Nintendo Channel Review

[Professor Layton]

Released in Japan last November, the Nintendo Channel has finally made its debut in North America! Jam-packed with videos and demos, the Nintendo Channel seems to be the best channel released thus far, right?


1. Platform: WiiWare
2. Publisher: Nintendo
3. Developer: Nintendo
4. ESRB Rating: E-T for Everyone-Teen
5. Release Date(US): May 7th, 2008

As soon as you click on the channel on the Wii Menu, you?re greeted by very tranquil and relaxing music as well as a very modern channel screen. When you actually enter the channel by clicking start, you?re greeted by a video summarizing recently added videos. By clicking on ?To the Video List?, you?ll get to see all the videos as well as browse the remainder of the channel.

After clicking the ?To the Video List?, you?ll be greeted by pages and pages of videos of Wii games, WiiWare games, Virtual Console games, and Nintendo DS games. Each video has a flashing symbol next to it to indicate what category it fits into. By clicking on the video, a screen will appear and you?ll be able to watch the video. By clicking A on the video, you?ll be able to enlarge the video. By clicking B, you?ll be able to select parts of the video you want to watch. If you want to watch the last minute of the video, you can click B and drag the cursor all the way down to the part where you think the last minute would start.

This looks very familiar...

In addition to watching videos, you can also send demos of Nintendo DS games to your Nintendo DS. To do this, all you have to do is click on ?Find Titles for You? at the top of screen. Then you?ll be greeted with a list of options. By clicking on ?DS Download Service?, you?ll be able to view a list of demos that you can send to your Nintendo DS. By clicking on the demo, a screen will appear explaining to you that you have to turn your Nintendo DS on and select DS Download Play from the DS Menu Screen.

If you want to view recent releases and upcoming releases, all you have to do is click on ?View New Titles? after clicking on ?Find Titles for You?. After clicking on it, you?ll be greeted by a list of games. By clicking on the game, you?ll get to view the games page. If you want, you can even buy the game by clicking ?Purchase?. In addition to this, you can even view videos of the game here.

What games will you search for?

Finally, you can make recommendations by clicking on ?Make a Recommendation? after clicking ?Find Titles for You?. After answering all the questions, your opinion on the game will be sent to Nintendo. In order to this though, you must have played the game for at least one hour. If you haven?t played it for at least one hour, you won?t be able to send Nintendo your opinion on the game.

In Conclusion...

Overall, the Nintendo Channel is by far the best channel Nintendo released so far. The game is free to download on the Wii Shop Channel and only takes up 248 blocks on your Wii. By downloading the Nintendo Channel, you can tell Nintendo how you feel about Wii games you own. Who knows what they?ll do with the information you send to them. Maybe they might use it to determine whether or not to make a sequel of a game?

Final Score: 8/10

[Silverhawk79]

Nice review. I personally didn't think it was so useful, because not many of the game trailers interested me, but I definitely see the potential.
I also only really played with it for about 10 minutes, so I'll have to try it out more later.

[Professor Layton]

Nice review. I personally didn't think it was so useful, because not many of the game trailers interested me, but I definitely see the potential.
I also only really played with it for about 10 minutes, so I'll have to try it out more later.

Have you tried the DS Download Service?

[The Seventh]

Nice review. I personally didn't think it was so useful, because not many of the game trailers interested me, but I definitely see the potential.
I also only really played with it for about 10 minutes, so I'll have to try it out more later.

Have you tried the DS Download Service?

Quite frankly, I did.  It has to be my most favorite feature on the channel so far.

I've also already sent in my opinion on several games I won.

Like Silver said, there is a lot of potential in this channel.

[OmegaMasterDeath]

Although I did not personally try the DS download service (as of this post), I agree with you guys that this channel has a lot more potential that we, or at least I, first thought it would have. I think Miamoto (Sorry if I misspelled his name)-sama {Japanese way of showing respect} sees this in ways we do not. Who knows what updates this channel will get. {some of the other channels got updates, why can't this one?}