Filed under: Born for Wii

It's always dark in the city. Always raining. The light from a thousand neon signs is refracted and scattered by the smog that hangs in the air, ominous and ever-present. Spinners pass by quietly overhead while those too poor to own a car travel by foot, hurrying with umbrellas clutched tightly and collars upturned against the cold and rain. A handful aren't even real -- fake, synthetic, the creations of man in his own image, now considered a threat and forbidden to walk the streets of L.A. For them, the chase is a fight for survival. They have no right to life. For you, it's just another day on the job. Retiring replicants is your business. You're a blade runner.

More than 25 years after its release, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner still stands as one of the best science fiction movies of all time. It's a haunting dystopian noir, a gripping mystery, and a special effects marvel. In a fitting tribute to the film, Westwood Studios revisited L.A. circa 2019 in their 1997 adventure game, simply titled Blade Runner. The events of the game play out in parallel to the story of Rick Deckard, as rookie blade Ray McCoy hunts down his own set of dangerous replicants. Westwood's point-and-click adventure was an ambitious project for 1997, but it succeeds on all fronts: it's consistently atmospheric, delivers a solid and well-acted script, and alters the traditional gameplay enough to be a fresh take on the genre.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Blade Runner

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, BattleTanx: Global Assault, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

Sometimes looking back at the games of our childhood days can be painful. More than a decade later, it's hard to imagine how Combat Cars for the Sega Genesis was ever...well, fun. Ah, the indiscretion of youth: hoarding your money, saving for that one, glorious moment when you pick out a new game to take home and devour, only to realize, years later, how terrible it really was. Still, blind purchases could occasionally lead to good things, and a few weeks ago I went home and recovered my Nintendo 64 from its years of storage exile for the express purpose of reliving some of those magical gaming sessions of my youth. In this case, the game in question was BattleTanx: Global Assault.

Likely one of the few good games to ever come out of the offices of the now-defunct 3DO, BattleTanx is about as straightforward as its name implies. The game turns 10 years old in 2009, and despite the fact that it looks and play like a Nintendo 64 game from 1999, it's still a lot of fun. Simple, arcadey gameplay, a multitude of tanks and a solid lineup of secondary weapons guarantee hours of mindless fun. The single-player is easy to plow through in short order, but fun enough to come back to -- and the real draw lies in the multiplayer, which rivaled Goldeneye, Smash Bros., and Mario Kart for four-player mayhem. Ready to take up arms with Battlelord Griffin Spade and Born for Wii as we assault the post-apocalyptic globe? Hit the link below.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: BattleTanx: Global Assault

Now that 2008 is tightly packed away into our memories and the glorious new year is unfolding before our very eyes, we're caught between looking backwards at what 2008 imparted upon us and anticipating what 2009 has to offer. Even though Born for Wii is all about looking backwards, it's hard not to be excited about what this year is bringing to the Wii: in just a couple months, the New Play Control version of Pikmin will be hitting the States, and it will be good times. But we've still got awhile to wait until then, and this week we're highlighting a sorely underappreciated Nintendo game of last generation: Super Mario Sunshine.

Mario Sunshine was released in 2002 as the first real successor to the groundbreaking Mario 64, and it was clear from the beginning that things were going to be a little different. For starters, Mario was on vacation on a tropical island, and soon found himself equipped with a water pack for cleaning up sludge. Though it was generally well-reviewed, Mario Sunshine has since become somewhat of a whipping boy in the fan community, and many claim that it didn't live up to groundbreaking pedigree Mario 64 established years earlier. Mario Galaxy managed to exceed its predecessors in virtually every way possible, but in the end, Sunshine still has things worth going back for. The wonderful tropical locale, the FLUDD-less levels, and some fun water pack puzzles all made Mario Sunshine a worthwhile endeavor, and a New Play Control version would give Nintendo the chance to polish its shortcomings and give Mario the vacation he deserved.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Mario Sunshine

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, NBA Jam, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

Nintendo knows how to sell you a console. Whether it's Tetris bundled with every Game Boy, Super Mario World packed in with each shiny new SNES, or Wii Sports freely tagging along with the bazillions of Wiis they've sold in the past two years, the gaming giant has a history of providing fun and enticing games as a free incentive to buy their consoles. This generation, Wii Sports has certainly become a runaway success -- there's probably an unsettling number of people who never even put another game in their system. And while Wii Sports can be a lot of fun, it's obviously a pretty simplistic experience that doesn't cover the range of entertainment sports have to offer. Sports videogames often get a bad rap for spawning milked franchises and little but roster changes from year-to-year, but every so often a game comes along and totally annihilates the formula. In 1993, that game was NBA Jam.

Midway's NBA Jam defined and popularized an arcadey, totally unrealistic and totally awesome style of gameplay for sports games. No fouls. Superhuman dunks. Turbo mode. Like the football series NFL Blitz Midway would develop several years later, NBA Jam passed up the finer points of basketball (like, you know, the rules) to focus on what really made the game fun. It's been several years since anything inspired by NBA Jam saw the light of day, and it's high time this timeless series returns to its former glory with a new take on its wacky, blissful gameplay.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: NBA Jam

After the dreary all-night study benders, frantic cramming, and endless writing that coalesce to produce the torturous period that is college finals, gamers around the country find time to kick back, relax, and play through the dreaded backlog that resulted from the flood of titles released during the holiday season. After playing through the wonderful Mirror's Edge, I set my sights on an older title I'd had sitting around for several months (thanks to the Xbox 360's spotty backwards compatibility). That game was Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath.

Released towards the end of the Xbox's life cycle in 2005, Stranger's Wrath was also the last game created by Oddworld Inhabitants before the studio shifted focus to creating cinematic movies. And it's a shame, because Stranger's Wrath succeeds at everything it attempts. It's fun, inventive, and as full of life as every other Oddworld creation. Follow along with Stranger (in both first and third person!) as he tracks down bounties in the Odd version of the Old West in this week's Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Stranger's Wrrath

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

Capcom has been on a roll this generation. First we got games like Dead Rising and Lost Planet which launched strong new IPs. Then the announcements started to hit. An Okami port for the Wii. Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop. Resident Evil 5 (which, judging by its recent demo, seems to be shaping up nicely). Street Fighter 4. Mega Man 9. Granted, not all of those games are making their way to the Wii, but on the whole they represent good times for gamers. Does it really get much better than that? Maybe it does.

As if the decade-in-the-making Street Fighter 4 wasn't enough to reinvigorate Capcom's fighting game base, the company decided to once again visit its vs. series with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. Just launched in Japan, the new fighter already has adventurous message boarders and bloggers scrambling for imports and Twilight hacks, while the rest of us pray nightly for the miracle of resolved licensing issues and a domestic release. In the spirit of Wii gamers in the land of the rising sun playing the gorgeous Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, this week Born for Wii aims to celebrate with a look back at what may be the most legendary game in the vs. series -- Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

In an industry perpetuated by sequels, we see plenty of gamers rabidly demanding new installments in their favorite series, whether it be the predictable Madden: Year Edition, Medal of Honor: Kill Some More Nazis, or Metal Gear Solid: Even Longer Cutscenes. Of course, there's also a vocal community crying out against the terrible process of franchise-milking, demanding fresh characters and fresher concepts. Every year there are a few surprisingly original titles from the big studios. This year EA has been surpringly generous with new IPs, publishing heavy-hitters like Mirror's Edge and Dead Space. In the past, we've gotten gems like Beyond Good & Evil and Zack & Wiki. Unfortunately, as we all know, new franchises mean new risks, and they don't always sell as well as they deserve.

Last generation, few games exemplified this tragic situation more than Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. Created by Swingin' Ape Studios, this wonderfully charming and surprisingly deep third-person shooter would be the developer's only project -- though they started work on the infamous Starcraft Ghost, they were eventually absorbed by Blizzard, and the game eventually disappeared. For whatever reason -- poor advertising, unappealing box art, or bad timing -- Metal Arms was overlooked by many a gamer. Those who gave it a chance discovered a lengthy quest chock full of hilarious characters, a genuinely original world, and a veritable ton of weapons, and that's why Glitch in the System is this week's game that's Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Metal Arms

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Wario's Woods, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

Few genres can match the gnawing, unquenchable addiction of the puzzler. The classics like Tetris and Puyo Pop have populated virtually every platform under the sun in one form or another, and modern-day classics like Hexic and Zuma have undoubtedly caused more than one dreary office worker to find himself ejected from his cubicle. Sadly, just as many wonderful puzzle games have fallen by the wayside. One of those games is Wario's Woods.

Wario's Woods has an odd history for a game: released on the NES and the Super NES only a few months apart in 1994, two similar, though notably different, versions of the game were on the market at the same time. Though the game only differs slightly from Puyo Pop and its various clones, the mechanics unique to Wario's Woods make it one of the most addictive puzzle games ever made. The NES version of Wario's Woods has been available on the Virtual Console for two years, but the superior Super Nintendo version is nowhere to be found. We've seen nothing new from the series for nearly 15 years -- it's well past time for a revival. And for reals, this time.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Wario's Woods

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Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Star Wars: Republic Commando, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

Star Wars games have a tough time. With a few exceptions, they generally end up steaming piles of bantha fodder. For every Knights of the Old Republic or Rogue Squadron there's a Super Bombad Racing or Revenge of the Sith. Still, each console generation manages to grab hold of a few shining stars of the Star Wars galaxy, and oftentimes these games are universally praised and well-received -- after all, anything Star Wars George Lucas didn't manage to screw up is something worth celebrating.

Star Wars: Republic Commando, developed in-house at Lucasarts, seemed to pass under the radar last generation, receiving less attention than most of its contemporaries. Those who gave it a chance were treated to a squad-based first-person shooter better than the Battlefront series and considerably darker in tone than most Star Wars games (hello, Lego Star Wars). Gritty, bloody, and atmospheric, Republic Commando is an underappreciated gem and a great opportunity for the Wii to bolster its rather meager library of first-person shooters.

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Some games are a little out there. You've got your No More Heroes brand of weirdness, where collecting coconuts is as commonplace as mass murder and sexual innuendo. On another level, there's Katamari Damacy, where rolling entire cities into a ball is a perfectly acceptable way to repair the cosmos. And then there are the games that are so bizarre, so inexplicably removed from the norm, that they transcend weirdness in a way few things ever have. One of the games is Cubivore.

Though it was released for the GameCube six years ago, it's still hard to believe that Cubivore found its way to the West. Thanks to Atlus, a company known for publishing titles that don't exactly have mainstream appeal, one of the most inherently Japanese games ever made was displaced from its home turf. Cubivore's eccentricity is also its greatest strength -- those few gamers who weren't turned off by its quirkiness discovered an adventure like no other, a fight to survive and evolve into a stronger, faster animal...thing. Its unique, hilarious, downright fun, and Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Cubivore

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Contra, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

As gaming moves forward, the perpetual improvement of technology naturally leads to the Gears of War 2 creed: "Bigger, Better, and More Badass." Unfortunately, the trend of increasingly film-like 3D games leads to fewer and fewer 2D titles finding their way to home consoles. Many series, such as Zelda and Mario, have successfully transitioned to 3D. But others never quite recovered after the jump, and were always in their prime in the 2D era.

Take Contra, for example. This weekend, upon curling up with my DS -- a handy shield against things such as responsibility and obligation -- and spending a few hours being brutalized by Contra 4, I realized two things. The first was that I suck at Contra. But the second was that, in spite of suffering several emasculating deaths every minute 10 seconds, I was still having a blast. The game perfectly captures the feel of the series and is a worthy successor to the incredible Contra III, which is now 16 years old (so I guess it's about time, eh?). But the experience isn't quite perfect -- the DS's tiny screens only makes a difficult game harder, and the divide between them compounds the problem. It's been six years since the last sidescrolling Contra made an appearance on a console, and if Capcom's Mega Man 9 is any indication, a classic series like Contra has a home on the Wii. This week Born for Wii attacks aggressively with Bill and Lance.

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Gallery: Contra 4 DS

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Grim Fandango, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

If spending your existence selling travel packages to the dregs of society sounds like a peculiar form of Hell, that's because it is -- quite literally. For Manny Calavera, life-after-death in the Land of the Dead is little more than a series of disappointing clients and missed opportunities. But things are astir at the Department of Death. Strange things. On the Day of the Dead, Manny finds his life as an indentured travel agent in serious jeopardy -- but could hope lie in the saintly (and recently deceased) Mercedes Colomar?

Released in 1998, Grim Fandango was an inspired capstone to an era of PC gaming. Though Lucasarts published Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, Grim Fandango represents the last truly great adventure game from the company. Like far too many of its point-and-click brethren, Fandango failed to sell as many copies as it deserved. Few games can match the sheer originality and style Tim Schafer crafted -- a comedy noir set in the Land of the Dead with a Mexican motif is like nothing else out there. In honor of its recent 10th anniversary and place in gaming history, Grim Fandango is this week's game that's Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Grim Fandango

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Eternal Darkness, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

It's almost Halloween, gamers: are you ready? For most of us, the approach of Halloween signifies a few things: a chill in the air as winter crawls ever closer, overdosing on candy, and concerned parents fretting over how many razor blades they're going to find lodged in seemingly innocent candy apples. For a few of us, it means wild parties and crazy costumes. But for all of us, it's the season for scares.

Of course, how you get your fair share of hair-raising excitement is up to you, but we here at Nintendo Wii Fanboy think there's a better way for you to spend your time than seeing Saw V this Halloween weekend. Close the blinds, turn off the lights, crank up the sound and settle down with one of the scariest, most original games of last generation: Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Everyone's favorite purple lunchbox was often criticized as being a kiddie platform to the chagrin of Nintendo fans everywhere, and Eternal Darkness did its best to challenge those claims when it was released in 2002. The game's rich narrative and diverse gameplay were a large part of its appeal (and critical acclaim), but being one of the downright creepiest games of all time sure didn't hurt. For messing with our heads and making us afraid to sleep at night, Eternal Darkness is the scariest game that's ever been Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Eternal Darkness

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Discs of Tron, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

The year is 1982, and your mind has just been blown straight out of the back of your head into an alternate reality of endless imagination and gripping fantasy. Why? Because you just saw Tron. The iconic Disney film, which was one of the first movies in history to use computer graphics, cemented itself in the public conscience as an integral part of 80s pop culture. A handful of legendary scenes are still instantly evoked when Tron is mentioned, such as the lightcycle sequence -- and many of them have found their way into a real videogame over the years.

One of those games was Discs of Tron, released in arcades a whopping 25 years ago. Inspired by a few minutes of the film, the game pits you against an adversary in a small arena on floating platforms, charged with "derezzing" your opponents before you bite the digital dust yourself. Unfortunately, you can't kick quite as much ass as Tron himself, but the game did an admirable job (especially by 1983 standards) of taking a single concept and making it fun. And even though the original really shows its age now and wouldn't stand up against the competition in 2008, just think of it this way: how could a murder disc simulator not be Born for Wii?

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Discs of Tron

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Cosmic Smash, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.

When you read "Cosmic Smash", does your mind instantly wander to brutal, over-the-top space battles full of massive explosions, flaming spaceships and blazing arcs of deadly plasma? Okay, so maybe that's just me -- but when I first heard of the name Cosmic Smash, the real thing wasn't exactly what I had pictured. Fortunately for my overly-active imagination, the actual game is almost as awesome as its name implies.

Cosmic Smash was originally released in Japanese arcades in 2001, and Sega soon followed up with a Japan-only Dreamcast release later that year. But what is Cosmic Smash? A futuristic, electronica-infused amalgamation of racquetball and Breakout. With a visual style that will instantly feel at home to anyone who's played Rez, Cosmic Smash keeps things simple with pristine environments and a pseudo-wireframe character. Cosmic Smash is like Wii Sports Tennis on steroids and LSD, and anything that meets that description is Born for Wii.

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Gallery: Born for Wii: Cosmic Smash

Every week, Born for Wii digs into gaming's sordid past to unearth a new treasure fit for revival on the Nintendo Wii. Be sure to check out last week's entry in the series, Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, and for more great titles that deserve your attention, take a look at Virtually Overlooked.