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With Nintendo’s big Wii presentations happening at the end
of this week – 14th September, 2006, in the US and
Japan, 15th September, 2006, in Europe – you’d be
forgiven for believing this last week has been pretty quiet of in
the world of Wii. However, ahead of these announcements, a few
details of Wii’s run-up to launch have been revealed.
Firstly, and, perhaps most importantly, Third-Party
developers have finally been clued-in on the Wii Remote’s Internal
Memory and Speaker usage. Studios have informed us that the latest
update clarifies the functionality of the Speaker – as
demonstrated at E3 2006 through The
Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess – as well as detailing
the properties of the Internal Memory – a paltry 4,000 Byte
capacity. The Internal Memory will be used to store Save Data for
control-style preferences, however, may only store that of a single
title at any one time; subsequent games would require the data to be
overwritten. Basic knowledge of Data Profiling will no doubt allow
gamers to see that it’s highly likely that all your control
preferences will actually be stored on Wii’s Internal FLASH
Memory, and transferred to the Remote wirelessly, and automatically,
when starting a game. Nintendo has warned developers not to
disconnect or attach peripherals while data is being saved or
transferred onto the Remote, as it may corrupt data.
While on the subject of peripherals, a new attachment has
been announced. Along with UBi Soft declaring their love for Wii by
unveiling no less than seven launch titles, they’ve further this
by announcing two subsequent titles, and a new peripheral of their
own. Alive is UBi Soft’s big  female-focussed title,
featuring a system that has been labelled (and subsequently mocked)
“action plus”. The title is apparently set after an earthquake,
and players must use their wits to survive, UBi Soft’s Chief Executive, Yves
Guillemot, had the following to say; “It's more oriented toward
drama, more life in characters, more depth,” said Guillemot.
“It's still about surviving, but you can't resolve things by
shooting only.” The second title that UBi Soft announced
could’ve been predicted about a year ago; Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double
Agent will be arriving on Wii.
A new exclusivity deal signed by UBi Soft allows them to
release titles based on the GT Pro Series Championships anywhere in
the world except Japan, and UBi Soft have been building their first title, GT Pro
Series, exclusively for Wii. The title will come packaged with a
unique Steering Wheel Attachment and will be compatible with all Wii
games – although most likely will only be useful for Racing games!
The attachment has been designed by Thrustmaster, a company well
renowned for their Third-Party peripherals, and Tats Myoio, the
title’s associate producer, made the following statement; “To
enhance the user's driving experience, GT Pro Series will
include a Steering Wheel Attachment made by Thrustmaster
specifically designed for this game. The Wii Remote will fit into
wheel horizontally with all buttons accessible, so tilting the wheel
will tilt the remote.” The wheel looks quite wheel designed,
considering its nature as the Wii’s first Third-Party peripheral,
and will hopefully pave the way for plenty more in the future.
The last snippet this week come from our very own UK; in the form of an article published by the videogames industry’s
trade rag, MCV. According to the publication, Wii is due to
launch in the UK on 24th November, 2006, with a price-tag of £149.99. Now, while this would be utterly
wonderful, the address of the article offered the information as
fact, not speculation as it clearly is. It’s quite obvious that
anyone with basic knowledge of the videogames industry and the
workings of the entertainment sector could predict a release date
and price and be within only a small margin of error, especially
given Nintendo’s very leading comments till now. In fact, many of Electronic
Articles own employees have what could be believed as incredibly
accurate estimates, however, as a publication addressing the public
with two separate partitions to the industry – fact and, in an
altogether different presentation, opinion – it would be
inappropriate for us to publish these. As a publication offering
information to the inner circle of the common videogames industry
receptors - namely retail - it’s simply not a good idea to run
with news which has very little evidence to back it up, especially
on a topic that’s proving to be this year’s Christmas
hot-property. A major issue with our industry reaching the mass
market it wishes to is that of its media coverage. Major
publications wish to label consoles into pigeon-holes and
industry-specific publications seem to be happy offering childish
squabblings as their primary source of fact. Until publications,
especially of MCV’s supposedly reputable nature, start
leading with interesting, factual revelations, I can see no
rejuvenation of the UK mass market media for the videogames industry
- a factor that keeps videogames billed to many as simply kids toys
or evil, violent attempts at corrupting fragile minds, as opposed to
art and entertainment, alongside films, television and music.
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