Wii Gaming News

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Time: Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 5 p.m. PST
Location: Watch the embedded video player here in this story.

Questions: Ask your question(s) in our Game Night thread.

Familiar with the heroes in a half shell? Do the names Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, and Michelangelo ring a bell? This week on Game Night, we’re going to check out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled for Xbox Live Arcade in addition to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up for Wii.

If you have any comments or questions, please submit them on 1UP’s message boards or our Game Night Twitter account. I’ll make sure to read them out loud during our live stream. And stay tuned for the recorded version of Game Night on GameVideos on Wednesday.

Simultaneously accessible and challenging, Virtua Tennis 2009 distills the sport of tennis to its purest form by offering a short list of shots (lob, top spin, and slice), while emphasizing your reflexes, position on the court, and ability to anticipate your opponent. At first, the mechanics might feel overly simple — a stark contrast to the other big tennis game on the market, Top Spin 3, whose gameplay leans more on realism than exaggeration. But beyond VT 2009’s simplicity is an addictive arcade tennis game capable of fostering intelligent, thought-provoking matches.

Tennis fans will appreciate the tools available to attack either from the baseline or near the net. Aggressive baseline players who favor force over finesse can return the ball from the back of the court with a speedy forward spin to overpower their opponents. Net players, on the other hand, who avoid the back in favor of the center of the court, can gracefully volley the ball as soon as it flies over the net. Baseline and net players are fundamentally different from each other, but require similar skills in order to be used effectively.

In the years since the launch of World of Warcraft back in 2004, Blizzard has implemented numerous premium services that allow users to modify their play experience for a small fee. First they began offering paid (and occasionally free) server transfers, then came name changes and, eventually, the ability to alter a character’s physical appearance and sex. According to a post on the official World of Warcraft forums (via WoW Insider), the biggest change is yet to come: Paid faction switching.

Because of potential complications with things like faction specific quests, pets, items, and Achievements, you probably shouldn’t expect to turn your Blood Elf Paladin into a Dwarf anytime soon. But Blizzard poster Nethaera promises that sort of functionality is coming, and that they’re working on adding it in a way that has the least amount of impact on gameplay. Nethaera offered the following tidbits of info:

“We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

“As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.”

We’ll be sure to deliver full details on World of Warcraft’s major faction changes as they’re announced.

Fans of SNK fighting games will be able to chase last week’s release of Garou: Mark of the Wolves with King of Fighters ‘98 Ultimate Match this Wednesday. The classic 2D fighter contains an almost stupefying 64 playable characters, and will set you back 800 Microsoft points, or about 10 bucks.

Also on the docket for Xbox Live Arcade is Worms 2: Armageddon, which was originally announced on developer Team17’s official Facebook page last week. The Worms sequel will also be going for 800 Microsoft points when it arrives this Wednesday.

Of course, if you feel like $10 is a little too steep, you can always turn to the original Worms for a little squirmy warfare. Since being added to Microsoft’s line of Arcade Hits, it’ll cost you half as much as Armageddon — not a bad choice if your wallet’s tight this week.

The NPD Group has sent word that the Gamer Segmentation 2009 report has found more females are gaming this year, in several categories. Females jumped from 23% in 2008 to 28% in 2009 in the Console Gamer category, and rose four percentage points each in Heavy Portable and Extreme Gamers. Other categories of segmentation in the study include Secondary, Online PC, Avid PC, and Offline PC. The NPD Group attributes the rise of female console players primarily to the Wii. The gaming industry seems to have caught onto this in a big way, focusing large sections of this year’s E3 press conferences on so-called “girl games,” which is quickly turning into a lucrative market.

Other data mined shows the dedicated habits of the core audience. This “Extreme” segment plays more than any other group (39 hours, versus 29 hours from Avid PC Gamers), and that number is actually down from last year. They also buy four times the games of other segments despite having the lowest income. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm doesn’t impact the game industry too much, since they only make up 4% of the total game-purchasing market.

If we take those two pieces of data together, it points in the same direction many have noticed for the industry. The wider net of female gamers and Wii adoption is simply more profitable right now than the core fan base due to its relative size. On the bright side, the data does suggest that more females are making the transition to becoming part of that core audience, so we’re unlikely to see our beloved AAA titles go anywhere.

The Chinese government has officially banned gold farming, declaring that virtual currency can only be traded for virtual goods and services. According to InformationWeek, the ruling will affect “more than 300 million Internet users in China,” and curtail a trade that “exceeded several billion yuan (one billion yuan is approximately $146 million) last year” while growing “20 percent annually.”

According to a 2008 survey by the University of Manchester’s Richard Heeks, between 80 and 85 percent of gold farmers are based in China. The process involves collecting in-game currency, then selling it via a website or PayPal to other players.

Gold farming has attracted controversy not just because it exploits certain game mechanics, but because entrepreneurs in America and Korea have hired low-cost labor in places like China to farm large amounts of gold. This has lead to accusations that gold farming outfits are sweatshops.

It’s been a few weeks since Rock Band Unplugged first arrived on store shelves, so there are bound to be a couple people out there who’ve already exhausted both the game’s stock soundtrack and the initial slate of DLC. More handheld rock is on the way, though, starting with the four brand new tracks that hit the PlayStation Store this morning.

Each of the songs below are currently going for the standard $1.99 apiece:

• “Afterlife” by Avenged Sevenfold
• “Constant Motion” by Dream Theater
• “Dr. Feelgood” by Motley Crue
• “Sex Type Thing” by Stone Temple Pilots

Though the game itself included many temporarily exclusive tracks in its setlist, the DLC for Rock Band Unplugged has thus far sampled from its console sibling’s vast back catalog of music. Would you prefer an entirely fresh set of song downloads for the PSP game, or are you content with rocking out to the same stuff they’ve been offering on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 since 2007?

Penny Arcade Expo 2009 organizers have officially announced their keynote speaker. This year’s speaker will be Ron Gilbert, who has become legendary for his work on classic LucasArts adventure titles like Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island titles.

“This is an unbelievable moment for us. I wasted an entire family vacation one year trying to figure out how to win that stupid spitting competition,” said Penny Arcade’s Robert Khoo.

Over the course of a twenty-year career, Gilbert has created the SCUMM scripting language, served as creative director at Hothead Games, and been inducted in the Computer Game Hall of Fame.

With iPhone’s Doom Resurrection arriving in the iTunes App Store today, id Software co-founder John Carmack discussed a few other iPhone projects that are currently underway. Looks like we can expect not just Rage, but at least the first two Quake titles, and possibly the third.

“There’s no doubt that we’ll go through Quake and Quake 2,” Carmack told MTV Multiplayer.

“I think that I can probably manage to do Quake 3 on the conventional iPhone platform, if Apple winds up addressing just a few things in their system software. When you start looking at the 3GS, [Quake 3] would not be a problem at all.”