Impressions: Wii News Channel

Yesterday Nintendo released the final missing channel to the gaming hordes of the world. While the Forecast Channel was met with indifference at best, the News Channel is actually surprisingly useful.

From the Wii Menu, you are taken to a list of various news categories including National, Regional (confusingly the regions are areas such as ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’ rather sub-national areas, Science & Health and Technology. You can then access news stories from these menu selections.

In comparison to my three regular news sources (the BBC website and the Herald and Guardian newspapers), the news stories are more detailed and varied then many of the BBC’s stories and cover far more international news then either newspaper. Unfortunately it also lacks the editorial slant of the newspapers, which renders it a bit bland.

The most amusing feature in the News Channel is the reprisal of the Globle view used in the Forecast Channel. This can be accessed by clicking on a news article marketed with a globe symbol and then clicking on the map that appears beside the news story. Unfortunately, this has it’s limitations as well, since not all stories are available on the map and locations are arranged from where stories were filed from rather then where they actually took place.

So, to sum up, I’m probably more likly to turn the Wii on then I am to turn my computer on to check the news now. My only gripe is the lack of  coverage by other companies. Hopefully, in time Nintendo might allow you to read RSS feeds or let other (hopefully specialised) media providers to distribute material over Wii News as well.

Square-Enix License Unreal 3 Graphics Engine

Square-Enix have licensed the Unreal 3 graphics engine from Epic Games (developer of the Unreal franchise and Gears of War) for their next current gen games.

So what does this mean for Final Fantasy fans? Well, the R&D manager for Square-Enix stated that this would mean a shorter development time for games in the future with less time spent developing custom engines for each game and more time spent on the mechanics and design of the games. PS3 Fanboy even managed to dredge up a quote (which I haven’t actually been able to find a source for) which claims:

“Since this is the 20th anniversary of Final Fantasy, we have a surprise we’d like to keep for our fans until the end of the year.”

Hmmm…could we have Final Fantasy XIII in 2007? Possibly, but FFXIII is known to have an advanced, custom built game engine known as the White Engine which has previously been demonstrated at E3 ‘06, so it’s pretty unlikely that it’ll be using the Unreal 3 engine. However, there are currently other FF and Kingdom Hearts projects in development (details on these is due to be released in Q2/3 07), so it’s likely that these will make use of the Unreal tech.

The licensing of technology from a company that is best known for developing for the PC and Xbox has added further fuel to the already rampant rumors that Square-Enix is planning to take one of it’s major franchises to the Xbox 360 in 2007/8.