You can get your hands on Nintendo's talkin' puck on Nov. 16, either bundled with Animal Crossing: City Folk for $69.99, or by its lonesome for $29.99. The accessory comes with a coupon which allows you to download the Wii Speak Channel for free (we're unclear whether City Folk includes said coupon), which will be available for download sometime in December -- and yes, you can only chat with those whose unwieldy friend codes you've already acquired. Sure, it's a minor inconvenience -- but considering the social gaming revolution this peripheral will initiate, it's a hoop we're certain you'll be willing to jump through.

Four prologue chapters have been added to further flesh out the story. A tutorial is also now in place to help out players who may not be familiar with turn-based strategy games. The Fire Emblem series is known for being challenging, and from what we've seen of Shadow Dragon so far that challenge was in place since the beginning of the franchise.

Three save options are now available: your progress can be logged in between battles, you can quick save during a fight to restart later (although the file will be deleted when you return), and there are also checkpoints on maps that will automatically create a mid-battle save file. The checkpoint system is a way of rewarding the player for completing major objectives during a conflict.

Nippon Ichi Software :
- Let's hitch-hike

Though November’s “Tomb Raider: Underworld” is ostensibly a faithful continuation of the franchise featuring everyone’s favorite buxom adventurer, there is one fundamental difference: You can now customize the gameplay to fit your play style by making certain aspects of the game easier or harder.

These mid-game difficulty weaks are presented in addition to the standard pre-game Easy/Normal/Hard options.

Let’s try to get through this without confusing you…

At a demo in a New York City hotel yesterday, Crystal Dynamics creative director Eric Lindstrom showed me the “Player Tailoring” menu. It included a set of options such as enemy health, ammunition capacity, damage to Lara, and time for saving grabs. Each of those parameters could be set to Less, Normal and Extra.

And though the menu can be accessed at any point during the game, Lindstrom said that changing these options in the middle of a fight — like during a battle between three tigers, for instance — won’t affect anything until the next encounter.