Lots of big news for this week's recap, so you'd better stay comfy. There's a hell lot of games coming to the Wii and DS in 2009, and we have news on the biggest that the two platforms are gonna get - whether they're the Pokemon remakes, Monster Hunter 3, and a bunch of retro WiiWare games, we've got ya covered. With a lot of games coming, it probably explains why the DS sold a million last April, so the new DS owners will have a lot to play and choose from. Quit wasting your time reading this babble, 'cause you're gonna read them again in the full article. Or not.

The ESA board must have been reduced to tears of joy yesterday - to them, I'm sure, they now believe there is a god. This week, the Swedish court has found the four operators of torrent site The Pirate Bay guilty as charged for copyright infringement and illegal activities (digitally distributing illegal copies of games and media content). Of course, ESA is more than happy with this victory against the ongoing war on piracy - so happy, in fact, that they had to come up with an official press release about it!

If you value your Wiibrew, better no update to the latest issue from Nintendo just yet. The latest update contains changes to various IOS versions, according to Wiibrew.org, and updating isn't recommended at this point until more is known about it.

It's the weekend so it's time to take a look back through the week and see what Nintendo has been up to. And to be quite frank, news has been pretty quiet at the Wii and DS blogs. Let's keep it nice and easy this week and let's talk about all them nostalgic games coming and the piracy that's really getting to Nintendo.

Originally posted on Feb 28, 2009 at 07:39PM

Nintendo's going on a swashbuckling offensive, asking the US Trade Representative for help on making pirates walk the plank. They also sent out a press release, calling out certain countries where "piracy is rampant," and China is at the top of their list.

Despite Nintendo's best efforts to keep its gamers from playing "backups," modders just keep getting the best of them. This new one, called FlatMii, lets you play backups straight from your PC via USB. It can render your Wii drive virtually obsolete.

Thanks to digicron for the tip!

Nintendo continues their war against piracy, arrrrr. They've revised the design of the Wii drive to render all current modchips completely useless. Sucks for "backup"-ers who came late to the party then.

Well no wonder you've got layoffs in the industry recently - not to mention the shutting down of certain studios and whatnot. According to research conducted by EEDAR, only 4% of the total games out in the market ever make a profit - all other 96% just either break even or lose money. Yeouch.

Nintendo's really cracking down hard on piracy, and on its warpath is trampling on Wiibrew grounds as well. The latest firmware update has gone live, with amendments to the Nintendo User Agreement, and stringent homebrew blocks.

Details after the link.

Thanks to Ando-kun and Lil-Diabo for the tip!

Downloading torrents is one thing, but attacking merchant ships with guns at the ready and stealing their goods is quite another. I'm talking real maritime pirates here.

Attacks from pirates off Somalia have been increasing recently, which might force merchant ships to take different trade routes. This could potentially cause shipments of various goods, including video game hardware and software, to get seriously messed up.