It looks like Nintendo released the first WiiWare games to North America this morning. They include Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, Defend your Castle, LostWinds, Pop, TV Show King, and V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack. Do you think any of these look especially interesting? Think there are any little gems here? What are your impressions?
btw, some type of storage expansion for the wii has be imminent, i'd wager we'll know more early this summer
Last edited by Cubit; 05-12-2008 at 06:01 AM.
Defend Your Castle is one of my favorite little flash games. Is it the same game? That's fun, but I can't imagine playing it on my Wii rather than a REAL game.
I'm interested in My Life as King and Lost Winds. If anyone has a chance to play them before I get home from work, please share your thoughts! (And save me some money if they stink!)
Lost Winds. Edge has had some good coverage of it (which always gets me hyped, even when it stabs me in the back), and the idea appeals to me in a very Okami-with-Wii-controls-done-right kind of way. Except it's not really the same kind of game, and all that, but for some reason that's the association my brain has gone with.
I've found that Edge is overly generous to UK developers in previews and reviews. (Still, I want Lost Winds to be great!)Originally Posted by Lizard_King
Edge is all over the map on previews. Still, I dled all 258 blocks of LostWinds just now, I'll let you know what I think FWIW.
Based on the screenshots in the online store, it is indeed the same as this game, though with co-op multiplayer and probably some other tweaks, too.
I'll just wait and see what the word-of-mouth on these games is like, since none of them really jumped out at me.
LW is an odd creature. I think I was correct in thinking it would be like Okami in some ways. It's pleasant to play and the mechanics seem solid on the surface, but I guess I'll have to see a bit more before I can see if they are going anywhere. Right now, the wind power as standard platform double jumping is doing nothing for me, and gusting fire and the like is not too impressive, but I imagine it scales and evolves. At least, I hope it does.
Probably what I like the least is the slow mo you go into when doing the wind moves. I guess it's necessary to pull them off, and it does keep the frantic gesturing down to a minimum, but at the moment it bothers me a bit, and I can't really put my finger on why.
I read the online manual for My Life as a King and was pretty tempted to purchase it. I love these simulation type games but I still need a bit of proof that it's well executed. Anybody seen reviews or early impressions? Neogaf would be my go to source but it seems they are having technical difficulties with their board at the moment.
Here's some impressions of the Japanese release of it back in March by Chris Kohler.
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/03/...e-impre-6.html
My Life As a King seems really interesting. That article makes it sound a bit like a console version of Majesty.
I doubt I'll ever buy anything on Wii DLC again until Nintendo figures something out regarding space issues. I ran out months ago and the irritation of making room for Lords of Thunder alone was enough to turn me into a grumpy gamer.
I can't wait for the moment I no longer have space for Disc-based savegames...won't that be a picnic selecting which adored classic game gets shitcanned because I want to save in the new Zelda Wii.
Wired will be adding impressions of all of the WiiWare launch titles here. They've currently got "full impressions" of My Life as King, Lost Winds, and Defend the Castle.
I want all three of those.
No demos?! XBLA has me spoiled I guess, but it still sucks not to have demos for these games.
So anyone here have impressions of My Life as a King? I have a soft spot for RPG's with a town building element (Suikoden, Azure Dreams, Dark Cloud 2), and a whole game of that sounds like $15 of fun to me.
Everyone's oogling over LostWinds but I'm not in love. I like it, it's quite pretty and it makes good use of the wiimote, but it hasn't grabbed me like MLaaK has.
So what do you do if you're almost out of blocks on the Wii? I heard from someone that you can back virtual console games onto SD cards, but you can't play them from there. And the process of backing it up is cumbersome and a pain in the ass.
Did they fix this with Wiiware games? Can you download a game straight to an SD card? If not, can you download it to the Wii, and then transfer it to an SD card and play it from there? If not, are they at least planning to sell a hard drive for the Wii any time soon?
It's not really cumbersome to copy games to an SD card, just really, really slow. It's faster for a lot of people to just redownload it from the store instead.
WiiWare doesn't change anything as far as I've heard, and you still can't play anything straight from the SD card (I'd imagine there are performance concerns there).
So the store remembers your Wii then, I take it? It remembers that this particular Wii downloaded this particular set of games, and is allowed to download them again if they've been erased? I know I never had to sign in and tell them my identity in any way, like a PSN account or an XBL gamertag, so I'm assuming the only way they could know who I am is through the hardware identity of my Wii.
Yeah, there should be an area within the store where you can see your download history and redownload anything you've previously bought. I don't know specifically how they tie it to the Wii, but I have heard that Wiis sent in for repair retain that history. But yeah, since it's not account based, you can't identify yourself to somebody else's Wii and play them there.
fwiw both LostWinds and MLaaK downloaded within 2 minutes and I believe those are the two largest applications to download from the service. It is certainly annoying to have to "clean out the fridge", but you can re-download games that you've already purchased.
All your purchases are tied to the Wii you own. If you have a My Nintendo account on the Nintendo website, you can even check there to see what you purchased. Everything is contained with your machine and ID so that you can redownload them at any time.
If you delete a Virtual Console or WiiWare game channel, you just go find that in the store again and then redownload it when you want to put it back.
So how does the whole SD card thing work for storage?
From what I've read it sounds like 2GB SD is the max, you can shuffle stuff between internal storage and the sd card but you can only execute from internal storage, and copying is SLOW (that's nuts that re-d/l is faster than transfer to sd).
I tried a 4gb sd (NON-SDHC) which works fine in my non-sdhc camera and pda. In the wii it can see save games I copied over from my old 512mb sd card to this 4gb using a pc (just standard fat32) but I can't seem to write anything to it which is lame.
Sounds like wii really needs a better storage mechanism if they want me to buy say more than 4 games for the lifetime of wiiware.
So I'll echo the sentiments about Lost Winds - I played it for an hour last night as was very pleased. Nice and calming wafting the little guy around, trying to get him up to new places.
I love all the little things that are affected by the wind as well. I played at spinning around water wheels and windmills for fun, had fun blowing around the villagers and listening to their "whoas", watching the trees and plants sway as I went past. Lots of little details that really add to the whole. Even with only an hour spent, I feel that it's been worth it.
I need more Wii Points! I want the FF:CC:MLAAK, Defend your Castle, and I know I'm picking up Dr. Mario whenever that makes it here.
Agreed. I transferred Sin and Punishment to the SD card last night, and it took about 5 minutes, which is about the same amount of time it took to download the Nintendo channel, which is also around the same number of blocks. So for me, SD card transfer is agonizingly slow, but it's still slightly faster than downloading it from the Nintendo store. I don't know why downloading things from the shopping channel is so slow though. Both my wired and wireless connections in the rest of the house are much, much faster.
Interesting. Both My Life as a King and LostWinds have gotten very positive reviews in the community recently. Tonight Gamespot reviewed them and gave scores of 5.0 and 5.5 out of 10 respectively. I haven't played either game, but the Gamespot reviewer's comments certainly haven't been echoed elsewhere . Wonder what their beef is.
I would have to agree that the game is not all that some people are cooking it up to be. Actually, the only thing that wasn't mentioned in that review is that you can send your adventurers out to gain experience, which will eventually let them take on the behests with rewards. OTOH, the game is fun little time waster, like Majesty was. $15 is a little high for the price, more and it would not be worth it to me. I'm definitely not buying any additional content for it.
Reading some of the comments in this thread made me wonder if Nintendo might publish a list of specifically recommended SD cards online. I recall seeing similar transfer speed issue complaints with other devices and it frequently boiled down to the manufacturer and class of the SD card in question.
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/sys...na/sdCards.jsp
Identifying Compatible SD Cards
Not all SD Cards are compatible with the Wii console. Please read the following:
* The Wii console is only compatible with SD Cards that are 2 GB (Gigabyte) or less. Cards with a capacity higher than 2 GB will likely not work with the Wii console.
* SD Cards with a slow speed may experience slow transfer time when loading files, or may not work at all. Slow transfer times can also occur with SD Cards that have a great number of files on them.
* While any SD Card with the above specifications may work, Nintendo has licensed specific SD Cards for use with the Wii console. You can identify these cards by the Nintendo Seal on the packaging of the SD Card. The following is a list of known licensed SD Cards and their manufacturers.
o Bensussen Deutsch & Associates, Inc. (BD&A) Switch and Carry
2 GB, 1 GB, 512 mb
o SanDisk
2 GB, 1 GB, 512 mb
#
The Official Nintendo Seal
Please note that even with a compatible SD Card, some devices may create image or movie files that are not compatible with the Wii Console. Click here for more information.
Last edited by barstein; 05-15-2008 at 10:47 PM.
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