Digital Home Advisor

21 upcoming Wii games to drool over
The 21 games we're most excited to play on the Wii.
GamePro staff (GamePro (online)) 08/08/2008 16:45:20
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It has come to our attention that certain parties on the Internet want you to believe that there are no decent games coming out on the Wii. These people are malicious liars, and you should not believe them. The Wii has so many great games coming out for it in 2008 and 2009 that we had a hard time narrowing it down just to this list of 21 best, most promising titles.Are they the same hot games coming out for the PC, 360 and PS3? No, but they shouldn
It has come to our attention that certain parties on the Internet want you to believe that there are no decent games coming out on the Wii. These people are malicious liars, and you should not believe them. The Wii has so many great games coming out for it in 2008 and 2009 that we had a hard time narrowing it down just to this list of 21 best, most promising titles.
Are they the same hot games coming out for the PC, 360 and PS3? No, but they shouldn't be. The Wii is all about unique hardware giving gamers unique experiences, and you'll find over 75% of the titles on this list are either console exclusives or loaded with Wii-specific features. So settle back and educate yourself about the 21 greatest games Wii owners — and in many cases only Wii owners — get to look forward to.
It has come to our attention that certain parties on the Internet want you to believe that there are no decent games coming out on the Wii. These people are malicious liars, and you should not believe them. The Wii has so many great games coming out for it in 2008 and 2009 that we had a hard time narrowing it down just to this list of 21 best, most promising titles.Are they the same hot games coming out for the PC, 360 and PS3? No, but they shouldn't be. The Wii is all about unique hardware giving gamers unique experiences, and you'll find over 75% of the titles on this list are either console exclusives or loaded with Wii-specific features. So settle back and educate yourself about the 21 greatest games Wii owners — and in many cases only Wii owners — get to look forward to.#21: Wii Music ETA: Late 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Two years ago the world got the first glimpse of Wii Music, when Shigeru Miyamoto used an early version of the software to conduct an orchestra as it played the theme from Legend of Zelda. This fall, you'll be able to play Wii Music, too, and share the joy of creating music with everyone. Use your Remote and Nunchuk with up to three other friends to play parts in a six-part band harmony, using one of over sixty instruments of your choice. While the E3 demo was sorta lame (we blame that drummer dude), the prospect of performing classic Nintendo tunes with friends is pretty interesting.#20: Red Steel 2 ETA: September 16, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Little is known about Red Steel 2 right now which was confirmed in the Official Nintendo Magazine, aside from one tremendous fact: it will be one of the first third-party games to support the Wii MotionPlus accessory introduced with Wii Sports Resort. That means the clunky swordfighting so many complained about in the original game is going to be replaced with the smooth, precise, realistic sword battles you can get a taste of in Wii Sports Resort's fencing mini-games. With an overhauled swordfighting system, Red Steel 2 could deliver on all of the sword 'n' gun crime action that the original game promised.#19: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed ETA: September 16, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed you'll be able to use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk as you take on the role of Darth Vader's secret apprentice in an adventure that spans the gap between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope. Use your Sith powers to hunt down and slay the surviving Jedi scattered across the Galaxy, while also eliminating any Stormtroopers or Rebels who try to stand in your way. Use your Force powers to push enemies away, hurt objects, leap impossible distances, fire the Dark Side's force lightning, and dive upon your enemy with speedy aerial dashes moves. It's being developed by a different team than the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, and will include exclusive stages as well as versus mode that should tide you over until The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels comes out (more on that game later).#18: Samba de Amigo ETA: September 23, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: One of the original arcade rhythm games, Samba de Amigo, is coming back for the Wii, with new Wii Remote support that removes any need for expensive peripherals. Shake a pair of Wii Remotes like maracas in time with the beats onscreen, aiming high, low, or at waist level. Strike a pose when the indicator comes up onscreen, holding the Wii Remotes as indicated. Pick from dozens of hot Latin songs, and post your scores on the global Leaderboards. You can even make a Friends List to compare your scores to those of people you know. Finally, when you've played all the songs to death, you'll be able to download new songs via the Wii Pay & Play service. If Nintendo lets a few classic Mario tunes free from the grip of Wii Music, we'd download them in a second.#17: Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels ETA: November 1, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Enter the world of the upcoming Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie, and use the Wii Remote to engage in long-awaited lightsaber combat. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels, you'll be able to play as one of ten characters, including Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, General Grievous, Asajj Ventress, Mace Windu, Count Dooku, and Ahsoka Tano. Carefully composed 3-D graphics capture the look and feel of the animated film. Parry blows in defensive stance, or use the power of the Force to overwhelm your opponent with super-damaging blows. Lock sabers and play one of a variety of mini-games to see who can ultimately gain the advantage. While we're discouraged that the game won't include Wii MotionPlus support (boo on Nintendo's ultra-secrecy), LucasArts has been working on making Wii Lightsaber controls for some time now and we bet it'll be near perfect when the duels start.#16: Call of Duty: World at War ETA: November 11, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: The Wii version of World at War is going to offer everything the PC/360/PS3 version of the title will, along with extra features the other versions of the title won't support like Wii Zapper support and improved camera movement. Running on a modified CoD 4 engine, Call of Duty: World at War takes the Call of Duty franchise back to World War II. This time the emphasis is on conflict in the Pacific Rim, pitting you against the devious tactics of the Imperial Japanese army and the hostile jungle environment. Use the flamethrower to burn out the enemies waiting to trap you. The game's premiere at E3 caught the eye of many critics — it's one of the best looking Wii games we've seen yet. If the gameplay can match the visuals, the Wii could finally have a FPS on par with the HD consoles.#15: Animal Crossing: City Folk ETA: November 16, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Now you can take the fun of the GameCube's hit Animal Crossing online with the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Visit your friends' towns, or welcome up to three friends at once into your town to play games or just mess around. Each copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk ships with the new WiiSpeak microphone, designed to sit freely in the room and let everyone present enjoy talking to your online friends. Visit the new Big City area to customize your characters with new haircuts and costumes. You can even make your main character look like your favourite Mii! As long as we can still deface our friends' towns, we'll gladly take another trip to Animal Crossing. #14: Castlevania Judgment ETA: November 18, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Everybody wanted a Castlevania Wii game. Nobody really expected a 3D fighting game, but life's full of surprises like that. Castlevania Judgment is, in fact, a non-stop stream of surprises. The Wii controls are light and floaty, with plenty of waggling for attacks and dodging. All of the environments are from classic titles in the Castlevania franchise, and you can collect and unleash sub-weapons on your opponents. Every character has characteristic attack, dodge, and super moves you can use to defeat your opponent. There will be fourteen playable characters, including Simon Belmont, Alucard, Maria Renard, Dracula, and Death. If anything, it's a nice change of pace from the 36 straight awesome-yet-cliched 2-D adventure-RPGs we've been seeing on the portables.#13: No More Heroes 2 ETA: TBA Why You Should Give a Damn: Okay, yeah, technically this game hasn't been announced yet. Come on, it's only a matter of time. Sales were solid, reviews were good, and creator Suda51 is on record wanting to make a sequel: "Then he confessed, 'Actually, I'm really willing to make a sequel version — and right now I'm asking if it can be made...I think No More Heroes is a great game, there's no other action game like it for the Wii. If it was a band, it would be really energetic, like the Arctic Monkeys.'" No More Heroes was one of the greatest Wii games to date, and when the sequel hits, it's going to be even better.#12: Wii Sports Resort ETA: Spring 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: Wii Sports is great, but you can only play the same six events for so long. Wii Sports Resort offers an all-new selection of events, and comes with the Wii MotionPlus add-on. With Wii MotionPlus, the Wii Remote becomes more sensitive than ever. Your Mii onscreen will copy every move you in an incredible new realistic way. Throw a Frisbee, steer jetskis, and even swordfight your friends as every movement you make registers onscreen with absolute accuracy. We can't wait to hear what other summer games Nintendo has in store. Suntan lotion rubdown contests, plz.#11: Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop ETA: 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: Want to kill a shopping mall full of zombies? Then the Wii version of Dead Rising is your game. Running on the Resident Evil 4 Wii engine, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop boasts motion controls and tons of zombies to hack through on every screens. Try to survive as time passes around you, making critical decisions about who to save and when to play it safe. Wield a fantastic variety of weapons scavenged from the mall around you, including katanas and a wide variety of gag weapons. While the Wii can't handle quite as many zombies on screen as the Xbox 360, we'll gladly trade that for less Otis and, oh yeah, text that 70 percent of the population can read!#10: Mario Super Sluggers ETA: August 25, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Wii Baseball's fun and all, but wouldn't it be better if you could hurl fireballs, eggs, and magic rainbows all over the field? Of course it would, that's why Mario Super Sluggers exists. Super Sluggers takes the addictive controls from Wii Baseball and matches them up with the fantasy-sports vibe as seen in the GameCube's Mario Superstar Baseball. Create dream teams that mix and match the 42 available characters (including Miis!), and have them battle it out across ten arenas in day or night conditions. Play Challenge Mode to gather characters for your team as part of an adventure story. We've already seen one Mario sports winner thus far on the Wii with Mario Strikers Charged... can the plumber go two-for-two?#9: Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World ETA: November 18, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: The long-awaited sequel to the GameCube's greatest RPG is coming to the Wii, with new Wii Remote support. In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, you'll be able to navigate your world with a simple point-and-click system using the Wii Remote pointer. Enjoy sidequests at your local guild and play a variety of mini-games. In battle, maneuver a party of up to four members to exploit the Flex Range Element Enhanced Linear Motion Battle System (which is similar to Tales of Innocence's Battle System) to do extra elemental damage to your foes. You can also exploit elemental alignments in order to capture, breed, and add any of the game's more than 200 monsters to the party to fight as an AI-controlled ally. It's like Pokemon, except you actually cares what happens in this story.#8: Deadly Creatures ETA: Early 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: Imagine you're a spider, or maybe a scorpion. The world is teeming with other creatures, all enemies or prey. Some you can defeat, easily, while others are beyond your power. You travel through a desert world, made enormous by your tiny size, while you can crawl on any surface. Creatures like snakes, lizards, and humans are enormous creatures with the power to wipe you out instantly... but you can fight back, too, if you're smart and quick. Deadly Creatures takes this exact approach to gameplay, and the result is an action game unlike anything else. Be a deadly scorpion or desert tarantula and see how long you could survive. It doesn't look like there'll be a game adaptation of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids anytime soon, so we'll have to make do with this.#7: Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers ETA: Early 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: It's right there in the title: the game has girls in bikinis and zombies — do you really need another reason to want to play Onechanbara? Well, in addition to the game's brilliant premise, it also plays a lot like Devil May Cry only with a hell of a lot more blood. As you slaughter enemies in the game, your weapons accumulate gore and blood making them more difficult to handle and weaker overall. Finally, a game that accurately depicts the results of violence.#6: Fatal Frame IV ETA: Early 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: The latest addition to the acclaimed Fatal Frame survivor-horror franchise, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is exclusive to the Wii, developed in a partnership between Tecmo and Suda51's Grasshopper Manufacture (who also brought us No More Heroes for the Wii). Use your camera to fight off hostile ghosts, or to take photographs of friendly and neutral ghosts. Use the Wii Remote to control your flashlight, or enter first-person mode to control your camera. Enjoy eerily beautiful graphics that push the Wii's limits, with no load times to stop the action as you move from room to room. Solve the mystery that haunts three girls who survived a kidnapping on a mysterious island, and return years later to try and unlock their repressed memories.#5: The Conduit ETA: Early 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: Who says you've got to own an Xbox 360 to get your sci-fi first-person shooter on? What looks to be a cross between Killzone and Perfect Dark, visually speaking, High Voltage's The Conduit can give you all that along with Wii Remote controls that'll make you never want to touch analog sticks again. Fight the alien Drudge that spawn endlessly from Conduits placed in every level. Destroy Conduits to secure the level, and use your ASE droid to solve devious puzzles. Customize every aspect of your controls, from which button does what to pointer sensitivity and running speed. Most importantly, it will have online multiplayer, which we've been aching to have on the Wii thus far. If this game works out, we can finally get our frag on, Wii-style.#4: de Blob ETA: September 26, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: de Blob is an upcoming puzzle game about rebellion against a drab, grey world. As the titular Blob, you can tweak the evil overlords by bouncing off the landscape and the citizens to splatter them with glorious fun-giving colour. Start as a clear Blob and then pick up colour by slamming into the paint cans hidden throughout the city. Once you've got a colour, then slide, bounce, and smear your new colour all over the city. As the colour brings life back to your surroundings, the soundtrack becomes more lively, with every new shade adding new instruments to the tune. Sorta sounds like Katamari Damacy in reverse, which we can dig.#3: Mega Man 9 ETA: September 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: Feel like new games are too weak, too easy for you? Sick of seeing bleeding edge graphics hyped like nothing else about a game could matter? Want to play something that'll kick your ass and make you come back for more? You want to play Mega Man 9, a hardcore old-school blast from the franchise's NES past. Enjoy pure 8-bit gameplay and a kickin' chiptune soundtrack as you try to beat eight new Robot Masters... if you can survive their levels. Spike pits, disappearing platforms, giant enemies with punishing attacks, Mega Man 9's got everything that ever made you throw a controller across the room. While this game is promised for other consoles, Mega Man and Nintendo have the strongest history, and the Wii Remote is the most natural, NES-feeling controller on the market. Who needs Achievements when you can have authenticity?!#2: Wario Land: Shake It! ETA: September 22, 2008 Why You Should Give a Damn: A 2D platformer, hand-drawn by the artists at Production I.G.? Yes, please. Nintendo is resurrecting Wario's first game series, the Game Boy Wario Land games, with a spectacular new version for the Wii, Wario Land: Shake It!. Smash and bash your way through puzzling levels hiding lots of gold to hoard and secret treasures to nab. Grab hold of enemies and shake them into submission, or Stun the entire screen with Wario's huge ground pound! Toss enemies into switches and other useful targets, and aim perfectly by tilting the Wii Remote. You can even buy maps from Wario's old nemesis Captain Syrup, who may or may not really be on your side this time. You want a hardcore Nintendo franchise for the holidays? Here it is.#1: MadWorld ETA: Early 2009 Why You Should Give a Damn: Your name is Jack, and you're trapped in DeathWatch, a violent, extreme death sport. You have a chainsaw strapped to your arm and a world full of deadly props like spiked walls, metal girders, and sign posts. Your goal is to kill the enemy, in as brutal and spectacular a fashion as possible, but without becoming dehumanized by DeathWatch's terrorist organisers. So with the crowd cheering and colour commentary praising your every move, you need to go out and tear your opponents (sometimes quite literally) apart. With stylish black-and-white graphics and a hardcore rap soundtrack, MadWorld is a comic book thrill ride from hell. If Sin City and Gears of War had a baby, that spawn would be called MadWorld.

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