Niintendo on a Wiinner wiith new Nintendo Channel?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 29 May 2008 14:46

Opinion and Analysis

May 30’s the day the Aussie Nintendo Channel comes your way, with tons of videos to play, give Wii games you’ve played the recommendation yay or nay and more, so Nintendo say, and it’s free to download with nothing to pay!

Heads up Wii owners, Nintendo is giving you more reasons to keep that Wii remote in your hands and TV watchers at bay with the launch of the Nintendo Channel, which Nintendo says is “an interactive guide to what’s new in the world of Nintendo”.

The channel is free to download from the Wii Shop Channel and gives you a few interesting new capabilities.

These include lots of videos to watch, a way to search for Wii and Nintendo DS games on sale at retail to see what their descriptions say they’re all about, a recommendation service giving you a say on what you think about the Wii games you’ve played, and a DS Download service that can send game demos and videos to your Nintendo DS.

The video selection sounds promising and from is set to include trailers (presumably for games and movies), mini-documentaries, TV commercials, product demos and game play videos, with Nintendo promising “more info” about the video content soon. If only they’d included music videos as well, we could cheekily have renamed this channel as NTV!

The games search function lets you search by “release date, platform, publisher, genre, or by keywords” and gives you “more detailed information” on the games you’re interested in.

Nintendo Wii owners who also own a Nintendo DS can download game demos and videos wirelessly, right to the handheld console. They’ll stay playable on the DS until you turn it off, after which you’d need to re-transfer the content to watch or play it again.

The recommendation service lets you rate any games you’ve played on your Wii for more than an hour, with Nintendo saying “everybody’s opinion counts!”

Please read on to page 2 for more information including the location of special websites on Nintendo's new and existing channels.