It’s officially April Fool’s Day, at least for us in Illinois. To open the day, we have ThinkGeek’s WiiHelm, which allows you to throw your neck around rather than your wrists!

ThinkGeek

We’ve seen the articles. The Wii has enormous potential to provide incentive for weight loss. However, how many games can you name that are really getting Wii owners up and moving besides WiiSports. VideoGameFitness analyzes some of the multiplayer games out there that are simply mini-game fests, rather than something really engaging.

Yes, of course there are plenty of other Wii games and I’ll keep renting them, but I hope sofware developers get away from the whole “mini-game” concept soon and start putting more thought and full body moves into their full games. I’m not advocating that every game should incite you to stand up and dance around and work out, but there has to be more that could be done to burn calories other than the five games in Wii Sports.

VideoGameFitness

This one’s a bunch of guys from Germany dressed up as Mario characters hitting an actual go-karting track. Unfortunately, the race is accompanied by crappy music. Luckily, they make up for it with music from Queen and Phantom Planet at the end!

GameTrailers

This day is deathly slow in terms of news so far. I figured I’d go ahead and post a video from two weeks ago that we never put up. It’s a bunch of guys that dressed up as Mario characters, driving around a dirt track, and throwing items at each other. Enjoy!

GameTrailers

Another interview. This time, it’s with the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto himself! Check out the excerpt below from the Newsweek interview, and hit the link for the rest.

One of the biggest points of my speech is that there was a time when Space Invaders and Super Mario came out when videogames were at the center of pop culture. It was huge news. Everybody knew what Space Invaders was. Everybody knew what Super Mario Bros was. The world used to react to games and respond to games in a way that I haven’t seen it doing in a long time. I wanted to try to convey the idea to people that the expanded audience isn’t just about reaching out to new people but in fact it’s about trying to get videogames back to a central position in pop culture and getting the world to pay attention to videogames again.

Newsweek

Alright, I completely take back everything I said about the Lego Mario video from last weekend. It actually turns out that this video has absolutely nothing to do with Mario. At all.

Yes, because Mario wears a backwards cap with a nipple exposing single red overall. Wait, if a nipple is exposed, then it wouldn’t be called an overall… Now I’m just confused.

GoNintendo

On April 10th, Reggie Fils-Aime, President of Nintendo of America, will be giving a presentation titled “Gaming for the Masses – How Nintendo is Making Video Gaming Mainstream” at Cornell University. Reggie will be speaking because he is a Cornell University graduate (1983), but unfortunately this will be a closed event and thus not open to the press.

Cornell

Yojiro Ogawa, who produced Sonic and the Secret Rings, recently gave an interview (haven’t had many of those lately). When discussing the Wii hardware’s capabilities, Ogawa pretty much pointed out it’s not the technical potential in a machine that’s important, it’s whatever you make of it.

“The powers of the PS3 and 360 are great, but the way to get the most out of a console comes down to the techniques that the developer has.

“If a designer has 256 coloured pencils and another only has 16, depending on the way the designers use the colours, what will come out can be very different.

“Even though someone may only have 16 colours, what they create can be impressive.”

N-Philes

I was supposed to post this about a week ago, but I’ve been crazy busy and forgot about it. Remember that awesome Zelda case mod for the Wii? The black and gold one with the Master Replicas Master Sword and Hylian Shield? and Triforce? with lights all over?

Yeah, it sold for $1276! In addition, the seller donated some of the proceeds to the Child’s Play charity. How nice!

eBay Auction

Maxi Consolas magazine finally broke the ice with some solid information about the new NiGHTS game. In addition to all the screenshots, the magazine revealed the following details:

• Takeshi Iizuka will be helming the development of the game.
• The game doesn’t yet have a name, but the game will be announced officially in early April.
• Nightopia will be filled more humans, enemies, and bosses.
• The game will introduce new tricks and movesets, primarily thanks to the motion sensing Wii remote.
• There will be a multiplayer option of some kind.
• Some online features will be included, but they may just be WiiConnect24 features of some kind.

I can’t wait. I want this game…and Sonic Team better do the franchise justice!

CVG