Wii Sports Resort

Old wrinklies are happier when they have video games in their lives, a new academic study has discovered.

Famous England cricketer Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff might have saved Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton's life.

L.A. Noire has lapped new entry DiRT 3 to remain top of the UK charts.

The rumoured Wii price cut and budget Wii games range has this morning been confirmed by Nintendo.

From 20th May in Europe (and 15th May in the US), the price of a Wii console bundle (with either Mario Kart Wii & Wii Wheel or Wii Sports Resort & Wii Sports) will drop to £129.99 ($149.99).

On the same day, Nintendo will introduce a Nintendo Selects budget-price Wii game range. Titles cost £19.99 ($19.99).

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Satoru Iwata has used a bunch of his favourite graphs to prove that Nintendo's Wii and DS are not doing badly in shops, despite posting a six-month profit loss of $25 million (£15 million) recently.

"I hope each and all of these charts will convince you that Wii, as a machine set to welcome its fifth holiday sales season, can never be considered to have lost momentum," Iwata said, splashing them liberally in investor's chops (as reported by Gamasutra).

His slides depicted impressive stuff such as Wii sales outpacing PS2 over a similar time-frame; Wii games having tremendously long sales tails; and phenomenal and unpredictable Christmas demand for Wii - 3.8 million were sold in the US last December ("The fact is, such unexpected things can happen when the seasonality throws its weight around.").

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The Wii Remote Plus – an updated version of the Wii controller incorporating the MotionPlus add-on – will go on sale in Japan on 11th November, Nintendo has announced.

Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros. Wii have all sold over 10 million copies in just one financial year - exactly as Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata predicted in August 2009.

Wii Sports Resort has sold nearly seven million units since its launch earlier this year and the original Wii Sports has now topped 50 million sold, Nintendo has told investors.

A trusted retail source has told Eurogamer that the UK will receive a special Wii bundle this Christmas instead of a price cut.

Nintendo has revealed that Wii Sports Resort has sold over one million copies across Europe.

The game, which bundles the Wii MotionPlus accessory, has passed one million sales in North America and Japan as well.

Wii Sports Resort managed to climb back atop the UK All-Formats chart this week, proving that the sequel has staying power as well as a strong start.

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A million copies of Wii Sports Resort have now been sold in Japan.

That's especially impressive when you consider the game has only been out there since 25th June. Data trackers Media Create reported it took just two weeks for WSR to hit the half-million mark.

Wii Sports Resort has also been a hit in Europe. As reported by good old GamesIndustry.biz a few weeks ago, 600,000 copies were sold within a fortnight of release - making it the fourth biggest-selling Wii title to date.

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Wii Sports Resort edges past newcomer Wolfenstein to top the UK All-Formats chart for the week ending 22nd August. There are only 2000 sales between them, though.

Nintendo had the best of another bad month for videogame sales in the US during July, topping both the hardware and software charts.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has said he expects Nintendo's three big 2009 releases - Wii Sports Resort, Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros. Wii - to sell 10 million copies each within this fiscal year.

Wii Sports Resort has jet-skied past the 600,000 sales mark in Europe, GamesIndustry.biz reports, and taken under two weeks to do so.

The game launched here on 24th July and promptly shot to the top of the UK all-formats chart, recording the fourth biggest first-week sales of any Wii game.

Wii Sports Resort will be gunning for a third consecutive top spot when the UK charts air this coming Monday.

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Nintendo has announced that Wii Sports Resort has been bought over 500,000 times across the US.

That figure, the publisher and platform holder added, was reached after just eight days on sale (WSR launched on 26th July, and data was collected on 3rd August).

"Through Monday we sold one copy of Wii Sports Resort roughly every 1.5 seconds continuously since it launched in the United States," said Cammie Dunaway, one of Nintendo of America's top movers and wagglers. "This tells us consumers were eagerly waiting to get their hands on these fun activities, and it's a great start for a game that will have long-lasting appeal."

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Wii Sports Resort spends another week atop the UK all-formats charts this week, enjoying a marginal bump in sales.

Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort has taken the number one spot in this week's UK All-Formats Top 40, knocking Harry Potter into a cocked sorting hat.

Nintendo will be turning a load of UK videogame shops into tropical islands this Friday, to celebrate the launch of Wii Sports Resort.

Editor's Grovelling Introduction: With Wii Sports Resort due out this coming Friday, many of you have made it clear that you felt our review should have spent more time describing the specific way that the Wii MotionPlus is put to use. Our reviewer, Christian Donlan, did what I asked him to do, so don't blame him - I should have realised that rating the first Nintendo game made for the Wii MotionPlus, of all things, called for more precision. Eurogamer exists to serve you, so I asked Christian to write a supplementary piece that reports on each event's MotionPlus implementation individually to give the review more context.

For a breakdown of exactly how Wii MotionPlus works with each event, check out our extra feature on the subject.

How was your weekend? I threw myself out of a plane. Actually, I threw myself out of about 50 planes, spiralling down through the clear blue sky again and again, whizzing past Bruce Springsteen, Dan Aykroyd, and my stepmother, gurning warmly for a few photographs each time, before the parachute opened with a cheery pop and I drifted towards the bright green grass below.

Skydiving in Wii Sports Resort captures just about everything that fans of its developer often struggle to put into words, and crams it all into the same period of time it takes to wash your hair. I guess you could call it the Nintendo Effect. Right there, in that simple, two-minute plummet is the whole deal: a control system so simple that most designers would either ignore it or over-complicate it with gauges and triggers, a range of goals that scale from charming pushovers to genuine one-more-go struggles with no apparent signs of stress, and presentation that manages to be both modest and quietly brilliant at the same time.

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Wii Sports Resort is already a huge hit in Japan, racking up more than 350,000 sales in less than a week on sale.

Nintendo's star thinker Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that the island in Wii Sports Resort is a character, and we will see it time and time again across games spanning many different genres.

With global sales approaching 50 million units, Wii Sports has comfortably overtaken Super Mario Bros. as the best-selling videogame of all time. Of course a great deal of that success can, as with the previous record-holder, be ascribed to the fact that the game comes bundled with the console upon which it plays in every country outside of Japan. But the link between Nintendo's Wii and its number one sports game runs far deeper than a physical tie at the point of sale.

Shigeru Miyamoto has responded to the announcements of Microsoft's Project Natal and Sony's motion controller by saying that new control schemes only work if you make compelling games with them.

Hot on the heels of Microsoft's show-stopping Project Natal reveal last night, Nintendo has this evening sought to regain the initiative with Wii MotionPlus via a lengthy on-stage demo of the imminent Wii Sports Resort.

A Japanese TV commercial for Wii MotionPlus has revealed two more of the mini-game sports for Wii Sports Resort: table tennis and golf.

Nintendo has told Eurogamer there are "no plans" to retro-actively fit Wii MotionPlus capabilities to existing games, keeping the new and optional features instead for specifically designed games.

Nintendo has announced that the Wii MotionPlus add-on will launch in Europe on 12th June, with pricing still to be confirmed.

Nintendo has said in a Japanese press conference that it will launch Wii Sports Resort, which uses its new MotionPlus peripheral, in June in Japan and July in North America and Europe, according to Reuters.

Nintendo has told Eurogamer that July release dates for MotionPlus and Wii Sports Resort are "purely rumour and speculation".

Nintendo of America kingpin Reggie Fils-Aime ducked questions about the launch date for the Wii MotionPlus add-on yesterday at GDC.

Speculation is mounting this week that the Wii MotionPlus add-on will be released before the end of June, but Nintendo remains tight-lipped.

Yesterday we talked you through our 2009 picks for Indie and Esoterica, which is us at our most self-indulgent, so today we turn to what will be some of the biggest and most profitable games of 2009. Quality, after all, is not anathema to profit.

InvenSense, the company that makes the MotionPlus accessory, has told Eurogamer the relationship with Nintendo is "not an exclusive" one.

According to bigwig Joe Virginia, other companies are interested in the tech - but he's not naming any names.

"Of course we're incredibly pleased - delighted would probably be a better adjective - that Nintendo approached us... but it's not an exclusive relationship," Virginia told us.

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Satoru Iwata has apologised to gamers who expected the next Super Mario or Legend of Zelda to be unveiled at Nintendo's E3 press conference last week.

Good news for fans of GameCube classic Pikmin - a sequel is on the way, according to none other than Shigeru Miyamoto.

It's fast. That's what really strikes you, almost more than the increased accuracy: with the Wii MotionPlus dongle attached to the base of the Wii remote, there is absolutely zero perceptible lag translating your movements to the screen. No woolliness, no wobble either. It is fluid, smooth, instantaneous, natural.

Frisbee this a way, frisbee that a way.

Reggie Fils-Aime has excitably revealed the sequel to Wii Sports.

Dubbed Wii Sports Resort, it will be "literally a day at the beach", we're told. That means throwing frisbees for your dog to catch, sword fighting (yes that is a beach sport) and jetskiing. The game's due out "globally" next spring.

Central to it all was the newly unveiled MotionPlus Wiimote accessory. This adds another layer of precision to the motion-sensing capabilities of the console, and was very impressive to observe in action.

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