In possibly the best gaming news all year, Nintendo’s utterly bizarre Muscle March has finally been green-lighted for release in North America come 2010. The WiiWare game – better known by its Japanese title “Muscle Koushinkyoko” – involves chasing bodybuilders as they run through walls, posing so as to fit neatly through the hole. Better than the gameplay, however, are the trailer videos, which redefine the very notion of strange.
Video trailer after the cut
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We can remember a time when parents were driven to horrible tears in the vain hope of finding a store with a Nintendo Wii in stock; now the company is apparently slashing production of the console after its recent dreary financial performance. According to Nikkei (subscription required), Nintendo has informed two Japanese suppliers that it intends to reduce the Wii production, a move that has apparently had an extreme impact on those suppliers' own profits.
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Black Friday has come and gone leaving in its wake disappointed shoppers who were unable to get the best deals on the gadgets they wanted thanks to limited numbers in stores. Pricegrabber has unveiled some statistics for online shopping on Black Friday and the most desired products including the Wii and iPod touch.
You can’t doubt AMD’s commitment to marketing speech: the company is describing their new ATI Radeon HD 5970 as the “fastest graphics card in the world”, and from glancing at the specifications it certainly looks potent. The Radeon HD 5970 – which we saw leaked in recent weeks – packs DirectX 11 support, dual Cypress graphics processors for up to 5 TeraFLOPS of power, and the potential for twice that if you hook up twin HD 5970 cards using CrossFireX. A single card can, thanks to Eyefinity, create a 7,680 x 1,600 workspace across three displays.
Nintendo may be facing a surprise dip in profits but they’re not resting on their laurels. The larger-screen Nintendo DSi LL (aka the DSi XL when it lands in the US and Europe in Q1 2010) is one such attack, but according to the Financial Times the gaming company are also considering adding integrated, contract-free 3G to their next-gen DS.
The weeks are just flying by, time change is this weekend so I hope you aren’t late for anything. The holidays will be here before we know it. This has been another busy week in the gadget world. HTC has confirmed that Android 2.0 smartphones are incoming and the HTC Dragon is the likely first Android 2.0 device to come from HTC.
Thrustmaster is really big in the accessory and controller world for the Wii and other game consoles. The last time we talked about Thrustmaster products it was a new accessory kit for the Wii Fit. Thrustmaster has unveiled a new line of Wii remote charging stands to keep that remotes ready to play at all times.
Continued »We've obviously gone through the rabbit hole: Motorola's income reaches positive figures while Nintendo turn around and report slashed profits [pdf link]. After a healthy last quarter, the Japanese gaming giant has announced a drop in interim net profits from 144.83 billion yen this time last year to just 69.49 billion yen this past six months, with a 43-percent drop in Wii sales.
I have seen my share of odd gaming accessories over the years and the Nintendo Wii spawns some stranger accessories than most systems do. Coming soon game publisher Bigben is offering a new game called Cyberbike that includes a full size exercise bike peripheral. I’m not sure if this is taking the fitness aspects of the Wii too far.
Yesterday marked the official launch of Wii Fit Plus. The original Wii Fit sat at the top of many game charts for a long time and the systems were very hard to find in stores. Wii Fit Plus is likely to be one of the most popular Wii titles for the holiday season.
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