Everyone's Nintendo Channel Launches in Japan
DS demos, game trailers, and more!
by Anoop Gantayat
November 27, 2007 - The Japanese Wii just got a major boost of the kind of stuff everyone likes -- the free kind -- as Nintendo launched the Everyone's Nintendo channel across the Pacific. The new channel, known as the Minna no Nintendo channel in its home territory, offers streaming videos, DS game demo downloads, and lots more.
You start off the new channel just as you do any of the system's channels, by selecting it from the main Wii interface. The pre-startup screen for the channel lists the latest content, so you can tell if there's any reason to actually go further. When we first used the channel, we were asked if we wanted channel updates delivered to our Wii, so we presume the system will notify us when new content is available.
After a short (around 15 seconds) bootup, the channel jumps right into a starter video. Currently, the starter video is a medley of clips from other videos, beginning, appropriately, with Shigeru Miyamoto talking about Wii Fit (set to swallow Japan this Saturday!).
The channel's main screen is basically a list of video clips. When you select a clip, the interface jumps directly into a video window, stylized depending on if the footage is related to the Wii or to the DS. The footage is played back in streaming form, so there's no need to wait for a download.
At any point during playback, you can click on the window to ditch the backgrounds and go full screen. There doesn't seem to be a means of expanding 4x3 footage to fill up the proportions of a 16x9 display, though. You can also, at any point, click a return button to go back to the menu. The video continues playing in a tiny window in the top-right corner of the screen.
We encountered no streaming issues when we tried out the channel late at night in Tokyo. Clips took just a couple of seconds to start off, and we didn't have to wait for rebuffering at any point during our view sessions.
The quality of the trailer footage isn't the highest, with low audio fidelity and visible video artifacts. Don't expect he same level of quality you get in the videos you download off the PlayStation Network or Xbox Live. Nintendo's video player also lacks rewind and forward controls, which would definitely be a nice feature given that some of the videos are as long as four minutes.
As of this writing, Nintendo has a couple of dozen clips on the channel. In addition to a Wii Fit commentary piece featuring Shigeru Miyamoto and the fitness experts who cooperated on the game, Japanese Wii owners can view trailers for upcoming titles like Tales of Innocence and Ryusei no Rockman 2, and lots and lots of commercials.
This isn't just the Nintendo Video Channel, though. Above the video list, you'll find a button that takes you to the other features of the channel, including a user rating tool, software search tools, and the DS demo download service.
Select the user rating tool, and the channel searches your Wii for software that you've played for more than an hour. You're then allowed to submit your opinion on these games by answering a series of questions. In addition to requesting your gender and age, the channel asks you to rate the game using a slider, select if the game is appropriate for all audiences or just hardcore gamers, and select if the game is pick up and play or the kind of game you'll want to spend a lot of time with. All this information is sent to Nintendo, where we presume it's piped into the brains of the people who keep on making those Zelda games so darn good.
The software search tools let you find software by name, genre, or by browsing a list of upcoming titles. You can refine your searches based off platform: currently Wii Disk, Wii Virtual Console, and DS. Information about games is limited to a few bullet points and links to whatever videos Nintendo has uploaded to the channel, although those wanting more information can opt to browse on over to the game's home page. This closes the current channel and opens up the system's internet browser channel.
More than anything at the new channel, the service likely to cause the greatest stir is the DS demo download channel. That's right, actual DS game demos, downloaded to your DS, via your Wii. The process is simple enough -- click on the demo, wait for it to download to the Wii, then transfer it over to your DS using the DS's game download option.
Some of the demos have expiration dates, so Wii users will have to hurry up and download while they last! Not that there's a real need to rush right now, a the demo channel currently has just a bunch of Touch Generation titles, including the two Brain Age games. There's a Pokemon Diamond & Pearl download, but it's just a bug fix that has been available at retail kiosks for months now.
While the content is lacking at the moment, Nintendo clearly built this channel with the intention of using it. The interface as you stream videos, download DS demos, and view game information, is fast and free of the kind of pauses one usually associates with streaming content and video footage. You're always given the option to cancel out from whatever you're doing, with no pause to jump back to previous menus.
Everyone's Nintendo channel has the potential to be another great addition to the Wii. Best of all, it's totally free, so you have no excuse to not download it once Nintendo begins international distribution.
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