Now Showing: Nintendo Channel

If you believe the moronic notions of some of the bigger internet games """"journalists""" and seasoned developers then the Nintendo Wii, aside from having the dust continuously wiped from it is now a legacy platform. You know, now that the Wii-U hasn't even been released yet. Anyway, judging from the output on the Nintendo Channel the hype might be true. This is what we find odd about the Nintendo Channel. It is essentially a marketing tool for Nintendo products that comes with every Wii and according to the software data there's at least 500,000 players that watch it. That being said, the coverage is inconsistent at best. A number of promotional series have started and then abruptly been discontinued (the Warioware and Monster Hunter ones spring to mind) and since ONM have been in charge of the 'regular' Nintendo News episodes the quality has been very hit and miss. The recent E3 round ups were pants and there hasn't been much in the way of uploads since then. Frustrating, especially considering how little games press coverage Wii games, WiiWare and Virtual Console games get. What a wasted opportunity. If they so wished, Nintendo could completely bypass the normal games press machine and make all their big announcements directly to players and consumers. NEways here's the low down on the recent videos.

• Xenoblade Chronicles This game has been getting some extra love from Nintendo, similar to how Monster Hunter Tri received special coverage. There's currently five Xenoblade Chronicles videos up at the moment including a three part, so far, interview with Koh Kojima and Tetsuya Takahashi, the official trailer and a Nintendo News special partly dedicated to the game. The interviews are alright but sadly rather standard promotional fare than enlightening or insightful. Oh and unnecessarily spoilerific :( Poor showing for the game that's rightly getting a lot of praise.
• Legend of Zelda Those creepy Robin Williams ads and plenty of 25th Anniversary and OoT shenanigans. We aren't LoZ fans at all (sue us!) but the coverage is pretty piss poor, mostly noise very little signal (as is custom for ONM).
• WiiWare game EscapeVektor has a video up. It looks a bit like Qix meets Pac-Man but since the Wii Shop Channel demos seem to have been all but dropped yet again there's not much more I can say about it.
• There's also a StarFox 64 3D trailer up. Obviously, without the benefit of a 3D trailer it just looks like Star Fox 64. Which is also why we still aren't too bothered about picking up a 3DS because, you know, we still have two versions of Lylat Wars that continue to work perfectly well.
• Upcoming Wii game Mystery Case Files The Malgrave Incident also has a trailer. It's a find the hidden object game. We find it hard to get excited about it to be honest.
• There's a trailer available for NyxQuest from the Wii Shop Channel. stupidly, however, it can't be launched from an SD card and we can't be bothered moving games to and from the Wii hard drive to the SD card for the sake of one demo so we deleted it straight away again.
• Weekly Download Trailers are always a laugh. Aya and the Cubes of Light reminds us of quirky PlayStation game Kula World. Except less good. Finally! Card game Bridge comes to the DSi for 500 points. That's more than it costs to buy a deck of cards and you can probably pick up a copy of the quite good 42 All Time Classics for less which includes Bridge and 41 other games. Gargoyle's Quest is now out for the 3DS Virtual Console because there aren't enough average platformers for the Game Boy. And that's the lot! Whoop de doo!