Sonic continues his gimmicky journey into the current generation this March with Sonic and the Black Knight, the second in the "Sonic Storybook" series of games. In this series Sonic is pasted into a classic storybook environment -- Arabian Nights in Sonic and the Secret Rings and the Arthurian legends in Black Knight. "Pasted into" is definitely the right phrase, too. At times it's not clear why this is a Sonic game at all.In case you haven't heard, Sonic now has a sword. Those spines on his back? Pretty pointless. Swinging that sword requires you to shake the Wiimote, which we're sure you're already aware, gets pretty tired after a while. Despite that, Black Knight isn't a terrible game. It's definitely an improvement over Secret Rings, though you'd expect that considering the two and a half year gap between the titles.The horizontal Wiimote-only control system of Secret Rings has been replaced with the far superior Wiimote + Nunchuck system. As a result Sonic is no longer on rails and you can move him forwards and backwards as you please, though the levels have remained largely linear, with the exception of some arena-style duels. There are plenty of levels to explore, with incentives to go back to each of them and complete specific tasks and collect more followers.

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Atlus is addicted to Nintendo DS game announcements. It's basically up to one a day at this point! The latest set to be revealed by the niche publisher includes one game that we knew was coming, and 101 that completely blindsided us.Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor is a strategy RPG in which players control a team of teenagers who collect and fuse demons and battle on a hexagonal grid. This was one of the game announcements revealed early via Amazon.ca. It's out June 23 for $30.101 in 1 Explosive Megamix is a minigame collection from European publisher Nordcurrent. It comprises various sports, puzzle, and action minigames, and it doesn't really look like much. It's an extremely bizarre game for Atlus to pick up. Maybe it knows something we don't, and the game is actually awesome. We'll find out when it comes out April 21, at a price of $20.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has no problem admitting Wii Music didn't live up to the company's expectations, but he doesn't want you to consider it a failure, either. During a recent Q&A session, he spoke about the company's hopes regarding Wii Music, as well as the difficulty Nintendo has had with consumer reception."There are people who highly appreciate it and those who do not appreciate it at all," Iwata said, adding that perceptions can be changed. It's all about word of mouth to him, as he said, "A cycle is born where people who have hands-on experience can immediately understand its appeal, easily explain the positive experience they had to those around them, who then spread that information to the others." That works, unless you're a blog who pretty unanimously hated it and told everyone how you felt. With Wii Music, the company was never able to achieve this "positive cycle," and Iwata says Nintendo now needs to "reevaluate" why it hasn't been able to "clear that hurdle." Nintendo, here's a protip from us: Emphasize that it has a dog suit and beatboxing. You might sell a few extra copies if you push that.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

In the first edition of Touch Ruminations, former DS and Wii Fanboy Lead David Hinkle talks about the transition to Joystiq Nintendo and why maintaining a community is so important to him. The opinions expressed here belong to the author and don't necessarily reflect those of Joystiq, Weblogs Inc. or its affiliates.When my peers Andrew and Richard wrote their pieces earlier this week, I thought about what I needed to say here that hadn't already been said. Redundancy of echoed posts is a dead horse that I dare not beat on any longer, and I've tried to answer questions as best I could through the comments section of various posts. My mind remained blank.So I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to get personal and talk about what I liked most about the Nintendo Fanboys and what I hope gets even stronger as time goes on here in our new space: the community.

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