Features// Nintendo's Wii and DSWare Showcase

Max and the Magic Marker (Press Play) for WiiWare puts you in control of a boy who finds a special pen that can draw makeshift boulders, bridges, stairs… anything you can think of really. You progress through the cityscape levels by platforming across obstacles, and using your magic marker to draw solutions to otherwise challenging problems. Press Play come from a background of Internet flash gaming, and this title is the first console effort. It’s largely inoffensive to the adult mind, but will likely be very appealing to children as they draw heavy blocks to squish enemies flat.

Toribash (Nabi Studios), a fighting simulator where you control different joints of a stickman, is already an incredibly popular PC game and is making its way to WiiWare with added decapitations. Nice. You get to create ballet-style brawls by moving various limbs and land blows in Matrix-style slow motion. When you replay the battle, you can go back at any point and edit your movements to perfect your scene.

Miffy’s World (Pan Vision) and Learning With the PooYoos Episode 1 (Lexis Numerique) aim to target the 4-6 year old crowd - the former by putting kids and parents in control of Miffy and friends as they go to the beach, school and other familiar places; and the latter being a new IP that teaches children words and colours via repetition, much like a TV show such Teletubbies.

There are many games coming out on the WiiWare and DSiWare platforms over the next few months, and a lot of them are the kinds of games that so-called ‘hardcore gamers’ would be very interested in playing. Nintendo has shown that it is trying to make the audience as diverse as possible – from high-score fanatics with BIT.TRIP.VOID, to the gamers from the ‘90s who now have kids and want to play with them on some interactive software.

The biggest hurdle I discovered, was actually getting all of these Wii consoles online in the first place – certainly when I spoke to PooYoos developer Lexis Numerique one of the challenges raised was how to promote awareness of the online component of Nintendo’s mass market console. Looks like the dashing Laurent Fischer has that covered somewhat.

Alongside a bit of promotion for the service, Nintendo of Europe is rolling out an ‘Ambassador’ initiative, wherein gamers can earn 500 Shop Points for every newly connected Wii console. If you have a mother (or granny) who doesn’t know how to set this up, that will give you an incentive to help out, won’t it? What’s even more eyebrow raising is the ‘Gold’ and ‘Platinum’ Ambassador features that people can earn. If you help 10 peoples' Wiis connect, you earn a ‘Gold’ title and get to download any first party NES game from the Virtual Console for free. Help 20 people and you get ‘Platinum’, and a free ticket to any NES, SNES or N64 game – first party or otherwise.

This, alongside all of the titles that are being released, shows that Nintendo is really wanting to get this online penetration problem it has sorted. There’s certainly no shortage of love for the digital distribution platform, that’s for sure, and with incentives like this there’s no doubt that we can expect some more fantastic games on WiiWare in the future.