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Nintendo launched a new Wii Channel in its homeland Japan today according to IGN, called the Television Friend Channel, or Terebi no Tomo Channel, according to IGN. Like the Mii Contest Channel, Everybody Votes Channel, and etc. before it, it’s available for download free of charge.

As you’d expect, the Channel adds a television program guide to Wii, with program information offered up to one week before airing and searches possible by genre and key words. Although it doesn’t matter much to the rest of the world, it covers Chijou Digital, Chijou Analogue, BS Digital and BS Analogue broadcasts.

There’s Nintendo style though, with a ’stamp’ feature allowing you to highlight programs of interest with a Mii-themed stamp, and to be alerted to those highlighted by your friends and family. These are also tracked and the Wii will rate programs out of five stars based on viewer interest.

Some more neat functionality is employed, with the Wii able to send out alerts to mobile phones or email addresses, and the Wii Remote able to operate as a TV remote for channel surfing and volume control. Nintendo achieves this by having the Wii Sensor Bar send out a signal which is magically bounced off a wall and transmitted back to the TV.

Unfortunately, the chances of the Channel making its way to Australia might be slim, with Nintendo of Europe telling Eurogamer that there are “no plans for Europe.”

Source: aussie-nintendo.com

The numbers are startling: According to videogame tracking site VG Chartz, Nintendo has sold an astonishing 20.9 million Wii game consoles worldwide, while Microsoft has sold 16.9 million Xbox 360s and Sony has managed to move just 9.8 million PlayStation 3s (PS3).Yet before the PS3 launched in November 2006, many respectable gaming pundits were convinced Sony would retain its decade-long domination of console gaming. Sure, the PS3 was expensive, but it was loaded with features, like high-definition DVD playback and a hyper-fast 3.2 gigahertz processor.

Nintendo’s Wii, on the other hand, was so pathetically underpowered that it couldn’t even display high-definition graphics. Sure, it had an innovative, motion-sensitive controller, but to a lot of people, that just sounded gimmicky. Before its worldwide launch in November 2006, lots of smart people thought the Wii would be a niche product, appealing primarily to young children.
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Japanese video games group Nintendo hopes to prise British couch potatoes off the sofa and help them get into shape with the launch of a new version of its bestselling Wii console in the spring.

Video game players are traditionally to be found hunched over their computers but Wii Fit, which will hit European stores on April 25, is designed to give them a proper workout.

With obesity reaching critical levels in the UK, the Wii Fit may provide some people with an enjoyable alternative to visiting the gym. As it is designed to be used in the comfort - and seclusion - of a person’s home, it allows the unfit to get back into shape without the embarrassment of attending exercise classes as a beginner.
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We’ve seen strange peripherals before like the FPSGun Mouse, but nothing quite like this. Novint has the next big thing in controllers, and it might just be a huge success, especially with the enthusiast crowd. The Falcon is probably the strangest controller that you will ever use, and it will probably be the most realistic that you can get your hands on for quite some time. Looking like an odd robot, the Falcon gives you 3D control, allowing movement in ANY direction.

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Austrian AI researchers wanted to find out whether giving an ‘autonomous agent’ emotion-like reactions would make it more successful at playing a fight-to-the-death strategy game. It turns out, neurotic bots have the edge when it comes to video game war.The study was designed by the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and was presented at an AI conference in Paris. Luckily for us, they’ve just put their slides online as a pdf file.

They used the popular strategy game Age of Mythology and created four software ‘bots’ to play the computer which were loosely based on the ‘big five‘ personality traits.
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