Popular online store Amazon has revealed the official box-art for the long-awaited Mario Party 9 for Wii. Nintendo has already announced that Mario Party 9 is due to be released March 11th in North America and scheduled to be released sometime in March in Europe.
Tip: Blair
Ben Kuchera from Wired spoke to a Nintendo representative at this years CES event in Las Vegas who reconfirmed that Wii games played on Wii U won’t be displayed at a higher resolution. Disappointing news for those that wanted to play The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword in 720p on their Wii U console. Still, the console is fully backwards compatible with all Wii games and peripherals.
The Nintendo 3DS continues to set the Japanese hardware charts on fire as the console saw a 20% increase in sales in the first full week of the new year. The Nintendo 3DS sold 240,819 units which clearly propelled it above the competition. In the same week Capcom’s Monster Hunter Tri 3G managed to cross the million mark in sales, becoming the third 3DS game to do so, and the first third-party 3DS game to do so.
Japanese hardware charts
Japanese software charts
No, it wasn’t the brilliant Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword that was the best-selling game of 2011 on Wii it was actually Zumba Fitness that successfully beat off all competition. Other games in the Wii top five include Wii Sports Resort and Mario Kart Wii but the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was noticeably absent.
The Best Selling Wii Games in 2011
1. Zumba Fitness
2. Just Dance 3
3. Just Dance 2
4. Mario Kart Wii
5. Wii Sports Resort
Nintendo has released the official European box-art for The Last Story. You’ll be able to purchase either the standard edition of the game or the limited edition. The limited edition version comes with a premium steel-book, a mini art book, and a soundtrack CD consisting of 7 tracks. Both versions will be available to purchase on February 24th.
Nintendo has announced today that the Wii Balance Board has been awarded a prestigious, new Guinness World Record for the best-selling personal weighing device.Wii Balance Boards were sold worldwide between launch and November 2010. This figure comprises 22,663,321 bundled with the original Wii Fit software and 9,451,107 bundled with Wii Fit Plus software. Since breaking the record, Nintendo has now sold over 22.67 million copies of Wii Fit and more than 19.31 million copies of Wii Fit Plus worldwide.
“The launch of Wii Fit with the Wii Balance Board revolutionised the way people got active at home, making it fun and easy to exercise in the comfort of their own living room. As the Guinness World Record shows, sales of both Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus have remained healthy since the day they first went on sale and, with Wii now having sold over 30 million units across Europe, Nintendo hopes this trend will remain strong.”
- Laurent Fischer, Managing Director of Marketing & PR of Nintendo of Europe
Activision, the publisher behind the immensely popular Call of Duty franchise has just purchased the domain name www.blackops2.com, suggesting that the company is hard at work developing a sequel to Treyarch’s well received Call of Duty: Black Ops. Expect to see plenty of footage of the game at this years E3 event in June.
Popular US gaming emporium GameStop has blamed low Wii software sales and the lack of new hardware as the reasons why it this achieved less than stellar results last Christmas. The retail chain saw minimal sales gains in the nine weeks leading up to December 31, bringing in a total of $3.02 billion during the entire holiday sales period.
Netflix has finally been made available on the Wii in the United Kingdom. You can download your free one-month trial from the Wii Shopping Channel. All you need to do is go to the Wii Shopping Channel, then select the Channels menu and the Netflix option is at the top. Netflix will cost £5.99 a month, after you’ve used your free one month trial.
MocoSpace, the largest mobile gaming community in North America has conducted a survey to find out exactly where gamers are spending their time. The survey which was conducted with 15,000 users found that the majority of gamers are now spending their gaming time on mobile devices rather than traditional consoles.
A whopping 46 percent of those surveyed by Moco Space reported that they are playing more on their mobile devices this year, compared to 26 percent of the participants who said that they are playing more on their consoles, and just 23 percent said they are playing more on their computers.
