The classic style wii controller will be used to play the virtual games but will it be used to play some brand new wii games also ( ported games etc.. ) ? Also I've read that it was hinted that Super Smash Brothers Brawl may be played useing the current GC controller, so I was wondering if it could be played useing the Wii classic style controller instead.

Thank you. Billy

It'll work with the plain-jane Wii classic controller. It wouldn't make much sense for a Wii game to support GameCube controllers and not the Wii's traditional counterpart. There's still one thing I'm still curious about, though...

Sup PGC?

I have a few questions/comments, mainly reguarding SSBB and Wii

1. Since Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to use the gamecube controller, this means that people who don't have a gamecube are going to have to buy a bunch of gamecube controllers in order to play it. Do you think this will discourage them from buying it, or do you think Nintendo is going to have some way to play it with the Wii-mote, or maybe even bundle it with a GC controller?

2. Somebody had mentioned a while back about the ability to play with seven players using bluetooth. They could do this with a game like SSBB, right, since everyone is on the same screen. Also, do you think we will be able to play with more AI players? I don't see why not. Especially for people like me who plays by myself a lot. It'd be fun to play against 7 computer players. And would it be possible to get a second sensor, and play on two tv's using one system? That would be soooo awesome.

3. On SSBM, we met the other hand, do you think in this one we'll get to meet the feet?

4. In regards to the name of the website, instead of planetwii.com, I think you should shorten it to pwii.com...

Thats it for now, Thanks PWii

Brandon

(Totally kidding about the PWii, if you can't sense the sarcasm ;) )

1. As was mentioned above, Brawl should work with the classic Wii controller. For the people out there that have never owned a GameCube before, they could just get the classic pad and beat the crap out of each other using that. However, there's something in regards to that topic that I'm kind of curious about. Will the GC controller/Wii classic controller be required to play SSBB, or will it possibly be controlled with the nunchuku/remote combo? Or perhaps the remote portion alone? I don't think it would be wise for Nintendo to require a peripheral for a game that isn't included. If the controller is a part of the main Wii package, then there won't be any worries. If not, what happens when the game is released, and the best controller to play it with isn't initially available to everyone?

2. It's technically possible to have six players in Super Smash Bros. Melee, with the multi-man melee modes (you versus five members of the Fighting Wireframe Team). Even though the GameCube could have done it, it wasn't to be. Like I said last week, it's an issue of practicality; just because you can do it doesn't mean it's best to. Things are frantic enough with four players duking it out at once, and adding in more characters into the fray would make things too insane for it to be practical. Too many players sharing the same screen would stretch things out too much, and Nintendo would need to tweak the game to work with that many more characters. I wouldn't get my hopes up about playing anything more than four-player matches on one console, and neither should you.

3. Sigh.

4. We covered this in a previous mailbag. You people really need to read back issues so I don't need to repeat myself over and over again. Yeesh.

Hi PGC. You ran an article before E3 that Capcom was shipping more Phoneix Wright games to stores and yet have heard nothing else. Did Capcom ship more games? Also sorry if you had impressions for the sequel "Justice for All" but compared to the first one how is it? I also heard Trauma Center:Under the Knife is hard to find any word on these two games are they out of print? Finally is this a good list of DS games for when I get a DS Lite?

1)Metroid Prime:Hunters

2)Metroid Prime:Pinball

3)New Super Mario Bros.

4)Tetris DS

5)Trauma Center:Under the Knife

6)Phoenix Wright

:-) Thank you PGC. :-)

Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright are in the same boat; they are DS games that are around eight months old. For the most part, the longer games are out and about, the less in demand they are. That means fewer copies of a title get shipped as time goes on. The games are probably still out there, sitting on store shelves...it's just that they may be harder to find. In the case of Phoenix Wright (pun), that may be more true with the announcement of Justice for All, the Ace Attorney sequel. No one has got a chance to play it yet (Capcom just gave us some screenshots), but chances are it's going to play exactly like the first one, with new and more challenging cases.

Your game list looks good, although you may want to reconsider Metroid Hunters if you don't have access to a wireless Internet connection at home. Hunters is a fairly dull single-player experience. You need to play that thing online (or local wireless) if you want to get your money's worth.

Guten tag good folks at my favourite gamecube planet, planetgamecube.com. I'm here with a simple yet... well im here with a question, and we'll leave it at that. My question is, does rare plan to release any original games on nds? I mean appart from dkr ds because thats pretty much a remake, im more focused on whether or not Rareware would consider, or more to the point, be allowed, to make a completly new DK game, which would be roughly following along the lines of either DK64 or DKC, yet with a completely new story line.

Personally i would love it if they did, and i'd definantly be there on its release date purchasing one of the first 12 copies from my local electronics boutique or jb hifi. What would the likelyhood of rareware making a game like this be?

Thanks! By the way, rad and fair dinkum awesome site you guys have here. I've been reading scince december 2002, a couple of months before billy left, that guy was a champ, but so are you guys, so yeh i really love the site.

p.s. what happened to louie the cat? I missed the louie 2006 e3 awards, this year they were just called plain old "pgc e3 awards" or something along those lines, i wish you'd bring old louie back, he was a champ, and i loved his rumours section, or maybe louie was a girl cat, ah well, tell it that im sorry, i call both my family cats 'he's' instead of she's, they even have male names.

With Rare making (or at least, porting) DKR, it's an odd situation. Nintendo owns the Donkey Kong license, yet they're giving it to a Microsoft-owned studio. Simply put, Nintendo is asking Microsoft to make a Nintendo DS game. I think that Rare's future development for handheld games comes down to whether or not Microsoft releases a handheld system. Rumors persist that MS wants to take on Nintendo and overtake Sony with a portable game machine of their own. If those rumors come true, Rare would be making games exclusively for Microsoft and their two game systems. However, Microsoft really has nothing to lose in allowing Rare to continue to make DS games, unless it would interfere with the development of the Xbox 360 stuff Microsoft bought them out for in the first place. I think it's for that reason why Rare's presence on the DS will be limited in the next few years. Hopefully, we'll see one or two new Rare titles on the system.

As for Louie, he has retired and gone back over to bug Billy instead of us. I wonder what that cat's been up to since he left?

My family is spending summer in greece. My son loves basic gamecube games like frogger and monkeyballs. Is there an adaptor for use with european tv? Thanks

No, unfortunately. It's not as easy as an adapter. American and European TVs have different video inputs, but they also have different video standards: NTSC in the Americas, and PAL in Europe. The two don't get along very nicely. The U.S. and the folk on the other side of the Atlantic also have different ways of using electricity, with those oddball power outlets and voltage settings. These reasons are why Nintendo (and Sony and Microsoft) need to produce slightly different versions of the same console hardware, so they can work with the different ways electronics are used in different regions.

There are special conversion boxes for fixing the video format issue, but they can be expensive and usually aren't worth the trouble. They could damage your system too, so I would advise bringing along a GBA or DS instead. They're region free, and a lot more portable.

After reading Tuesday's mailbag, I get the impression that I was not the only one mislead into thinking you aimed the Wii remote at the screen. While you did a good job setting people straight that you aim at the sensor bar, you turned back around and said they should make a duck hunt game for the system.

Let's be clear here: Imagine playing duck hunt with a mouse or analog stick. That's basically what it would be on the Wii. The remote is not a light gun and will not act like one.

I was terribly disappointed when I got my hands on Red Steel at E3 and learned this. The system is great, the controller is great, but there's a lot of expectation here that just isn't true. You aim at the sensor and that basically acts like the center of an analog stick, and you can point up, down, left or right from the middle of the sensor bar. And it does take getting used to, unlike a light gun where you aim and shoot directly at your target. The light-gun looking add-on for the controller will only further confuse people.

Yes, the remote pointer isn't a light gun. However, the calibration and sensitivity of the Wii controller could just as easily be tweaked so aiming the gun to an area on the television screen (via the sensor bar) would achieve the same effect as that of pointing a gun. As a matter of fact, there's already a game gun that essentially does what the Wii does. The LCD TopGun doesn't use light, but rather relative position, just like the Wii controller.

Don't forget that the Wii hardware shown at E3 still wasn't final. Pointing at the sensor bar to use the controller won't change, but if Nintendo gets things smoothed out for the consumer versions, the difference between a light gun and the “analog stick" feel could be minimal.

I was wondering something about the USB ports on the back. It has already been confirmed one can be used for an Ethernet port add-on. It has also been confirmed that you can connect an external hard drive to one (or both, possibly). However, that is two peripherals and there are only two ports. What if Nintendo releases more USB-based peripherals, or offers support for other types of 3rd-party peripherals? So my question is, will the Wii USB ports support standard USB Hubs? Or will Nintendo release their own?

On a related note, we know the Wii will support hard drives. Will it also support keychain flash memory drives and/or non-SD USB memory card readers? Their small size and portability could be of great use, and plenty of people have other sorts of memory cards lying around from cameras or media players (XD, CF, Memory Stick, etc).

USB is the same no matter what kind of hardware the ports are found on, so hubs and splitters and the like will work on the Wii's USB ports. Any USB device should work with the Wii, provided the console recognizes and supports them. USB devices let the hardware know what kind of device it is, and then the hardware can either use that device if it is supported, or ignore if it is not. If the SD card slot integrated into the Wii hardware is connected to the Wii motherboard via USB (which is not uncommon), then I would think any USB card reader or other memory device would also work.

You lied to me Windy! A few mailbags ago, I asked if that GCN Kirby game was still coming out, and you said no. Well according to IGN, it and a few others are still scheduled to come out in the GCN's lifetime.

I just wanted to let everyone know you're spreading terrible lies.

Love,

Egore

No lies. I clearly stated it was probably canceled. That doesn't mean it's really canceled, at least not yet. I mean, we still have it listed as TBA, so until Nintendo says that the game is no longer in development for GameCube, there's always the chance that it still is.

The odds are against it, though. Nintendo still has their Kirby game page up, but the status is still listed as “announced" from when it was revealed at E3 last year. You would think that they would have given us more details by now. Also, if the game has been in development for a year (at least), shouldn't it be pretty close to done by now? If so, why wasn't it on Nintendo's list of upcoming GameCube releases? The GC is on life support, and it needs all the Nintendo games it can get. Or perhaps that's why we haven't heard anything new about the game for almost 13 months?

I say there's too much evidence against Kirby coming to GameCube one more time. Whatever it is they're working on is probably getting moved over to Wii, if they are still working with the same stuff we saw last year. It wouldn't be the first time a Kirby game was scrapped and brought back from the ashes (Kirby Air Ride was an N64 game to start), so it's not as if Nintendo hasn't pulled this stunt before. I would love to be proven wrong, but at this point in time, would Nintendo be doing Kirby justice by releasing a GameCube version after the Wii launches?

I don't get it will Twilight Princess still be on Gamecube? I mean I know Nintendo said it would be. But it doesn't show up on the Gamecube fall list. And furthermore why does IGN say TBA 2007 for the Wii Version when Nintendo said 2006 for both versions assuming there are still going to be two versions.

The list of releases that Nintendo gave out at E3 was just for games through October of this year. Twilight Princess is still coming to GameCube, but it's not going to be in October or before. The GC version will ship simultaneously with the Wii version (one would assume), and the Wii version will be at the launch of the Wii console (more than likely). Therefore, the GC version of the next Zelda should come out when the Wii launches. When Nintendo announces the Wii launch date, expect the final details on both versions of Twilight Princess to be alongside.

Hey PGC,

I've been reading about the control schemes for the FPS games for Wii (Red Steel and MP3) and I have to admit I'm a little disappointed they haven't included a fixed cursor option. Everyone I've read who played with the Wiimote says this is good because it's so sensitive and it's impossible to keep your hand still, but how many of you tried playing with the Wiimote sitting down? Did you still have problems keeping the Wiimote still?

I personally plan on logging in some serious hours on my Wii, and I don't plan on standing. I haven't tried the Wiimote but I can keep my TV remote pretty still by resting it on my leg while sitting. Even for the people who insist on standing, do what all those special-op guys do with their guns, keep your nunchuck forearm under your Wiimote forearm to stabilize your aim, and instead of keeping the Wiimote shoulder level, lower fatigue by shooting from the hip (like a badass quick drawing Eastwood).

Something about the current setup with the hybrid aimbox with turn the boundary reminds me of the players in Goldeneye who had to use the R button. Only pansies needed to use an aiming reticule. I think in online play, the fixed cursor control scheme will ultimately prove to be the superior one; it'll be like Goldeneye all over again "Aww, poor baby can't aim and move at the same time? Die." Hopefully, over time, people will get used to the Wiimote, start only using small wrist movements instead of sweeping arm movements, and developers will feel safe putting in a fixed cursor for a FPS game.

Thanks,

-Bryan

First, let me address the issue of standing versus sitting while using the Wii controller. I got a chance to play Red Steel twice: Once while standing, and again while sitting down. I think the combination of already being familiar with the game and being able to sit down and stabilize the controller on my lap the second time around made the game feel much, much more natural. I had already understood the general feel of the controller and how it worked with the game, so I was able to walk around and shoot at thugs without my shaky hand screwing up my aim. Just moving around and turning worked a lot better as well. It wasn't just Red Steel, either; I cheated a little bit in Bomberman Land and held the controller against my hip while aiming at the screen. The stabilization of the remote makes an enormous difference. I plan on sitting down when playing games most on the Wii, and so should everyone else.

This brings us to the fixed cursor/moving cursor debate. For the modern FPS using a traditional controller, there's no question that a fixed-cursor that moves with the camera view is the best way to go. A moving cursor worked alright on the N64 because games back then were much slower than they are today. Trying to use the same system in a faster game makes it really hard to fine-aim with haste, as demonstrated in the TimeSplitters games.

Red Steel is different, however. Unlike the FPS majority, Red Steel shows the player character's entire arm on screen, instead of just the gun. To make the aiming cursor fixed in the middle of the screen would mean the arm attached to the gun would essentially stick out straight at all times, which would look stupid. Ubisoft Paris could animate the arm so that it moves naturally with movement, but you would still be controlling the aiming cursor and camera more than anything. With how the game is setup, the moving cursor makes sense because you're not actually controlling the cursor, you're controlling the character's arm movements. Your character's arm moves up, down and to the sides, and rotates whatever weapon he has in his hand to mirror the movement of the controller in your hand.. This aspect is an essential part of Red Steel's gameplay—it makes it feel as if you really are the character you're controlling.

Still, I agree with you that the majority of FPS games on the Wii should have a fixed-cursor. I had imagined a Wii FPS to be similar to a PC FPS, but I haven't seen that yet. Then again, there were only two FPS games to speak of at E3, so it would be unfair to assume that all Wii games will work like Red Steel and Metroid Prime 3. Call of Duty 3, for instance, could have the fixed-cursor standard. I hope developers understand that giving people different options is the best way to go about it, because no one wants to be stuck with a control scheme that may not be the best for the gameplay that's offered.

Oh, and for the record, I used the aiming cursor in Goldeneye all the time. While my buddies were pumping me full of lead with automatic weapons, fumbling to aim at my head with the C-Buttons, I just took my time, aimed at their heads, and popped two rounds in their skull with the DD44. Good times.

That wraps up another week of questions from you, our very loyal and awesome readers. Feel free to send in questions any time during the week, and I'll see if I can get to them for the next update. Remember to write your name in the e-mail body text (and where you're from if you want), and send in a good question (and one that hasn't already been asked). This has been WindyMan, signing off until next Sunday!