Nintendo Launches WiiWare: An Open Playground for Creativity
Downloadable Game Service Delivers Developers’ New Ideas Directly to Consumers
REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Nintendo’s Wii™ console has already changed the way people play games. Now its new WiiWare™ service decisively tears down limitations for how developers create games – and the way people receive them.
Starting today, Wii owners with an Internet connection can download new, creative games from a wide range of developers, from large publishers to indie shops. By reducing the barriers that make console game development prohibitively expensive, WiiWare showcases original ideas in the most democratic environment in industry history, connecting the people who make games more directly with the people who play them.
WiiWare frees developers from the traditional constraints of video game development. WiiWare lets developers experiment with big ideas and small budgets to the benefit of players everywhere. Newer, smaller teams now have an outlet for their creative ideas. The constantly growing WiiWare library will have a regular flow of unique video gaming experiences consumers might not otherwise have access to.
“WiiWare is to the video game industry what independent films are to Hollywood,” said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “WiiWare lets developers experiment with new ideas and experiences. Combined with our collection of classic Virtual Console games, Wii provides one-stop shopping for the greatest games of the past – and the future.”
WiiWare games are easy to download. Just go to the WiiWare section of the Wii Shop Channel, find the game you want, redeem Wii Points™ and start the download. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel or at retail outlets. New games, at various Wii Point values, will be added to WiiWare on Mondays. The newly launched Nintendo Channel on Wii will let people view videos of and read information about WiiWare games and other Nintendo products. Users also can see player opinions to help them decide what to play next.
Today, the inaugural lineup of WiiWare games is just a taste of things to come:
FINAL FANTASY® CRYSTAL CHRONICLES®: My Life as a King™ (Square Enix, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone – Mild Fantasy Violence, Mild Suggestive Themes, 1,500 Wii Points): FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES: My Life as a King takes a legendary franchise and launches it into the realm of simulation gaming. Players are challenged to rebuild a kingdom, leading its young king on a path of discovery through an adventure bristling with mystery and intrigue.
LostWinds™ (Frontier Development, 1-2 players, Rated E for Everyone – Mild Fantasy Violence, 1,000 Wii Points): A fresh, enchanting platform adventure that puts the power of the wind in the palm of your hand – from raging tornados to the gentlest breeze. You’ll wield your Wii Remote™ controller to power Toku’s jumps and glides, suspend and smash enemies, meet friends and solve puzzles using LostWinds’ novel, intuitive and playful control system.
Defend your Castle™ (XGen Studios, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone – Cartoon Violence, 500 Wii Points): Defend your Castle takes place on a grassy plain surrounded by invaders. You are the commander of your castle, and it is your duty to fling the invading enemies sky-high, watching them plummet to their demise. As you progress, add powerful spells and upgrades to your arsenal for repelling the attacks. How long can you hold them off?
Pop™ (Nnooo, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone, 700 Wii Points): Pop bubbles to score points and stop the timer from running out. Pop can be enjoyed by anyone – casual gamers can simply play to pop bubbles and keep the game moving, whereas advanced players will need to pick their shots rapidly and accurately and generate combos to maximize their score.
V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack™ (High Voltage Software®, Inc., 1-4 players, Rated T for Teen – Simulated Gambling, 700 Wii Points): V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack re-creates the casino experience, with fully animated players and a realistic Las Vegas dealer. Single players can increase their bankrolls, while multiple players can engage in a head-to-head mini-blackjack tournament.
TV Show King (Gameloft, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone, 1,000 Wii Points): TV Show King transforms your living room into a real TV quiz show studio where you’ll face the challenge of answering more than 3,000 questions across six different categories. Compete against family and friends and use your Wii Remote controller in original ways to make it to the finals to see who can win the greatest amount of cash in one final, deciding duel.
For more information about WiiWare, visit WiiWare.com. Remember that Wii features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other Wii features, visit Wii.com.
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I may look into defend your castle. I enjoyed the flash game and I do have 500 points burning a hole in my pocket.
No demos? I think I may pass on all of these, then. :/
I'm holding out for Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People in June. I think I'll wait for some reviews to come in before I start considering any others.
I'm in for Lost Winds. The lack of a demo doesn't bother me since I don't normally have a chance to check out many demos. It's $10 and looks too charming to pass up.
Seriously, why can't Nintendo offer demos?
I've always had fun with the hack and slash of Crystal Chronicles. (I had three other people to play with on the gamecube, so that helped.) So I'm thinking of picking that up when I get home.
Even if it isn't a real substitute, why not wait and see what the reviews says and give them a try based on those? Or does everyone always use demos nowadays?
I was going to pass on My Life As a King...but for some reason, I find myself wanting it.
Probably that little Sim lover in me...build up a castle and send adventurers out to do my bidding? Sold!
That's what that voice is telling me.
June comes around, the missus wants me to pick up Strong Bad's game. I was going to get it without her asking, but it makes it that much cooler that she wantsto play it too.
I don't do much demo based buying. Its a nice touch, but usually, if its a game I feel pretty strongly about conceptually (Way of the Samurai, Lost Winds, most brick and mortar games that I buy, actually . . .) I'm all for putting my points down.
The ones this hurts though are Pop and Defend your Castle. Neither compel me to buy them without hearing what other people think about it.
I don't do much demo based buying. Its a nice touch, but usually, if its a game I feel pretty strongly about conceptually (Way of the Samurai, Lost Winds, most brick and mortar games that I buy, actually . . .) I'm all for putting my points down.
The ones this hurts though are Pop and Defend your Castle. Neither compel me to buy them without hearing what other people think about it.
I can't wait...must go home!
I don't base all of my purchases on demos, but XBLA (and to a lesser extent, PC gaming) have conditioned me in such a way that I expect a demo. Especially when it comes to digital distribution. I'm OK with putting my trust in the hands of reviewers (in fact, I hope we have a LostWinds review up on Dtoid sometime this week), but it's always nice to go hands-on with a title. You can usually tell within the first five or ten minutes whether or not you feel the game is worth your money.
@ShawnKelfone -- You might want to do a bit of reading before you by My Life as a King. It's a sim, no hacking or slashing involved.
I haven't been this excited about a Nintendo product since....ummm, I think No More Heroes?
I'm holding out for Eternity's Child, World of Goo, New Alien Crush, and the Strong Bad game myself.
@Nick Chester
Yeah, I'm the same way. For full retail games you can rent (or buy and trade in) if you're unsure, but you're pretty much stuck with digital distribution games when you buy them. It's nice to have a demo before you buy something you can never really get your money back for.
Still on the fence about My Life As A King, but Lost Winds is as good a sold to me. I'ma download it when I get home.
I was interested in Crystal Chronicles until that "pay to play" crap regarding the different races came out a few months back, then I wrote the game off...
I saw the whole no VC update thing coming, but it still irks me. The less VC games coming out, the less chance of a VC game I actually want coming out. I hope this is a one week deal and they don't alternate VC/WiiWare games every other week...
If there was a demo, I'd be all for trying some of these.
I already downloaded Lost Winds. I have only played a little of it, but so far I love it. The music and graphic style is amazing. I really like being able to make every bush, tree and flower on screen move in the wind with just a flick of my wiimote. Of course, they are going to have to vary the gameplay to keep me at this level of excitement, but I already think it is worth 10$ already. Oh, and I like the story so far too, I think it's a safe purchase. FF scared me away with the pay for play icon. I want to know the total cost of the game and if the addons are necessary or just cosmetic. I'm just worried that the little 15$ game will turn into a 30$ game or more in no time. Last thing, Nintendo really needs to fix the memory problem. I am so out of room on my flash memory and have already copied a number of games over to my SD card.
I'm just going to have to join the bandwagon. If there was a demo, or at least some early reviews or something to give me an inkling as to whether any of these were any good, they'd have my money right now (well, after I spent 15 minutes figuring out how many blocks of memory this took, and how many I needed to free up from the internal memory. Plus an additional 10 minutes to decide which games I was prepared to delete off it to free up the proper amount of space)....
I just remembered... unitl you give me more room and make this less of a hassle, go to heck, Nintendo!
I downloaded Lost Winds this morning, and from the brief time playing it, I can say it will be the premiere game for the service! If Nintendo can keep the quality of games atleast at this level for the service, it will go really far and stand out from PSN and Xbox Live. The titles already announced already look to have a better vibe to them than the usual throw away live titles that flood the service.m If any one is on the fence with Lost Winds, let me be the first to tell you it
s worth the purchase. Them to be can be best described as Ico,Kirby's Cursed Canvas, and Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey all rolled into one. The game runs at a solid 60fps and looks beautiful. It's so cool to spin the wiimote around and create a gust of wind(you actually here the wind build up). When walking around the village, you can also greate gust of wind which effects everything from people to windmills on buildings. The game just has so much character that it feels like a title that would have been released in a brick and mortar store. For example, to replenish your health, you can either blow fruit off a tree or pull it from the ground. And then by pressing Z, Toku will pick up the fruit(which is as big as him and began to chomp into it taking a few bites. Intead of finishing the whole fruit, he'll sit it down, climb on it and jump up and down on the fruit smashing whats left into bits. The soundtrack is very beautiful as well and reminds me of the melodies that played during Ico's intimate cinema screens. I wish I didn't have to come into work today. ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!
I apologize for the grammatical errors as I was in a rush to post and had to keep an eye to make sure no one here at work was looking. LOL!
hey nintendo - thanks for launching this the day after i move out of my apartment with the wifi i could steal from my neighbor. looks like no lost winds for me this week.
I'll grab LostWinds and let you know how it is.
I'll look into LostWinds, I don't have points anyway, so I want be playing any of them soon.
Anybody with a Wii that passes on LostWinds needs shot and killed, it's easily the best Wii game ever. Maybe even the best game ever if I didn't highly suspect its only about 3 hours long. Easily 10/10 for what it is for $10.
LostWinds looks nice.
Also, anyone unfamiliar with Defend Your Castle, try the flash game it's based on: http://www.xgenstudios.com/play/castle
I love the new art project-y aesthetic of the Wii version: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/32430.html
I'm excited to try a lot of these out later today.
My Life as a King looks pretty sweet too, come to think of it..
I've gotta second the preliminary reviews of Lost Winds--it's got such an engaging control scheme and it really looks gorgeous. I bought it simply because I wanted to give it a whirl, and I really think this is something special; but again, this is all preliminary, and I agree with the on-going responses about space storage and demos.
i was hoping that dr. mario or.... pokemon ranch would be up. kind of odd that there's nothing from nintendo themselves for the launch. any word on when those two titles drop?
They don't offer demos, but the nintendo channle has good videos of all of them, so you pretty much see exactly what youre getting. Didn't seem risky to me. Between the videos and my own research, it was pretty easy to choose which games I wanted, with POP being my only regret.
I bought all of them except the blackjack game and the trivia game. Then my girlfriend hopped on and bought the trivia game! LOL
Here's a breakdown for you folks not willing to make the big $10 jump:
FFCC:My Life as King - This was the one I was on the fence about out of all my purchases and wound up liking it almost as much as I like LostWind (my fave so far). It's a very interesting game. I know it has the body of a SIM, but I wouldn't call it that. It doesn't feel like any sim I've ever played. It kinda reminded me of dungeonkeeper, but instead you run a castle. It was so fun sending out warriors, and then reading their reports of surrounding dungeons and deciding who to send to what dungeon. While a small aspect of a deep game, that was my fave part. I think so far the story is great too. WARNING: THIS GAME EATS TIME!!!
Lost Winds: This was really an amazing experience. The way the wiimote is used is just awesome - pushing, pulling, moving things around - just perfectly fluid gameplay. And the platforming was really fun. I haven't felt that into platforming in a long time. Also, the design is just wonderful, you feel like you are in this toy world where everything, even the backgroung means something. The story was minamilistic, but very touching so far. I highly recomend this for platform fans and just gamers in general. If you only get one game, this should be it.
Defend Your Castle: I'd never played the browser game, but I spent tons of time with this today so far. I was surprised how addictive it was - with that feeling of "JUST ONE MORE ROUND." Grabbing and tossing the buttons-heads was very enjoyable. I like games that use the a-b pinch to grab things. I thought the $5 pricepoint was actually cheap for the ammount I can see myself playing this game. TONS OF FUN.
TV Show King - I though I was going to hate this, but my girlfriend wanted me to play it with her, and I did. I love the use of Miis in this. Not only to represent you but also the crowd, really cool. I was surprised at the variety of questions - espeacially the entertainment ones about movies and stars and whatnot, I guess I was expecting something generic and outdated. Overall we had a great time and I can see us pulling this one out when we have a couple over for dinner. If you like trivia games, cant go wrong her.
POP: I didn't like this game at all. My GF loves it though. It reminds me of those popcap games where you are just frantically clicking things. I suppose there is a point to all of it, but I just didn't get it. Personally, I say skip this one unless you like those clicky popcap games.
So there you go! So far I am completely stoked for WiiWare. These are some really good games AND THEY ARE THE LAUNCH TITLES! Can't wait to see where it goes from here!
Well...seeing as I'm a sucker for all things trivia (and trivial) I'll probably buy "TV Show King". Laugh all you want.
I ended up getting LostWinds on Nilcam's suggestion. I love it completely. I had to stop to clean up and such, But I'll be coming back to it for sure.
I've been waiting for LostWinds and My Life as King for a while now. When is Eternity's Child getting released?
That's ridiculous. Then again, releasing any classic game, like oh say Earthbound, would be fairly bad business sense for them.