Nintendo made an official announcement today regarding Operation Rainfall (see our previous story here), the fan campaign striving to persuade Nintendo into releasing three Wii-games in the US that so far are only available in Japan: Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower. Their response? From the official Operation Rainfall blog:

“We promised an update, so here it is,” NOA announced on its official Facebook page. “We never say ‘never,’ but we can confirm that there are no plans to bring these three games (Xenoblade aka Monado, The Last Story, Pandora’s Tower) to the Americas at this time.”

Here’s a protip for you, Nintendo: If you really want people to believe that you’ll cater to the hardcore-crowd with the Wii U, I’d suggest you start right now. If you already have three hardcore games lined up, where’s the harm in releasing them to people who are a) obviously eager and willing to pay for them and b) allegedly the group of gamers you want to win back?

Take a look at all the games hitting store shelves tomorrow after the jump, anything that interests you?

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With the 2011 release schedule for Wii being pretty much anemic, fans decided to take matters into their own hands. Thus, Operation Rainfall was born, a campaign to get Nintendo of America to release Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower, all games that have been available (and successful) in Japan but not considered for a release in the US.

While the first course of action was supposed to be a letter-writing campaign, some fans decided to take a different route: They started preordering Xenoblade on Amazon under it’s old title Monado. And lookie here: It’s on the top spot of Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Video Games” list.

Now as Kotaku reports, Nintendo of America reacted to the stunt on their official Facebook page by saying “Hey fans, we appreciate your enthusiasm. Look for more updates to come soon!”. While this doesn’t have to mean much, at least the campaign caught their attention.

So, if you feel like actually playing some games on your Wii again instead of using it as a doorstop, join the fight and preorder your copy of Xenoblade today.

Ever since it was announced, fans have been anticipating the release of Dragon Quest X for the Wii. It’s been long since it was announced and we haven’t seen much in the way of an actual game but it may already have plans for Wii U compatibility.

During a meeting Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada was asked about the release of DQX on the Wii after Nintendo’s big Wii U announcement at E3. He responded by claiming that they are currently looking into the possibility of making the game compatible for both consoles in some way.

What kind of support Dragon Quest X could have for the Wii U is obviously unknown. It could add enhanced support, which seems difficult using two different dev kits, or it could just flat-out play on the system via backward compatibility. Maybe Square will finally give some hard details on the title at TGS 2011 in September.

One of the more unexpected announcements at E3 was Nintendo’s decision to bring it’s long-running Itadaki Street franchise overseas, under the name of Fortune Street. While it was already shown that the game will feature both characters from the Mario and Dragonquest universe, 4Gamer now has some more details.

The article mentions two maps (boards?) to be featured in the game: Alefgard from the original Dragonquest, and Mario’s Circuit from the Mario Kart franchise. A new easy mode will also be added to the game, reducing some of it’s complexity and allowing people that’ve never played an installment in the series to get the hang of it quicker. Seeing as how the franchise is basically an expanded version of Monopoly, this is definitely a good thing.

The retro-style platformer adventure game La Mulana has been released on WiiWare in Japan today. For those of you who don’t know, La Mulana was a game originally released for Windows PCs in 2005 that tried to emulate the graphical style of old MSX games. You took control of a whip-wielding archeologist, exploring caves, fighting enemies and seeking items in the vein of Metroid or Castlevania. While the WiiWare re-release ditches the low resolution and 16-bit color palette typical for old MSX games in favor of shiny new graphics, the gameplay is to stay intact, including the “NES-hard” difficulty. While no US release date has been confirmed as of yet, chances are good that Nintendo will bring this little retro gem overseas. I for one can’t wait.

Back in April of this year the Redbox corporation announced that they would soon be offering video game rentals in their kiosks nationwide. This week that announcement came to fruition. 21,000 out of 27,000 of the popular video renting kiosks now have the latest titles for the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. Redbox began testing $2-per-day game rentals in 2009, and said that in two years consumers rented more than 1 million games from its 5,000 test locations.
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