We miss Harmonix's pre-Guitar Hero games FreQuency and Amplitude. Well, we don't miss them -- we've got them right here on the shelf -- but we're sad that Harmonix's plastic-instrument games got so ridiculously popular and the company left its more complex, musically varied series behind.Aaron Lindsay and Kevin Dodge, rather than just writing wistful blog posts about the defunct series, have created a homebrew "tribute" to Amplitude on the Wii. Supersonic Wii: Winter Edition, submitted to the Drunkencoders Winter Compo, is a pretty accurate imitation of Amplitude, right down to the typeface. In Supersonic, as in Amplitude, various instruments in a song correspond to "tracks" on the game field, and players must complete measures on each track, quickly jumping from track to track to maintain combos. The game features nine songs, and is totally free! Provided you can run Wii homebrew, of course. If not, there's potentially some cost involved with the setup. Check after the break for gameplay footage![Via 4cr]

It's a full week on WiiWare and the Virtual Console for Wii owners. We've got two new WiiWare games, but, sadly, only one Virtual Console game. Looks like that streak Nintendo's been on for a while now will continue. Oh well, onto this week's releases:WiiWare LONPOS (Nintendo, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone, 800 Wii Points): A puzzle game not for the weak of heart, LONPOS tasks players with solving puzzles revolving around a rectangular area comprised of 55 spaces. Using 12 different pieces, the goal is to fill the entire playing field and not have any pieces left over. Snowboard Riot (Hudson Entertainment, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone-Mild Fantasy Violence, 1,000 Wii Points): Hudson's snowboarding game takes advantage of the Wii Balance Board and is full of ... well, racing down mountains covered in snow.

Virtual ConsoleSonic Chaos (SEGA MASTER SYSTEM, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Wii Points): Players can go through the game as either Sonic or Tails in an attempt to stop Dr. Eggman, who has nabbed the Red Chaos Emerald and plans to use it to create nuclear weapons. No, we did not just make that up.

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NPD, GfK Chart-Track and Enterbrain have combined video game software sales lists for the respective regions they cover to declare Mario Kart Wii as the top selling game of 2008. Games sales across the "world's three largest games markets" saw an 11% increase, totaling 409.9 million units last year.Top five selling games for US, UK and Japan combined:

1. Mario Kart Wii - 8.94 million
2. Wii Fit - 8.31 million
3. Grand Theft Auto IV - 7.29 million
4. Super Smash Bros. Brawl - 6.32 million
5. Call of Duty: World at War - 5.89 million

The rankings are almost identical to Edge's "guesstimate" sales list released last week, which included all of Europe, but not Japan. Overall, the US and UK markets saw increases of 15% and 26%, respectively. The Japanese market saw a 13% decline in software sales, which Enterbrain explains has little to do with the current generation of consoles, but is due to the 46% software sales drop on the PS2. Check out the chart after the break for a regional dissection of the software ranks.

Continue reading Top 5 selling games in 2008 across global markets

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Early last year, we saw some potential concept art for a Wii Kid Icarus update from developer Factor 5. Today, NeoGAFfer Shiggy posted what may be an early character render from "late 2007/early 2008." We've included the original Famicom Disk System version's character art for comparison.This is about as tenuous a rumor as there could possibly be because: A) We don't know if the Factor 5 Kid Icarus game was ever real. B) We don't know if this image or the previous concept art was actually from that hypothetical game. C) Even if it was real at some point, the game is most certainly dead now, due to the state of Factor 5.

We don't want to cast aspersions on Factor 5. They are responsible for true classics like the Turrican series, as well as recent favorites like the Rogue Squadron games. But we won't lament the early demise of this (probably fake) interpretation of Pit. After all, he's got Solid Snake hair circa-Metal Gear Solid and he's wearing a sort of Ryu Hayabusa ninja outfit. We could only imagine this game's story involving Pit getting infected with a techno-organic super-virus codenamed E.G.G.P.L.A.N.T.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments