Japan Gaming Guide

Mario Party DS is coming out on November 8th in Japan, just a week after Super Mario Galaxy launched on the Wii. The game’s official page is being regularly updated.

There’s going to be a 4-player wi-fi mode (from one cart), a story mode and 60 mini games. Some puzzle games are also included which look like a Tetris game, a Dr. Mario game and 3 others which we’re not sure about.

Check the site out for screenshots of all the game types.

[Read]

Someone built a giant Super Mario made of cans. It’s for charity, and it’s Mario, so you gotta love it.

[Read]

Super Mario Galaxy went on sale today in Japan. We went along to Osaka’s Yodobashi camera store to get our copy. hoping there might be some kind of promotional stuff going on, but although there were a couple of Galaxy displays, Ace Combat 6 seemed to be getting more attention from the public.

A quick non-scientific survey of the people in our queue showed 4 people buying Ace Combat 6 for Xbox 360, and only us and the guy behind us buying Super Mario Galaxy. We were pretty surprised by that. It could be that it was lunchtime on a weekday, so there were more salaryman types than usual about. It could even be that the local planespotting group came along together, but we were pretty surprised by it, and will be interested to see the sales figures for the games when they come out next week.

We’ll also be posting some more on Mario Galaxy if we can tear ourselves away long enough.

Somebody played Super Mario World, and timed the sound effects to ‘Hare Hare Yukai’ the theme song for popular anime Suzumiya Haruhi. It can’t be easy to do this:

[Read]

He’s-a-coming. Oh yes! The pipe diving one is on his way to Wii in Super Mario Galaxy, which now has an official Japanese release date of November 1st. The game is the true sequel to Super Mario 64, and will allow a second player to join in the action by manipulating on-screen objects with the Wiimote.

Naturally we’re very excited about this – we may go and jump on some turtles to celebrate.

[Read]

Super Mario Galaxy is getting ever closer. A whole load of new screens just went up – check them out.

[Read]

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto confirmed that Super Mario Galaxy will be released later this year.  Wii owners will also be getting a new Mii channel, allowing them to enter their creations into online competitions.  Miyamoto also told of his wife’s conversion to gaming stating ‘If we can combat my wife, we can combat anybody.’