Whoa, hold your horses, people - we say preliminary Wii support because while there is Wii remote and emulation code integrated into the latest build of Dolphin, the GameCube emulator does not successfully play Wii games. Also note that while this update is Wii-centric and applies directly to Windows gamers, it's essentially here to call out to developers who would like to pick up the project. Learn more about it at the full story.

Here's a light update from the ongoing GDC 08. Funny as it may sound but it seems that the console wars will continue within Electronic Arts' Spore. Consoles such as the Nintedo's Wii, Sony's PS3, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 were rebuilt in-game.

Check out how they turned out after the jump!

In case you've been wondering where this year's Midnight Gaming Championship is expected to take place, we've got news.

The event's official site has just sent out a press wire announcing that the MGC 2007 is expected to take place this September 8, in the cities of San Francisco, and Columbus (Ohio). The MGC is expected to end on September 15, in the cities of Denver and Cleveland.

These select cities come as a result of the MGC's previous online votes, with gamers asked where they wanted this year's MGC to go. This year's competition is expected to feature these five games:

• Super Smash Bros. Melee (Nintendo; GameCube)
• NBA 2K7 (2K Sports; PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, Xbox)
• Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) (Ubisoft; PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Mobile)
• GTR2 FIA GT Racing Game (Viva Media; PC)
• Fast and the Furious: Fugitive (I-play; Mobile)
  

Video Gamers League president Jeff Gross had this to say regarding the upcoming event:

We wanted to give gamers a chance to bring the MGC tournament to cities that normally may not get a video game tournament. The race was really close at the end, with the top six cities coming down to the wire.

Winners of these series of tournaments stand to win a round-trip ticket and one-night hotel stay in Dallas, where the championship takes place this October 6. take note that the cities we listed earlier are just the first batch - drop by again as the list gets updated with more venues. Or, if you're keen on casting your vote, drop by the MGC official site for details (the read link).

Through Nielsen Media Research's TV monitoring technology, the same technology that tracks TV ratings, some rather interesting bits of info have surfaced from their findings.

They can track a lot of different types of data coming from your TV. For example, their press release states that "Wii households are upscale. They are more likely to earn more than $100,000 income per year."

Which makes some people question as to why that's so, since the Wii is famous for being the cheapest of the next-gen consoles. Data like that would be very useful for those in the gaming industry.

Other data they have collected should bring perspective to the gaming industry at large. For example, with the console wars raging on, it's very interesting to find out that the PlayStation 2 remains the most frequently played console out there, and the original Xbox is the second. Here's a more accurate account of the data, representing the percentage of total playing time per console:

• PS2: 42.3%
• Xbox: 17%
• Xbox 360: 8%
• GameCube: 5.8%
• Wii: 4%
• PS3: 1.5%
• Other consoles: 21%

Looking at it from another point of view, Nielsen also found that the Xbox 360 had the most number of sessions a day, averaging at 2.21 sessions. The PS3 had the least, with an average of 1.88 sessions. People tend to play the PS3 longer, however. The average number of minutes people sit down and play the PS3 is 83 minutes. The PS2 and Xbox come in second place for longest hours, averaging at 62 minutes a session.

Other interesting things to note: World of Warcraft is the most popular PC game this June, constituting 18% of all PC gaming, next is Halo: Combat Evolved (3.6%), and in third place is The Sims (3.3%).

 

France-based publishing giant Ubisoft has just announced that Surf's Up (for the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, NDS, PSP, PS2, GameCube, GBA and PC) has been shipped to stores today. The game, based on Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animations' upcoming animated film of the same title, will allow gamers to become surf legends just like Cody Maverick.

Surf's Up has been rated E10+ by the ESRB and should be available at a US$ 49.99 price tag for copies on the next-gen consoles, a US$ 39.99 price tag on the Sony PS2, PSP and GameCube, a US$ 29.99 for the DS and the Game Boy Advance, and a lowly US$ 19.99 for the PC.

Surf's Up will introduce gamers to the competitive sport of extreme surfing, packed with arcade goodness as only this game can. The game will also bring the player to various surf locales in the island of Pen Gu, where our penguin hero begins his adventure toward being a world-class surfer.

The game will be officially available on June 8, 2007 for North America, starting August 2007 for gamers in Europe (August 10, 2007 for the UK), and starting June 2007 for gamers in the Asia Pacific region (although Australia will get it on September 13, 2007).

Each year, Microsoft hosts an exciting competition for the brightest young industrial minds in the country. The competition is called "Next-Gen PC Design Competition" and it seeks to bring out talent and creativity where it springs best from: Young, insightful designers.

Allen Wong and Matt Conway were this year's big winners with their Kenyan and Bulb PCs getting the top spot. They said they drew their inspiration from the tough educational conditions they witnessed when they visited the African nation of Kenya. There, they said they found the drive to re-think computers so that they may be made accessible by people in developing nations.

Kevin Eagan of Microsoft's OEM group said, "This year’s competition winners have envisioned a brave new world of computing. Through insightful design, the winning entries take computing to bold new places and to traditionally underserved audiences."

   

None of the designs that won are like anything we've ever seen or expected from PCs. The Blok, for instance, looks more like the Nintendo GameCube game console than a regular computer. John Leung, one of the finalists, came up with MADE in Asia, a PC that looks more like a calligraphy scroll than a computer. Yet another crazy concept that got in was the Zeed+ which was designed to maximize device mobility.

Microsoft praised everyone who gave the event a shot and assured the design community of its long-term commitment to nurturing the industry by fostering evolution fuelled by innovation and creativity.

Video game retail outlet GAME seems to be gearing up for a big buyout of Activision's game adaptation of the "Spiderman 3" movie as their recent press release confirms that they're "expecting a huge demand for [the] game" and will be providing copies for all of their 400+ stores region-wide.

They will also be making limited stock of the Spider-Man 3: Collector's Edition for the PlayStation 3 available to interested gamers who want to also play as the New Goblin.

The special edition has been announced to be only exclusively available at GAME for Europe, but there is no official word to confirm it as yet.

The first and second game adaptations of Spider-Man have jointly sold an excess of 1.6 million and some analysts believe that Spider-Man 3 (for the PC, Xbox 360, DS, GameCube, PS2, PSP and Wii) will probably do just as well as both games did, if not better.

GAME pre-release data has revealed that 74% of the pre-orders for the game have been made through their GAME Reward Card, and that the pre-orders came from males aged 20-24 years old. The game is slated for a worldwide release on Friday, May 4, 2007, coinciding with the world premiere of the highly-anticipated movie itself. No word on the PSP version's release date yet.

Okay, here's the latest stats on the Japanese gaming market. For the week ending 1 April 2007, the stats didn't really show significant changes. Nintendo still leads the hardware sales with a total of 16,073,997 units sold and dominating 38.4 percent of the console market. The Wii, still from Nintendo, comes next at a sales figure of 2,052,397 units while composing 24.2 percent of the market.

Next in the console sales count are PSP, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, GBA and Gamecube composing 19 percent, 8.1 percent, 8 percent, 1.5 percent, 0.6 and 0.1 percent respectively.

When it comes to software sales, meanwhile, DS software sold the most, representing 51.7 percent software sales. The rest of the software sales stats are as follows:

• PS2: 33 percent
• Wii: 8.8 percent
• PSP: 3.3 percent
• PS3: 2.8 percent
• Xbox 360: 0.4 percent

We might say that the changes occurred in the game title sales count. The top 10 games sold in Japan for the week ending April 1 are as follows:

1. Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix by Square Enix (PS2)
2. Musou Orochi by Koei (PS2)
3. Digimon Story Sunburst / Moonlight by Bandai (DS)
4. More English Training for Adults by Nintendo (DS)
5. World Puzzle Mojipittan DS by Namco (DS)
6. Pro Baseball Spirits 4 by Konami (PS2)
   
7. Yoshi Island DS by Nintendo (DS)
   
8. Prof. Layton and the Mysterious Village by Level 5 (DS)
   
9. Tamagotchi Splendid Rainbow Venture by Bandai (DS)
   
10. Monster Hunter Freedom 2nd by Capcom (PSP)
    

It's a no-brainer that everyone hates game delays. Each time that a release is moved to a later date, the whine of gamers is met with a standard-issue "we want to add more quality to the game and we need more time to do it" type of response. Most of the time, it's enough to silence the fans. According to analyst Michael Pachter, that's only half of the truth.

In fact, business strategy is the other half of the story. True, creative and technical issues are considered, but publishers may opt to hold in the title for a period of time if that's what it takes to generate better profits. Whether the company is looking for a date where it can cash in on holidays or if it wants to go head to head with the competition, nothing happens by accident as even the smallest details are considered.

One good example of a game delayed for business strategy would be The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess which could have been released for the GameCube 16 months earlier than the actual ship. But Miyamoto and crew seem to have had a business-savvy plan in mind to give the old 'Cube and the new Wii a mutual benefit.

In E3 2004, the world first laid eyes on the next installation in the immortal Zelda franchise. It took a year, however, before we got our hands on a playable demo. That was E3 2005 where Nintendo promised a November 2006 release. What happened next was a series of moves that would lead us to the status quo of electronic entertainment.

According to Pachter, Twilight Princess was good to go on the GameCube in the original release date or somewhere close, but director Eiji Aonuma may have hit a snag with Miyamoto and crew. The game was apparently deemed good enough for the Wii and development of a port was ordered. The game was to be released simultaneously for the Wii and the GameCube to give the new console the additional firepower for its launch. It was the logical thing to do.

Nobody can argue with the results. Together with other Nintendo titles, Twilight Princess propelled the Wii to becoming the hottest-selling console on the planet, edging market leader Xbox 360 in the first quarter of 2007. At the end of the day, everyone, including Nintendo loyalists, was happy.

From the Shiny Entertainment to star-studded Tinsel Town, Kevin Munroe, designer behind Earthworm Jim, MDK, and Freaky Flyers, had a lot to say in an interview with John Gaudiosi about his love for game development, especially for his collaboration (or insufficiency thereof) to create TMNT: The Video Game already available for the PC, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, GameCube, PSP, Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance.

TMNT: The Movie writer-slash-director Munroe wished that he could have been "more involved" with the development of the TMNT game. His works on the CGI characters on the big screen, the actual environmental artwork, the sound effects - he gave them all to Ubisoft to tinker with. He even went so far as to describing the gist of the movie's story, the was happy to see that it fit well with the game engine.

"Other than that, I got so swamped with the movie. All of the plans about getting more involved with the game and kicking ideas back and forth all went out the window," said Munroe, who only got word of the game's developments through an Xbox 360 dev kit provided by Ubisoft.

He described that the game was pretty much playing through the movie's story. Aside from the better visuals the movie is more capable of, the game itself transports you to the monster-invaded streets of the Big Apple. His kids were excited that they could explore the vast city and be free to search for trouble.

Munroe continued, "My kids were freaking out about it. It was cool to see them feel like they were playing the movie. It's a trite thing to say, but I could feel it when I was playing the game. It's the first time I ever felt like that promise was carried through."

You can click the Read link below to see the blow-by-blow interview where he also discusses the various gaming consoles and handhelds his family has back home, and more on what it was like working on the movie.