Nintendo Channel is LIVE in the U.S.
Is your Wii blinking blue lasers at you? Well, unless you put a Blu-ray disc in there, it’s telling you that Nintendo’s Nintendo Channel is now ready for American consumption. You know, the one that’ll supposedly let you download DS demos? It also lets you do other stuff:
Nintendo Channel is an interactive guide to what’s new in the world of Nintendo – now available for easy download from the Wii Shop Channel. Watch trailers, mini-documentaries, product demonstrations, and gameplay videos. Browse the game guide pages to get information about your favorite games on Wii and Nintendo DS. You can even click to order games straight from your Wii, if you have the Internet Channel installed. Make sure your Wii is connected to the internet, and get started!
Yay, advertising! Yaaaaay!
I’ve tried it. Impressions:
It takes a while for the DS downloads to initialize, but only a few seconds to transmit to the DS. They have some interesting ones, like Flash Focus (supposedly the full version is no good), Ninja Gaiden, Crosswords DS, and Jam Sessions. There are about 7 or 8 demos in all, most of them casual titles. As a guitar player, Jam Sessions was a little intriguing. Flash Focus was interesting, too, the baseball mini-game especially. I have Ninja Gaiden queued up but haven’t tried it yet.
There are videos mostly. They don’t quite play uninterrupted, but the quality is at least 2 or 3 times better than YouTube with a small amount of compression. However, the videos could be faster. Wii’s online schematics aren’t ideal for this type of thing and the videos often need to buffer more than once. I’d have to say that the DS demos are the biggest draw, though. Took long enough. Besides all that, it’s one big semi-transparent trojan horse of an advertisement, and i don’t care for that sorta thing.
You’re gonna LOOOVE the Ninja Gaiden demo!
It was better than expected. But i assume, based on reviews, that in that demo i played about 25% of the entire game.
It would behoove Nintendo to add new demos regularly. And hey, did you know: if you opt out of sending Nintendo your game and settings data, you can’t use the demos. What do you guys think about that? Seems to be controversial on other blogs. I think it’s fishy, but it will at least inform them of how much time i’ve actually put into anything on that system, hopefully serving as a heavy-handed hint.
Hey, nothing is free… You want the demos, they want your personal data: everyone’s happy!