It’s been pretty quiet here at the Frwee Wii Blog for the last few months. But I can’t resist quickly mentioning that Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People: Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner has been released on WiiWare. You can check out a demo on PC too. This is one of the strongest (pun slightly intended) additions the WiiWare offerings to date, especially for fans of the Homestar Runner and Strong Bad Flash cartoons, or those that enjoy point and click adventures like Sam and Max Hit the Road (the more recent incarnation of which has also been developed by Telltale Games).
Without wanting to sound too much like the Nintendo PR Department .. It’s great to see people having fun with the Wii. It’s been a year now, and yet the consumer demand and the general buzz is still alive and well … multiple family members have been requesting that I bring my Wii when I visit them over the Christmas period already … so much so I almost feel I could just lend them the Wii and not turn up, and they’d be happy .
A quick search on Flickr for ‘wii’ pulls up lots of smiling faces and flailing arms, reminding me of our last family gathering with the Wii. Here’s a few of my favorites (sorry, can’t embed Flickr photos here .. you’ll have to follow the links):
… Age is no barrier … now we’ve just gotta get these guys into some ‘hardcore’ games and encourage third-party developers to release some titles to capture the ‘grey dollar’.
There’s tons like this, and more at the Wii Motion Flickr pool … dedicated to photos of people having fun with their Wii. It’s like a peek into the living rooms of those lucky few who will unwrap a Wii come Christmas morning.
An update for the Wii Shop became available today (at least in Australia), which allows Virtual Console games to be bought as gifts and sent to a friend via their Wii Number. Unfortunately you cannot send Virtual Console games you have already bought, you have to send them directly from the Shop at purchase time (there are a few I bought in the first few weeks I’d love to give away now …).
The new version of the Photo Channel, version 1.1, is also now available … this is the slightly controversial one that removes MP3 support and replaces it with AAC format support. Luckily, Nintendo has allowed users who bought a Wii with the original MP3-supporting Photo Channel (v1.0) to upgrade to v1.1, and later downgrade back to v1.0 if they want to regain MP3 support. Good move Nintendo, allowing reversible upgrades …. of course it would have been nicer if the new Photo Channel simply supported BOTH MP3 and AAC, but that would have probably required twice the licensing fees …
This isn’t really Wii or Nintendo related, but an important ‘gaming news’ issue anyway. Most readers who follow general gaming news have probably heard a lot about the Gamespot-Eidos-Gerstmann affair already .. the executive summary is this:
The “sometimes controversial” Jeff Gerstmann reviews the new Eidos game Kane and Lynch and gives it a mediocre score. Most other reviewers agree with his analysis.
Jeff Gerstmann is fired.
Accusations and speculation fly that Eidos put pressure on Gamespot to fire Gerstmann, since Gamespot also has some advertising deals with Eidos.
There are lots of interestingresponses to these events, debating the state of ethics in game journalism and the state of game reviews in general.
So far there has been little comment of interest from the parties actually involved, but it will be certainly interesting to see how this all plays out. Gamespot has already lost a huge amount of credibility in my book, but lets see how they do the damage control …
.