Nintendo continues to release bite-size portions of old DS games as DSiWare games, which may rankle some, but we think its latest broken-up DS game makes a lot of sense. The company plans to release Electroplankton in Japan as ten individual 200-point downloads, each consisting of one of the "plankton" instruments from the "game."

This Wednesday, Tracy, Hanenbon, Nanocarp, and Beatnes will be available on Japan's DSi Shop. On July 22, Rec Rec and Lumiloop will be released. Finally, in August, Sun Animalcule, Luminaria, Marine Snow, and Volvoice will be available.

This could be the perfect venue for creator Toshio Iwai to release future musical toys. Could Electroplankton continue this way, with new instruments being released periodically? It's probably not wise to hope for anything that isn't a segment of an existing game, but it's possible!

One Zelda fan discovered that McDonalds had selected a very special Chicken Selects strip for him: one that bears a resemblance to the Ocarina of Time from, well, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The one on the right is the chicken strip -- we know it can be hard to tell the two near-identical images apart. After holding the treasure aloft and singing the classic Zelda "You Found an Item" fanfare (we are approximately 100% certain this happened), the lucky owner of the magical instrument ... -shaped chicken strip decided to share his good fortune. By putting it on eBay.

Despite starting bidding at a reasonable (for a legendary artifact) $25, nobody bid on 0iz0's auction for some old food. Now what is he to do? How does one dispose of something like this?

[Thanks, George!]

Folks, it's time to break out the party hats and noise makers because, just as expected, Bit.Trip: Core is the 100th WiIWare game to release on the service. Why, we remember our little pal doing finger paintings and learning to ride a bike like it was yesterday. They grow up so fast!

Square Enix's totally mysterious teaser site has revealed -- surprise! -- Four Warriors of Light: Final Fantasy Gaiden, only a few days after Jump revealed it. The site offers a bit more detail about the game than we knew -- most importantly, it confirms that the Four Warriors of Light, described as a "newly retold classic," is designed for play by up to four people.

Like the last couple of Final Fantasy remakes on DS, Four Warriors of Light is being developed by Matrix Software. It features a new implementation of the standard Final Fantasy "job system," called the Crown System, which lets players switch jobs whenever desired. That sounds like the Dress Sphere system from the maligned Final Fantasy X-2.

A statement from producer Tomoya Asano on the site, as translated by Andriasang, indicates the team's hope to deliver a game with "the charms of the classic RPG era before RPGs became JRPGs."

We often want to play SNES, but our busy up-and-go lifestyle of blogging for Joystiq doesn't allow it. Thankfully, a modder over at Retroactive.be came up with a solution: the portable SNES you see above. Sure, it's not our first time seeing such a mod, but it is definitely one of the most stylish. Why, we haven't been so blown away since we've seen this same mod made out of wood!

Head past the break for a video showing off the device, then hit up our gallery below for some other impressive retro mods.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

Nintendo of Europe's Hanabi Festival returns, bringing with it, of course, import games! Fantastic stuff is available this week on Virtual Console: Pulseman, a Mega Man-style platformer from a pre-Pokemon Game Freak, and Ogre Battle, the legendary strategy title from Yasumi Matsuno's Quest.

This week's awesomeness extends to WiiWare, with both Bplus's Bit Boy!!, the maze action game that shuffles between various levels of retro, and Gradius Rebirth, which settles at the 16-bit era. And on DSiWare, the Mario calculator and clock apps arrive. Roll your eyes all you want, but they're surprisingly delightful. Details after the break.

Nintendo also announced Hanabi Festival titles you can expect in following weeks: Bomberman '94, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II, MUSHA, Detana!! Twinbee, and the NES Smash Table Tennis!

We're just gonna come right out and say it: July 2009 may be the worst month for new retail releases ever. Unless you like 2D fighters that is, because in that case, it's awesome. Or games about movies about hamsters, those two groups are being really well serviced.

If you haven't fully prepared yourself for the horror, we'd suggest you gird your mind with all the reason and clarity you can muster before continuing on.

When Sega released the first episode of its Production I.G/Gonzo-animated Infinite Space video series in Japan, we were quite pleased to look at it, but our rudimentary understanding of the language prevented us from gleaning anything substantive from the story.

Luckily, Sega has started translating the videos into English, with voice acting and everything, and we can now enjoy both looking at them and knowing what's going on. The voice acting is pretty much what you'd expect from American anime releases, but it's a small price to pay for comprehension. In this trailer, we see that a crash-landed "Watcher" gives protagonist Yuri the opportunity to build his own spaceship.

This trailer comes along with Sega's announcement of a spring 2010 release date in North America. We can only hope it continues releasing translated videos to tide us over.

Here in the States, we've grown accustomed to certain luxuries: subsidized gasoline for our free Hummers (hey, gotta stimulate that economy!); a complimentary 72oz soda with every purchase (just buy anything!); a lifetime supply of type 2 diabetes; and, of course, monthly updates from NPD charting the sales numbers of the major video game consoles. Our friends in the UK aren't so fortunate. So when we get a peek behind that curtain, we look to share it with you.

And here, courtesy of UK retailer GAME's first-half fiscal statement, we find data from GfK Chart-Track for sales up to June 27th, 2009. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo is in the lead with the DS, having sold 2.7m in the past year, bringing its total up to 9.1m units (that includes 300,000 DSi units sold since launch). The Wii is in second place with 5.4m, up 2.3 from last year. And then we get to the main attraction: 360 and PS3 sales.

You'll recall that in February, Microsoft claimed the 360 bested the PS3 in overall European sales by 1m units, citing GfK Chart-Track data again. In the UK, the Xbox is siting pretty with 3.9m units, up 1.7 from last year, while the PS3 is at 2.2m, up 900k from last year (and, coincidentally, right where Microsoft would've been a year ago). In between the "big boys" is the PSP, with 3.3m consoles sold, up 500k from last year.

It's weird: despite their genetic differences (three stomachs? gross!) the video game shopping trends of UK citizens sound an awful lot like those in the States.

Have you thought about purchasing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but decided to wait until the price dropped to exactly $14.98? If so, today is the day you've been waiting for. Amazon, for its Deal of the Day, has marked down the tactical role-playing remake by 50%. It's a very cheap way to occupy like a million hours.

A warning, though: if you buy it now and one of your friends challenges you to a multiplayer match, that person has probably been playing the game since February or so. You can expect a few seconds of humiliating punishment, is what we're saying. Have fun!

Nintendo has made a deal with UK TV station Five to fully fund one of its new shows, MCV reports. The Advertiser-Funded Programming deal means that Nintendo will pay for eight episodes of the new Britain's Best Brain show, which subjects contestants to five tasks, each designed to test a different brain function: "memory, co-ordination, numeracy, recognition and risk."

Obviously, we suspect Nintendo will use this opportunity as a promotional platform for the Brain Training series. If it were, say, Capcom looking for Britain's best brain, there would be cause for concern. MCV notes that in-show product placement is illegal, meaning that Nintendo will have to relegate the DS mentions to ads.

Listen up, musical theater majors! Your time of reckoning approaches. Sure, your friends can easily best you at Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4 -- but in a short while, a title which will finally allow you to invoke your unique skill set will hit store shelves. We speak, of course, of Grease. The movie. The video game. For Wii and DS.

505 Games recently picked up the rights to adapt the musical film in conjunction with Paramount Digital Entertainment. The game will put players in the gaudy, unfortunate shoes of one of Sandy or Danny's cronies, forcing them to sing and dance using motion controls, microphones or the DS touch screen. Further gameplay details or a release date for Grease are currently unknown. C'mon, 505! Tell us more! Tell us more!

The Rune Factory series is showing that it is still, at heart, part of the Harvest Moon franchise -- mostly by having lots of sequels. The latest issue of Famitsu reveals another, Rune Factory 3 for DS. This is actually the fourth Rune Factory, counting Frontier on Wii.

In addition to his duties as a farmer, new protagonist Maisu, who features a character design right out of Tetsuya Nomura's sketchbook, can transform into monsters, gaining different abilities in battle and interacting differently with other characters out of battle.

According to IGN's translation, the game now features "active seeds" that grow into plants that can be used in battle! Most exciting farming game ever.