Father Darren, who spent months procuring the highly sought-after console, is hoping the “accident” will be covered by his home owner’s insurance.
“It must surely be counted as a leak,” he said.