If you're one of the folk that purchased Metroid Prime Pinball, you've no doubt been playing Metroid Prime Hunters all this time with your free Rumble Pak as it realistically vibrated the echo of missile damage through the handheld, then your fingertips, and finally on into your brain. You could've also purchased the GBA slot-fitting add-on direct from Nintendo, or at a more expensive price, through importer Lik-Sang, to experience the tremors of gameplay. Or, if you're one of the dozens of people on the globe who've yet to acquire Metroid Prime Hunters, you could finally pick up the bounty-hunting simulation and get the accessory for free as it's now included in copies of the game, yet only while supplies last. No word yet on if the bundle will be available for those in Europe.
Metroid Prime Hunters includes free Rumble Pak
No new Metroid games for DS this year?
Showing some true 1up-manship, Jeremy Parish has updated his blog with tantalizing non-details about a secret, pre-E3 Nintendo DS press event. Like all of the attending journalists, Parish was allowed to experience some new DS titles ("pretty cool surprises") at the cost of having to keep his opinions bottled up until Nintendo yanks the cork out. Expect the yanking to occur as soon as E3 is upon us.Parish does share one minor detail, though. There wasn't a single new Metroid game. If you had any dreams of playing a traditional, 2D Metroid game on the DS, consider them decisively stomped to teeny, unrecognizable smithereens. At least for now. It's not that I don't like Hunters--it's just that I tend to prefer exploring an intricate network of ancient ruins to repeatedly shooting menacing bounty hunters in the face. Chalk that up to a deranged childhood, if you want.
[Via 4cr]
Nintendo of Europe a habitual ball-dropper?
The guys at NoE Watch seem to think so. Acting as a sort of watchdog over the activities of the European branch of Nintendo, the website is dedicated to sniffing out and latching onto the fleshy ankles of some of the injustices faced by gamers from across the pond. Did you know that Wario Ware: Twisted is only due for European release in July, over a year after its American debut? Good luck trying to blame that one on localization--last time we checked Wario Ware's level of text barely rose above that of single-word instructions.
In addition to forums and publisher rankings, the site features both a "Hall of Fame", containing games that released in Europe first, and a matching "Hall of Shame", filled with games that took a really, really long time to travel across the ocean. Metroid Prime Pinball took 8 months to hit the Euro flipper. Ouch. NoE Watch further casts shame on the UK Nintendo Wi-Fi site which hasn't been updated in 5 months. That alone is worthy of a hearty "gadzooks!"
Have any of our European readers experienced similar frustrations? If so, it might be worth visiting NoE Watch and making your voice and accompanying exotic accent heard.
[Thanks Matt!]
New uses for that GBA slot
Apart from allowing us to replay our favorite GBA games, like Astro Boy: Omega Factor, that slot at the bottom of the DS has opened the door to many interesting possibilities. One such possibility is that of vibration, most recently seen in Metroid Prime Pinball's Rumble Pak. It slots right into the GBA slot and, depending on what's happening in the game, will provide some semblance of force feedback to your sweaty hands. But why stop there?This is the question posed by one Brian Langlois, who suggests some creative alternative uses for the GBA slot on the DS. An Eyetoy-like device, a gyroscopic motion-sensing cart and a teeny tiny hard drive are just some of the options he discusses in his article at NintendoDS Advanced. It's well worth a read, though be warned that it makes gratuitous use of the word "pak". I've always hated that word, for some reason.
