Nintendo Previews Round-Up

Endless Ocean 2 (Wii)

I have absolutely no idea what the hell was going on here, not least because it was all in Japanese. I was on a boat. Messing with some reasonably self-explanatory icons, I managed to dive underwater. Hitting the A button while holding the cursor over a fish identified it. I then drew some stuff on the screen, and took some photos. I used something that looked like a sonar but didn't really appear to do much. Then I took out a food pellet which attracted a really big fish, which I identified and took a photo of. So, er, eight out of ten?

If it's anything like the first game, then it's very much going to be a game in which you dive underwater through a variety of locations, identifying and taking photos of fish. No violence or danger, here; just exploration and relaxation. Take that as you will.

Flipnote Studio (DSiWare)

This isn't a game, exactly. It also shouldn't cost anything. What Flipnote Studio does is turn your DSi into a small animation studio, and Nintendo had hired Real-Life Artist Karolina Magnusson-Murray (viewable under “Fine Art” here) who seemed rather taken with it, to show it off.

The program works like a flipbook, as the name implies. You draw an image, then “flip” to the next page, then draw another image, and repeat. When you're happy, you can watch the images play out like an animation. It's a simple concept and a simple program, but it seemed to have just about anything you'd want – you can draw in different thicknesses, you can have a “ghost” of the previous frame put onto the next so that you can see how far it went, and so on. Sounds can be added, and the finished products can be sent to other people or uploaded to the internet.

The touch screen seems the perfect place for an art program of some sort, but I'm not wholly convinced that this'll prove to be anything more than a novelty, depending on how well the online integration works. Still, for the price of Free, it'll likely be an interesting diversion when it hits DSiWare later this year.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)

I'm consistently staggered at how well the Mario RPGs are received, but there's good reason: they're consistently treated with love and care. They're not cheap cash-ins, but full-fledged RPGs, and really good ones, with plenty of very clever ideas and some top-notch writing.

One of the best written is fan-favourite Fawful, who speaks like... well, like a badly-translated Japanese game character, with shouts such as “I HAVE FURY!” and “Preparations have completion!” Fans will be pleased to know, then, that Fawful appears to be the primary antagonist here, although not much was shown in the way of plot.

What we do know is that Mario and Luigi have been shrunk and are inside Bowser, and this provides two fields of play. Bowser (who seems to be channelling Phoenix Wright's Gumshoe, with the amount of times he called people “pal” in the demo) wanders the overworld, and the Mario Bros. wander his insides, providing help while presumably trying to get out. As an example, Bowser needed to pull an island over via a rope (yes, you read that correctly) and the brothers went to his arm muscles to power it up through a little minigame. And yes, the usual RPG combat is there, complete with the timing elements. This looks like another Mario RPG, and while it doesn't seem to do much new, it looks like it's going to be another great game.