Nintendo has a habit of, with each new console, throwing a bunch of features at the wall to see what’ll stick. Most things, let’s be frank, don’t.
Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?
One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.
But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.
About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:
The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:
- Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
- Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
- My Aquarium and its sequel, WiiWare titles
- Tiger Woods PGA Tour (enable in Options)
- In Japan: Rilakkuma: Minna de Goyururi Seikatsu
- WiiRoom, a Japan-only video-on-demand service
