NintendoWare Weekly: Excitebike World Rally, Electroplankton, Cybernoid, and more

um... no. like every single other nintendo WFC online game ever released, friend codes are optional. SHOCK.

to be specific, when you start a game, you can choose 'race against anyone' or 'against friends'. if you choose the friends option you are going to need to use friend codes. If you choose against anyone, that's it, you're in.

btw never played the original but this game is pretty fun. Maybe a fraction overpriced given how simple it is (it's no Lost Winds, say) but on the other hand the presentation is nice so that's fair enough I guess. It's nicely easy, too: so far I got S on everything in Bronze Cup and the first from Silver Cup.

(Btw my scores improved a lot once I actually paid attention to the '1 button is turbo' thing... uh yeah that helps... I kind of assumed 1 was going to be brake like every other racing game, but no it's a button you actually have to press, and kind of the whole point of the game... oops.)

Coupled with the face of your avatar, I feel so bad for you.

Pending Nintendo's approval... again

but at least, after a month of no news, Nicalis is finally talking about the game again.

either way, I suspect December, at the earliest...

My thoughts exactly.

Truth; this has replaced Cave Story as my most wanted WiiWare game, and yet it's still nowhere in sight

TELL me about it!!!

QUIT HOGGING IT!!!

Seriously though, why did Nintendo have to limit the original game to their online store? ;~;

Just import it. Comes with earbuds and doesn't require an understanding of Japanese to enjoy.

Mainly I was annoyed the game didn't let you save any music, or let you compose it together. So basically you're just fiddling with the plankton and nothing more. Great idea, just needed to go the extra step.

I just recorded it on my computer. All you gotta do is connect your computer to the DS through the headphone jack.

Though I do agree it needed some better way of saving data. Can these ones at least save to the SD card? Please?

wow you weren't kidding $40 was the cheapest i saw. some were going for over $85

It's really funny how some games you don't know if they are gonna be rare or not. Unless it's an AAA game it's hard to know how many copies of a game will be printed.

Dragon's Trap is one of the best games on the Sega Master System, alongside Phantasy Star. The TG16 version isn't nearly as good thanks to a slightly wonky translation and more awkward physics.

Every week there has to be someone having a nice long cry about how the game they want hasn´t been released yet.

So what if I'm "crying"? I'm just saying that they never release the games that the people truly want, which as a result, forces many people like me to resort to to other methods (such as the homebrew channel in this case). The whole issue on whether or not HBC is legal is one thing I could care less about. Nintendo has deterrents to prevent people from installing HBC, hence the VC. Sure, the videogame industry can come up with all these anti-counterfeit measures (SercuROM, Starforce*, etc), but one way or another, people have found ways to circumvent them. If Nintendo truly desires to stop people from installing "illegal" homebrew on the Wii, the best way would be to have polls and then have people vote which games they want to see on the VC and actually go through with it. Or at LEAST show what games are coming out, one month at a time. This is why hackers are doing the very thing that Nintendon't want to do, which I don't consider illegal. Injecting ROMs you don't rightfully own into WAD files on the other hand, now that's just stupid, not to mention you have a very high chance of bricking your Wii.

(*Starforce is something I can never figure out how to get rid of)

Check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Boy We're not out of the woods yet. See? Is this not motivation to soft hack your wii?