It’s a few weeks old now, but it doesn’t make it less exciting. Here is a clip of some gameplay of Super Mario Galaxy, unveiled at E3 2007. I’ve been really enjoying Super Mario 64 on Virtual Console (33 stars so far !!), and this game looks like Super Mario 64 on steroids.
The release date is reported to be November, 2007 for the USA … but Europe and Australia get Super Mario Galaxy in August 2007 !! Nice to see Australian Wii owners don’t always get shafted with late (or non-existent) release dates
Let’s face it: YouTube is uber cool, but it sort of sucks when viewed using the Wii Internet Channel. Zoom in, zoom out .. switch fullscreen …wait … wait some more. And I can never hit that pokey little Pause button with the Wiimote pointer. TV isn’t supposed to be too interactive, and when I’m vegging out on the couch I don’t want to have to mess around with all that just to view each short video comfortably.
Enter Moowee.tv and StumbleVideo; two YouTube-powered video sites that specifically optimise their pages for viewing on the Wii.
Australian Virtual Console releases this week are dominated by TurboGrafx-16 games .. after six months of no TG-16 for Australia, Nintendo are now laying them on thick and fast.
Releases are:
Battle Lode Runner (TG-16), a multiplayer version of the fun and tricky Lode Runner series (a platform/puzzler).
Here are some general guidelines which should keep in mind to ensure your WordPress temples display properly in the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii. Much of this applies to any web page designed for the Wii Internet Channel.
Test your site in Opera 9. The Internet Channel on the Wii is based on Opera 9, so testing in Opera 9 is a great start to finding potential compatibility issues. Ultimately, you really need to view the page on the Wii using a TV to check that is it legible.
The maximum page width is 800 pixels wide, but keeping image and CSS element widths well under this is advised (the Wii shop channel looks good, and is 608×456). This should mean that the user doesn’t have to scroll sideways or zoom out to see the layout as intended.
JPEG, GIF, PNG (with alpha transparency), BMP, ICO, SVG 1.1 basic, and scripted canvas are supported.
Only Flash 7 is supported, and most Javascript is okay (no Java or other plugins are available)
Opera on Wii uses only two fonts: a sans-serif font “Wii NTLG PGothic” and a monospace font called “Wii NTLG Gothic”. Keeping the font size to a minimum of 14 – 16px should ensure that the fonts are legible on a TV without requiring the user to zoom in.
I was planning on customising a Wordpress template to detect if the browser has the User-Agent for the Wii Opera browser (Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)), and display a custom css stylesheet accordingly. Turns out, this has already been done with the WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3) !! I’ll probably tweak it a little in the future, but it works well enough to use “out of the box” !!
(For Firefox users who wanting to see this site using the stylesheets designed for the Wii, install the Switch User Agent Add-on and add the User-Agent “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)”, then reload this site).
Here are some links with general guidance to make pages display better on the Wii:
The 100th Virtual Console game on the Australian Nintendo Wii Shop has been released. Nintendo claims that the 100th game is Metroid for the NES (but several other VC games were also released on Australia’s weekly “Virtual Console Friday”, so which one was really the 100th ?).
The US and Europe hit their 100th release two and three weeks ago, with the US 100th VC game being “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link” for the NES, and “F-Zero X” for the N64 being Europes 100th release.
