There are 3 new title updates for the Wii Ware Channel this week.

• NEVES Plus (Yukes Company of America, 1 - 4 players, 800 Wii Points): Originally a DS puzzler, the game now comes to Wii in an enhanced state that adds several multiplayer modes spanning across 500 new puzzles. Players can work cooperatively, or against one another, as each tries to complete one silhouetted puzzle after the next.
• Family Mini Golf (Aksys Games, 1 - 8 players, 500 Wii Points): Aksys brings the family back again, this time for a round of putt-putt. The press release mentions that there will be several hazard-filled courses to navigate, and that players “can download new courses to expand” the experience. Based on Aksys’s other Family titles, however, you may want to wait a bit on this one.
• Drill Sergeant Mindstrong (XSEED, 1 - 4 players, 800 Wii Points): Unlike the military’s physically demanding boot camp, this is a training camp for the mind. Players are drilled on a series of questions, with the goal to be the top recruit in the class. We just hope everyone learns something in the end and grows as a person, like in that Major Payne movie.

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NintendoWare Weekly: NEVES Plus brings Art Style to SimEarth

Ghostbusters news has been pretty focused on the Xbox/PS3 versions of the game as of late, so for those of you hankering for some content to oogle on the Nintendo side, here’s your chance! This “first twenty minutes” video will take you through a short intro, a small tour of the firehouse, and show off

Watch video here:
Ghostbusters Wii: First 20 Minutes! (Spoilers)

- Due out May 26th in Japan
- Costs 800 Nintendo Points
- Put out by Namco Bandai
- Objective is to catch a thief that has stolen your protein supplements
- Chase the thief through 3 levels: City, Edo and Future
- The thief will break through walls, and you have to hold the Wiimote/Nunchuk in the correct positions to match the hole that the criminal made, allowing you to run through
- ‘Dash Zones’ have you shaking the Wiimote/Nunchuk has hard as possible in order to run up to the thief and grab him - grab three thieves per stage, then move onto the next
- “Ude Kurabe Attack”: multi-player mode for 4 players, match poses to fit through walls, after 5 passes the game speeds up

Check out more screens, art and even a promo clip here Link

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Muscle March - details, screens, footage

Nintendo’s Wii video channel is set to go live in Japan on May 1. The channel, called “Wii no Ma” (Wii Room) brings video services to the Wii that have already been present in rival consoles — and market research to advertisers as well.

Kotaku has all the details. Instead of streaming existing content to users consoles and home TVs, as done by Sony’s video on demand service and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Video Marketplace, Nintendo plans to offer original content consisting primarily of “family-oriented” programming.

More ominously, Nintendo is teaming up with Japanese ad agency Dentsu. Users will pay for some of the videos — but others will be supported by advertising.

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Sales numbers released for March show that Nintendo continues to dominate the U.S. gaming console market. The company sold more than a million units in March (DS and Wii combined), even though the gaming industry as a whole saw a drop of 17% in revenue compared to March 2008.

Nintendo continues to hold the top two spots in console hardware sales, with the Wii moving nearly twice as fast as the Xbox 360 and nearly three times as quickly as the PS3. The DS also outsold the PSP by more than three-to-one.

Sony’s decision to drop the PS2’s price to $100 on April 1 hasn’t had a chance to make much of an impact, so perhaps the April numbers will tell a different story. Still, Nintendo’s continued reign as console king will probably continue — even in a down economy.

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After months of waiting, Nintendo has finally given a release date for the Wii MotionPlus accessory, the Wii Remote-enhancing add-on first introduced at E3.

As Gizmodo reports, Wii MotionPlus will be officially released on June 8th. It will retail for $20. Wii Sports Resort, a mini-game collection similar to the original Wii Sports console pack-in, will be released on July 26th. Wii Sports Resort has been specifically designed to take advantage of the Wii MotionPlus peripheral. It will sell for $50, and include one MotionPlus add-on.

With a Wii Remote running at $40, and a Nunchuc add-on costing $20, the MotionPlus brings the total Wii controller cost to $80. Hopefully Nintendo will begin including the add-on with new consoles - and drop the price.

Despite the Wii’s incredible sales figures, third-party game makers are having a hard time figuring out what to do with the platform. This is especially true when it comes to comparing the Wii to the Xbox 360 and PS3. While the Wii Remote opens up many possibilities for gameplay innovation, the wide disparity in graphical processing power continues to give developers a headache.

Exhibit A: EA Sports EA Sports President Peter Moore at the MI6 conference. As reported by Kombo, Moore explained to his audience that developers cannot expect to write a game for Xbox and PS3 and then “port down” to the Wii. Instead, developers must build Wii games “from the ground up.”

EA tried porting down in the past and “learned their lesson.” Kotaku wonders if “porting up” from the Wii to the Xbox 360/PS3 would be possible instead. At least EA still plans on making games for the Wii, even if they won’t be the same games available on other systems.

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Nintendo announced the release date of Wii Sports Resort, a sequel to the Wii pack-in game Wii Sports. The game - and the highly anticipated MotionPlus add-on - should arrive stateside in July.

Kotaku reports that the game will be released in Japan in June. Since the MotionPlus Wii Remote add-on is essential for playing the game, it will be released around that time as well. The game (and add-on) will be released in “other markets” - including the U.S. - in July.

During an address to The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced the release dates. Wii Sports has proven so popular that many other publishers have created knock-off multi-game packs. More complete release information will come later.

MotionPlus was first announced last July. The add-on snaps onto the Wii Remote and provides an even finer level of motion control.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata is hinting that the Wii video streaming service the company is planning for Japan might expand to the DS — and could be coming the US soon as well.

The company is planning a “Wii no Ma Channel” for Japan, enabling users to stream video content to their Wiis á la Netflix on the XBOX 360. According to Iwata, if all goes well the video-on-demand service could soon be expanded to the United States.

Now Nintendo is thinking about expanding this service to the Nintendo DS. “If the Wii and the DS are connected, it should be possible to download video through the Wii and take it with you on the DS,” Iwata told the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). He continues, “There are a lot of on-demand video services, so there’s no reason to do the same thing, so we’re going to do something different.”

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A Wii price drop may be coming soon. Nintendo has almost halved the cost of producing a Wii console. Since the initial run of units manufactured in 2006, the big N has reduced production costs by 45%.

This is according to Credit Suisse analyst Koya Tabata, as reported in a post by Edge Online’s Rob Crossley. Crossley reports that Edge asked Nintendo whether Tabata’s analysis was true or not, and has not yet received a reply.

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