WiiNintendo

This has been rumored for months (maybe even a year now), its the same political dodge we’ve seen a handful of times when devs are questioned. They don’t confirm anything, but they don’t rule it out. In my opinion I’d love to see GTA Wii, but if we never get it on the Wii I’m hoping No More Heroes 2 can fill that open world void.

Eurogamer asks Ben Feder from Take-Two about a GTA Wii game. :

What about the Wii? One of our readers was disappointed that GTA: San Andreas Stories wasn’t announced for the Wii during the Nintendo conference. Are you looking at the Wii as a platform for a GTA game?

Ben Feder: Nintendo’s been a terrific partner for us. We always look at ways in which we can bring our games to platforms that make sense for our games. We’re eager to work with Nintendo to bring our games to their platforms. We just haven’t yet defined the right title for the right platform.

Famitsu has an ad for what appears to be a new Tingle game for the DS. It’s assumed that this is a sequel to his 2007 RPG, Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, which was only released in Japan and Europe.

Anyone care to speculate?

More Tingle info, (a lot more):

Tingle, known as Tincle in Japan, is a fictional video game character of The Legend of Zelda series, first appearing in Majora’s Mask in 2000. Since then, he has appeared in each installment of the series up through The Minish Cap, except for Oracle of Seasons and Four Swords. Since then, he has not made in-person appearances in the main The Legend of Zelda series, due primarily to the evident unpopularity of the character among Zelda fans in the United States. Instead, he has gone on to star in his own video games for the Nintendo DS: Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, currently released in Japan and Europe, and Tingle’s Balloon Fight DS, exclusive to Japan.

Creation and conception
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page.

According to an interview with Kensuke Tanabe, producer of Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, Tingle was created in a “very relaxed manner” by a character designer at Nintendo EAD. The same person was also in charge of the character design of the games F-Zero and Star Fox.

Characteristics
Tingle is a short, paunchy 35-year-old man who is completely obsessed with “forest fairies” and dresses up in a green costume, slightly resembling that of the main character, Link. In Majora’s Mask, he wears tight red shorts and a necklace with a clock that is permanently stuck at four o’clock. Tingle is normally seen floating around on his red balloon, drawing and selling maps for his father, who runs the Southern Swamp pictograph contest and sees Tingle as “a fool”. He is also known for his catchphrase: “Tingle, Tingle, Kooloo-Limpah!”. Tingle appears to have a fixation for Rupees and other similar collectibles, such as Force Gems in Four Swords Adventures and Kinstones in The Minish Cap. In Majora’s Mask, Tingle can be found around Termina selling maps, and in The Wind Waker, he translates Triforce Maps for a high price, among other things. Tingle’s fixation for Rupees is explained in the Nintendo DS game Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, where it is stated that Tingle needs Rupees to live, as a result of a curse placed on him by Uncle Rupee.

Tingle’s siblings
Ankle is Tingle’s younger brother and Knuckle’s twin. In The Wind Waker, he is found turning the grinding wheel at Tingle Tower with David Jr.. The reason he does so much work is to support his brother, Knuckle. He also has a love of gardening. He also appears in Four Swords Adventures and later in The Minish Cap, where he fuses Kinstones behind Lon Lon Ranch. His outfit is faded purple.

Knuckle is Ankle’s twin and the one who built Tingle Tower. In The Wind Waker, he is largely a side-quest character, requiring use of the Tingle Tuner to find. By doing so, Link can gain the Hand-Me-Down Tuner which provides additional options. He also appears in Four Swords Adventures and later in The Minish Cap, where he fuses Kinstones in Trilby Highlands. His outfit is light blue.

David Jr., although similar in appearance to Tingle and his brothers, is from Windfall Island and is unrelated to Tingle. After getting shipwrecked on Tingle Island, he was forced by Tingle to work turning the wheel. Unenthusiastic about his role, he does it anyway, although he is prone to complaining. He also appears in Four Swords Adventures and The Minish Cap, the latter in which he fuses Kinstones in Lake Hylia. When reading his inscription in the Nintendo Gallery, it implies that his father was the one who made the ghost ship chart, but died immediately after doing so. His outfit is white.

To discuss this and more, head to our forums.

During Kevin and Bean’s Breakfast with Green Day this morning on KROQ 106.7 FM, the band confirmed that they’ll be doing something involving Rock Band in the near-ish future.

When an audience member asked them when their songs would be appearing in Rock Band, lead singer Billy Joe had the following to say: “Uh yeah, we’re doing a whole Green Day Rock Band…uh.” Uh? Is that a track pack, or a full game add-on? We’ve contacted Harmonix for more information, but until then all we have is “uh”, along with this stunning revelation of the release date for “uh”:

[Kotaku]

Fireflowers, mushrooms, and coins!

[NeoGaf]

Discuss This in Our FORUMS!

A tip sent by Mark W, states the following:

A source has informed me (who works for Activision) that these are the songs list for the New Guitar Hero:Smash Hits.

GH1
Bark at the Moon *
Cowboys from Hell (LIVE) *
Godzilla *
Hey You *
I Love Rock and Roll *
Killer Queen *
More Than a Feeling *
No One Knows *
Smoke on the Water *
Stellar *
Take It Off *
Take Me Out *
Thunder Kiss ‘65 *
Unsung (LIVE) *

GH2
Beast and the Harlot
Carry On Wayward Son *
Cherry Pie
Free Bird *
Freya
Heart-Shaped Box
Killing in the Name *
Laid to Rest
Message in a Bottle *
Monkey Wrench
Mother
Psychobilly Freakout
Shout at the Devil
Stop
Them Bones *
Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart
The Trooper
Woman
YYZ

GH3
Barracuda *
Cult of Personality (Original)
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Lay Down
Miss Mur.der
Raining Blood
Rock and Roll All Nite
Through the Fire and Flames *

GH 80s
Ain’t Nothin’ But a Good Time *
Caught in a Mosh
Electric Eye
I Wanna Rock *
Play With Me
Round and Round

While a spokeman for Skype has said it is technically possible to port the VoIP service to the Nintendo DSi, they have not confirmed it will definitely happen.  Many speculations have been made concerning camera usage, but for now, we must wait.

“Skype is extending its lead with a focus on rapid innovation, which delivers the new features and products people want, and by integrating Skype software and services into other open platforms with recent examples including the Skype application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Intel-based MIDs, Nokia N97, and a Lite version of Skype for Java-enabled mobile phones. Whilst we can’t comment on any future plans to bring Skype to Nintendo’s DSi, it would technically be possible.”
- Skype rep

[Tech Radar]

We’ve got a lot of great stuff lined up for the June issue, including a heavy-hitting review of Punch-Out!!, a special report on Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, and a first look at one of the year’s biggest action games for Wii…. WHAT?  And what’s with the GIANT Katana sword not so subtly in the background….

RED STEEL 2 with MOTION PLUS… ftw?

[GoNintendo]

OK, MOST FIGURED IT OUT…  BUT WE’LL GO AHEAD AND SAY IT.  APRIL FOOLS!
NOW, WE JUST HOPE IT COMES TRUE (THINK BACK TO THE SONIC IN SMASH BROS JOKE).

I was enjoying one of my usual bouts of insomnia last night when I saw that my Square Enix RSS widget had updated. “SQUARE ENIX ANNOUNCES KINGDOM HEARTS III RELEASE DATE”, it said. That, of course, was the only thing that could possibly convince me to buy a PS3, so I opened up the article and took a look.

Well… here is the first paragraph:

LOS ANGELES and CALABASAS, Calif. (March 31, 2009) — Square Enix, Inc., the publisher of Square Enix® interactive entertainment products in North America (Square Enix), and Disney Interactive Studios® announces today the release date for KINDGDOM HEARTS III. The latest title in one of Square Enix’s most popular franchises will be available in December 2009 exclusively on the Wii home video game console. Additionally, the release of KINGDOM HEARTS III has been confirmed for a North American release in 2010.

This is what countless Kingdom Hearts fans have been dreaming of! Check out the original article here.

I guess Famitsu was correct when they said Square Enix would have an announcement this week.  Click here for GoNintendo’s article concerning this.

The following is a mock-up found online for a Wii boxart.  It is not the real boxart, as the game has just been announced.

Late last night, GameFocus.ca’s Japanese contact over at Nintendo sent them word about something really exciting: a Wii remake of the one of the greatest N64 games ever produced: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They were also told that an official announcement would be made around April 5, which is the North American launch of the Nintendo DSi.

While the whole announcement made us really excited, announcing the game alongside the launch of the DSi made us ask ourselves one question that went unanswered: Is it going to have some kind of DSi inter-connectivity?

Mark your calendars people and get ready for probably one of the most cool announcements of the year.

[GameFocus]

Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, will be speaking at GDC 2009 on Wednesday, March 24th (tomorrow) at 9 am pacific time (that’s noon eastern time for me). When the President of Nintendo speaks, it’s often good to listen. There has been a lot of talk about what to expect and I’ve taken the liberty of gathering the facts and rumors, as well as adding in my own opinion to give you a peek at what we can expect to see tomorrow.

The Topic

The topic of Iwata’s keynote is “Discovering New Development Opportunities”. What kind of new development opportunities could they be talking about? Well, there’s the Nintendo DSi for one thing. Nintendo has stressed that the camera is not meant to be high quality, but meant to be a tool to explore more uses in games. Maybe we’ll see our first retail DSi title or at least some creative use for the DSi. It is possible though that any DSi announcements will be held off until later in the day when Masato Kuwahara will talk about the DSi in a session called “The Inspiration Behind Nintendo DSi Development”.

More importantly though, I think Nintendo will talk about Wii MotionPlus. Its release date slipped from Spring 2009 to a generic 2009 on Nintendo’s Press site and now we don’t know when it’s coming. Wii MotionPlus can definitely offer up some great new development opportunities and I would say it’s a shoe-in for the keynote tomorrow. Nintendo could easily show that they will be supporting Wii MotionPlus and making it the new standard by announcing some new games to go with it as well.

Previous Keynotes

Sometimes it’s good to look at the past to get a good indication of what’s coming in the future. Last year, Nintendo announced their Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection Pay and Play service which included DLC and announced more details on WiiWare. In 2007, Miyamoto announced the Check Mii Out Channel and debuted a new Super Mario Galaxy trailer.

The last time Iwata took the stage was in 2006 when he talked about “disrupting development”. That’s when he revealed The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and the addition of Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 games on the Virtual Console. He also had some Nintendo reps demo some games, like Brain Age and Metroid Prime: Hunters. The year before that, in 2005, Iwata revealed new details on Wii (then codenamed “Revolution) and revealed a new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Based on history, it seems that when Iwata comes on stage, there is a big announcement or two. He also seems to love to bring something new about Zelda with him, like a new trailer or the announcement of a new game. Could we see a new Zelda title? Let’s take a look at history…

The Legend of Zelda

If we look at history, we’ll see that the console Zelda games have all been released two years apart, except for the three year gap between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Since Twilight Princess released in 2006, we can expect the next Zelda title this year or early next year. That means we know we’ll have to find out more about the next Zelda sometime this year. We know it’s coming to Wii and we know that it’s been in development since around when Twilight Princess was released. The only question is whether Nintendo will show it off tomorrow at GDC or wait for E3. They do love to make us wait until right before release time to give us details, so who knows. If they show it off at E3 and show off one or two other things, their conference will automatically be awesome.

However, the GDC keynote is all about new development opportunitites. A recent patent which referenced a game known as The Legend of OO. The patent hinted at a new casual audience-friendly Zelda title that included hint videos in the game that would be accessible at certain parts of the game and a collection of cutscenes and other important storyline portions where players can just jump into the game at any point. We do know that the next Zelda for Wii will be like no other Zelda title, so this patent could be hinting at new features of the next Zelda or the title could be used as a reference only. We’ll just have to wait and see if Nintendo will reveal it at GDC or E3, but you can expect it at one or the other.

The Facts

What do we know will happen tomorrow for sure? We know that the press will be allowed to live-blog and write about the keynote, but will only be able to film the first five minutes of the keynote. Why the first five minutes only? We don’t really know, but it seems odd that only that part of the keynote can be filmed. We also know that Punch-Out!! will be playable on the show floor, so maybe they’ll also demo it during the keynote as well. All of that comes from IGN’s Nintendo Voice Chat Podcast.

Sam Kennedy from 1Up had much more interesting tidbits to tell us about the keynote. Kennedy mentioned that he thought they would only be talking about Wii MotionPlus and the Nintendo DSi, but it turns out they will be announcing some new games. The new game announcements will be for Wii, WiiWare, and Virtual Console and they’ll include Nintendo titles and third party titles. Kennedy says he has heard about a few of them and one of them makes him giddy and excited for tomorrow.

While not completely related, we know that the storage solution for Wii is coming in the Spring, and IGN has said they heard it will release at the end of March. Could we hear about it at the keynote? Maybe a passing mention.

What To Expect

Based on everything, it sounds like it’ll be something to pay attention to. We can expect some Wii, WiiWare, and Virtual Console game announcements from Nintendo and third parties. We can also expect more on Wii MotionPlus, including hopefully its release date. It’s very hard to say if the new Zelda Wii will be shown tomorrow or if they’ll wait until E3. If it is shown, we can probably expect Wii MotionPlus compatibility for the game. Whatever the case, we should expect some good announcements. WiiNintendo will have all the latest posted here for you, so make sure you tune in!

[Via Kotaku, Joystiq, 1Up, and NeoGAF]