Congratulations to mew2man, bigtime726, killquick, and the possibly robotic p200038262! I've contacted you all through GamePro.com's email systems. Once I have your mailing address, I'll be able to send you your games. If I don't hear from any of you in one week, then I will award your game to someone else! Don't make me do that! 

Also, as I'm sure you've read at other blogs, BlogFaction is shutting down. I got special permission to make this post to make sure contest winners got their games, so it'll probably be the last post ever made to the BlogFaction network. Thanks for reading us all of these months! I hope you had a pleasant stay. 

(Don't worry about us writers-- you can read us all elsewhere!) 

2010 is drawing near and that means it's time to look at the best-selling games of the... uh, the 00's, I guess? Anyway, it looks like the #1 best seller of this decade is going to be a Wii game, with little chance of anything on any other system catching up.

The top-seller for the decade is going to be Wii Play, according to IGN, which most people snagged for the second Wii Remote and the $10 game attached to it. Even if you have issues with Wii Play as a game, it's 11.1 million copies sold speaks volumes about the popularity of the Wii. 

To put some perspective on that number, the second-best seller for the decade is Grand Theft Auto III: San Andreas at 8.25 million copies. Third best is Wii Fit at 7.9 million, then Grand Theft Auto III: Vice City at 6.9 million, then Mario Kart Wii at 6.7 million. 

Hmm, all PS2 and Wii games... maybe sales of high-definition games will take off in the next decade, when HDTVs and the HD consoles get even cheaper.

Wii Play screens on GamePro.com

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The lucky folks at IGN got the exclusive on officially revealing two more fighters for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. As rumored weeks ago, the final two fighters are Joe the Condor, another Gatchaman character, and Zero from the Mega Man X series. Over a decade of fans fervently requesting that Zero put in an appearance in a Capcom crossover fighter has finally come to an end.

According to IGN these are the final Tatsunoko vs. Capcom character reveals, which would four characters exclusive to the US version of the character (along with Tekkaman Blade and Frank West). The original rumor, as you might recall, indicated a fifth character: Yatterman-2 from the obscure Tatsunoko classic Yatterman.

It looks like any plans to put her in the US version have been dropped (if they ever existed), if IGN is correct. That would make plenty of sense-- Yatterman's never come out in the US in any form, while Gatchaman and Tekkaman Blade have seen American release in many different formats.  Online play for the US version is worth a lot more than a Yatterman character, anyway. 

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars screens on GamePro.com

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October is squarely in the Q4 pre-holiday game rush, so it shouldn't be surprising that this week is loaded with major game releases. It's relatively rare, though, for a big week for the industry to also be a big week for Wii and DS. Usually the Nintendo-dictated rhythms of the Nintendo fan's year are just a little bit different.

That's not the case this week. While gamers on other systems stress out over whether to buy the likes of Uncharted 2 or Brutal Legend this week, Nintendo fans are going to be staring at an avalanche of high-quality software. It's such a huge week, in fact, that the very first review for this week's Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky went up at GamePro while I was typing this piece up.

So what's hitting this week that makes a first-party Nintendo title seem small? Sega's releasing a sure-fire million-selling title in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for Wii and DS. Majesco and WayForward's much-touted A Boy and His Blob revamp for Wii is out and apparently excellent. For horror fans, the novel Ju-On: The Grudge "haunted house simulator" hits Wii just in time for Halloween. On DS, a little game called Hero's Saga: Laevatain Tactics has snuck out that might be very interesting to fans of portable tactical RPGs.

We'll take a closer look at all of this week's big games, with trailers and commentary, behind the jump. Since Metacritic appears to be down as I write this, I've decided to use GameRankings for critical aggregation purposes. I'm thinking I might stick with it, as GameRankings seems to aggregrate more outlets overall, but let me know what you think if you care either way.
 

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games screens on GamePro.com

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Market research firm Smarty Pants set out to measure which brands were most successful with kids with a study the company calls Young Love.  Over 4,700 kids aged 6 to 12 sat down with their parents and filled out a survey designed to measure just how much kids love roughly 260 different major consumer brands. Nintendo topped the list, with Nintendo Wii at #1 and Nintendo DS at #2.

Remember that this wasn't just a survey of gaming brands-- both Wii and DS beat out the likes of McDonald's, Nickelodeon, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and Disney to reach the top spot. Other gaming brands that ranked high in the survey's Top 100: PlayStation at #14, PSP at #31, Xbox 360 at #42, Mario at #50, the iPhone at #54, the GameCube at #76 (!), and Nintendogs at #96. You can check out a .pdf of the survey's top 100 here. 

So if you ever wonder how the hell Nintendo gets along with so little recognition from the mainstream gaming press, well, here you go. While most gamers my age are all about 360 gaming, Nintendo rules the elementary school set with an iron fist. So really, not much has changed for Nintendo in the past 20 years. 

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There's a French company called BigBen Interactive that's looking to cash in on the Wii exergaming craze while it lasts. One of their offers, My Body Coach, is a pretty standard Wii Fit-alike that comes with one-pound weights as a pack-in. Reasonable enough.

It's the other project, Cyberbike, that is absolutely demented. Cyberbike's exercise pack-in is going to be a full-size exercise bike. Seriously, that thing in the pic? Comes with the game. Somehow.

Cyberbike looks like it's being pitched as a sort of biking sim hybrid. BigBen's press release touts 18 circuits to traverse and lots of customization items to unlock for your bike and biker. The game will feature a multiplayer mode where people take turns on the Wii-connected exercise bike and a story mode that is clearly going to break new ground in the field of interactive entertainment. 

Now, you're probably wondering, "How the hell expensive is a game packed in with an exercise bike going to be?" You're not alone. Unfortunately, BigBen hasn't announced a price yet for the Cyberbike set. Unless they're going to make their product substantially more expensive than Wii Fit, it seems unlikely that the pack-in bike is going to be a very good one. The pics already released of it sure don't look promising, anyway. 

Cyberbike (9 images)

Hot exerbiking action comes to Wii!!

One of the things that consistently amazes me is how Mike Haggar isn't in more games. He gets a cameo every so often, sure, but Haggar has spent a few years now as a constantly mutating Internet meme. Then again, Capcom's attempts to reignite the Final Fight franchise have all ended really badly.

Final Fight 2 never got an arcade release, and was designed specifically for the SNES. Haggar, along with Guy's fiance's sister Maki and the now-ignored Carlos Miyamoto, fights his way across the globe looking for the Mad Gear gang's latest kidnap victims. I remember FF2 being substantially easier than the original game, with more hidden power-ups. This is also the game that gave the world Rolento, who'd later go on to a starring role in the Street Fighter Alpha series.

On WiiWare this week, Gravitronix is the first game from newbie developer Medaverse Studios. Watching the trailer, it appears to be a multiplayer combination of air hockey and Breakout, controlled by twisting your Wiimote.

Finally, Nintendo itself has released Pinball Pulse: The Ancients Beckon, a DSiWare pinball game influenced by Greek mythology.

This week's Download can be found after the jump.

There are games that can be appreciated in the grand scale of things and some that can only be appreciated in the relative scale of their format. Thorium Wars is one of those latter types of games.

On its own merits, Thorium Wars comes off as a throw-back to the earlier days of 3D gaming. If the game play footage were observed with no indication of when it had been made, it would be understandable to think it was some obscure early Playstation 1 title or even a 3DO game. The graphics are blocky in the way that 3D games of that era were, with not much detail to the surroundings or enemies beyond just enough to tell them apart. In fact, almost everything about the presentation feels so much like it is from that period, it almost seems on purpose. All it is missing are the digitized, live action cut scenes that would have been the major selling point at that time.

XSEED's The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road shipped a few weeks back, roughly coinciding with the recent release of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz on Blu-Ray. To celebrate, XSEED has sent OMG Nintendo four copies of the Nintendo DS game to give away to our readers.  

To enter the contest, just leave a comment below that answers the following question: What is your favorite version of The Wizard of Oz? What you pick doesn't matter-- it can be anything from the classic movie to one of L. Frank Baum's original novels to weird stuff like the grim n' gritty Oz comics-- but writing something amusing certainly won't hurt your chances of winning.

Before you submit your entry, make sure you either enter a valid mailing address in your GamePro.com profile or leave a valid e-mail address in your comment. I can't send you a free game if I don't know where to mail it! 

You have one week to submit a comment to this entry if you want to enter. The contest ends at 8:00 AM on October 18, 2009. The winners will be announced sometime on October 19 (possibly in the evening).  

For the record, my favorite version of The Wizard of Oz is probably Return to Oz, the absolutely surreal 1985 film that adapted the second novel in Baum's original series. The special effects at the time were just perfect for expressing how strange and unsettling Baum's Oz was meant to be, especially when it came to nasty bad guys like the Wheelies and the Nome King.

We've covered the eight best Mario spin-offs, so... you really should have seen this one coming. We're about to run a gauntlet of eight spectacularly terrible games that just happen to star Mario and/or his pals.

Any character as prolific as Mario is eventually going to be in some pretty awful games. For gamers of my generation, though, we expect a certain level of quality when Mario puts in an appearance. Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 were revolutionary, while most everything else in the main series is at least pretty good.

The bad spin-offs we discuss below aren't just crap-- they're insulting crap, which is of course the worst kind.  

 

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