Watch Wonderswan TV Ads

I found this really cool site that had tonnes of TV ads from loads of different countries for an exhaustive list of consoles.

Check out the Wonderswan page for TV spots for Final Fantasy II and other Wonderswan games.

I also enjoyed checking out the ads for 3D0 and Atari Jaguar!

Wonderswan Sat Nav

Things to do with a Wonderswan...




Connect it to a GPS device and use it as a Sat Nav system! I found this picture whilst Googling which shows how some Japanese hobbyist has set up his Wonderswan for sat nav and connected it to his bike. Unfortunately the page is in Japanese (a familiar problem for us Western Wonderswanners) but you might get the gist.

Wonderswan Profiled

Sean O'Mara has written up an excellent profile of the Wonderswan on deadOtaku, which is "a blog dedicated to covering esoteric extremities of Japanese popular culture".

He's done a great job of detailing the lifespan of the system and given attention to some of the highest profile games available, as well as listing all the hardware specs and available accessories.

Judgement Silversword

We found out a bit more about Judgement Silversword in this post back in January.

I was just checking eBay for any new stuff and realised I hadn't checked eBay.com (rather than .co.uk) for sometime. I wish I had checked earlier because I could have told you about the auction for a brand new copy of Judgement Silversword which is now finishing in about... 2 hours from now.

It's worth visiting the auction site though because the seller has put up some great information about how the game came to be

If anyone is selling any Wonderswan stuff on eBay which is a bit special or noteworthy, feel free to email me with details.

Rewind: Wonderswan Color Hatches

I recently came upon a pile of old Edge magazines, and have been going through them to see what kind of fanfare was given to Wonderswan at the time of its release.

First up is this piece from issue 90, released Nov 2000. I don't know about the legality of copying the whole article so I'll just paste in some choice snippets to give you a flavour how it was being anticipated.

Wonderswan Color Hatches
Bandai has announced details of its off postponed colour handheld device, just a few days after Nintendo's Spaceworld 2000.
...
The general specifications of the device are largely the same as its black and white predecessor, though there are a few changes ... One of the biggest problems with the original Wodnerswan was that its screen was fair reflective, make it difficult to play. It would appear this has not been fixed.
...
There are a host of peripherals planned for the device. The WonderGate adaptor will enable it to be connected to mobile phones, and there also extensions that add compatibility to MemoryStick and SD Cards. There is also a USB port and a demo has showed the Wondeswan Color linked to a PC laptop and PS2.
...
Bandai's greatest problem will be competing with Game Boy Advance. A strong software line up did not enable the original Wonderswan to seriously compete with Game Boy Color, and Nintendo's strategy for the handheld market seems to be much more robust than Bandai's.

USB Port??? Is there??

So it seems that the view from the widely respected Edge magazine at the time, was that the WSC was facing an uphill struggle from day one thanks to the competition provided by Nintendo's GBA which stolen the show at the Spaceworld 2000 exhibition and was getting very favourable buzz.

Wonderswan Promotional Material

David Lo has kindly sent in some pictures of original promotional material from Bandai for the monochrome Wonderswan console. I think it looks pretty cool - if I didn't already have, I'd definitely want one!

Thanks David, it's great to see this kind of thing. If anyone has anything else of a similar ilk, email it in and I'll put it up.

But what if you can't speak Japanese?

Received this email from David, who has come up against a similar challenge as many as us other Western Wonderswan owners have found - what are the best games for no Japanese speakers?

It's always nice to visit this Wonderswan shrine site and also to visit the auctions to check what is on sale. I was wondering if anyone had like a recommended list for games to get for those with little or no Japanese language ability.

That way people can see if the swan can be for their videogame/system collection. Seeing some of the screens of the RPG's it just seems too difficult to get through those games. Now if the swan had MarioKart...

You will suggestions buried within the comments sections of previous posts David, but hopefully we can compile a new list of suggestions within this post!