OMG Nintendo.com

This is fantastic new for Wii owners with a taste for hardcore games. Renegade Kid is a small developer that works with the flamboyant publisher GameCock, and got a lot of attention with their first DS project, Dementium: The Ward. It was a badly flawed game from a control standpoint, but the sheer chutzpah and originality behind it makes it worth picking up. Their DS follow-up, Moon, is looking promising... and now it seems they're going to be bringing something hardcore to the Wii, too. Check out this help wanted announcement from their official site:

We are looking for programmers of all levels for the development of Renegade Kid's next original title for the Wii.

If you are looking for any of the following roles, please do not hesitate to send us your resume:

• LEAD PROGRAMMER
• SENIOR PROGRAMMER
• PROGRAMMER

• Prior development experience with consoles is required.
• Prior development experience with Wii or Gamecube is a plus, but NOT required.

Boogie is one of those games traditional gamers hate and "blue ocean" gamers seem to love. While I have a lot of sympathy for the "blue ocean" strategy and the people it reaches out to, I got completely bored with the gameplay inside of a ten-minute demo at last year's E3, so my opinion of the title is not especially high. Regardless, it moved roughly 300,000 copies and got more than its fair share of complimentary write-ups in mainstream news pieces about the Wii (and a 57% percent Metacritic average, to indicate how little the enthusiast press thought of it).

It seems that the sales were good enough to convince EA to fund a sequel to their karaoke/rhythm/general goofiness title. Although EB Games has since deleted the listing, their website briefly listed a title called Boogie Superstar set to ship for Wii in October 2008. Right now the only record that the listing was ever up is reports from eagle-eyed sites like WorthPlaying.com. Would this theoretical Boogie sequel actually manage to be fun to play? Personally, I'm doubtful, but I fully expect to see EA officially announce this one in the coming months.

If it was any developer with less cachet than Valve, I would dismiss it as non-news. Given that it is Valve, the genius developers who behind Team Fortress 2 and Portal, a little tidbit like this can become a big f'ing deal. The clever bastards at CVG popped this out of a much longer interview with Valve that, as far as I can tell, hasn't been published yet.

"There's a lot of people at Valve who are parents and would love to make a game for kids," Valve's Doug Lombardi told us recently.

"We all play the Wii a lot and we think that the proper way for Valve to approach the Wii would be to make something cool designed specifically for it." he added, when quizzed on the possibility of Valve venturing away from its usual FPS scene.

"I mean, I'm not making any announcements", he continued, "but there's a lot of desire internally to do something for kids, do something on the Wii."

The only real concern with Valve developing a console title is whether they could get it to ship before the system's lifespan was over. They good, but they slow.

Something's amiss at Retro Studios, the developer that's worked with Nintendo to produce the fan-favorite Metroid Prime games.

On April 23, Shacknews reported that three key Metroid Prime staffers had been fired and were escorted "off the premises": design director Mark Pacini, art director Todd Keller, and principal technology engineer Jack Mathews.

This immediately sparked rumors that Retro Studios was about to be closed down, which famed internet rumormonger Surfer Girl had already hinted at in a post going back to April 20. Nintendo debunked rumors of a closure to website CVG on April 24, stating:

"We still continue to work alongside the team at Retro and no official announcements as to its status have been made. All existing reports are rumour and speculation."

This wasn't the last of strange headlines about Retro Studios and Metroid Prime. Hit the cut to catch up on the rest.

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The scan that's driving the rumor in question is above, courtesy a fine gent named king zell at NeoGAF. It's a promo for a totally non-game-related piece of merchandise, but check out that list of game titles underneath "step 5". One of the titles referenced there is Street Fighter 4, plain as day (er, if you can read katakana, anyway).

Is this a hoax? A dream? An imaginary story? Hell, it could just be a simple misprint. But it's definitely not impossible, given that Capcom's Yoshinori Ono is on record stating that SFIV can and should come to as many platforms as it can.

While a Wii SFIV definitely wouldn't look as gorgeous as the arcade screens driving the game's hype, it would probably be passable and playable... just like the SNES version of SFII, back in the day. I'm easy with that, though to be honest, I'd probably buy my copy for 360 or PS3.

A job listing that recently went up on the Stray Bullet Games website has lead to a lot of speculation about the game in question being a Wii MMO. Probably because of that first sentence right there.

Stray Bullet Games, an independent developer of Massively Multiplayer Online games, seeks an Experienced Sr. Programmer for our new Wii project.

I mean it's possible they've suddenly decided to try their hands at Sudoku mini-game compilations, but it doesn't seem likely.

This story takes a left-turn into the realm of the bizarre when you pause to consider what kind of MMO fare Stray Bullet's built their track record on...

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While Nintendo continues to vigorously deny the DS redesign rumor and Famitsu tries its best to retract statements about it, an interesting new rumor about features the redesigned DS might offer has cropped up on technology blog site dbTechno. The dynamite feature? Integration with Miis.

The most likely add-on will be Mii integratioin with the new Nintendo DS. This means that users will be able to create a Mii on the Wii or DS, and then have that Mii go back and forth between the two consoles.

This could allow Nintendo to create something along the lines of the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live where users can have their Mii act as their user name for online games via the Nintendo WiFi Connection. ...

The Mii characters are also rumored to be involved in a new version of Pictochat, which will enable chat over a WiFi connection.

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Ah, E3 season, when any ridiculous rumor can get virtual ink and fans are willing to believe all hype. We've already got new rumors about what this year's promised big E3 Nintendo announcement could be.

New F-Zero Game: The source on this one is German site Planet Nintendo. Reportedly, the linked article claims the new F-Zero is going to include online, all the tracks from F-Zero GX, and a... weapons system?

New Nintendo DS Design: This rumor has a much longer history and more solid sources, namely a Japanese Bloomberg article and Famitsu coverage. Of course, Nintendo denies.

These two join the already-extent rumor about Factor 5's unnamed Wii project. While I find all three fairly plausible as E3 announcements, I expect the actual big Nintendo announcement to come as a total surprise.

A side-effect of the console war mentality on gamers is that everyone's expected, on some level, to identify with a system as a particular favorite. In this hardware generation I acquired all the systems one by one, and I've enjoyed games for all of them. Yet, between bursts of activity, they mostly sit in the entertainment center, quietly gathering dust.

This is because I really, really love the DS, and you can be sure I didn't expect to. In concept the system sounded terrible, and it certainly had a rocky half-year after launch. Maybe it was Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, or maybe it was Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, but at some point the DS's profile completely changed. Suddenly it was the system with all the unique games, all the really creative games, and plenty of weird imports and ports of classics that appealed to the inevitable nostalgia that comes with a lifetime of gaming.

If someone were to press me for my favorite system, I'd have to say the DS is it. Is that allowed? I mean, after all, it's "only" a portable... or is that the charm of a DS game? Here, I'll explain behind the cut.

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One of the first images that hit the 'net for Mario Kart Wii was the Wii Wheel, a cute little white plastic accessory that clips onto the Wii Remote, and... uh... it makes it look like a steering wheel. It seems suspiciously like it's going to be from the Crappy Plastic category of Wii accessories.

Or...

Check out the comments at the Engadget post that announces Wii Wheels going on sale individually at GameStops for $14.99. You'll find some Devil's Advocates arguing that the Wii Wheel does serve a gameplay function: by forcing you to hold the Wii Remote at the correct angle, it prevents the "oversteering" phenomenon that a lot of people complained about in games like Excite Truck.

This is an argument that gave me pause. In just about any Wii game that uses tilt input, there usually is some sort of horrible input problem you can cause by tilting the remote too much. Could an attachment like the Wii Wheel really keep gamers from oversteering in Mario Kart Wii?

I don't know. What do you think?