Shovelware has graduated to the next level: irony. Turns out Mastiff plans to debut its coveted Major League Eating license on WiiWare, when the service launches May 12. Players will literally simulate the shoveling of food into their mouths using Nintendo's patented Waggletech®. You thought busted TVs were bad? Wait till someone swallows a Wiimote.

Major League Eating: The Game features two-player offline play, plus an online mode and leaderboards. Players will be taught to use various techniques -- like the cram, toss and typewriter -- while engaging opponents with an arsenal of 'gurgitatory' weaponry, including bites, burps, belches, mustard gas and jalapeño flames. Burp-offs and hot potato challenges are also con-firmed. This can't be ... Oh yes, it's real.

If you browsed the Wii section of your local video game store this week you may have seen a glut of new racing games, a kid's basketball title and whatever Myth Makers: Orbs of Doom is. The shocker isn't that the Wii got a heap of shovelware, it's that this whole lot was coming from one publisher that you've likely never heard of: Destineer. MTV Multiplayer grilled the company's CEO about how a company goes from Nowheresville to releasing six titles in one week.

The answer? Well, basically, the company found them. Boss Paul Rinde told MTV that while in Europe, he ran across group called Data Design Interactive that was looking for an American publisher to work with, and a match in budget heaven was made. So, if you're wondering how many Wii games are waiting in the wings, there's your answer: They are littered across the ground, inviting strolling publishers to pick them at their leisure like ripened blackberries and foist them on to an unsuspecting public.

But is that necessarily a bad thing? And if so, who is it bad for? Rinde makes a fairly convincing case that the market isn't at full saturation, but what do you think?

Granted, some might say there's a lot of -- oh, what's the polite term being used -- "shovelware" coming to the Wii. Evidenced today by the mega-list released by Nintendo, but there's a game that even got the guys over at Wii Fanboy a little skeeved: Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was a great game ... in 2005. As Wii Fanboy puts it, other than giving it motion controls, "what other improvements could Ubisoft hope to make to the title to validate it on the Wii?"

An extreme possibility is Wi-Fi play, as multiplayer was a component of the original game. Mostly though, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 gives the haters more ammunition that the Wii is a great repository for old games "now with waggle." Nintendo should definitely attempt to craft good relationships with third-party developers and not continue down this path of "Nintendo is all about first party," but it's hard to see how allowing three year old games to make a second run with added Wiimote support is helping. It's still early enough in the Wii's life for this to be minimal, but third-party ports of old games will hopefully not be on the Wii justification list in 2008.

[Via WiiFanboy]