So you have straight up puzzles, a puzzle-platformer starring sacks of goo, and then the original sack of goo platformer, Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure for the Sega Genesis (800 points). Flick boogers, fart toxic clouds, belch fire, and basically act like me while no one is looking in order to somehow save the day. Do not worry, true believers; I only use my powers for good.

WII-KLY UPDATE: TWO WIIWARE GAMES AND ONE VIRTUAL CONSOLE GAME ADDED TO WII SHOP CHANNEL

Nov. 24, 2008

This week, it's all about you. By adding three new single-player games to the Wii™ Shop Channel, we're helping gamers turn their Wii time into "me time." That said, don't be surprised if you attract a crowd of onlookers with this remarkable lineup. From elastic critters and elaborate puzzles to a hero with highly questionable manners, these solo titles are suitable for sharing, but give your friends and family fair warning: They may have to wait a while for their turn once you've gotten a taste of the single-player fun.

Nintendo adds new and classic games to the Wii Shop Channel at 9 a.m. Pacific time every Monday. Wii owners with a high-speed Internet connection can redeem Wii Points™ to download the games. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel or at retail outlets. This week's new games are:

WiiWare™

Boingz (RealArcade, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 1,000 Wii Points): Stretch, flex and flick your way to freedom. A truly mind-bending experience, Boingz introduces you to cute, colorful, stretchable friends lost in an alien world, searching for the magical gates that will take them home. Boingz springs to life with 30 levels of puzzle-platforming fun. The Boingz are bendy little critters that can be pulled, stretched and flicked from place to place like rubber bands. It's a team effort, as all the Boingz will have to work together to unwind the game's puzzles. What's more, many of the Boingz have fallen into a deep slumber, and you'll have to lead the stronger Boingz to find and wake up their sleepy friends. Explore surreal landscapes, sail through the air like a trapeze artist, walk along the seafloor, and collect the Twinklies to power up your elastic-powered flights.

Sudoku Challenge! (Digital Leisure Inc., 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Wii Points): Now's your chance to play the brain-busting puzzle game taking the world by storm. With over 100 million Sudoku puzzles, you'll never see the same puzzle twice in Sudoku Challenge! You can select the classic nine-by-nine Sudoku game boards as well as Grand Sudoku, which challenges you to complete five intersecting Sudoku boards simultaneously. Just a beginner? Don't worry-with three difficulty options, even a novice player can complete a Sudoku with ease. But if you're a seasoned pro, challenge yourself in Expert mode and test your true skills. It's time to get your thinking cap on and see how many Sudoku puzzles you can conquer.

Virtual Console™

Boogerman™: A Pick and Flick Adventure (Sega Genesis, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone-Comic Mischief, 800 Wii Points): In this top pick from the Sega Genesis, play as Boogerman, the heroic alter ego of Snotty Ragsdale. While investigating Professor Stinkbaum's lab, Boogerman stumbles upon a strange machine that opens a portal to another dimension. Boogerman has a nose for adventure, but has he met his match in this sticky situation? Journey through dangerous worlds while battling wicked enemies like Fly Boy and Deodor Ant. Deal them a blow with Boogerman's super abilities: pick and flick with deadly precision, belch, and use his deadly signature stomp.

For more information about Wii, please visit wii.com.

DSi Not Bound for US Until Well Into Next Year
EA May Have Gotten Early Look at DSi, New WiiWare Announcement Today
Tetris Party, Boingz Coming to WiiWare, World of Goo Dated
MadWorld Still Not Playable (In the US at Least)
The Conduit - Still Going Strong
Boingz: The Game Where You Play as a Condom
Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop Makes Me Sad
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon - Not a Looker, But She's Got Heart
Cave Story - Everything That's Old Is New Again
Call of Duty: World At War - None Dare Call It Call of Duty 5
Tetris Party - Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

While all that was making my head explode going on, I also got the chance for some quality time with Mirror's Edge and Gears of War 2. Oh, and I also got my hands on NXE - it was pretty sweet.

I'm going to go feed on something else now - preferably pizza. Fahey got me stuck on pizza.

I’m not sure that’s what Ninja Bee had in mind when they came up with the 2D puzzle platformer for WiiWare. I can tell that the game has more in common with Lemmings or LocoRoco than it does with the contraceptive aisle in a pharmacy. But I can’t help but think as I grasp the reservoir tip antenna of the little green, blue, red, and yellow guys that there might be a penis in there that’s about to get snapped when I let go.

But enough about condoms. Let’s talk about why you want this game. And you do, because if the Wii has any answer to LittleBigPlanet, Boingz is it.

You play a single Boing at a time, waddling your way through a world to wake your buddies up and get them into color-coded exit games. The Boingz lack arms to grab things and can only jump short distances – so you get by mostly by snapping or flicking them across the level. To do this, you aim the Wiimote at a Boing’s head, press and hold A to grab and pull as you drag the Wiimote in different directions to find the right release angle. Once you’ve lined up your red trajectory arrow, you let go of A and your Boing goes flying – bouncing off of surfaces or sliding over hard angles like a jelly-filled condom rubber band. The goal is to get every Boing into a gate, but if you want to be a little more hardcore, you can try a timed mode where you race against the clock to solve the puzzle.

I started out with one blue guy that I had to flick across a body of water. I aimed him straight across, so he bounced off a sleeping yellow guy on the other side. Now that he was awake, I switched to control the yellow guy by pointing at him and pressing A. I tried to rocket the yellow guy up to a ledge above him where his exit gate was waiting, but the ledge was too high and I fell in the water. Boingz float, so I had no trouble jumping out of the water and getting back to where I left the blue guy below the ledge. Switching back to the blu guy, I grabbed him by his head and stretched his body across the water, pinning his antenna to the ground by pressing B. I then swapped back to the yellow guy and had him stand on the blue guy that now made a bouncy bridge across the water. From this angle, I was able to make the flick up onto the platform where the exit gate waited.

But wait! There was still another Boing in the level - a sleeping green guy way up on the top-most ledge. I targeted the exit gate where I’d sent my yellow guy and pressed A to call him back out. Through a series of flicks, I got him up to an even higher platform, where he woke up a green guy. I used the green guy to knock down a rock from a ledge and then stapled the yellow guy’s head to it before plunging off the side of a cliff to fall back down to where the blue guy was still hanging out. We rolled off of him and I switched controls so I could unpin the blue guy’s head, opening up the way to the water. Switching back to yellow, I used the weight of the rock stuck to his head to go deep underwater and collect a series of power-ups, which gave my Boingz the ability to jump higher. Now, without the need for blue to act as a bridge, I was able to get the yellow guy back up to his gate, get the blue guy across another body of water to his gate and then switch back up to green and send him over the cliff to where the green gate was.

That probably doesn’t sound as awesome as it is. But hey, I thought Braid sounded pretty dumb when someone tried to describe it.

The bottom line is Boingz is a physics based game that feels really good to play; the exact kind of game we want on the Wii. There’s a sense of accomplishment as you work your way through the increasingly difficult puzzles; and the bright, friendly colors plus cute sound effects are only the icing on the cake.

Look for it on WiiWare hopefully by the end of this month (maybe early next month – it’s in certification, and that can drag on for a while).

Tetris Party will include a cooperative mode, a competitive mode as well as traditional modes. You can also use the balance board to play the game. Leaning left to right on the board moves the piece, squatting turns the piece and tilting backwards and forwards speeds the drop. The game's shadow mode offers puzzles, and a climber mode that has you working to build to the roof. Finally stage racer has you controlling a single piece as you try to move it down through a rising wall of pieces. It's like a maze, it's pretty cool. The Hudson Soft game will hit the Wii "very soon" for 1,200 Wii points.

In Boingz you play as stretchy little jelly dudes in a 2D adventure. Gamers use the Wii remote to grab and stretch the characters to flick them across the stage. The physics based game offers players multiple solutions to the game's many puzzles which typically involve saving other boinks. It's meant to be "casual friendly" though there is also a time challenge for more hardcore gamers. The game is being developed by Ninja Bee, but no price or date were announced.

They wrapped things up by saing that the much anticipated 2008 Independent Games Festival winner World of Goo is hitting oct 13 on the WiiWare channel.

AJ Glasser