On the virtual console side of things we have two TruboGrafx16 titles, futuristic boxing title Digital Champ Battle Boxing (700 points), and Gradius Gofer No Yabou (900 points), the CD-ROM sequel to the original shooter classic, and probably the most exciting game of the week as far as we're concerned. See anything you'll be picking up?

Two WiiWare Games and Two Virtual Console Games Added to Wii Shop Channel

No matter how many years go by, the blocks just never stop falling. Now Tetris Party gives you the chance to show off all the block-stacking skills you have honed through the years while competing with friends in a variety of new challenges. If you’re in more of a solitary mood, see how long it takes you to work your way through The Incredible Maze. The Virtual Console also sees two classic games added. Whether you like to do your fighting with an airship or a pair of boxing gloves, you’re covered.

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™

Tetris Party (Tetris Online, Inc., 1-6 players, Rated E for Everyone, 1,200 Wii Points): Tetris Party is a deceptively simple, totally addictive puzzle game that is sure to keep you and all of your friends and family entertained for hours on end. The WiiWare game features 10 never-before-seen single-player and multiplayer variations of Tetris, including Field Climber, Stage Racer, Shadow and Wii Balance Board-enabled modes (Wii Balance Board™ accessory sold with Wii Fit™). Several of the modes give users the chance to take advantage of the unique point-and-shoot capabilities of the Wii Remote™ controller. The party doesn't stop there, though. Take the Tetris fun online via Nintendo® Wi-Fi Connection, where you can play multiplayer Tetris against up to five friends at a time. You can also see how your Tetris Party skills stack up against the rest of the world using the global ranking system.

The Incredible Maze (Digital Leisure Inc., 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Wii Points): Get lost in The Incredible Maze! Simply tilt your Wii Remote controller to navigate a series of exciting and twisted mazes. Entering the maze could not be easier, but finding your way out will require a keen eye and a steady hand. Obstacles and traps are around every corner, so move your ball around the maze without falling off the edge. But watch out, there are lots of surprises in store. You can hunt for gems in a timed challenge, or test your abilities in a race against the clock. The Incredible Maze is also compatible with the Wii Balance Board, so you can really put your weight into it. This is the way in, but you’ll have to find your own way out.

Virtual Console

Digital Champ Battle Boxing (TurboGrafx16, 1 player, Rated E10+ for Everyone 10 and Older – Mild Violence, 700 Wii Points): Set in the near future, Digital Champ Battle Boxing is a first-person-perspective boxing title that plunges players into the raw intensity of the ring! Determined to thwart Mother Computer’s plot to conquer mankind, you infiltrate the enemy’s domain, using your boxing skills to vanquish your foes. Each round is three minutes, with a total of 12 rounds to a match. Advance to the next contest through either a KO or by flattening an opponent three times in a round for a TKO. Utilize an arsenal of left and right jabs, hooks, power-charged crosses and three different kinds of “Devastator” punches. Deftly block and slip your opponent’s attacks, and look for your chance to lay them out. Master these techniques and take down the greatest opponent of them all, DIGITAL CHAMP!

GRADIUS® II GOFER NO YABOU (TurboGrafx16 CD-ROM, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone – Mild Fantasy Violence, 900 Wii Points): This shooter is the sequel to the seminal masterpiece, GRADIUS. Two years after its last epic battle, the GRADIUS army recommissions the VIC VIPER super-dimensional warplane to combat the invasion of a new nemesis known as GOFER. Piloting the latest model of the VIC VIPER, players can select between multiple WEAPON MODULES and SHIELDS to tackle the varying stages and enemy attack patterns they come up against. With a total of nine stages, this perfect port of the original boasts one of the longest adventures in the series and features more of its trademark fast-paced background music to accompany the intense action.

If that’s the case, consider buying Tetris Party if it could pay for itself. Hudson is hosting a Tetris Party tournament, which begins in December and runs until April, where winners of the tourney will walk away with an undisclosed amount of Wii points – potentially up to 1200. Keep an eye on tetrisparty.com for full details.

I was pretty much sold after my first hands-on with Tetris Party at the Nintendo Media Summit. Stage Racer and Field Climber were my favorite modes; I like having to force myself to defy everything Tetris has ever taught me about not having blank spaces in the grid. I still get a little anxious when I see holes opening up in Duel Spaces, but then I remember that I want those spaces to remain open so I can score more points against my opponent when I close the gap from above.

It occurs to me that there is a generation out there that didn’t grow up with Tetris, so they can’t appreciate how new all the different modes feel after two decades of the same old game. Apparently that occurred to the developer, too, because they’ve included a beginner’s mode with a very basic grid and big, friendly-looking Tetriminos (blocks – we always called them blocks when we were kids). Playing this mode for even five minutes catches you up on about 20 years of gameplay (minus the “New Coke” experience) and gets you ready to defy everything you learn in that time when you set out to play Shadow or some other such mode that makes you leave blank spaces.

Once you’ve got the basics down (and gotten used to the idea that you have to rotate pieces both clockwise and counterclockwise in order to survive Stage Racer), you’re ready to take on the competition either against other people in your living room, or online, or against the AI – which can get pretty vicious depending on the difficulty it’s set to. You’ll want it to be hard, though, if you’re set on entering the tournament.

Each phase of the tournament will feature a different mode – you earn points for completing each phase which are then tallied on the website. Potentially, you could still rank high in the tourney even if you miss a phase (hard to imagine, but that’s what the PR guy tells me), but you’ll want to get in as much practice with all the different modes as you can between now and December.

Here, have some screenshots:

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.

In its jump to WiiWare, Tetris has become Tetris Party. Multiplayer Tetris is not a new idea in and of itself, but the new game modes introduced in Party challenge everything we’ve ever learned by playing a Tetris game.

The most mind-blowing mode for me was Field Climber mode. The idea here is to use the falling pieces to build a structure up which a little stick figure can climb to get to the finish line at the top of the screen. This means – gasp! – there have to be blank spaces and you have to build little ziggurats so your guy can climb. It took me three tries before I was able to un-train my brain enough to not build a flat surface, and another two before I learned not to a) trap my guy in a place he couldn’t climb out of or b) squish him with a falling piece.

Shadow mode also forces you to unlearn your Tetris habits. You’re given an outline of a shape inside the the playing field that you have to fill in with pieces. You lose points for all the parts inside the shape you don’t fill in and for any pieces that fall outside the shape. As the levels get harder, the shape becomes more complex and you’ve got to get more creative with how you place your pieces to fill it all in.

Duel Spaces is the most hardcore of the “new school” of Tetris. The whole point is to take up as much room as you can by building around spaces on the field. You’re taking turns with other players to lay down your pieces, trying not to build a bridge for them to finish with one of their pieces, thus earning them the points. It’s like Blokus – you want to spread out early and cut the other guy off before he encroaches on the part of the field that you think of as “yours.”

The final mode I really enjoyed was Stage Racer – this was shown off at the Nintendo Media Summit to loud oohs and ahhs from the crowd. The field scrolls upward and either side of it is lined with grayed-out pieces that jut out, forming a maze. You play as a single piece falling through this level and your job is to constantly flip your piece and move it left to right, navigating the maze. At all levels of difficulty, the field moves as the same pace – but the arrangement of the maze gets more and more difficult and the pieces you’ve got to work with change to make it even more challenging.

The one lame thing about Tetris Party for me is the inclusion of the Wii Balance Board. You’re supposed to stand on it and move your body left, right, up and down to move and flip the piece. I guess the developer thought people wouldn’t be too into it, because they made this mode very easy, with big, kid-friendly pieces and a small playing playing field.

I’m actually surprised – I didn’t think I would like anyone messing with my time-honored Tetris. But most of these game modes were really fun for me, and I’ll be hard-pressed to find an excuse not to buy it when it comes out “sometime this fall.”

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