There’s an entertaining review of Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles by Adam Hartley up at Sprong. I’ve been looking forward to this game, and it looks like it’s turned out to be decent, so I’ll probably pick up a copy myself sometime soon.

Some choice quotes:

“Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles is, in my opinion, the best original third-party game developed for release on Wii this year.”

“… Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles co-op, with two Zappers, is close to the most perfect amount of fun two people can have with their clothes on.”

I’d say the House of Dead Wii releases in the pipeline are going to have a hard time competing with RE:UC, and the classic RE4. Check out the full review for the lowdown.

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 …

That’s right … Virtual Console purchases have earned Nintendo the equivalent of ~ USD$33 million so far … to quote a Nintendo executive asked about this:

“we’re currently unsure if this is a lot or low. They’re not bad figures.”

I’ll say these figures are not bad ! Many of these classic games haven’t made any money for developers, publishers or Nintendo for 10 years or more … now suddenly they are resurrected and are turning a profit … the overheads of ‘porting’ them to the Wii via emulation wouldn’t be huge, so basically any profit should be considered a complete gift !

Via GWN and IGN.

I was going to attend this expo since I live nearby to where it’s being held … but after reading the program I decided it wasn’t really worth the effort. There weren’t going to be any great revelations like E3 or the Leipzig Games Convention, and most of the ‘previews’ of new games are things that have already been released in other parts of the world, just not Australia. This is the biggest event of it’s kind in Australia, and yet ultimately I felt uncompelled to attend. Some Gamer has blogged the eGames Expo(and here) and generally reconfirms my feelings. A few parts sounded okay; it’s a shame I missed the interview with the Aussie guys who worked on Bioshock, that sounded like it might have been interesting. Oh, and I wouldn’t have minded some freebies.

Greg Arthurton, Nintendo’s Australia’s Director of Marketing, gave a short keynote speech. It was just the usual Nintendo “marketoid” banter, read directly from his little cue cards. Hey, I couldn’t have done much better … it just wasn’t that exciting. Listen for the guy who groans loadly
when Greg claims Metroid Prime Corruption has “redefined the way we play a first person shooter on a home console” …. true, pointing the Wii Remote is a great new way to play a first person shooter, but it’s not really all that revolutionary but simply more of an extension of the gameplay style introduced many years ago with games like Duck Hunt on the original NES. I probably would have groaned or exhaled loudly too.

(Via Aussie-Nintendo)

Disturbing news from a fairly repuatable source (Engadet) about the soon-to-be-released Photo Channel update.

If you update your Photo Channel you will lose MP3 support for background music during slideshows, and instead have it replaced with AAC format support. Sure, AAC sounds better, but most of my (and many other peoples) CD collection has been ripped to MP3 years ago … I don’t exactly want to have to go back and re-rip all that music again. Maybe this is because Nintendo doesn’t want to pay the 75 cents per device licensing fee for using MP3 … if so that is pretty tight. If they remove MP3 support, they may as well replace it with the royalty free OGG format, since if the Photo Channel won’t support MP3 most people are going to have to convert their music to some new format to use it on the Wii anyway ….

I certainly won’t be updating my Photo Channel if MP3 support is removed, unless there is some compelling must-have new feature that I feel really outweighs what is otherwise a serious backward step.

Read the rest of this entry »