WiiWare launching in US today

By Robert Purchese Published 12 May, 2008

One new game each week.

Nintendo will launch its WiiWare service across the US today.

It goes live with six titles, including LostWinds from Frontier Developments, and is set to receive one fresh game a week.

WiiWare behaves just like Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, and offers independent developers a source of distribution for their smaller-scale and usually arcade-style games.

The titles are bought in the Wii Shop Channel, and range from 500 Wii Points up to 1500 Wii Points.

After an hour of playing any of the games you will get your chance to score the game. These scores will be totalled up and the results published on an ongoing basis.

WiiWare is called Wii Software in Europe and will launch here on 20th May.

Those available today are:

  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (Square Enix) - 1500 Wii Points (GBP 10.50 / EUR 15)
  • LostWinds (Frontier Developments) - 1000 Wii Points (GBP 7 / EUR 10 approx)
  • Defend your Castle (XGen Studios) - 500 Wii Points (GBP 3.50 / EUR 5 approx)
  • Pop (Nnooo) - 700 Wii Points (GBP 5 / EUR 7 approx)
  • V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack (High Voltage Software) - 700 Wii Points (GBP 5 / EUR 7 approx)
  • TV Show King (Gameloft) - 1000 Wii Points (GBP 7 / EUR 10 approx)

Look out for hands-on coverage and reviews very soon.

Picture of Robert.

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 (21) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • toythatkills #1 4 years ago

    Available now

    LostWinds opinions plz

  • GamesConnoisseur #2 4 years ago

    Hahahaha!

    I am laughing ironically at the idea of the downloadable contents with pissy measly internal 512 mb ram. I ran out of spaces long time ago and stopped swapping with the added SD memory card.

    We who spend the money the most, and having to struggle with the limited memory the most? NO THANKS!
    Edited by 1 at 12/05/08 @ 15:34

  • Psychotext #3 4 years ago

    Are there demos on these games?

  • DanWhitehead #4 4 years ago

    Rumour has it that Nintendo Europe has secured celebrity endorsement for the European launch, and it will now be known in this territory as Edward Woodward's WiiWare Warehouse.

  • Darren #5 4 years ago

    And where pray tell are we supposed to store these games, Nintendo? ;)

    @ EG - Please let us know how big these games are in blocks please as I'm curious as to how much space they actually use...

  • TafKas #6 4 years ago

    Same here, my internal memory was filled ages ago, im sick of having to shufflestuff about,an update that let us use the games from an SD card, USB pen or external HDD would be most useful now.
    Edited by 1 at 12/05/08 @ 15:57

  • CallousB #7 4 years ago

    FFCC: My Life As A King - 287 blocks
    TV Show King - 290 blocks
    LostWinds - 259 blocks
    Pop - 110 blocks
    Defend Your Castle - 121 blocks
    VIP Casino Blackjack - 207 blocks

    Personally I'm not currently having a problem with storage..mainly because I tend to buy a game and complete it..rather than storing a chunk of games I'm not playing (which seems pointless to me).

    I suspect it'll only really start being a problem for me if there are a load of games I want with episodic content or lots of decent quick blast multiplayer games.

  • motslaps #8 4 years ago

    does anyone know when the Nintendo Channel (link below) is going to be available in UK/Europe?

    http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=3ZQ46yL5YSo

  • toythatkills #9 4 years ago

    May 30th

  • Darren #10 4 years ago

    @CallousB - Thanks for the info. I've got around 90 blocks left on my Wii so I won't be downloading any of those games any time soon.

  • GamesConnoisseur #11 4 years ago

    CallousB

    "Personally I'm not currently having a problem with storage..mainly because I tend to buy a game and complete it..rather than storing a chunk of games I'm not playing (which seems pointless to me).

    I suspect it'll only really start being a problem for me if there are a load of games I want with episodic content or lots of decent quick blast multiplayer games."

    Fair points, though why cant Nintendo simply allow us to execute contents from the external ram? This should be easily implemented with the firmware update. I am used to the luxury of the hard drives on PS3 (250 gb upgrade), X360 and even the PSP's memory spaces and with Wii is the only one I am getting into position of having to go through the silly motions of moving files. Perhaps Wii is simply not compatible with gamer of my expectations?!

    /Got BloomBlox today though!

  • Muddtallica #12 4 years ago

    DanWhitehead: I like that. I like that very much.

  • LazyDan #13 4 years ago

    @GamesConnoisseur

    "why cant Nintendo simply allow us to execute contents from the external ram?"
    "allow us to execute contents from the external ram?"
    "execute contents from the external ram?"
    "external ram?"
    "external ram?"
    "external ram"
    "external ram"


    Sorry, my inner geek is exploding with rage D:
    Edited by 1 at 12/05/08 @ 17:27

  • penhalion #14 4 years ago

    A good thing to cover also, would be how much ruddy space you need free to download the games.
    Edited by 1 at 12/05/08 @ 18:41

  • Rizzle #15 4 years ago

    Ewar Woowar's WiiWare Warehouse = victory. That is all.

  • WinterSnowblind #16 4 years ago

    The only game I was interested in for this system was the Final Fantasy King game (I forget which actual title they finally went with) but the micro-transactions in that game are 100x worse than anything Microsoft or Sony have ever done, and probably any other company ever. I'm very disappointed in Square for that one. Not only are you essentially buying half of a game, but the downloads are very expensive.

    Pokemon Ranch is the only other one I care about, and sadly, it's not part of the launch line up. It's not even really a game and the graphics are rather horrible, but I'd get it for the extra storage space and Mew.

  • seasidebaz #17 4 years ago

    NOE sent a message to my wii saying it was called WIIWARE.

    i know it doesn't matter, but it does.

    i already mentioned this in the forum.

  • Lava #18 4 years ago

    Great, I need 300 points to buy the only game i really want to have...so let's go and buy a 2000 points card for 25 euro :(
    Why can't Nintendo let us pay with bank transfers, or paypal, or some other way that doesn't involve having a credit card.

  • Razorus #19 4 years ago

    Just a side note; there is a new Pitfall game being made for the Wii but most people would rather see a remake on WiiWare.

  • Colin8703 #20 4 years ago

    Lost Winds Impressions

    I downloaded the game last night as my Wii is American.

    So far it seems lovely but i only managed to squeeze in 20 minutes. The game has a very innocent and childlike vibe to it but without being "kiddie" if that makes sense. The controls seem very good and the graphics look lovely. The art style surpasses most of if not all the original xbox live games. The story scenes remind me of the Wind Waker and the game structure seems to be a bit like Super Metroid in regards to the fact that you seem to be drip fed abilities that then allow to reach other places while still feeling original in terms of gameplay. I will see how it pans out when i play it more tonight.

    My first impressions are that it's very very good and i'm feeling the need to play it more.

  • ianegg #21 4 years ago

    God, the Wii has an SD slot supporting 4GB cards (and possibly 8GB with a firmware update), and the homebrew scene even has preliminary support for USB hard drives, so why are Nintendo restricting us to a measly 512MB of internal storage?! If anything I'd prefer to leave the interal stuff as unused as possible so as not to wear it out. (Yes I know it would have to be completely erased and rewritten every day for 30 years to worry about that, but still.)