Two Wii-based educational projects have received grants in the small east Texas town of Lindale. The Lindale Independent School District Education Foundation has awarded $1,021.40 to Early Childhood Center teachers Cookie Hartley and June Wright, whose "Wii Can Do It!" project aims to use Wii games to teach as "therapy and instructional tools" to "accelerate learning" for preschoolers with disabilities, and Lindale Primary School's Cynthia Peters and Bobbie Williams for "Wii Fit, Wii Moving, and Wii Happy," a more general program about using the Wii to introduce students to technology and build teamwork skills.
The Fund consists of donations from local citizens and businesses. These two grants are part of a total of $13,802.36 awarded in the district, all handed to teachers with surprise novelty checks, Publishers Clearinghouse-style. The only downside is that Wii systems are going to be a bit harder to find in Lindale this week for everyone else.
Back in October 2008, Nintendo of Japan showed off a ton of Wii games all at once. They're still not all out yet. Some, like Cosmic Walker, remain largely mysterious, while we're only recently hearing renewed discussion about games like Span Smasher (now called FlingSmash). One of the weirdest games from that already-weird lineup was Kensax, a minigame collection in which competition was based on achieving search engine queries with greater results than your opponents.
Nintendo has since renamed the game to And-Kensaku, opened a website (earworm warning!) and announced a new partner for the search engine: none other than Google. Using a set of 10,000 words provided by Google on the disc (with more available by going online with the game), players will compete in activities like guessing which words are more popular, doing "and" searches with given words and your own words and using the number of results to add stairs to a staircase as you climb it, and passing a bomb around that explodes in the hands of the player with the fewest search terms. Yes, it's really, really strange.
And-Kensaku will be released in Japan on April 29. There's no word on an international release, though it's entirely possible that Nintendo of America will bring it to E3 and then never mention it again, like Line Attack Heroes.
Nintendo has added the next round of rewards to its North American Club Nintendo store, for those of you eager to burn off your fake money. The WiiWare game Grill-Off with Ultra Hand is now available for real, priced at just 80 Coins. If you prefer to spend way more Coins, the second volume of Nintendo's Game & Watch Collection for DS is now available -- for 800 Coins, 200 more than the price of the original.
Finally, a set of three Mario posters has been added to the shop for 350 Coins. They're okay ... for something that isn't a free video game.
Danny Bilson - executive vice president of "Core Games" at rebounding publisher THQ - recently told CVG that his "fighting group is actually taking on the management of another game that we're going to announce at E3 that has a certain amount of melee combat in it ... ." Before spilling all the beans, Bilson added, "It's a major developer and you'll get exactly what I'm talking about when I'm able to talk about it. It's really cool, it's another one of the things I'm doing to rebuild everything around the core division of THQ."
This reminded us of something Bilson told Joystiq when we spoke with him at the Game Developer's Conference earlier this month. "We have one active product that we're going to announce pretty soon and it's on Move, it's on Wii, and it's on Natal," Bilson said. When asked if "active product" meant "physically active" Bilson replied, "It's physically active. On a big brand. And it's super awesome, we'll definitely show it at E3. I'm very proud of it."
Whether or not these two projects are one and the same remains to be seen, but there are some parallels worth pointing out: A "certain amount of melee combat" could allude to a "physically active" product and this unnamed fighting game is "really cool" while the unnamed motion game is "super awesome."
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensionswill get its amazing, noir web-slinging on this September. The game's story, written by Marvel's Dan Slott, finds four different wall-crawlers working across parallel universes to put together the Tablet of Order and Chaos, which sounds like a rejected item name from the Zelda universe.
The latest issue of GamePro has some more details on the game and, for those who'd like to wear their spandex suits in public while checking out Shattered Dimensions, also the San Francisco WonderCon should be showing off the game this weekend.
Activision Publishing, Inc. and Marvel Entertainment have released the first details of Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the newest entry of non-stop heroic action to star the iconic wall-crawler.
Of the many, many games that GameStop sold in 2009 (not to mention the millions of dollars it made), we were left wondering where the lion's share of the game retail juggernaut's capital went in terms of product that the company was actually buying for its stores. And in a recent SEC filing for the last financial year, the company an unsurprising leader: Nintendo took the top spot, with 23 percent of GameStop's "new product purchases" in fiscal year 2009. Sony trailed in second place by only five less points at 17 percent, while MIcrosoft, EA, and Activision picked up 12, 12, and 11 percent (respectively).
The remaining 25 percent presumably belongs to various third party peripherals and game-related items available for sale in the retail chain's stores. That said, while over 41 percent of GameStop's sales come from new products (read: from the vendors listed above) over the 26 percent coming from used game sales, the vast majority of revenue is still very much coming from used game sales, and thusly, the company's number one vendor: you.
This is one of those cases where we really want to share something magical with you, but fear the tremendous weight the Joystiq Biomass carries will crush the life out of the magical thing in question. Still, though we don't want to bring Nintendo's attention to this, we couldn't not share this incredible, homemade Advance Wars board game with you -- especially since you can print out all the assets and start playing it with your fellow tabletop enthusiasts immediately.
The name of the game is actually Skirmish Wars: Advance Tactics, but considering all of the art assets were straight yoinked from Intelligent Systems' series of turn-based strategy games, we don't actually think they're fooling anybody. Seriously, board game fiends -- grab this one while it's still grabbable.
I was sitting on a couch at Nintendo HQ, facing a large television. On it, a planetoid shaped like Mario's head stared back at me. It was Starship Mario, the interstellar plumber's preferred means of travel between the many galaxies that make up Super Mario Galaxy 2. This small world serves as transportation and a mini-sandbox within which Mario can practice moves. It also evolves as the game progresses, gaining new features, such as a "blemish" on its nose -- actually a Yoshi egg that appears after players have met the dutiful dinosaur.
As we've already talked about, the game's designers have tossed out the full-on hub level of Super Mario Galaxy in favor of a more classic, straightforward branching level menu. (Think: the overworld screen from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and you get the idea.) Moving from galaxy to galaxy is a snap, as is seeing how many worlds you've discovered in each galaxy, as well as the number yet to be found. My first stop was the Puzzle Plank Galaxy, which turned out to be just as clever as it sounds.
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Texas schools receive funding for two Wii-based initiatives originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
