Nintendo Voice Chat, Episode 16

Welcome to the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast. Each week your IGN Nintendo Team – made up of Matt Casamassina, Mark Bozon, Craig Harris, and Daemon Hatfield, – get together to talk about all things Nintendo. Covering both Wii and DS, the Nintendo Voice Chat podcast is the only place you'll find reliable voice support and "Nintendo" in the same area, so be sure to tune in each week, and listen in. This week's topics include: E3 2008. 'nuff said.

Breaking news: Wii Zapper pack-in will be Zelda Crossbow Training

If you're a manager for a GameStop store, at this moment you're in Vegas, enjoying all the vendors pitching their games to you. A source at the show tells Opposable Thumbs that after Nintendo's speech, the managers were given a world-exclusive first look at the pack-in game for the Wii Zapper. Are you ready? Zelda Crossbow Training.

"The game looked beautiful," my source said. "I'm pretty sure it was running on the Twilight Princess engine. It's a third-person game, and you had some control over Link. While the video was way too short to get a good idea of the gameplay, it looks like a light-gun inspired Zelda title." (He says that as if we'd know what a light gun-inspired Zelda title would look like.)

This is huge news, and it should sell a bunch of Wii Zappers. Zelda Crossbow Training will come packaged with the Wii Zapper hardware for $20. No specific release date was given.

Worms going to space on Wii

We're really interested in the newly announced Worms: A Space Oddity that THQ is bringing to the Wii in spring of 2008, and it's not just because the Wiimote is a perfect fit for the turn-based action game. No, we're more curious about how, exactly, one goes about making Worms into a console game again after its release in its $10 downloadable Xbox Live Arcade form.

Wii will have four-player online play, but XBLA already has that. There's also apparently a "fresh visual style," you'll have to ask Worms 3D how that worked out. Don't get us wrong, we love Worms, we're just curious how they'll make it seem like a full-priced game again. If they pull it off, we'll be the first in line.

McFarlane Toys answers Call of Duty

Last week, McFarlane Toys revealed its plans to produce action figures based on Activision's hit Guitar Hero franchise.
Now another of the publisher's biggest gaming properties is making the
jump to the tangible world, as the toy maker today confirmed a line of
four action figures based on the upcoming Call of Duty: World at War.

The line features three Marines and one British Special Ops soldier.
Each 6-inch trooper features "game-accurate" sculpting and carries a
distinctive weapon, from an M2-2 flamethrower to a Mark II Sten gun.

The
line marks an intersection of two McFarlane specialties. The company
has produced game-based toys for Soulcalibur II, Halo 3, Metal Gear
Solid 2, Onimusha 2, and Ultima Online in the past, and it also has an
ongoing military line that focuses on modern-day US troops from all
armed forces branches.

Each Call of Duty: World at War figure will sell for around $10-$15. McFarlane Toys expects to launch the line this November.

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Showdown in Japan: Wii still on top, PlayStation 3 catching up

Despite a huge 700% boost in sales last month thanks to the success of platform exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the PlayStation 3 still wasn't able to catch up to Wii sales in Japan.

For the month of June, the Wii is still far and away the clear winner, selling 235,990 units while the PlayStation 3 sold 139,494 units.

It is of note, as Enterbrain points out, that the Wii only outsold the PlayStation 3 by 1.7-to-1, whereas in May, it had a lead of 6-to-1. Is the PlayStation 3 finally catching up? Or were sales only given a temporary boost courtesy of Solid Snake?

This is only in Japan, mind you. In the rest of the world, the PlayStation 3 still has a lot of ground to cover. By the end of march, there have been 12.85 million PS3 consoles sold worldwide - half the amount of Wiis sold at the time.
Technorati Tags: Japan, Solid Snake, Enterbrain

Pimp my Pong - rumbling paddle fun with Wii remote

Thanks to a code that Captain_Hero sifted from the early Wiimote
Demo source, the homebrew developer grafted rumble feedback plus Wii
remote control to an old arcade classic. What resulted became Pimp my
Pong, and it was named so, because coder Captain_Hero hopes to add
interesting features that could only be Wii-inspired or simply all out
fun.

Rumble feedback kicks in every time the ball bounces off a
paddle, and tumble will also nudge in when a ball is lost. The author
says that Wiimote cursor control has been added to the left bar, so
players will have to prime their senses for incoming balls from the
right.

We also noticed that coder PaRaDoX has a feature-filled Pong
game in the works, and that the other homebrew game will feature online
multiplayer on its next release. We'll keep an eye out for that, but
right now, you can simply install this game in your HBC SD card, and
give it a go.

Wii leaves India alone and in the dark

While most readers of Wii Fanboy don't have to face this kind of problem, there are many nations throughout the world that force gamers to resort to the gray market to pick up their system of choice. Take India, for example, the second most populated country in the world.

Sony and Microsoft have distributors in the country, but the Wii doesn't. However, that may change soon enough, after Milestone Interactive tests out the market for Wii software. We're not entirely confident in Milestone's approach, though. For one, it hardly seems smart to base results on game sales when the console itself hasn't even officially released yet. On the other hand, since that's just how things are in India (and they're not likely to change anytime soon), we can understand Milestone's rush to get the ball rolling.

Here comes the other, less excusable problem: the game Milestone chose to distribute is Alone in the Dark Wii. Not even critics are playing the Wii version of Alone in the Dark, so is it fair to assess the Wii's chances based on Atari's survival horror title? Also, because Indian gamers import their Wiis, we wonder if the region of the disc will have any effect on sales.

At least this is a step in the right direction, but now that supply for the Wii is starting to meet demand globally, we hope Nintendo branches out into some of the areas it currently neglects.

New Active Life screens leap, skip, and kayak our way

We found little in the latest batch of Active Life: Outdoor Challenge
screens that was new to us, though they are the first English language
shots (not that the game was packed with mountains of kanji in the
first place). It's the usual mix of runaway minecarts, kayaking, and
jumping over logs -- increasingly, this is looking less like an
exercise game (and thus a competitor to Wii Fit) and more like a light-hearted selection of minigames bundled with a potentially fun peripheral; we could never imagine Active Life: Outdoor Challenge calling us fat, for example.