No good to me as I have a US Wii but I thought this was interesting enough to post as it could lead to bigger and better things. I got a mail from Nintendo Europe about what their calling their 'Hanabi Festival'.

Basically, they are releasing classic games to the European VC that had never been released in Europe before - JP Mario Lost Levels (for a limited time only), and Mario's Super Picross.

It will be followed by Sin & Punishment (I know some of you were waiting for that), US Ninja Gaiden, US Gradius 3 and something called Ninja JaJaMaru-kun.

Edit: Apparently this week is Mario Week, then it's Ninja Week, then Sci-fi Week.

I have mixed feelings on this.  On the one hand, I'm super excited that S&P and (to a lesser extent) Mario's Super Picross are seeing releases outside of Japan.  I assume they're doing the test in Europe instead of the U.S. to see how the more tolerant European market deals with the Japanese text.  On the other hand, I think Nintendo's being kind of lazy.  They want gamers to pay full price for games they aren't even bothering to translate.  This is especially slimey since these particular games have so little Japanese text they could probably be translated very quickly.  Should be interesting to see if they do the same thing in the U.S. or not.

Sin and Punishment doesn't need a new translation, does it?  I thought it was pretty much prepped and ready to go for a US release but canned at the last minute.

I don't know about S&P but generally I don't think any shooting games really need a translation, since they're all about the action. Maybe menus but that's it. I've yet to see a shmup with a complex plot (or anything more than a simple "destroy the bad guys" stuff). It would be interesting to see something like that though.

Um, where does it say they aren't translating them?

-Joshua

See the Mario Picross screenshot here: http://wii.nintendo.co.uk/7.html