Nintendo downloads: first of the New Year

by: Tina - posted: 1/3/2011 12:21:00 PM

Now that the weekend is over and the New Year has begun, Nintendo is getting back into the normal routine of Monday download offers.

This week sees the introduction of several Wii and DSi titles. In Sneezies (500 Wii points), players will guide floating Sneezies to safety by sprinkling sneezing powder on them. Ghost Mania (500 Wii points) is a puzzle game in which players help the two protagonists gather up escaped ghosts to get their jobs back. Robox (0 Wii points for the demo, 1,000 Wii points for the full version) puts players on a creature-inhabited planet that they must battle their way through.

Three titles are also available on the DSiWare. Alt-Play: Jason Rohrer Anthology (200 DSi points) is a collection of Jason Rohrer’s indie titles. Word Searcher 2 (500 DSi points) is a themed word-search puzzle with 100 challenges to face. Lastly, Music on: Drums (500 DSi points) gives players the opportunity to create songs in real-time and even tinker with settings such as frequency and panning.

Although there is no Virtual Console title offered this week, there’s always next week.

WiiWare

Sneezies
Publisher: Chillingo
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: Sneezies is an overload of cuteness! Grab a cup of coffee, sit back in your favorite plush chair and enjoy soothing, relaxed game play featuring fantastic graphics and sweet melodies. Use your Wii Remote™ controller to drop a burst of sneezing powder into the field of floating Sneezies and watch as they sneeze themselves out of their bubbles in a marvelous chain reaction. Try to rescue as many Sneezies as you can. Sneezies features beautiful graphics, varied backgrounds, hilarious sound effects and soothing background music. Play through 45 relaxing levels of Sneezies in the Classic Mode or unleash your skills in 15 Challenge Mode levels. Post your high scores online from within the game (broadband Internet access required) and see how you stack up against other Sneezies players around the world.

Ghost Mania
Publisher: Legendo Entertainment
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Wii Points
Description: Ghost Mania is an original puzzle game for players of all ages, offering a new twist on the falling-block genre. Build and expand colored stacks of ghosts and blocks in any direction and any number. The game features multiple single- and two-player modes, including a relaxed and thoughtful puzzle mode, an arcade mode and a variety of two-player modes such as Battle and Enduro. The game centers on the misadventures of Becky and Tim, a pair of ghost guardians who’ve just lost their jobs. Having fallen asleep on active duty, they accidentally let all the ghosts escape from the Spirit World. Help Becky and Tim get their jobs back so they can return to the Spirit World. Catch the runaway ghosts before it’s too late.

Robox® (demo version)
Publisher: DreamBox Games
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone) – Fantasy Violence
Price: 0 Wii Points; full version available for 1,000 Wii Points
Description: Jump, explore and shoot as you discover a planet filled with strange and menacing creatures. Go through a beautiful and lethal forest, find your way out of a labyrinth cave, jump into jelly bubbles and go for a ride on a giant slug. Fight epic battles against giant final bosses. Regain the abilities you’ve lost with the help of tiny creatures. Move through walls, break the floor or get new gadgets such as drills and gigantic cannons. Discover one of the most beautiful, exciting and challenging games of the last few years.

Note: Some demo versions do not support all game features, and players cannot save their in-game progress in demo versions.

Nintendo DSiWare

Alt-Play: Jason Rohrer Anthology
Publisher: Sabarasa
Players: 1-2
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 200 Nintendo DSi Points™
Description: Alt-Play brings the best of independent gaming to the Nintendo DSiWare service, introducing players to some of the most unique experiences this medium has to offer. In this compilation, award-winning game auteur Jason Rohrer’s work comes to the Nintendo DSi system, including three of his best games to date: Passage, Gravitation and Between. The deep themes and distinctive presentation in Rohrer’s work help to blur the line between visual art and video games, evoking thoughts and emotions rarely associated with gaming.

Word Searcher 2
Publisher: Digital Leisure Inc.
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: You’ll need a sharp eye and a quick mind to complete 100 themed word-search puzzles. Word Searcher 2 contains fun words from multiple categories including palindromes, pirates and painting. Packed with a huge assortment of subjects to choose from, there’s sure to be a puzzle anyone can enjoy. Help improve your vocabulary, memory and problem-solving skills. Keep track of – and try to beat – your own play-through times again and again as words are scrambled each time you play. Put on your thinking cap and conquer all 100 puzzles today.

Music on: Drums
Publisher: Abylight
Players: 1
ESRB Rating: E (Everyone)
Price: 500 Nintendo DSi Points
Description: It’s a beatbox full of features for creating songs and rhythms. With a library of 160 sounds, use your creative skills to assign them to eight available tracks per pattern. Activate or deactivate each of the 16 steps that make up a track using the buttons or the stylus and combine the eight patterns to compose up to 64 songs. If you want to produce a more complex tune, you can customize each step and set the volume, change the frequency and assign a panning. Like a professional DJ, you can create and play in real time. Once you’ve laid down your patterns, you can use them to create much more complicated rhythms in Song mode, where you can add them to a sequence of up to 32 parts and change their length, activate or deactivate tracks, add repeats and so on. Music on: Drums also includes a pre-recorded song.