Weekly Round up – w/e August 22 – Moving Forward but standing still

If you got caught up in the election fun, you might have missed what happened last week in the Nintendo world.

A little games convention was on in Germany this past week, but if you have only an interest in Nintendo, then you wouldn’t have noticed it. There were new trailers and screenshots, new game announcements galore for the HD consoles, but absolutely nothing really of interest for Wii and DS owners. Hell, the 3DS wasn’t even there. Nintendo must be saving it all up for that super huge 3DS release date announcement event at the end of September.

Alright, I tell a lie – There was a new game announcement for the Wii last week. It was Ghost Recon from Ubisoft. It’s not the familiar Ghost Recon, but an on-rails or ’third person guided experience", to borrow and mutilate an expression used for another big franchise that hit the Wii. It doesn’t look too bad really.

Again, I lied. THQ announced the uDraw and its accompanying games. This tablet, in which you plug your Wii remote into, allows you to play games with drawing and comes with a art studio to draw with. It doesn’t look too bard either, but will it get any more support outside these three games?

More (bad) news from Gamescon with the revelation that Red Steel 2 only sold a merge 270,000 copies worldwide. Expect a Playstation Move port of that some time soon then. More bad news see’s that Golden Sun: Dark Dawn may have been delayed until 2011, but only in America. Psyche!

There was some new preorder deals from EB that seem interesting this week. Guitar Hero 18 also got its next track list and there was a kick ass trailer from Nintendo for Metroid: Other M – really just watch it. Samus is so hot.

But the biggest, and worst news of all this week was the lay off of over 100 people at Krome Studios. It was so bad, the entire Adelaide studio was shut down in addition to people from both Melbourne and Brisbane studios facing the chop. As one of the biggest and varied developers in the country, I always thought they would have been mostly safe from this sort of thing. They even bought out other developers when they went under. It’s a real shame about this and I hope all the developers let go find more work soon.

This week’s releases

Gun Blade NY & L.A Machine Guns from Sega is out this week, the classic arcade games in their pixelated glory. There is also My Fitness Coach Dance Workout and Ballerina are also out. Yep, they sure are.

Around the forums

Dragon’s Quest IX came out last week, have you been playing it?

indevelopment wants to vent his frustrations about his fridge.

Iron Chef: Australia is on the way… watching?

Every Wednesday the guys get together and play some Animal Crossing, why don’t you join them?

Nintendo released the boxart for the Kirby’s Epic Yarn, is it suitably epic?