The week in games…

Interesting developments in game news wrapping up the week including how Nintendo obsessed Australia is, Dr. Kawashima (Brain Training), and much more.

We’ve seen a few interesting developments this week in gaming news.

Australia would seem to be a Nintendo obsessed nation. The DS has sold over one million units here while the Wii has hit over 300,000. That’s a lot of consoles and six of the top ten games for 2007 were Nintendo titles here.

Nintendo Australia managing director Rose Lappin said “We are finding that people who have not played video games before are now enjoying playing Nintendo DS and Wii”.

My grandmother beat me in Pangya Golf on Wii. I probably shouldn’t be saying that out loud.

Still, I’m hedging a bet that at least 1 in 3 DS owners has a copy of a Dr. Kawashima Brain Training game. Even if you don’t have a copy, you know that there are loads of copies out there. I bet you think the good doctor is rolling in the dough. He’s probably made a giant brain-shaped swimming pool to fill 24 million dollars that he made from the Brain Training games.

Nup. He’ll have none of it. “Not a single yen has gone in my pocket,” says Dr. Kawashima. “Everyone in my family is mad at me but I tell them that if they want money, go out and earn it.” Instead of taking it, he put the money into research and built a very expensive lab. Go him.

I wonder if how many people yell “Glasses! Glasses!” at him on a regular basis…

Rock Band doesn’t exactly have a release date yet. EB Games are feeling a mid-March to mid-April ETA while EA’s Cameron Jenkins is less optimistic about that sort of time frame.

Strangely, today EA said that Rock Band would be hitting the European market (which isn’t us) sometime between April and June 2008. That said, a lot of things meant for the European market do make it here around the same time so… fingers crossed…

Finally, Duke Nukem Forever might actually see the light of day!

That’s really one of those statements where you need to have around four asterisks all leading to some condition at the bottom of the page saying “Probably” followed by “Maybe not” and then ending with “In your dreams” and “Hail to the King, Baby.”

According to 3D Realms’ Art Director, they’re now just “doing a lot of polishing of set pieces, environments, and characters”. Uh huh. Sure. Will the polishing take another year to do and will you pick another engine in between the buffing because I don’t know how much more gamers can take.

Sources: CVG, Kotaku, The Sydney Morning Herald

Written by Leigh D. Stark