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Also, what does the future hold for the 3DS portable Virtual Console?

The Virtual Console we all know and love hit the scene a little over four years ago, and since its inception has paved the way for release of 379 titles in North America. Over the past year, however, only 28 titles were published on the service spanning the 10 systems it represents. Compare this to its first full year and you’ll see a striking difference. In the calendar year of 2007, 157 titles of the available 379 were released. If anything is clear, it’s that the Virtual Console has been a bit of disappointment over the past couple of years, providing a small helping of games, with only a few gems littered in. But what does this mean in the grand scheme of the service itself?

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Players can use their coins to grab a replica of a piece of Nintendo history.

Nintendo announced today that Club Nintendo members now have a new reward item to spend their accumulated coins on. A working replica of Game & Watch: Ball is now available in the store for a hefty 1200 coins. For those unfamiliar with the game, players must juggle a series of balls without dropping them.

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Fire Up for February with Fresh Downloads for Nintendo Systems

Winter blues got you down? Bid farewell to January and say hello to a new batch of downloadable games for Wii™ and Nintendo DSiT systems. As always, the latest additions to the WiiWareT and Nintendo DSiWareT services offer a wide variety of titles to lift your spirits. WiiWare users can also take advantage of demo versions of select games available for zero Wii PointsT, giving players the chance to sample select games before downloading the full versions. As you trudge through the dog days of winter, the Wii Shop Channel and Nintendo DSi Shop are open 24 hours a day to help keep you fired up no matter what the weather has in store.

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This experimentation with puzzles and music is unbelievably engaging.

For many years, puzzle games have been very well-defined and extremely rigid in their design. Whether it was shifting blocks, or simply moving on a set plane, every game had a finite set of possible moves and functions. As time has gone on, particularly in this generation, puzzle games have become more abstract, requiring use of a more fluid style of control and design. Auditorium HD is such a game, as it allows players to move and shift a flow of sound waves in real time toward different repositories to produce a song and complete a level. With an open-ended way to solve puzzles, and a wide variety of different tools to direct the flow of sound waves, Auditorium HD is a fascinating and deep puzzle game that remains interesting from beginning to end.

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