IGN's Wii-k in Review podcast has indulged us with a few facts about just what WiiWare games will be like. Not surprisingly, it'll be rather similiar to Xbox Live Arcade in many ways. I'm sure Greg Canessa is proud of the slight copycatism here.

• Game size limit is 40MB (as opposed to XBLA's 50)
• Most game budgets are coming in under $100K
• Smaller companies are trying some "really weird deals" with their business models in order to keep profit high, and risk low (I have no clue what that's really supposed to mean)
• Nintendo to share profits with developers 35%/65% (with devs getting the larger portion - this is evidently very similar to XBLA)
• If developers can keep their file size down, they will get paid more quickly (this is to entice devs to create smaller games)
• Prices to be set by the developers themselves
• Developers are only allowed one release per month in order to keep the quality high

It's interesting that they are targeting 40MB as opposed to 50MB as many recent original XBLA titles have been teetering near 50MB. This may mean that titles that will be released for both consoles will possibly have fewer assets due to the WiiWare size restriction.

[Via Evil Avatar via Nintendic]

Microsoft's Gamerscore Blog is running a [url=http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2007/01/31/540514.aspx]Xbox Live Arcade contest[/url] where 100 people will win 1000 MS Points.  In order to get into the contest you'll have to answer three questions right (listed below).  I'm sure that anyone who has played these three particular games (they are three really good ones) will know these answers already and won't have to resort to the [url=http://www.google.com]oracle[/url] for their answers.

• In Small Arms, the frenetic action shooter, in what city did Mousey McNuts, the lovable street urchin, grow up? (Quit laughing, that's his name...)
  
• In Marble Blast Ultra, the 3D marble puzzler, what is the difficulty rating of the hardest single player level?
  
• In Cloning Clyde, the zany-side-scrolling platformer, how much money is Clyde offered for his help in the cloning experiment?

For more information, [url=http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2007/01/31/540514.aspx]visit the Gamerscore Blog contest post[/url].

Xboxyde (always a great place for screen shots) has posted shots for 7 of the upcoming games I just posted about.  They are:

• Castlevainia
• Worms
• Alien Hominid HD
• Catan
• Eets Chowdown
• Luxor 2
• Band of Bugs 

 You can check them out here.

 Thanks for the heads up steverulez. 

Unfortunately, no it wasn't us, but the "interesting" folks over at VGM daily were invited to a XBLA event in Canada and basically simply list the games they played:

• Centipede/Millipede
• Alien Hominid
• Street Trace:NYC
• Ms Pac-Man
• Track & Field
• Pinball
• Rally-X

Unnamed Buena Vista Racing game (probably Novadrome, but this is unconfirmed)

If you don't have the time (or don't want) to listen to the podcast, they complain about each and every game!

Now I'm not normally into calling other sites out for doing stupid things, but this one goes that extra mile.

These two jackasses are obviously drunk, and there doing their podcast in their car!  If anyone from Microsoft is reading this and are looking for someone to invite to these type of XBLA events, who don't promote drinking and driving, please leave me a message. 

If you really must, the podcast can be found here.

 

Two games have been announced for Xbox Live Arcade, according to Game Informer. Xbox' successful indie game Alien Hominid is to make it's way onto the Arcade later this year, while Castle Crashers will be early 2007.

Why not make Alien Hominid backwards compatible? .. For those who do not own the game on the Xbox, it wouldn't be a problem. But for those who do have the original, would you throw down 800 - 1200 Microsoft Points for a game you already own - for achievements, HD Support, etc..?

Thanks to Hexx and Audie for this information.

Microsoft Representatives have stated that they can't make any guarantee that we will see a new title every Wednesday after Pac-Man on August 9th. However, it was said at the "Xbox Live Summer of Arcade" event, that they apologize for the lull of  in Xbox Live Arcade, but they are stepping it up - Aiming for a total of 50 Xbox Live Arcade games by the end of the year, with each game to be released on a Wednesday at 12:01 Pacific Time.

Sources: PixelGamers , Jason Cross

Ah yes, the lack of Xbox Live Arcade games.. There is no supply, but there sure is demand. They're being promised, but not delivered. Sure, we have some great titles available to download from the Marketplace at the moment, but why in the past 3 months have we only seen one Arcade release (Uno)?

Peter Moore explains to Next Generation why our Arcade games blade is so empty, and he seems to have a credible 'excuse'.

"Here's what happened - people didn't believe that Arcade was going to fly. So we went round a year and a half ago as we were doing the final plans for launching 360, and told our publishing friends that here's what we think is really cool idea, where you could make games for hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions, and at very low risk, but people didn't believe it. And we released it and it blew the doors down. Now all of a sudden we're in this phase where Sega, Namco, Konami, Midway... they want some of that. But we do have an important quality bar in place - we could probably throw 300 games up there quickly, and we are trying to get the independent guys going as well. It's almost going to be like Pop Idol, where someone will pop out suddenly - Geometry Wars is a great example. But I love this forum, whether it's profitable or not, this platform for indie developers, for four or five guys to put $100,000 into it, and we'll publish it and see what happens."

I understand that the releases have to be consistent, but.. Wii are waiting too long.

According to Finance Asia, Microsoft will be holding a developers contest this year for Korean developers to try their hand at developing some XBLA games. In an effort to "provide more localised contents to customers", MS will be selecting up to 5 winners who will receive development kits.

Could you image the number of entries they would get if they tried that in North America?

You can check out the Finance Asia post here.

Denis Bourdain, VP Business Dev at Load Inc, see picture bellow, took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few quesitons about the upcoming Mad Tracks. He answers questions about pricing, DLC, and a release time frame (just an estimate of course, this is XBLA after all :) )

Read it all after the break

Late last week IGN posted a round of previews. They are only a couple of sentences each, but it's better than nothing.

Here's the first one.

And the second.

An interesting part is that according to these articles, IGN thinks that Robo Blitz will be out first with it's "early summer" release date.