Namco-Bandai has agreed to a deal to transfer the majority ownership in developer Monolith Soft to Nintendo effective Tuesday. Those of you familiar with the Xenosaga games on the PS2 (and DS in Japan) or the Baten Kaitos games on the GameCube know Monolith Soft’s work.

Nintendo will hold 80% ownership of the developer, while Namco-Bandai will retain 16% stake. The overwhelming hold on Monolith Soft, however, will likely mean Wii/DS exclusivity for most if not all of the developer’s future games.

Monolith Soft is currently working on Disaster: Day of Crisis for the Wii.

Nintendojo

Masahiro Sakurai, the director of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Konami’s Hideo Kojima were at the Snake Vs. Zombie event, where they talked about Brawl’s progress and how it’s turned out. Sakurai and Kojima have often been playing the game together in Sakurai’s studio recently, and Kojima commented that the game feels very complete in its current form. Kojima is clearly impressed, as he feels the game would sell millions of copies even if it were released in its current form.

This is very good news, since we’ve not had any new information on Brawl for a while now. The game is further along than most of us thought, and the development team is likely just tying up loose ends and polishing the game. Maybe we really will see it this year.

NeoGAF

Loki has posted instructions on modding your Wii remotes so that the B-button lights up either all the time, or just when the remote rumbles. Look at that picture…seem like something you’d like to have? Head on over to read the instructions on how to mod your remote!

WiiCade

This is the coolest cookie I’ve ever seen.

Extreme Funny Pictures

Gyakuten Saiban 4, the 4th game in the famous law series, Ace Attorney, has managed to sell over 500,000 copies within its first week of availability in Japan. The series is as popular as ever, with the series having sold over 2 million games worldwide since its introduction.

I still need to find a copy of the original game before I allow myself to play the other games. But I really need to play these games… they’re based on law!

Snackbar Games

A JeuxFrance video revealed most the rest of the captains in Mario Strikers Charged, and yet no one can identify the last one! So far the list is as follows, but the twelfth figure pictured below has yet to be identified. Any ideas?

• 1. Mario
• 2. Wario
• 3. Bowser
• 4. Bowser Jr.
• 5. Luigi
• 6. Waluigi
• 7. Peach
• 8. Daisy
• 9. Donkey Kong
• 10. Diddy Kong
• 11. Yoshi
• 12. ???????????

4colorrebellion

Guitar Hero III for the Wii has many unique possibilities, enough to make Wii owners impatient for the rest of this year to pass on by. IGN takes a look at what Guitar Hero III can take advantage of on the Wii, and where some shortcomings may lie.

Easily the biggest challenge, however, is the issue of space - or in Wii’s case, lack there of. The console features 512 megabytes of onboard flash memory (about 312 megabytes is usable), which is there to store saved game data, Virtual Console titles and Channels. When one considers that some N64 titles alone can weight in at 64 megabytes, well, that space doesn’t amount for much. Each track in Guitar Hero III can be upward of 15 megabytes since they are multi-layered and there are dozens upon dozens of possible songs. Do you see where we’re going with this?

Head on over to IGN Wii to see what else they’d like to see show up on this surefire hit for the Wii.

IGN Wii

I’m no criminal, but if I saw this bag while out on my daily stroll, I would definitely snatch it up and run. Fast. I wouldn’t even think twice. There must be at least five giant mushrooms inside! On a less kleptomaniacal note, does anybody know what kind of item Mario could be? He looks quite flat, but cozy at the same time.

flickr

Congrats to Rez who has won our first ever Treasure Ship contest in what turned out to be an extremely surprising turn of events! With less than 2 hours to go before a tiebreaker round would have been called for, Rez shocked the world (or just me) by answering the final challenge correctly. His insane knowledge of useless video game identification will now be rewarded handsomely with a copy of Lunar Knights for the DS.

Thank you to everybody who took part in the first ever edition of The Treasure Ship. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, because the brand new round will start up in a few weeks with a brand new prize!

Sure, this might be a timed post since I am actually writing this at 3am, but I just heard some thunder outside. Awesome. It’s no secret that the next game sucks, but I can’t help but love it at the same time…

EDIT: Alright, before we can determine a winner, we need to solve this challenge. Get to it!

EDIT #2: So this became interesting. Users Rez and chopstix182 are actually tied at 6 points right now (Rez won challenges #5, 20, 21, 23, 24, and 25, while chopstix182 won 8, 10, 11, 15, 27, and 32). If either of them guess the above challenge by 9pm they will win. If not, then we will go into a crazy tiebreaker round. More details on that if the need arises.

Good luck!