If you can somehow manage to pry yourself away from the recent release of Mario Kart Wii, you might notice that today Nintendo launched its personal, appropriately-named channel, the Nintendo Channel. Now, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but after a brief 30 minute self-introduction, I’ve discovered that this is a channel you might actually use.

Once the channel has been downloaded from the Wii Shop channel, you can then run it like any other channel from your Wii main menu. When you first load the Nintendo Channel, you will be greeted with a few introductory messages about sending data, what the channel is about and so forth. After those are done, you see the channel’s real start-up page, which is a video featuring all of the latest updates at the time.

The main menu of the channel mostly shows videos of games, with some commercials mixed in. However, If you dig a little bit, you will find something that almost every Wii owner has wanted since the release of the system - a DS Download Station. Woot! Nintendo is now offering demos that you can stream straight from your Wii into your DS. This morning, I played Brain Age 2 and Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword - both of which I’m probably going to buy now. Thanks for finding another way to siphon my money, Nintendo.

DS Download List (5/7/08):

• Brain Age 2
• Flash Focus
• Crossword DS
• Jam Sessions
• Rayman Raving Rabbids 2
• Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with Friends
• Disney Friends
• Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword

The New York Times reported our friend Reggie as saying:

Mr. Fils-Aime said that future DS device will be more tightly integrated with its Wii console. Complete games as well as game samplers will be able to be downloaded into the Wii using its broadband connection, and then transferred wirelessly to the DS.

This is very promising for a few reasons. As talked about since the Gamecube/GBA days, there has been a want to integrate Nintendo’s awesome hand held systems and their consoles but it has never really been taken advantage of save for Crystal Chronicles. What Reggie is saying is far better than just interactivity between the two systems. In addition the Wii will function as a portal to download demos and full games to the DS.

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