Wii

Why so serious?

HIGH Getting to be The Joker is probably a dream most comic fans have—Lego Batman allows you to cross it off your list of life goals.

LOW Being stuck in an area for half an hour, unsure of how to progress because the game's awful platforming mechanics had me convinced that the jump I knew I needed to make (and failed at multiple times) wasn't the correct one—and it turns out it was.

WTF Killer Moth? The Mad Hatter? They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for some of these villains.

A guy in a go-kart, on a highway, swerving through traffic, tossing banana peels in front of cars in adjacent lanes... You'd have be nuts to attempt this... or you could be none other than everyone's favorite French practical joker, Rémi Gaillard—I don't know who he is either, but he does a mean Mario impersonation.

This is ironic and funny to us, but no doubt embarrassing for Nintendo. Here is a company that limits its games by way of complicated friend codes, weak online features and even its hardware like Wii Speak so as to keep the horrible realities of the online world away from its (apparently) fragile and corruptible userbase. But within one of the special press-only Animal Crossing: Wild World (NDS) cards, you find a racial slur... created by one of the people (its unclear who) hired to play the DS game.

A pre-played version of 2005's Animal Crossing: Wild World for DS, sent out to media outlets to encourage connectivity with the recent Animal Crossing release for Wii, contains at least one shocking addition, reports MTV Multiplayer. Importing the saved data from the DS cartridge sent by Nintendo into Animal Crossing: City Folk introduces a host of changes into the game, including one, suddenly no longer E-rated character, Baabara, who now greets players with: "How are you, Ñ---á?"

An article in the November 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum Online describes how Guitar Hero is being used to help "train" artificial arms for amputees. It's part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) 2009 project, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of the RP 2009 project's goals is that:

[i]n four years, DSO [the Defense Services Office] will deliver a prosthetic for clinical trials that has function almost identical to a natural limb in terms of motor control and dexterity, sensory feedback (including proprioception), weight, and environmental resilience. The four-year device will be directly controlled by neural signals.

(Via Disability Studies, Temple U):

Penny L. Richards, scholar with UCLA's Center for the Study of Women and historian of disability and special education (among other things) asks about the game Raving Rabbids: TV Party (emphasis and bold in the original):

Crazy, wacky, raving, and rabid too... which all apparently mean screaming with wide open mouths and unfocused eyes, causing havoc, chaos, destruction? "Get ready for you and all your friends to go insane." Lovely.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is the new Wii version of the hit game Animal Crossing. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the US-original Gamecube (GCN) version of Animal Crossing, and in fact, I just checked in on my town a couple of months ago. (Sadly, one of my original residents decided to move out, after several years of residence. I was surprised to say the least!)

The new City Folk appears to be a refinement of the series. It looks like a smoother version of Animal Crossing (GCN) modified with some features from Wild World (the DS iteration). Notably, terrain is on a curved surface instead of being flat, Copper runs the gate to the outside world tucked into a northern cave, the sky has constellations and I believe accessories are available.

Guitar Hero: World Tour - 1
Rock Band 2 - 0

So after being completely impressed with WiiWare's World of Goo, I hit up the developers for a brief word. Quite friendly and accommodating, this is what 2D Boy's Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel had to say...

Drawing a Line is About as Fun as it Sounds

HIGH The aesthetic and core concept are pretty adorable.

LOW The difficulty of later levels is ridiculous.

WTF In a game all about drawing lines, why is it so hard to connect or erase them?