Slim pickins’. That’s all I got to say about this week’s new offerings from Nintendo. But you know what they say, “One man’s slim pickins’ is another man’s DLC GOTY.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s how the saying goes.

Hit the jump for this week’s full list.

Nintendo eShop

• Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword

Nintendo eShop + Nintendo DSiWare

• GO Series: Undead Storm

Nintendo Video

• “Drown in the Now” by The Crystal Method

Iwata Asks

• Swapnote

WiiWare

• Carmen Sandiego Adventures in Math: The Great Gateway Grab

Over the past few years Nintendo’s online shop has developed a bit of a reputation. WiiWare once was looked at as a platform for indie developers and small studios to showcase their work. However, in reality, it’s something more akin to a dumping ground for sloppy, poorly made games that no-one really wants.

Despite that negative distinction, the service has accumulated a number of outstanding titles that clearly stand apart from cashgrabs and shovelware. Unfortunately for Wii owners searching for the next diamond in the rough, Zombii Attack just isn’t one of them.

Still interested? Well then, read on after the break for the full breakdown of the latest gem to join the Wii’s library.

If it’s one thing that makes Zombii Attack an interesting game it’s that it puts a new spin on an incredibly tired concept. Rather than beating back hoards of the walking dead with a baseball bat or blasting off heads with shotgun shells, players must use a giant slingshot to fire miscellaneous objects at the oncoming zombie hordes.

This makes for a somewhat amusing mechanic, watching how red playground balls, anvils, and what have you slow the oncoming deluge. Unfortunately, a being bizarre only go so far to compensate for what is otherwise one of the worst games I’ve played in a long time. 

Players gwill find themselves in the employ of a scientist that is experimenting on the undead. Throughout Zombii Attack‘s 18 levels he’ll ask you to collect an assortment of different colored zombies. The slingshot doubles as a tractor beam, which will let you catch and hurl test subjects into a helicopter hovering in the skies above. It’s a diversion that helps to relieve the tedium of chucking rocks at brain munchers, but, like the rest of the game, the concept falls apart in practice.

Occasionally collecting specimens offers enjoyable moments where the final zombie appears as the tide of walking corpses breaks through the barricades, allowing the player to escape with just fractions of a second to spare. Unfortunately the exhilarating feeling that this provides the exception to the rule. More often players will find themselves busy fending off sporadic waves of enemies while waiting for the right color combination to appear.

At times this can take a very, very long while. I once waited for what seemed like an eternity for a single green zombie that never came. In the meantime hundreds, perhaps thousands, of zombies of every other color soaked up each and every piece of ammunition I’d purchased over the course of the game. It was a long, slow, frustrating defeat that was only made worse by having to start over from the beginning.

The troubled gameplay is paired with controls that sporadically cease to function. Imagine waiting for several minutes for a particular zombie only to have the reticule disregard your input and send that precious specimen flying in the opposite direction from the helicopter. It’s moments like these that make me glad the Wii remote has a wrist strap to prevent me from throwing the remote through the television screen.

The visuals don’t fare any better. On a system filled to the brim with games that have less than stellar graphics, Gamers Digital managed to scrape the bottom of that barrel. It’s actually something of an achievement that this game looks the way it does. Zombii Attack makes even the ugliest N64 title look like a work of art.

It’s not all bad though. Aside from being a tad repetitive, the soundtrack is actually pretty decent and quite fitting for the subject matter. My favorite aspect of the game were the Rad Racer-esque bonus levels. Players drive from one location to another and get points for running over zombies. Unfortunately they were pretty infrequent and it’s somewhat telling about the product as a whole if bonus stages that resemble an NES game is the best part.

I’d be somewhat shocked that Nintendo gave this the green light if it weren’t for the poor quality of the vast majority of titles that populate their digital distribution platforms. And while I’ve played my fair share of sub-par WiiWare games, this one takes the cake.

Faulty controls, terrible graphics, and uninspired gameplay are what players can expect from this one. Even for five dollars Zombii Attack is an insulting waste of time and money.

This review is based on a digital copy of the Wii game Zombii Attack.

Zombies are attacking Nintendo’s digital platform and the only way to stop them is…a massive slingshot apparently. This new shooting gallery title from Gamers Digital pits survivors against an oncoming zombie horde.

Players will need to launch everything from anvils to boxes filled with dynamite to stop the undead menace (and maybe destroy a few buildings along the way). Zombii Attack is now available on WiiWare for 500 of Nintendo’s moon bucks.

Twenty years ago, shoot ‘em ups were one of the most prolific genres on the market. Since then, they’ve fallen into decline and become something of a rarity. Now, fans of the venerable genre always have their eyes on the horizon, on the lookout for the next slice of bullet heaven to waltz their way.

A couple of months ago that might have meant the British colonization of Mars on PC, but this week you might want to set your sights on Nintendo’s WiiWare service. If you enjoyed Ikaruga (how could you not) and its unique polarity mechanic, you may just want to check out what Microforum has in store.

What separates Kyotokei from your average shooter is a polarity mechanic, shamelessly pilfered from critically acclaimed shooter, Ikaruga. Enemies come in two colors, light and dark, each of which shoot bullets of their same color. The player has the ability to switch between light and dark. Bullets of an opposite color polarity will cause  death, while same-color bullets are harmless. Rather, these bullets are absorbed and converted into stored energy for a homing attack.

The polarity mechanic leads to some challenging gameplay. Kyotokei may start off slow, but after a few minutes the challenge amps up considerably. Soon enough the screen fills with bullets of both shades, and throws patterns of increasing complexity at the player. Unfortunately the difficulty isn’t balanced in the slightest. You’ll spend the majority of a level mindlessly shooting harmless enemies only to periodically hit walls of uncharacteristic difficulty or have enemies fly in from off screen without warning and skill you instantly.

Frustrations aside, it all works well enough from a technical standpoint. The controls, enemies, weapons, are all solid but unimpressive. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing terribly good either. Everything Kyotokei does has been done before, and done better. Borrowing gameplay from one of the most respected and innovative titles in the genre doesn’t draw flattering comparisons when your product is decidedly average and uninteresting.

Microforum may have good taste when it comes to drawing on other games inspiration, but that good taste doesn’t really extend towards Kyotokei‘s art style.  Visually, it looks like a mediocre SNES game. Character models and environments aren’t particularly inspired either. And when you consider the decent but forgettable soundtrack, you just have to wonder if they were trying at all.

It’s only five levels long, but a shmup’s longevity never truly lies in its length. Even on the easiest difficulty setting you’ll see several “Game Over” screens as you’re learning the ins and outs to Kyotokei‘s levels and bosses. If you need a reason to come back for more, there’s three difficulty settings and an option for two player co-op to help flesh out the package.

If you’re a Wii owner looking to spend five bucks you could certainly do worse. There’s some fun to be had here, but by no means does Kyotokei join the ranks of essential WiiWare titles. It will surely get a lot of attention purely for the fact that it draws so heavily on Treasure’s 2001 masterpiece, but in doing so it just serves to highlight its own shortcomings and lack of originality. Talk about living in the shadow of greatness.

Last week’s update featured the comparatively awesome offering of Kirby’s Dream Land and Final Fantasy III. It left me wondering if Nintendo was finally going to start getting its act together. Would next week’s update bring Metroid II, Pokemon Red, or even Sonic Chaos? Nope. The disappointment continues.

Hit the jump for this week’s list of games with funny names.

WiiWare

Nintendo eShop + Nintendo DSiWare

Nintendo eShop

After being virtually omitted from this year’s showing at E3 and with a complete lack of software coming down the pipeline, it’s become apparent that the Wii is on its way out and the Wii U will soon take center stage. Because of that, I would like to take this opportunity to highlight many the successes that the Wii has achieved over the past five years.

Nintendo may have forgotten the Wii, but that doesn’t mean we have to.

For all intents and purposes the GameCube, as a piece of hardware, was indistinguishable from the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Despite a solid line of first party software, features such as the lack of DVD functionality, virtually non-existent online capabilities, lack of third party support, and Nintendo becoming increasingly out of touch with longtime fans caused an otherwise fantastic console to fail at market.

By the end of the last console generation Nintendo was forced to come to a realization. Through poor sales, it was forced to recognize that it could no longer continue to fight fire with fire. Nintendo needed to do something different if it was to have any hope of replicating the success it achieved in the 1980s and early 1990s. From that point of desperation and Nintendo’s constant mantra of “innovation” the Wii was born.

The Wii’s most obvious achievement comes from a technological standpoint — new input devices. The Wii Remote is the result of the combination of accelerometers and IR (infrared) detection. These devices, in addition to the LEDs contained within the console’s sensor bar, sense the position of an object within a three dimensional space.

The Wii Motion Plus, and subsequent Wii Remote Plus improved things considerably with the introduction of turning fork gyroscopes which not only allowed the sensor bar to detect motion better but directly reflected your movements on-screen. The Wii Balance Board introduced pressure sensors that allowed your feet and body to act as the controller. These devices allowed Nintendo to bring motion controlled gaming to the forefront of the gaming industry.

Games like The Conduit and Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition proved that motion controllers can provide a mouse-and-keyboard-like shooting experience on a console. Red Steel 2 and the upcoming release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword let you swing your Wii Remote and see your actions mimicked on screen as a sword in a 1:1 fashion. Countless independent titles on WiiWare like Lost Winds, Lit, the Bit.Trip series, And Yet it Moves, and Fluidity showcased new and unique experiences that only Nintendo’s new controller could offer. There are now entire genres of games that were previously almost nonexistent such as exercise and dance.

Nintendo changed the game considerably by turning the market’s focus from a graphical arms race into a contest where the competitors have to offer new, different methods of control. Motion control may have been laughed at and derided when it was first introduced — but one needn’t look much further for proof of motion control’s success than the number of Wii consoles sold over the last half decade or how Microsoft and Sony followed suit with the Kinect and PlayStation Move. New methods of control have opened new doors and new opportunities for gamers.

They’ve also revived old ones. Something I have particularly enjoyed about the Wii is the resurgence of the light gun game. The Wii Remote’s IR pointer allows console gamers to experience classic arcade gameplay in their homes. Highlights include Dead Space Extraction, House of the Dead 2, 3 and Overkill, the Resident Evil “Chronicles” titles, and Sin & Punishment: Star Successor. The arcades we grew up in may be disappearing at an alarming rate, but at least now we can get similar experiences in our living room.

Another genre fading into obscurity that received a resurgence on Nintendo’s little white box: 2D platformers. By the time the final days of the SNES rolled around sprites had become gorgeous works of art. Unfortunately, decades of pixel-art evolution were sidelined by polygons. While revolutionary at the time, the introduction of 3D polygonal visuals brought graphics back into an aesthetic dark age, one that we have only recently come out of with the advent of high-definition.

While the Wii lags behind its competition graphically, that hasn’t been the worst thing in the world. It’s allowed gamers to take a nostalgic trip back to more youthful days with 2D platformers. And what a revival it has been. Favourites include Donkey Kong Country Returns, New Super Mario Bros Wii, A Boy and His Blob, Lost in Shadow, Warioland Shake It, Megaman 9, Bit.Trip RUNNER, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn.

There are more reasons to celebrate the Wii’s standard-resolution visuals than just a retro revival.  While many celebrate Nintendo’s decision to join the HD revolution with the Wii U, smaller developers probably aren’t among them. Lower resolution graphics have led to lower development costs. Lower development costs mean that developers can produce niche games, and make a profit on sales figures that would make other developers working on games for the high-definition platforms weep.

Suda 51’s studio Grasshopper Manufacture released No More Heroes in 2007. If it were a PlayStation 3 title selling 500,000 copies would have been a failure. On the Wii half a million copies sold allowed Suda 51 to produce a sequel, and a damn good one at that. Titles like No More Heroes exist, in part, due to the lackluster visuals for which the console has received much derision and scorn. Little King’s Story, Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Madworld, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, Rune Factory Frontier, and many other cult hits were made possible by “bad graphics”. These are among my favourite titles of the generation and while I’m sure they would all look great in HD, I’m thankful they exist at all.

Finally, I would like to recognize the Wii for expanding the audience and redefining what it means to be a gamer. Five years ago videogames were perceived by the public at large as something for children and nerds. The Wii and the DS have made great strides toward breaking that stereotype.

It’s interesting to think that five years ago Nintendo’s back was against the wall. Their home console was in third place, despite being technically superior to its primary competitor. Nintendo’s strong franchises and long history with gamers wasn’t enough to ward off the incredibly successful PlayStation 2 and all of its mass market appeal.

That was five years ago. Now, my mom owns a Wii. Somehow Nintendo is getting games into the hands of people that you never would have expected and they’re responding. Nintendo’s Wii series alone has shifted more than 150 million units. While hardcore gamers may resent the casual crowd, the fact is that their enjoyment of the medium only really only benefits us all in the long run as gaming gains more mainstream acceptance.

These are but a few reasons why the Nintendo Wii has been a success. However, from a personal standpoint, the most important thing the Wii has achieved exists in the social sphere. People were once ashamed of playing videogames. While that social stigma still exists, day by day it is being washed away as more people consider themselves gamers. Being able to sit down with family members who previously thought gaming was a juvenile waste of time and share a common pastime is an amazing experience.

It’s Thursday and you know what that means, yet another offering of downloadable titles from Nintendo. While they’re still no where near competing on the level of Microsoft and Sony in the online department, with Kirby and Final Fantasy titles in the mix, this week’s offering is an easier pill to swallow than the last.

Virtual Console & WiiWare

eShop & DSiWare

• Moto eXtreme – Defy gravity, perform awesome stunts and navigate crazy courses. With intuitive controls and fun-packed game play, this is a ride you won’t want to miss. (For 3DS / DSi)
• Boardwalk Ball Toss™ (eShop, DSiWare)
• Hearts Spades Euchre (eShop, DSiWare)

eShop

Were you hoping that the arrival of the 3DS eShop would mean exciting things for Nintendo’s downloadble services? Well, that won’t be happening — at least not this week.  The most exciting title of the week features Chimaki from Guilty Gear 2 in a “quirky” platformer called Pro Jumper! Guilty Gear Tangent. It could be alright.

Hit the jump for the rest of this weeks titles, or not. Better luck next week, Nintendo.

Nintendo eShop and Nintendo DSiWare™
• Pro Jumper! Guilty Gear Tangent!? – Chimaki from Guilty Gear 2 stars in this quirky platformer. Make use of his run, jump and towel attacks to collect apples and successfully bypass the legions bent on his destruction. (For Nintendo 3DS™/Nintendo DSi™)

WiiWare™
• The Mystery of Whiterock Castle – Experience a thrilling search for a missing princess. Find all the hidden objects in 10 meticulously detailed settings as you get to know the various inhabitants and rooms of the castle. (For Wii™)

Nintendo eShop and Nintendo DSiWare
• Stratego: Next Edition – Demonstrate your strategic skills on the battlefield against opponents who will do everything in their power to outsmart you. Rise to the challenge and become the greatest general of all time. (For Nintendo 3DS/Nintendo DSi)

Also new this week:
• Tennis (Nintendo eShop)
• Delbo (Nintendo eShop, Nintendo DSiWare)

• 120 completely new BIT.TRIP challenges spanning all six games
• Exclusive Audio Gallery with fan remixes, original songs, and demo versions of existing BIT.TRIP themes
• Exclusive Image Gallery with production stills, concept art, and promo images
• Exclusive Video Gallery with more than 25 movies telling the story of CommanderVideo
• 6 Letters to BIT.TRIP Fans, written by Alex Neuse, the series’ director
• Exclusive BIT.TRIP Soundtrack Sampler CD with music from all six games
• All 6 games in the award-winning BIT.TRIP series in one completepackage
• New difficulty modes in all games
• Online leaderboards

The Wii version of Bit.Trip Complete is slated for release alongside the 3DS version of the same compilation, Bit.Trip Saga, at some point later this year. If you’ve been itching to try one of the most popular and highly acclaimed series on WiiWare, now is looking to be a great time to do so.

If you update your 3DS you’ll notice that the Nintendo 3DS eShop just went live. The firmware update is accompanied by a 3D Pokédex application and a free download for NES classic Excitebike remastered in 3D. Forthcoming 3DS Virtual Console releases include Super Mario Land, Alleyway and Radar Mission.  If you’re interested in those titles or downloadable titles on your 3DS in the future, the eShop will update weekly on Thursdays.

Nintendo DSiWare

• GO Series Picdun, Gamebridge, 1 player, 500 DSi Points
• Dreamwalker, Code Mystics Inc, 1 player, 500 DSi Points
• Crazy Cheebo: Puzzle Party, Cypronia, 1-2 players, 200 DSi Points

WiiWare

• Ubongo, Korner Entertainment, 1-4 players, 800 Wii Points

It’s kind of an awesome week to be a Wii owner. There may not be that many big releases to look forward to anymore, but at least there’s still the occasional downloadable gem.  Bit.Trip CORE just got a free demo via WiiWare. If you haven’t checked out the full game yet — download that demo!  Also, Mega Man X was re-released on the virtual console today. It’s about time, Capcom!

The full update awaits after the break.

Virtual Console

• Mega Man X [SNES] (Capcom, 1 player, 800 Wii Points)

WiiWare

• My Little Baby (dtp young entertainment, 1 player,  600 Wii Points)
• BIT.TRIP CORE [demo version] Aksys Games, 1-2 players, 0 Wii Points; full version available for 600 Wii Points)

Nintendo DSiWare

• GO Series Captain Sub (Gamebridge, 1 player, 200 DSi Points)
• DodoGo! Robo (Neko Entertainment, 1 player, 200 DSi Points)
• Music on: Learning Piano Volume 2 (Abylight, 1 player, 200 DSi Points)

This week’s Nintendo Update is a great babysitting tool. Afterall, the Gameboy experience is something young kids will enjoy on airplanes — when there’s nothing else to do. If you’re interested in keeping your kid busy, I recommend Play with Birds; I hear games about birds are popular these days.

Nintendo DSiWare

• Art of Ink, Sabarasa, 1 player (800 DSi Points)
• Slingo Quest, MumboJumbo, 1 player (800 DSi Points)
• Escape Trick: The Secret of Rock City Prison, INTENSE CO Ltd, 1 player (500 DSi Points)

WiiWare

• Play with Birds, Games Farm, 1 player (500 Wii Points)
• Fast Draw Showdown [demo version], Digital Leisure Inc, 1-2 players (0 Wii Points; full version available for 500 Wii Points)