Talking About Games presents its video review of Okami for the Nintendo Wii.  Although the game is a port from a nearly two year old PlayStation 2 title, the transition to Nintendo's platform has done the game a lot of good, although not without a couple of minor issues. 

You can find out video review below.  If you'd prefer to watch this in a larger Flash format, or via the original source file, you can find both at our Blip page. A written review for the game will be available on our site later this week.

To paraphrase Sesame Street, Super Smash Bros Brawl was brought to you by the number 287.  That’s the number of songs in Brawl’s soundtrack, and a perfect example of the gargantuan beast that the latest incarnation of the Smash Bros. series.  Whereas any other game would have somewhere between 30 and 50 songs, Smash Bros. Brawl blows them all away with over 5 times the content of other games, and this theme applies for more than just music.  Super Smash Bros. Brawl feels like three or more games combined on one disk into a single super-game, its dual-layered DVD stuffed so full with digital goodness that some Wiis can’t even handle it all.  A virtual smorgasbord of pugilistic fun, SSBB beats out Mario Galaxy for best Wii game, and is easily my pick for game of the year and possibly game of the generation.

No More Heroes is one of those games that's going to represent a 'moment' in the history of the Wii, because of what it does, and what it doesn't do.  Suda 51's latest creation is bloody, grotesque, sexual, violent, and brazen in a way you simply haven't seen in a while, and certainly haven't seen so far on the Wii.  This is a mature game, in so many senses of the word, on a system whose very nature is the direct antithesis of mature gaming.  After all, the Wii is bringing together families, reinvigorating old people, and bringing the casual market into the gaming fold.  So you would never, ever expect a game like No More Heroes to be available on the Wii, much less as a system exclusive. 

And that's one of the many surprises that No More Heroes has in store for you.  On a system that seems to be plagued with the "Casual" stigma, where concerns about its longevity as a hardcore gaming platform are bandied about left and right, where gamers are now suffering from a sense of Wii-morse as they lack a regular flow of AAA titles, the release of No More Heroes isn't just a breath of fresh air.  It's a slap in the face, shaming us for ever thinking those things in the first place. 

No More Heroes walks a fine line between genius and insanity.  If you don't mind a game that's visually lacking with a mixed aesthetic, you'll love No More Heroes.  For the people lamenting their Wii purchase and wondering why it inertly sits on the shelves of their entertainment center, this is a game worth dusting off the system for, because finally, we have a mature title.  And it is goodness.

Bring a tarp with you when you hit the jump.  There's blood on the dance floor.

Ask any of the 20 or so people who owned one of Sega's 32-bit Saturn gaming consoles back in the 90s what their game of choice was and most will immediately answer with Nights Into Dreams.... Developed by Sega's in-house Sonic Team, the game featured a variety of 3D dreamscapes which could be explored either on foot as a human "dreamer" or in the sky as the titular Nights character.

The never-franchised franchise now returns as a Nintendo Wii-exclusive sequel from Sonic Team USA entitled NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams. And the biggest question gamers should be asking themselves right now is why.

Hit the jump for the full review.

Super Mario 64 has been both a blessing and a curse to the world of platforming. In 1996 it wrote the book on how to make an amazing 3d platformer. That was the blessing. The curse is that for eleven years we had never really seen another platformer that surpassed the level of gameplay seen in Mario 64… until now. The curse has been lifted by Mario 64’s very own grandson Super Mario Galaxy. Featuring fantastic graphics, a superb soundtrack, outstanding level design, and transcendent gameplay, Galaxy truly deserves the title “Best 3D Platformer of All Time.”

I deem Galaxy this not just because of the qualities listed above but also because Galaxy learns from the mistakes of its predecessor, Super Mario Sunshine. After years of mediocre platformers aping Mario 64’s general formula, Shigeru Miyamoto’s Gamecube was largely expected to raise the bar of fun far beyond where it had sat since the N64’s launch. However, Nintendo approached the design of SMS as a sequel/extension of Mario 64. In other words, their design idea for Sunshine was “Mario 64 + X” where X ended up being the FLUDD water cannon. This was extremely disappointing because the Mario series is well known for gameplay innovation, and adding what basically amounted to a backpack-mounted gun/hover device does not qualify as innovation to most people. So what Nintendo did when it came time to begin development on Super Mario Galaxy was look at the basic elements of the Mario 64 formula to see if there was something that could be altered, removed, or completely messed with and still have a game you could call a platformer.

What was the answer? Find out after the break.