Nintendo Unlocks the Wonders of the Sea With Endless Ocean for Wii

2008-01-22

REDMOND, Wash., Jan. 22, 2008 – Nintendo invites you to dive into a new genre of video games. Launching this week for Wii, Endless Ocean lets users discover a vast undersea adventure at their own pace. It’s like a virtual scuba vacation in the tropics that includes interaction with hundreds of different animal species, relaxing swims through brilliant coral reefs and exploratory dives on wrecks of ships and warplanes. With the game’s intuitive controls and beautiful underwater visuals, every member of the family will want a chance to dive in.

Endless Ocean contains everything you might find on a real ocean scuba dive. Divers can find dozens of different treasures, from gold bullion to ancient artifacts. The marine biology encyclopedia lets divers record the different animals they spot and learn facts about each one. Divers might encounter more than 230 types of creatures, including penguins, tropical fish, sharks, whales and trainable dolphins. The stunning visuals will make you feel like your TV has transformed into an undersea portal. Navigation is simple too: To swim, just point the Wii Remote and press the B Button; to examine an object, just point at it and press the A Button.

“Endless Ocean is a siren song for adventurers, family gamers and the just plain curious,” says Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of sales & marketing. “Kids will love meeting and cataloguing all the sea life they meet, while their parents can lose themselves in a seemingly unlimited underwater landscape.”

When connected to Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, Nintendo’s wireless gaming service, two divers who have exchanged Friend Codes can dive and explore their environment together. Divers can listen to diving music by international best-selling artist Hayley Westenra or play audio files from an SD card.

Endless Ocean is one of two games Nintendo is releasing this week that demonstrates the way the company continues to appeal to both core and casual gamers. While Endless Ocean for Wii invents a new casual-game genre, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for Nintendo DS is a turn-based strategy game that appeals to both existing fans of the series and newcomers to the strategy genre.

Remember that Wii features parental controls that let adults manage the content their children can access. For more information about this and other Wii features, visit Wii.com. For more information about Endless Ocean, visit EndlessOcean.com.