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.
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and weren’t too shopped out yesterday! If you still have shopping to do for Christmas, we have some seen some cool gear over the last week that might be worth a look. The Sony Ericsson Kurara has been reviewed and the verdict is that the device needs to be cheap to succeed. We reviewed the Nokia Booklet 3G this week. The final verdict was that the machine is underpowered and outperformed by first generation netbooks.
We’ve marvelled at the prodigious size of the Nintendo DSi LL, freshly released in Japan this past weekend, but PC Watch took things one step further and broke open their gaming handheld. Their teardown does sadly confirm that Nintendo didn’t take advantage of the extra room to squeeze in anything especially exciting.
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Nintendo's DSi LL hit Japanese shelves this weekend, and we hope those who braved the stores to pick up the new, oversized handheld had been doing their arm exercises; as Game Watch's comparison photos show, the "LL" moniker isn't just there for show. Shown here next to a Sony PSP-3000, the DSi LL looks, frankly, huge.
It’s almost as much fun speculating about new gaming hardware as it is playing on current-gen consoles, so color us intrigued at DigitalFoundry’s “credible sources” who are saying that the next-gen Nintendo DS will run NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and that it’s “not unrealistic” that the handheld will out-grunt the current Nintendo Wii. Problem is, Sony’s next-gen PSP2 has also seen a few spilled details, and that’s looking even more impressive: think along the lines of potential GPU power in-between the original Xbox and the Xbox 360.
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The BBC has announced that it will be "relaunching" the iPlayer streaming TV system on the Nintendo Wii, with the system now present as a dedicated Wii channel. While iPlayer access on the Wii has been possible since April 2008, the new iPlayer channel will apparently offer a "faster, high quality and improved viewing experience" according to Erik Huggers, direct of Future Media and Technology at the BBC.
Remember how Sony launched a PS3 at a BRAVIA flat-panel TV pretty much just for the fun of it? Well, they seem to have triggered a new trend of firing gaming hardware at solid objects, as French gaming magazine Amusement have included a photo-shoot involving Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP Go being fired through walls.
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.
We already know that US and European gamers will have to wait until early next year before they can pick up a new Nintendo DSi XL, but with the Japanese launch of the DSi LL imminent the handheld has already had its first TV appearance. In the video you can see after the cut, TV Osaka demonstrate the new DSi LL and compare it against the existing Nintendo DSi. The outcome? Yep, it’s bigger.
SlashGear Japan
