If you’re the type that’s inclined to believe retailer release dates, then take a look at what Amazon says about Professor Layton’s second outing, The Diabolical Box. The online retailer has the game pegged down for August 24, which is just three months away.
This is a good thing, considering that, for the longest time, we’ve been feeling like young Luke there, glazed over and stunned, staring into that half-opened glowing box of doom. Just what new adventures lay ahead? It looks like we’ll find out soon enough.
In the latest trailer for Boom Blox: Bash Party, the man with a plan, Steven Spielberg, gets intimate and offers details on EA’s sequel to its beloved Wii puzzler. Marketing jargon is thrown around quite freely, with Spielberg admitting that Bash Party “takes Boom Blox to a new level” and that “all of the good ideas” were saved for the sequel. Yeah, right.
Thankfully, the video doesn’t stray into that territory for long, as we eventually get a close look at what we all want to see: multiplayer! If that doesn’t look like fun, then we must be dead.
Last year, in the midst of a pile of news from Level-5, the company quietly announced three DS puzzle games called the Atamania series. The first game in that series comes out on May 21 in Japan, and it looks like something worth getting excited about!
Sloane and MacHale’s Mysterious Story is, like Level-5’s Professor Layton series, a collection of brain teasers wrapped up in an overarching mystery tale. The puzzle content in this game consists of lateral thinking puzzles from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale, presented as both animated scenarios (in a very cool silhouette style) and text. The puzzles seem to involve moving the text of the puzzle around with the stylus to make connections.
Of course, Level-5 has yet to say anything about localization on Mysterious Story. We’d say it’s an obvious choice given the success of Professor Layton, but we have yet to see any of the Layton sequels!
Roogoo: Twisted Towers is a fast, action puzzle game coming to the NIntendo Wii and DS later this month. Taking over where the original Xbox Live Arcade and PC releases left off, the game supposedly sports new modes and features, including touch and waggle. All right, maybe it’s more than “supposedly” including waggle since the latest trailer actually shows the feature in action. You know what else the trailer shows? Adorable music. Okay, it doesn’t show music but … you get what we mean. Geeze. Just read our hands-on for more details and stop being like that.
PopCap Games has just unleashed a new trailer for the ultimate Peggle experience, Peggle: Dual Shot. In this version, players can enjoy 120 levels and 90 challenges, as well as the unique Peggle Zoom feature. There’s also an all-new bonus underground and multiplayer duels, should that tickle your fancy. We can’t be the only ones dying to play this, right?
Peggle: Dual Shot releases for the Nintendo DS on March 3.
Nintendo of Japan revealed a ton of new games at its fall media conference, and it’s just now getting around to talking about some of them. Kensax was one of the many first-party games buried in the avalanche of news, with nothing released but three baffling, context-free screenshots and a few seconds of video.
IGN has translated an article from the latest issue of Famitsu revealing the first information about Kensax, which, as it turns out, is about … search engines? The minigames in Kensax all revolve around putting words into a search engine and using the resulting hit count as a measure of progress and as the focus of multiplayer competition.
For example, “Battle! Search Panel 9″ tasks up to four players with combining words from a “stock” with words from a 3×3 board to conduct search terms. The player with the highest hit count steals a panel from another player. At the end, the game tabulates the panels in each player’s possession, as well as the total hit count, to assign a winner. In “Fastest! Search Shooter”, players shoot moving words to create high-hit-count combinations with their stock words. Kensax includes 3,000 words and their estimated hit counts, but players can go online to bolster the game’s vocabulary. Famitsu didn’t offer a release date beyond “2009″, and, of course, there is no word on a release outside of Japan. We hope to hear more about the other stealth Nintendo announcements soon, like Cosmic Walker.
Last year’s de Blob found a squishy, colorful place in all of our hearts and, more importantly, sold enough copies to make THQ keen on a sequel. Speaking to IGN, a representative for the publisher expressed pleasure at de Blob’s performance worldwide, promising that we can “expect to see more of de Blob in the future.” We’ll hold you to that, THQ.
Something else of interest in IGN’s article: NPD data shows that de Blob sold 230,000 copies in North America between September 22 and the end of 2008, whereas Wario Land: Shake It! moved only 150,000 copies in the exact same period. de Blob isn’t just a third-party “core” success — it’s even outsold a rival title from Nintendo!
That copy of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen you stashed under the mattress to partly fund your early retirement just got a whole lot less valuable. The ESRB has rated the rare Enix RPG for a Virtual Console release, along with another, more widely known SNES gem: Super Punch-Out!!. Is Nintendo planning to release the classic pugilist title alongside its modern Wii equivalent, as it did in the case of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption? Perhaps!
Those aren’t the only surprises in the latest ESRB ratings: Lonpos, a launch title for the Japanese WiiWare service no less, has also been classified. As it’s been a while, here’s a reminder of what it looks like:
We called it, and now those lovely 2D Boys have confirmed it: World of Goo will be rocking Europe, Australia, and New Zealand’s WiiWare service this coming Friday, a.k.a. tomorrow! Eeee!
You may recall that the puzzler endured a rocky road leading up to its Euro/Aussie debut. At one point, plans were afoot to launch the PAL version in something known in the olden days as a “box.” Fortunately, the outcry over that decision caused 2D Boy pair Ron and Kyle to opt for a WiiWare release, and we’ll be reaping the benefits of that noble decision in just a few hours!
All right, we watched this trailer, and we’re still pretty cloudy on the details. Apparently Plättchenhad a story — and it ties into the story of Bplus’s next game, Niki - Rock ‘n’ Ball. Developer Bplus is, rather surprisingly, expecting to launch Niki this week, according to the Nintendo Channel, although Bplus just says “soon”. Taking a lesson from Plättchen’s reception, they’re pricing Niki at 500 Wii Points.
The new trailer is part of the newly-opened Niki website, in which you can see control diagrams of the game’s motion-based and “retro” sideways-Wiimote control schemes, learn about the various low-poly creatures inhabiting the world, and, perhaps most importantly, read Niki’s story in legible text instead of teensy subtitles.
Amazon lists Professor Layton 2 for August originally appeared on Joystiq Nintendo on Fri, 22 May 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
