Upcoming Wii Launch Dates

Nintendo has posted a list of European launch dates for the Wii on the Nintendo-Europe website.

The good news is that there are some quality First Party titles coming out over the next few months, including the highly anticipated WarioWare: Smooth Moves on January 12th and Mario Party 8 in March. The bad news is that there are also a lot of dross titles coming out, including several cartoon, TV and movie tie-ins. Hopefully Nintendo will have some juicy Virtual Console release lined up for this period.

In other Wii related news, the Wii Forcast channel when live today following a small firmware update. It covers the majority of major cities and towns in the world and is easy to configure. Information available includes a five day forecast, global temperature highs and lows and the UV factor for your location.

On Friday of this week, another Wii Channel should become active with the release of the Opera Browser for Wii. While the official launch doesn’t take place until March, a trial version of the browsing software is being made available through the Wii shop. The software will be free to download until July, when users will have to pay a charge of 500 Wii points to download it. More information can be found in Nintendo-Europe’s press release.

Enviro-Gaming – Nintendo’s Excessive Packaging

A few years ago, the EU passed a law banning the use of excessive packaging in the distribution of computer games. That’s why all games now come in DVD style packaging instead of large cardboard boxes as they used to. Given this, I was shocked when I opened my package full of games from Amazon and found that the Wii Points card came in a DVD case.

Admittedly, it’s a rather nice, white, Wii branded DVD case, but the amount of packaging inside the DVD case is even more shocking. The Wii points card is quite small, about the size of a credit card.

Inside the box, was a 28 page instruction booklet, an 8 page Wii promo leaflet, the points card and a circle of card where the disc would normally be.

Just in case you lost the instruction book, the instructions for using the card are also on the back of the DVD case and in the Wii’s operation manual.

To come to a point, Nintendo must be off their heads to package a 16 digit code in a DVD case with that much paper waste. Surely it would be both cheaper and more environmentally friendly to put the points card in a small envelope?

Hopefully Nintendo will alter the design of the card packaging soon. Had I known just how much gumph came with the card, I would have just bought points online with my credit card, something which I would recommend people to do. Gamers damage the environment enough with the amount of tech waste created by the industry, high levels of electricity usage and the use of non-renewable resources, the games companies shouldn’t be encouraging us or creating more waste then they need to.

Impressions: Rayman Raving Rabbids

I picked up my Wii today at around about one o’clock GMT. At about two o’clock GMT I picked up my selection of games from my local post office. There are a few things which I’m going to talk about as far as that goes, but for now I’m going to focus on RRR, or Rayman Raving Rabbids.

I’ve talked about how much I was looking forward to this game before, and it met very expectation.

Forget Mario Party, forget Smash Bros, forget Mario Kart. Ubisoft has just come up with one hell of a party game killer.

My girlfriend and I (NB: My G/F is not a big gaming fan. She has an Xbox Live GamerCard, lil miss orange, but she only plays Viva Pinata and the XBox Live Arcade games regularly), however, since I picked up the Wii, I’ve barely been able to remove it from her. She loves it and so do I.

Following the US reviews, I was expecting some disappointment regarding the graphics on the Wii and I knew the Wii was going to be my ‘Party’ console (as compared to the Xbox 360 and my PC). What I didn’t realise was just how much fun the Wii was going to be.

There is no way RRR is the best game ever, but having played a good few 360 games, Wii Sports & Play, this is the best seventh generation game I’ve seen yet. From the bizarre jogging mini-games to the the DDR with Rabbids, RRR is utterly amazing.

More on the Wii coming soon.