Nintendo Wii Tracker

Tokyo headquartered and publisher Square Enix is building a new studio in El Segundo, Los Angeles. They had announced last week that they would publish Gas Powered Game’s Supreme Commander, to create games targeted mainly at consumers in North America and Europe. Now, the job listings on their site reveal that they are looking forward to fill several positions for the new location and hiring staff to work on currently announced Xbox 360 and Wii Action games.

The listings on job board’s claims that the software engineers in the new studio will experience creative control in the right direction with the backing and funding of a major publisher. It also suggests that this studio will come up with original designs apart from the technical work for Japanese-designed games. This studio might fare up than Square’s other development studios in U.S.

Activision representative has confirmed to MTV Multiplayer that Wii owners will not receive the additional Jimi Hendrix tracks for Guitar Hero: World Tour. There are some technical limitations as some labels or artists will only give Activision the rights to distribute track packs, with prohibition of the sale of individual songs. Another eason provided was that the Wii’s infrastructure only allows releasing single songs as DLC.

In this case, licensing restrictions from Jimi Hendrix’s people mean Activision must offer the music as a track pack and not singles. The restriction, along with the rules of Nintendo implies that some artists will have to be excluded from Wii’s DLC offerings. For example, Jimi Hendrix tracks from the PS3/XBox 360 will not be available.

Mad Catz, the peripheral manufacturer, is in agreement with Wii to create its peripherals for Wii installments in the Rock Band franchise. Under the agreement, Mad Catz has secured the worldwide rights, except Asia to produce the bass guitar and a portable drum set. Recently, a collection of live recordings from AC/DC has been released for Wii in the US. It contains 18 songs pulled from years of AC/DC live recordings, in a mix created specifically for Rock Band.

CEO of Mad Catz, Darren Richardson states that in collaboration with Wii, they will together provide Rock Band fans the opportunity to enhance their gameplay with their instruments for Nintendo’s extremely popular Wii system. This agreement is liable to start in early 2009.

From November 21st, three Art Style games will be out on Wii Ware. These three games are Art Style: Rotohex, Art Style: Cubello, Art Style: Orbient and are a set of puzzle games. Out of these three, two of them are remakes of Bit Generations games from the GBA.

The GBA games were characterized by simple gameplay and even simpler graphical styles. There are no changes in the game except for the graphics that have been redone in the Wii version. It is to wonder whether Nintendo is making Europe its pivot as we have seen the earlier creations like Disaster: Day of Crisis, Space Invaders Get Even and now these three.

It was time for Nintendo to take up the title of the game All Star Cheer Squad on the day of its release. However, they were compelled to halt the purchase as they were not sure whether it was the ultimate cheerleading game. It was only through Natalie, the New York Jets Flight Crew cheerleader who played the game stomping on the balance board with poses and accepted that she enjoyed it.

The All Star Cheer Squad is a cheer leading game for youngsters delivering a motion-controlled rhythm game in which movements scroll from right to left and players have to maintain Wiimote and nunchuk into correct position when the movement comes in the middle of the screen. Coming back to Natalie playing the game, she wore expensive huge boots on the Balance Board which Nintendo doesn’t approve. Still this game surprisingly sounds funny!

The new team Ninja is now showing interest in Wii games finally since they seem to be more open to experiment on new consoles than before. Yosuke Hayashi of the post - Itagaki Team Ninja was earlier not that business-oriented. However, now it feels that to create a Wii game would not only be fun but also profitable as they are now looking forward to involve more members and fans. For this, they feel Wii would be the right platform.

Team ninja would not be working directly on the Wii projects but their company Tecmo would be working on it. They are confident that they have lot of Wii console fans in their company who could definitely continue to work upon something fruitful.

Nintendo is saying that the titles of DS are more compatible with DSi. The new hardware is also proving pain to the backside of the users. The game currently is in development to fit DSi; the gamers might face problems in future.  However, it is also a setback for a new console which was designed to play with DS hardware.

According to the article by Game Spot, EA Dave McCarthy, executive producer, informed that the mega publisher has designed its own Western approach to fitness. It sounds very interesting but we don’t know whether the Western approach is comfortable or not.

On Oct 30, KBC securities showed cuts in rating on game console as well as on Nintendo Company. Nintendo announced earnings for the first half of the year.  Hiroshi Kamide has highlighted Nintendo’s heavy dependency on U.S. as well as on European markets. The shares of Nintendo were up by 8.6 percent at 29,970 yen.

Nintendo’s DS handheld game and the Wii console both have rivals machines from Sony and Microsoft which was helped by latest games such as Wii Fit home exercise. Kamide also said that he was expecting Wii to achieve highest demand in the coming years.