Games Cheats and Reviews

MCV: Title sells through 294,000 in UK; Wii Sports Resort is territory’s best performer in Q3; Dragon Quest IX tops global sales

Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort has topped the UK all format chart for the week ending 22/08/09.

Darryl and Kyle are back with the second episode of Under Review! Jumping into the past week in reviews done by GU, Darryl and Kyle tackle Wii Sports Resort, Splosion Man, and GI Joe. Miss a review or don’t care to read it yourself? Listen to the podcast as Gaming Union discuss the games and question each other’s opinions.

Nintendo has expanded on its Wii Sports series with Wii Sports Resort. Taking twelve sports, all related to relaxing vacation sports, Nintendo has created new ways for gamers to use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. Like the original Wii Sports before, some of the mini-games require both controllers while some only require the Wii Remote.

Translating the physical actions of the actual sports to work with Wii Sports Resort all depends on the game themselves. The twelve games are archery, basketball, bowling, golf, table tennis, swordplay, air sports, canoeing, cycling, Frisbee, power cruising and wakeboarding. Frisbee, as an example, uses the Wii Remote and gamers simulate the real motion of tossing a Frisbee to throw it in the game. Wii Sports Resort also supports Wii MotionPlus.

It looks like Nintendo has another party game that will help support its casual gaming genre and solidify its dedication to bringing more multiplayer to the console.

Wii Sports Resort supports one to four players and is scheduled for release on July 26, 2009.

Watch all the videos below and check out the screens. (It’s a lot of stuff)

Wire writes "Come on, Wii Sports Resort is not even released outside of Japan, so how come every time I try to buy a MotionPlus, the store is sold out? Do people understand this only works with selected titles?"

That Gaming Site writes: "First impressions are important, especially when it comes to introducing a new piece of hardware. Bundled with the Wii everywhere outside of Japan, Nintendo have estimated that over 45 million copies of Wii Sports are floating around, a game that I imagine for most Wii owners was the first game to introduce them to the Wii hardware. Wii Sports Resort doesn’t introduce itself in a casual manner. Instead your trip to the games aptly named Wuhu Island starts with a leap into the sky. Here you have the chance to meet Nintendo’s newest piece of tech Wii Motion Plus, which as you’ll see offers flawless accuracy as you twist your character around hundreds of feet in the skies above Wuhu Island."

For those of you Wii owners who might not have noticed, there’s an option to update the firmware for the console to version 4.1 as of Thursday morning.

The details of the update are rather nebulous, if you read the message that Nintendo sent accompanying the update reminder:

This update provides behind-the-scenes fixes that will not affect features but will improve the overall system performance.

The Japanese 4.1 update was to address a bug in Wii Sports Resort that had to do with playing the game after having played a Virtual Console or WiiWare game loaded from an SD card. Apparently, the bug forced users to watch a Wii MotionPlus tutorial video every time the game was booted up, rather than just the first time– before a save was created for the game in the Wii’s internal memory. There are worse bugs, to be sure, but it’s understandable how this bug might be at least moderately annoying. It’s widely expected that this 4.1 update for the United States addresses the same bug, but Nintendo has not commented on the update, as of press time.

Wii Sports Resort will be available in retail stores on Sunday, July 26th, at a suggested retail price of $50 and comes with one Wii MotionPlus accessory. As for the firmware update, if you have not yet received a message from Nintendo with an option to download the update, you can always manually check for new firmware updates by selecting the Wii System Update option, which is located on page 3 of the Wii System Settings screen.

After you’ve downloaded the update, keep it locked right here at Games Are Evil for much more Wii coverage– including our upcoming full Wii Sports Resort review, as we put this long-awaited follow-up through its paces.

Wii Sports Resort sales data, much like the original game, will most likely be tracked for a long time to come. But how did the title perform on opening day in Japan?