Hanabi festival stuffs Wii/DSiWare/VC

By Robert Purchese Published 3 July, 2009

Mario Calculator! Mario Clock!

There are several offerings spread across DSiWare, WiiWare and Virtual Console today - all in celebration of another Hanabi festival. This typically fills Nintendo's online cupboards with old games previously restricted to Japan, and bumps the price up a bit in the process.

Those oldies are action platform Mega Drive game Pulseman, and SNES strategy game Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. Both cost 900 Nintendo Points (GBP 6.30 / EUR 9 approx - online-bought points and shop-bought points differ in price).

Today also marks the release of Konami's first WiiWare game Gradius Rebirth, which will be followed by top-down racer Driift Mania later this month and Contra Rebirth in August.

Gradius Rebirth is joined on WiiWare by Bit Boy!!, a pixelated RPG, which has 4-bit dungeons, 8-bit caves, 16-bit strongholds, 32-bit labyrinths, 64-bit arenas and 128-bit worlds. Apparently. Gradius Rebirth and Bit Boy!! cost 600 NP (GBP 4.20 / EUR 6 approx) each.

DSiWare boasts two Mario-themed extras - a clock and a calculator - for 200 NP (GBP 1.40 / EUR 2 approx) each. There's also Brain Challenge, which isn't Brain Training but might as well be. Brain Challenge costs 800 NP (GBP 5.60 / EUR 8 approx).

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About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (12) Latest comment 3 years ago

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  • the_dudefather #1 3 years ago

    'Mario-themed extras - a clock and a calculator'

    Pow block anyone?

    /Hopes someone else listens to Giant Bombcast
    Edited by 1 at 03/07/09 @ 14:56

  • carrotcake #2 3 years ago

    If I knew they would do Mario themed apps I wouldn't have bought the Animal Crossing ones. I have no feelings about AC having never owned one of those games.

  • nick_f Verified Senior Producer, Microsoft #3 3 years ago

    But where is Bonsai Barber?

  • JeroenZM #4 3 years ago

    " This typically fills Nintendo's online cupboards with old games previously restricted to Japan, and bumps the price up a bit in the process."

    So true.

  • uglygamer #5 3 years ago

    Yo Nintendo if you want to compete with the app store stop coming out with this shit.
    Otherwise they will just pull away.
    Edited by 1 at 03/07/09 @ 16:26

  • giant_frying_pan #6 3 years ago

    Pow block anyone?

    NEVER.

    (++++++++++++++++++++1 dudefather)

  • Les #7 3 years ago

    "If I knew they would do Mario themed apps I wouldn't have bought the Animal Crossing ones."

    Unfortunately Nintendo at its worst. They should have bundled these kind of applications in a single package. :(

    But there's also some good news on the DSiWare front: In the US they relased a proper sudoku game priced at 5$ this week. That's much better value than the €20 minimum you typically pay for a DS cart-based game. :)

  • neonemesis #8 3 years ago

    No comments on Ogre Battle yet? Bet there's quite a few people glad to see it up on the VC...

  • Slamhound #9 3 years ago

    "No comments on Ogre Battle yet? Bet there's quite a few people glad to see it up on the VC..."

    I am. This is good.

  • thisisatempaccount #10 3 years ago

    Ogre Battle is immense; a real landmark in the not-very-accessible, are-you-sure-this-is-a-console-game tradition of fantastically deep tactical JRPGs. It's a shame that Eurogamer doesn't seem to do the virtual console/wiiware/psn/xbla roundup reviews anymore as it's the kind of release that really should be evangelised - provided, of course, that someone has bothered to translate and localise it first (these are the sort of details a review could helpfully provide for us Joe Plebians).

    So yeah, EG. What gives? Surely it can't be that you're struggling to keep up with reviewing all the AAA releases we're seeing during the summer drought...

  • GrumpyLlama #11 3 years ago

    Are these games only available for a limited time?

  • YenRug #12 3 years ago

    @GrumpyLlama

    Most Hanabi festival games stay in the catalogue permanently, afterwards; there have been a couple of games, in previous festivals, that have been delisted but I believe they have all been added permanently in subsequent festivals.