As nearly everyone and their grandmothers know, the Wii is still the hottest thing in the gaming world, despite the fact that Nintendo's little white console has been out for nearly two years. Thanks to the rise of casual or mainstream gaming (or whatever you like to call it), the system has made its way into living rooms, dorm rooms, and nursing homes all over the world. The only drawback to this explosion in popularity is the fact that developers and publishers are rushing to put games out for the system, occasionally at the expense of quality. With so many Wii titles hitting the market, GameSpy decided to separate the wheat from the chaff to give you a better idea of which games you should be getting excited about.

Since this is a list of what we consider to be the system's biggest titles of the upcoming holiday season, it's missing a lot of the smaller games. To find out when your most anticipated game is coming out, take a look at our full list of release dates. Now, without further ado, here is GameSpy's 2008 Wii Fall Preview!



Guitar Hero World Tour

The second season of the battle of the music games fires up this fall as Neversoft takes Guitar Hero above and beyond anything we could've conceived when we fired up the inaugural game in 2005. World Tour boasts GH Tunes, which appears to be an exceptionally deep music-creation application. If content creation isn't your cup of Earl Grey, look for plenty of exclusive tunes from the likes of the Eagles, Lenny Kravitz, and Lynyrd Skynryd.


Vicarious Visions, the team behind the excellent Wii port of Guitar Hero III, will be translating all of the hard-rocking action to your console. We don't have official confirmation that you'll be plugging your Remote into the new World Tour drum set, but we wouldn't doubt it.

Wario Land: Shake It!

You'll have to shake it like a Polaroid picture to guide Wario through this upcoming adventure. In Wario Land: Shake It!, the tubby villain is once again out to fill his pockets, this time by finagling a bottomless sack of coins as a reward for rescuing a recently captured queen. The spiritual successor to the handheld Wario Land games, this side-scrolling 2D adventure is rendered with gorgeous hand-drawn visuals that give the game the look and feel of an interactive cartoon.


This may also be the most physically taxing platformer yet, with shakes and wiggles of the Remote powering Wario's moves. This includes his ground stomp and his shakedown, where he grabs enemies and shakes the coins out of their pockets.

de Blob

Rebelling against a humorless totalitarian regime called INKT that's bent on bleeding color and music from the world, a small, semi-amorphous hero named de Blob must restore his homeland to its once-brilliant state. To do this, he'll need to platform-hop, paint and pummel his way through several drab black-and-white levels that get spiffier once he's returned color and song to Chroma City.


With a mellow, jazzy soundtrack that builds along with your progress (adding more instruments as you go) and intuitive hop 'n bop controls, de Blob looks to be a cute and cuddly take on the traditional hardcore platformer with a subversive yet artistic coat of paint.