OMG Nintendo

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. 

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.
 

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.

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.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box has been selling well for Nintendo since its release a few weeks back, and the original Curious Village never really stopped selling well. Since Layton is such a hit on DS, then Level-5 and Nintendo must be dying to get some Layton games on Wii, right? 

Well... wrong. According to Level-5 head honcho Akihiro Hino, his company has absolutely no plans for a Wii version of Professor Layton. In his interview with the UK-only Official Nintendo Magazine, Hino states that all he wants to do with Layton right now is get all three games in the original trilogy out in English while working on completing the second trilogy that starts releasing in Japan this year. 

Now, Professor Layton does have a big movie ready to sweep into Japanese theaters this year, but there's absolutely no word about that getting an English release yet. C'mon, American anime industry, if you can license every other crap anime ever based on a video game, you can give us the classy-lookin' Layton movie, too. 

The Nintendo Download this week has only one game coming out for each of its three services. One looks interesting, one does not, and one is a classic in its rawest form.

Surprisingly, the interesting one, for the second week in a row, is on DSiWare. Thorium Wars, from Big John Games, looks to be a, relative for DSiWare, ambitious vehicle-based 3D shooter.

On WiiWare we have... Word Searcher. It is a word searching game like the ones you can buy in those little books by the checkout counter in the supermarket. There is not much more to say about it.

On Virtual Console we have the original NES version of Final Fantasy. With long lasting series like FF, the chance to play the original that started it all may be interesting just to see if it holds up.

On a final note, Nintendo wants you to know that today is your last chance to get 1,000 free bonus DSi Points if you have recently purchased a DSi. Maybe Thorium Wars or last week's Dragon Quest game might be enough to make you take them up on the offer if you have not already done so.

The press release is behind the cut.

It's a weird week here on the Download. So far this year, if nothing's happening on WiiWare, there's something to talk about on the Virtual Console. The DSi's downloadable content, conversely, has been fairly lackluster by comparison, with entire weeks dominated by such "games" as Mario-themed clocks and calculators.

This week, though, the biggest news on the Download is arguably the premiere of Dragon Quest Wars, a grid-based strategy game that appears to pit the classic DQ monsters against one another. The trailer's one of the least impressive things I've ever seen, but it's an Intelligent Systems game, so it deserves a second look based entirely on that.

WiiWare is considerably less impressive, although it's a solid enough lineup. As opposed to the frequent recent lineup of one decent game and one shovelware game, both our WiiWare titles may be worth a look. Arkanoid Plus is... well, the more I look at it the sillier it gets. Taito has an uncanny ability to add crap to very simple games, which is why there are about thirty-five different versions and updates of Space Invaders. Now Arkanoid Plus comes along and adds power-ups and, I am not making this up, a story mode. Apparently breaking blocks with a ball and a paddle has become necessary to allow humans to flee from a war-torn Earth and it's Monday and I think I've gone completely insane.

In slightly less crazy news, Driift Mania is the first console game from Konami's European studios, which used to be strictly devoted to games for mobile phones. It's been out for a couple of months in PAL territories, where the reviews are fairly positive; it's a fun multiplayer arcade-style racer, but apparently the single-player game leaves something to be desired. Eurogamer compares it to Super Off-Road, which is pretty decent company to be in.

Finally, Sega is releasing the original, arcade-perfect Altered Beast on Virtual Console, for an arguably overpriced 1,000 Wii Points. The game is twenty-one years old, and we're not getting the full-figured, slightly updated version that recently came out on XBLA. Instead, we're just getting five levels of classic, half-naked monster punching. I'm not sure what about it made Sega think that charging ten bucks for it was a good idea, but maybe there's a vast underground Altered Beast fandom that I'm simply not aware of, which Sega intends to exploit for fat cash monies. Also, perhaps I will turn around and find an oil drum filled with gold coins and whiskey sitting in the middle of my office.

...

Nope.

This week's press release can be found after the jump.

This week Nintendo announced a new Wii Sports Resort bundle that features two Wii MotionPlus units would be going on sale October 12. Since Wii Sports Resort needs multiplayer to shine just as much as the original Wii Sports, this bundle is roughly twice as good as the standard deal that only includes one MotionPlus. The price is a steal, too: the two-MotionPlus bundle goes for $59.99, only ten bucks more than the one-MotionPlus bundle. Individual MotionPlus units sell for $19.99 apiece. 

The current bundle is intended for 2009 holiday shopping and is a "while supplies last" deal. Wii Sports Resort has sold 1.25 million copies in the two months it's been out, so I have hard time believing the holiday bundle's reserves are going to be all that limited. If you want to get this before Christmas, you probably will. Nintendo's reporting 2.9 million MotionPlus units in gamer hands, too, so you probably won't lack for MotionPlus titles in the long run. Basically, if you care at all about getting MotionPlus and don't have it already, you'll want to pull the trigger this holiday season. 

So you've probably never heard of Ghost Trick. Don't feel bad; it's a totally new game IP, with no history anyone could possibly know. It has an interesting pedigree, though, conceived by Ace Attorney creator Shu Takumi while at work on the third game in that series. Thinking that might be the end of his involvement with Ace Attorney, Takumi began thinking about what kind of mystery-solving game he might be able to create next. 

The result is Ghost Trick, a game where players control an amnesiac ghost named Sissel who has to save other characters from untimely deaths. Sissel arrives on the scene 4 minutes before a character is about to die and can only intervene by possessing objects around the would-be victim. To me this sounds more like Scribblenauts or Professor Layton than Ace Attorney, but it's all good-- clever little games like this are what make the DS such an awesome system.

If you were fretting about whether or not you'd get to play Ghost Trick in English, don't! Takumi has confirmed that the game will be coming to the US sometime in the future. Ghost Trick is just a working title, though, so don't be surprised if this game gets a name change before it hits store shelves. I'll just be glad it's going to get there.