How's this for heady irony? The "Games Aren't Art" faction takes a mighty blow today, and it comes at the hands of the publisher that brought us ... 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. THQ has revealed "uDraw," a four-by-six inch tablet peripheral for the Wii that makes drawing as natural an input into the system as punching and pointing. It launches this holiday season in the states for $70, bundled with uDraw Studio, an "expansive drawing, coloring and art-based video game." A couple of other titles, Pictionary and Dood's Big Adventure will arrive on the same day for the appealing price of $30 with more on the way. Wiicasos in international territories can look for the pad in early 2011

The upcoming Batman: The Brave and the Bold will be doing something too few games have done so far this hardware generation: feature cross-play compatibility between the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.

The game will be available on both systems, and if someone is playing the Wii version alongside someone on the DS, the person playing the handheld edition can enter the console game, taking control of the diminutive "Bat-Mite", who appears as a pesky little character in the Wii game but is controlled by the DS stylus.

Why are we over five years into the life of the DS, and nearly four years into the life of the Wii, and so few games have tried this? I want my Wii/DS version of Four Swords, dammit!

We're calling it: the Virtual Console is dead. There have been two games this summer. If there are any more, consider them stragglers. Nintendo, if you'd like to prove us wrong by stepping up the Virtual Console release schedule from "almost never" to "occasionally," please feel free.

There are still DSiWare and WiiWare games, though, including Divergent Shift (formerly Reflection), the long-awaited puzzle platformer about navigating two mirrored versions of the same character across different terrains simultaneously.

WiiWare

• Space Trek (Calaris, 1 player, 700 Wii Points): A third-person vehicle-based shooter in which you pilot a space jet through a hostile alien planet.
• A Monsteca Corral: Monsters vs. Robots (Onteca, 1-4 players, 500 Wii Points): Control a herd of "Stompies" to avoid capture by enemy robots.

DSiWare

• Divergent Shift (Konami, 1 player, 800 DSi Points): Control one character on two screens in this puzzle platformer (formerly Reflection), avoiding dangers on both simultaneously.
• 3D Mahjong (Cosmigo, 1 player, 500 DSi Points): 50 different mahjong layouts, as well as "Memory" and "Matching" minigames for those of us who have no idea how to play mahjong, but somehow end up with this game.
• myNotebook: Carbon (Nnooo, 1 player, 500 DSi Points): The latest release of Nnooo's notebook app includes 24 "unlockable squared and lined paper styles," five ink colors, and page exporting functionality.
• Just Sing! National Anthems (Engine Software, 1 player, 200 DSi Points): It's a karaoke game, in which you sing the national anthems of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and the US. Okay.

Sensing perhaps that there was room in the market for an official peripheral for the upcoming GoldenEye, Activision and Nintendo have teamed up to release this gold-coloured Classic Controller Pro.

The limited edition controller - which looks more "pimp" than "bond" - will be available as part of a bundle including GoldenEye itself, which will cost $70 in total.

Smart move releasing a gold Classic instead of a gold Wii Remote; old-time fans will surely prefer analogue control over waggle, particulalry given the improvements made to controllers since the days of the Nintendo 64.

Be the Man With the Golden…Classic Controller Pro [IGN]

If you went out this week to pick up a Wii, congratulations! You're part of history. Nintendo just announced that the Wii has now exceeded 30 million units sold in the US, forty-five months after its launch.

To celebrate the occasion, Nintendo released some rare sales data, disclosing not only the top ten Nintendo-published Wii games (as of the end of June), but the top ten third-party games as well. Nothing from 2010 is on the list, reaffirming the belief that many Nintendo titles enjoy high sales alongside long tails. If that list isn't to your liking, however, perhaps you should go buy several copies of Sin & Punishment: Star Successor to move things along.

The Mail Online calls it a "pink cat-like medallion," and X17 Online calls it a "flashy, piggy-bank necklace," but we know R&B singer Chris Brown is just spreading the Kirby love.

Square Enix is making a Kingdom Hearts game for the Nintendo 3DS. The main characters will be Sora and Riku, and players will alternate between them while playing as they make their way through the game's "mysterious" story. How...mysterious!

While unable to go into great length about the game system, designer Tetsuya Nomura says that the developers are thinking about "falling down" as a key point for the game.

"What I want to do is make a Kingdom Hearts you can touch," the designer adds, making the following pun. "A falling 'Sora' and a flying 'Riku'."

"Sora" is not only the name of a Kingdom Hearts character. It also means "sky" in Japanese. Likewise, "Riku" can mean "land".

"I guess the game's theme would be trust," Nomura says. There are things in the game that players cannot do alone and thus, players will need to have have trust in order to be successful.

For the Nintendo 3DS Square Enix will start with Kingdom Hearts, Nomura continues, and then they are thinking of branching out to other franchises.

Nope.

At this year's E3 gaming expo, Capcom showed off two still-in-development Nintendo 3DS games: Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition and the tentatively titled Resident Evil: Revelations. Don't look for them to be hitting your local game shop anytime soon, though.

At a recent investors meeting, Capcom was asked whether it planned to release any Nintendo 3DS games during the financial year ending next April. Capcom stated it did "not expect" those 3DS titles to be ready for release during this fiscal year.

When pressed further about when Capcom will release Nintendo 3DS games, the company replied that it had not yet set any dates.

Capcom will be using its in-house game engine "MT Framework", which it uses for console and PC titles, to develop Nintendo 3DS games. "By employing our original game development engine the 'MT Framework'," Capcom stated, "we are able to streamline the basic development processes with those for other consoles. Thus we don't really expect to see a dramatic rise in costs."