In a few days time, Tuesday 20th of May, WiiWare launches in Europe. Nintendo may be late to the table with their downloadable game sub-platform, but its line-up is not to be sneered at and its potential exciting.
For the purpose of confusion, Nintendo have been cryptic about the exact launch line-up. These are the announced games, but not all of them will be there on Tuesday. Some will be spread across the following weeks, with the aim of releasing a new game every week.
A new version of Dr. Mario with local and online multiplayer. A demo version of the game can be sent to play against someone without the game in a similar fasion to DS Download Play single-cart multiplayer games.
| Developer: Arika/Nintendo | Price: £7.50 (1000WP) |
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A town-building spinoff of a spinoff series of a pseudo-series. A glutinously priced array of micro-downloads are available from day one. Not very subtle.
| Developer: Square Enix | Price: £11.25 (1500WP) |
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A 2.5D platform adventure with beautiful graphics from Frontier,
Elite-programmer David Braben's studio who are currently developing the supposedly very ambitious
The Outsider for PS3 and 360. This is arguably the crown jewel of the WiiWare launch and they're already planning a sequel.
| Developer: Frontier | Price: £7.50 (1000WP) |
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A simple but apparently rather good pointy-shooty game with time limits and chaining and powerups and thngs, for up to 4 players. The only 'indie' game of the line-up. It's the first game from a tiny new developer called Nnooo who had the advantage of connections at Nintendo of America.
| Developer: Nnooo | Price: £5.25 (700WP) |
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A slight spin on the vertical-scrolling shooter series, based on time-attack gameplay across just two levels.
| Developer: Hudson | Price: £6.00 (800WP) |
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A new version of the Dutch puzzle platformer originally on Gameboy Colour.
| Developer: Two Tribes | Price: £6.75 (900WP) |
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A basic 4-player trivia quiz game which uses Miis.
| Developer: Gameloft | Price: £7.50 (1000WP) |
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There's also a game called
Pirates: The Key of Dreams from Oxygen, supposedly arriving at some point. But without so much as a screenshot released, they obviously don't care if we don't care.
Anyway, Lost Winds ey?
posted by Raff 
