Nintendo Channel Review

Today I just found one article regarding to Nintendo Channel.

Determined to keep its user base guessing, the Big N quietly launched the anticipated Nintendo Channel to U.S. based Wii owners this morning. (Most of us believed that the Channel would arrive after the debut of the company’s anticipated WiiWare service, set to rock America on May 12, but Nintendo thankfully had other plans.) The Nintendo Channel is your one-stop destination for Wii and Nintendo DS video previews, information on products from both libraries, DS demos and more. We downloaded the Channel and took the service for a spin? We know Wii storage blocks are a hot commodity, so is it worth the space? The short answer is yes. Keep reading to find out why.

The Nintendo Channel is free of charge. You’ll be able to download it very quickly from the WiiWare section of the Wii Shop Channel, but be if you’re running low on storage space you’ll need to do some spring cleaning. The Nintendo Channel requires 122 blocks – bigger than the 53 blocks needed to keep the Everybody Votes Channel, but significantly smaller than the 233 blocks required to hang onto the Internet Channel. It took us about a minute to download the Channel and we were up and running a few moments later without any incident.

After booting the Channel, you will be treated to an intro “digest” video, a montage of footage from some of the big video previews currently featured on the service. It auto-plays and you can magnify it by pointing and clicking on it with the Wii remote. You can do this with all videos on the Channel to watch them in full-screen view. Of course, if you have a high-definition television, you will see lots of compression artifacting on zoomed-in videos, but on the plus side the footage streams instantly to your Wii.
The video list section makes up the bulk of the Channel, as it already features nine pages of video-based game previews, service walkthroughs, and even an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, who talks candidly about making Wii Fit. In the coming months, Nintendo is sure to feature first-look trailers of forthcoming games on the service.
In the upper-left corner of the screen, you can click on the wrench icon to change your settings at any time. You can opt in to receive commercial messages from the Channel on your Wii Message Board and you can also choose to turn on your data-sharing feature. If you do, Nintendo will receive information about your console, everything from your play history and recommendations for games to your Wii console settings. We wanted the Big N to see that we’re completely out of system storage space so we chose to turn the data-sharing option on. If you fear Big Brother, you have the option to ignore it.

You can make a recommendation on the games played and Channels you’ve used for more than an hour and you can even recommend games and Channels to certain demographics. The Nintendo Channel compiles all user recommendations into handy pie charts.

WiiWare, game download service for the Nintendo Wii.

That’s really interesting that Nintendo will beat to PS3, by launching of its WiiWare game download service for the Nintendo Wii. If you’ve hooked up your Wii game console to the Internet you can connect to the Wii shop channel, buy some Wii points and start downloading some new games online.

The Wii points exchange rate is at $1 USD to 100 Wii points and the online games run from 500 to 1,500 Wii points each with six games initially available. The service offers games built my independent developers that they can then post and sell through the Wii Shop Channel. The initial game lineup is different in the U.S. than those launching in Japan with the single exception of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As a King, which launches in both.

Other games available include Pop, a competitive bubble bursting game, Defend Your Castle, LostWinds, Blackjack and TV Show King. All are available now through the Wii Shop Channel.

You can check it out the List WiiWare Games