Ones to Watch: Wii and DS for September 2009

Home » Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Ones to Watch

Ones to Watch: Wii and DS for September 2009

Submitted by Joe Fourhman on September 2, 2009 – 12:13 am14 Comments

As the competition kicks off a Holiday 2009 price war, Nintendo is mum on a price drop for the Wii… and the DSi is solid at $170. Instead, Nintendo has resorted to an old sales gambit: new colors! Assuming you’re not in line for a white DSi or a black Wii Remote, let’s see what new games are on offer for September. Yes, the holiday shipping season has begun!

Let’s start with the Wii:
September 8
Academy of Champions Soccer combines arcadey soccer with a lot of British dorm school references that are just going to look like Harry Potter refs to us Yanks. Also, Sam Fisher and Beyond Good & Evil’s Jade are on hand.

Muramasa: The Demon Blade finally arrives, taking the Shamefully No One Will Buy This seat right alongside Okami and Madworld.

September 9
Yep, the Wii is also getting The Beatles: Rock Band.

September 15
Tornado Outbreak has received a tiny amount of buzz with some comparisons to Katamari, but we’ve all heard that before.

Toy Story Mania brings the Walt Disney World virtual shooting gallery attraction to your Wii in the form of a virtual shooting gallery.

September 22
Remember a couple months ago when people were thinking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up was going to be the Smash Brawl killer? Well, I doubt anyone continues to think that, but the game is still coming out anyway.

September 28
Dead Space Extraction brings the sci-fi/horror favorite to the Wii for all your strategic dismemberment needs.

September 29
The game that flopped in Japan and spawned a million TEH WII IS DED articles, Deca Sports 2, heads to our shores… where we will also not buy it because we just picked up Wii Sports Resort.

And now, the DS enjoys a strong month with three long-awaited titles…

September 14
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story continues the Mario RPG fun. This series is always fantastic. And since you can’t find a copy of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time anywhere these days, you may not want to sit on the Inside Story fence too long.

September 15
Finally, we’ll all get to test our vocabulary of obscure nouns with the arrival of Scribblenauts. It seems impossible that this game could truly live up to the hype, but preview after preview of hipsters writing in year-old trend words like “zombie” and “keyboard cat” says it will.

September 29
When will we ever understand the subtitle to Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days? As soon as the first otaku beats the game and posts a rambling summary to GameFAQs.

Speaking of RPGs, The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road will close out the month with an unexpected take on the public domain works of L. Frank Baum.

Tags: ds, muramasa, Nintendo, Ones to Watch, scribblenauts, wii

crispy4001

“Remember a couple months ago when people were thinking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up was going to be the Smash Brawl killer? Well, I doubt anyone continues to think that, but the game is still coming out anyway.”

What exactly are you trying to imply here?

If anything, these last few months have made it clear that Smash Up's is Smash Bros re-imagined rather than Smash Bros re-hashed. To quote the strategy guide author: “it’s very similar to Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but it’s different enough to feel like a new game.”
http://tinyurl.com/ksuolx

I never once heard the term 'Brawl Killer' associated with this game. But the judgment is still out on the few specifics GameArts promised to do Brawl one better on – a smoother, more full featured online mode most notably. The announced online tournament and tag team modes already seem to give the comparative a leg up in that regard.

Ultimately, we'll have to wait to see how it all pans out. Even if Smash Up succeeds in areas where Brawl was lacking, Ubisoft or fans of the game post-release would be stupid to label it a Brawl substitute. That's not what it's going for, and never was.

Chastise me for being an optimist here, but I do think that comment was being disingenuous to a game that was never hyped up as a “Brawl Killer” in the first place.
JoeFourhman

I think the Brawl Killer hype was pretty high a few months back, especially when they released that tacky trailer that kept invoking Smash Brawl. And as you say, with NP having the big reveal, and with a number of notable Brawl devs working on the game, there was also the assumption that it was a Wii exclusive… which added to the fire. And that one trailer that kept shouting BRAWL and SMASH seemed like a fair marketing grab for the crown.

Even the subtitle “Smash Up” is a cheeky nod to top SSBB. I guess what I am implying is that I don't feel fans are as hot for this game as they were. Smash Bros is one of Nintendo's four BIG brands, so anybody trying to best them at their own game has quite a high bar to hurdle.
http://www.aeropause.com mclazyj

I am very interested in Academy of Champions: Soccer, if only for the involvement of Pele. It does riff off of Harry Potter quite a bit, to the point that the comparison was made by the developers themselves at the Ubisoft press conference at E3.

Dead Space Extraction is the one I really want to see succeed, because it is a really good looking title on the Wii, and it also keeps a lot of the creepy elements that made Dead Space so good.
InfinityDevil

Still happy I don't have a Wii.

A DSi, though, would be a fun toy to play something quirky like Scribblenauts, but I think I'd get annoyed with the screen quality compared to the PSP.
TonyLBC

What!? No mention of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2? That is the game I am most looking forward to!
cyruszuo

It's sad that some of these games (Muramasa, Scribblenauts) don't get more love. Wait, I'm treating them as though they already came out and were ignored by the hardcore. Let's try again, it will be sad if some of these games (like Muramasa, Scribblenauts) don't get some love. I'm always disappointed by the 'enlightened gamer' who is skipping great games because of their own prejudices. September is looking good, though August and July were also a lot of fun (Little King's Story, Resort, Layton 2 were all excellent).
crispy4001

Thanks, I have a better idea of where you're coming from now.

But really, that tacky CG trailer said nothing about the game that we didn't know already, and couldn't have done much to hype it. In it they said: “From the dudes who brought you Smash Bros Brawl,” which wasn't a lie (GameArts was the core Brawl team), and was something the NP article arleady made known. That's not quite the same thing as saying “Brawl Killer.”

I won't argue with you that there's a little more negatively floating around about this game than at first. Those terrible slow-mo trailers didn't help matters. But tackling Smash Bros was just as much of a high minded goal then as it is now. When the game was first announced, they didn't even have a title for it. “Smash Up” was likely decided upon from a marketing perspective, not because the team set out to make Smash Bros 4 with Turtles from the begining (as they quite obviously haven't).

And as for the exclusive thing, why should that be any reason to look forward to this game less? Like Silent Hill Shattered Memories, the Wii version is the lead SKU. The PS2's less relevant than the PSP these days. I think all that announcement did was make the detractors think worse of it.
ACK!

No love for Spyborgs? That hits on Sep. 22 I believe and for only $40…
wrciii

Why was Spyborgs left out?
JoeFourhman

I think once we heard that the game was going everywhere, that made it less special for Wii owners… and in fact raised the usual concern that the Wii version would be sucky with tacked on motion controls, like a lot of Wii editions of multiplatform games.

Shattered Memories seems to be way more Wii-focused than TMNT, which has the opposite effect… you wonder WTF is going on with the PS2 version.
IGNfabz

Where's mini ninjas?
JoeFourhman

They're hiding.
Tpepper

Kingdom Hearts and Mario really look great. I only just recently got myself a DS through this site – http://www.gamesncs.com/rd_p?p=191613&t=9528&a=… – and those 2 games are really getting me excited. Hope they keep a good stream of games like them.
Tpepper

Kingdom Hearts and Mario really look great. I only just recently got myself a DS through this site – http://www.gamesncs.com/rd_p?p=191613&t=9528&a=… – and those 2 games are really getting me excited. Hope they keep a good stream of games like them.