OK, DSiWare patrons. Nintendo has announced the new titles available for download from their DSiWare service. This week we get three new titles -- two games and a camera app.

Another week full of lawsuits. Poor, beleaguered company Midway came under fire once again, and this time it was from a very unlikely direction: the guy behind the Mortal Kombat movies is suing them in order to "protect his IP rights", which is a better way of saying that he wants to keep milking the MK franchise for as long as possible. Square Enix also got served with a class-action lawsuit for "deceiving" Final Fantasy XI patrons regarding fees. Not everything was bad, though. Read all about 'em after the jump in this week's Warrior recap.

With the GDC riding off into the sunset, the gaming scene is left with a seriously hyped-up trail filled with bits of info on this year's hottest titles. Couple that with the new info that Famitsu's so darn good at getting, and you have a very noisy news week to recap. For starters, Square Enix revealed more info for their much-awaited games, plus the Wii homebrew devs seemed to have really hit their stride, releasing their heavy artillery for the scene. For this edition of the Nintendo Weekend Warrior for the DS and Wii, there's gonna be some rumor-busting, some Squeenix quizzing, and Wii brewing!

NPD Group has released the market performance results for May 2008, and already the PR armies at Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have began to churn out their reformatted versions of the results. Of course, each one talks only about what they've achieved so far in the fifth month of the Year of the Rat, but what happens when we put them all together? Yes, we get the full NPD May story.

It's never too early to speculate about what games we'll be having this year, and if you're among those who want to play Nostradamus, the latest trademarks gaming giants like Square Enix and Namco Bandai secured may catch your interest. Find out what titles have been stamped at the full article.

It's an endless debate when talking about girls playing the same video games guys play. They say girls only like MMORPGs, then follow up with "there are no girls on internet." Others believe female gamers stick to casual games, but Mario and Pokemon titles have more fanboys than fangirls.

No matter what your stand is, here's a list of non-girly games that aren't Barbie, Bratz, or any of those glamorous stuff.

It's a one-two hit combo for Western Australia as the Asia Pacific region celebrates gaming over at Perth. The GO3 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or GO3 Expo for short, was launched by the Minister for Industry and Enterprise Francis Logan at the Perth Convention Exhibition Center, as detailed from an official press release.

 

With the Asian, Europe, and Oceanic game industry's gaming icons to participate in the event as guest speakers, the three day affair will showcase the industry's games, game hobbyists' leisurely activities, network communication and computer technology. So from March 30 to April 1, expect attendees to be able to try out games from the promotional demonstrations sported by game developers.

Not just focusing on computers, consoles will also be making a scheduled arrival at the event, with Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3 demo booths to be available to excited Aussie gamers. So you could expect their little handheld cousins aren't far behind either. The region's industry celebrities, government officials, and high profile media, including but not limited to MTV and Famitsu, will be joining gaming giants in making this uniquely positioned event a great success. Guest speakers include:

• Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid)
• Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Sega Rally Championship and Rez)
• Masaya Matsuura (Parappa the Rapper)
• Goichi Suda (Killer 7)
• Feargus Carroll (LucasArts)
• Nicklas "Cece" Cederström (World in Conflict)

Aside from the Fury MMORPG PvP showcase, guests can also expect other events to tiptoe their way in the busy weekend. First up is the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) 2007 qualifiers showcase, who will be representing Aussies from the world over in the Grand Finals at Paris later this year.

The GO3 LAN Party will also take place at the event. For 30 hours, over 600 attendees can relive the glory LAN party days and boast their talent against their seatmates' hand-and-eye-coordination skills. This is probably one of the largest network gaming setups ever attempted in Australia.

Also making a peep show is the GO3 Cos-Play Competition just to showcase the huge subculture phenomenon in the Asian region. The competition will allow the best game-character to win an all-expense paid trip to the 2007 Tokyo Game Show. Next up is the Nullarbor Game Development Competition, where budding game dev enthusiasts and serious students around Australia can present their work to a large crowd.

Visitors interested will be able to demo the games and vote for their favorite ones, allowing the best ones to bring home cash and prizes. And last but not least is the Dance Dance Revolution Competition, where Australia's best footwork masters duel it out to win more cash and prizes, plus get immortalized as the GO3 "DDR Champion 2007."

The Japanese are famous for things like sushi, sumo wrestling, and giant mutated lizards, among other things. But they've got one specialty we all grew up with. Giant robots.

Yup, they've got hordes of Gundam, Nadesico, Mazinger Z, and Majinkaizer. And they are all coming to the DS. Super Robot Taisen W by Banpresto is literally a battle of giants as the robot characters slug it out in a strategy game. There will be characters from the different series joining the fray.

Voltron, Yuusha Ou GaoGaiGar, Gundam Seed Astray, and Detonator Orgun will make their respective debuts in this installment of the series.

Super Robot Taisen W will be out in Japanese stores on March 1. (Collective groan) We'll just have to wait and see if this will make it stateside. For the meantime, be happy with the knowledge that DS is region free.

This next article is about prestige games. While we were quite sure already what point we would like to drive at, we wanted to be sure. So we went to our mini library, picked up a Webster's and looked up the meaning of the word.

Prestige: reputation or influence arising from success, achievement, rank, or other favorable attributes; distinction or reputation attaching to a person or thing and thus possessing a cachet for others or for the public.

Before we proceed, pardon us first this bit of explanation: In the movie industry, prestige films are those that are not expected to do blockbuster numbers but brings pride to those who are part of it. They are funded by various studios and actors are asked to accept lower rates. Book publishers likewise, also support books that are award-worthy but not necessarily top sellers. Both of these art forms gained prestige, so to speak, because of their favorable attributes (read: content).

Now, here comes the serious question: Why are there no prestige titles? The problem, unfortunately, lies in the big companies' metric of success. For them, a game is successful whenever it brings high revenues.

Reviews are important only before and during a game's first weeks in the market. In the event that sales wouldn't pick up, they abandon the title. Abandon, in the sense that they try to distance themselves from it. You don't believe us? Look at these:

• Capcom dissolves Clover Studios because of disappointing sales for their last project. The latter's last project happened to be Okami, a title that received high reviews and commendations across the industry.
• Last year, Microsoft dropped Psychonauts because of being unpopular. The game was then picked up by a much smaller company, Majesco.
• UbiSoft released Beyond Good and Evil. It was supposed to be a series. But because of disappointing sales, the planned series was dropped all together.

These are just the recent things that readily comes to mind. Given the time, we are sure we'll be able to find a lot of other similar cases out there. A good number of excellent titles but because of economic reasons, are lying at the bottom of the heap, dusty and forgotten.

The solution, as easy and as naive as it sounds, lies in inner values. Until the day publishers and developers take pride in content rather than revenues, things wouldn't change. And until the day the triumvirate (giants Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft ) takes the industry into this direction, it would remain an unpaved and crooked road for prestige titles.

Once again, one of the basic principles of Economics holds true - the one where it states that competition in the market can lead to better services or products for less cost. We're not about to launch into another report about how the industry giants are trying to one-up each other again, but we do have another nifty update that involves an entry into the NeoFlash Summer Coding Competition 2006.

The_Legend, the author of the application which has been dubbed as SounDS, has created a sound application for Nintendo DS. The app supposedly enables your handheld to load and play sounds in their raw formats directly from your SD card. There is also no size limit to the file that you can load. After loading up your sounds, you can then start to play around with it. To quote from its creator:

"...you can change the frequence of the sound at anytime, during the playing process, so you can make a sound play faster/slower depending on the original sound frequence! stereo/mono selection is also included, and the default is 11025 Hz / stereo."

Some parties have expressed that this application, if further developed, may have potential, especially for people who may be in the music industry who would like to be able to mix simple tracks while on the go.

This application has not yet been tested here in the QJ offices, but we would love to hear our readers' thoughts on this application. Think this could win a prize from NeoFlash? Let us know via the comments.

Download: [SounDS]