One of the Nintendo Wii’s overlooked features is the ability to playback Nintendo Gamecube discs natively; a great option for those who already own Gamecube games or like to hunt eBay for those retro goodies. Not content with selling us new Wii games at $50 a time; someone high up at Nintendo has managed to sneak through the idea of re-releasing Gamecube games under a new branding and selling them to us once again.

You can read the rest of my review over at Wiigamereview.com right now.

Let’s start this review of Max and the Magic Marker with another one of my moments of reminiscing about gaming in days gone by. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s Britain was well known for its bedroom programmers. Back in the good old personal computing days of the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum, it was possible for you program your own games right out of the box (providing you knew how to program or were willing to learn that is). This continued up until the mid-1990’s when game development finally became out of reach for a typical home computer user. The indie game movement we have today evolved from the public domain movement from back then; small groups or individuals who have a great game idea but for one reason or another design and make it themselves.

You can read the rest of my review over at Wiigamereview.com now.

Real time strategy games have never been my favourite game genre and if I’m honest I’ve only played a handful in the last few years. I tend to prefer more lightweight RTS games such as Pikmin or Mega Lo Mania. I just couldn’t get into Command and Conquer and the many others that were popular on the PC during the late 90’s. Empire Total War comes from the Creative Assembly crew that bought us recent console game Stormrise as well the other more well known Total War games such as Rome and Medieval.

Read the rest of my review over at Gamesweasel.com

With combined sales of around 100 million Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS lites one would wonder if Nintendo needed to develop a third iteration of their dual screen money printing machine but they have done it anyway. Have Nintendo improved on the already popular DSlite enough to warrant a new model and an increase in price? We’ll find out in my review of the Nintendo DSi.

Read the rest of my review over at Gamesweasel.com

My two DS lites sold on eBay in just a few days priced at £75 each (both were bundled with two games). With the money in the bank I went to Toys R Us who are currently selling the DSi for £135 (about £15 cheaper than most UK retailers).

I’ve only had a few hours with it but thought I’d share my initial impressions and do a full review later.

So firstly the new Matte finish looks nice but feels rather odd and in my opinion is step back from the DS Lite’s shiny coating which may have shown smeary fingerprints but felt rather pleasant. The DSi’s onscreen keyboard has been incorrectly designed and unlike the Wii’s keyboard layout the DSi has many essential characters missing for true ASCII super strength password. It’s great to see that WPA and WPA2 (TKIP and AES) encryption are supported even if you may have to lower your passwords strength to use it.

The DSi menu system is now very Wii like and much more pleasing to the eye, elements of the old DS software still remain (Pictochat and Download Play) and now look quite dated in comparrison.

The DS shop channel works much like the Wii shop channel and the free 1000 point sign up gift is very welcome, currently only a handful of games are available along with the free Opera Internet Browser to download. The Opera Browser isn’t too bad, web pages take between 10 and 30 seconds to load which is comparable to many lower spec mobile phones – as usual Opera have done a great job in making sure pages render well on a small screen.

The Music and Camera applications are fun, nicely presented but limited – sadly I can’t see myself using them all to often but it’s nice that the support is there.

I currently think the DSi is a little overpriced, especially if you are upgrading from a DS Lite. I think DS Phat owners will be more impressed by taking the jump past the Lite and into the DSi. If you’re new to the DS then I would recommend the DSi purely because it has more scope to the future with downloadable games etc, however if you only ever see yourself buying retail games then the DS Lite might be your first choice.

A full review to follow later.

I bought a black DSi