Bongo Blast, Baten Kaitos details News

It may not have had any GameCubes on its E3 stand this year, but that doesn't necessarily mean Nintendo's given up on the silly little joybox yet - with Zelda and Super Paper Mario still on the way, and a couple of others - DK Bongo Blast and Baten Kaitos Origins - also set for release this year.

As the title suggests, DK Bongo Blast is another game to make use of the bongo drum-set created for Donkey Konga, and is a sort of racing game that has players banging on the bongos to swoop, bank side to side and launch attacks on rival racers.

It features five 3D worlds, and four-player options as well as a single-player campaign, and is currently in development at Paon, who you may remember did DK King of Swing on the GBA and PS2 oddity Trapt. You can see how they're doing with Bongo Blast in the game's screenshot gallery. It's due out in Q3 this year in the US.

Baten Kaitos Origins, meanwhile, was announced in Famitsu recently and is a prequel to the Namco's Cube role-playing game. Nintendo now says it's due out in the US on September 25th.

As we said when Famitsu announced it, it's about a group of adventurers trying to work out why the world's changing. Nintendo's E3 literature tells us that it features thousands of lines of voice acting and should "easily" last longer than 80 hours thanks to the huge storyline and "dozens" of side-quests. It all starts off in linear fashion, then the player gets hold of a ship that lets them head off in other directions.

It'll be one of the Cube's last hurrahs, and you can see how it's shaping up in these screenshots.