Wired's Game|Life blog has up a post pointing out a surprise from Nintendo: a cute voting application now available on your Nintendo Wii. Unannounced and easy to understand, Everybody Votes appears to be attempting to gain a gestalt view of the Wii-owning population. The app gives you several multiple choice questions to answer, and allows you to submit your own. Chris Kohler hopes that this might be the beginning of downloads for small, entertaining programs Nintendo fans may have never otherwise seen. "If you've ever been to an E3 or read about Nintendo's booth, you know that they often show little demos or applications that never get released. Well, with Wii, it seems that we might actually start seeing those little experiments thrown out to the public. Since Nintendo as a game developer uses this first-prototype-something-fun style of design, we could see all kinds of things that ordinarily wouldn't ever make it out of Nintendo headquarters." I personally hope we get a full-fledged version of the conducting game that Miyamoto used to demo the system at last year's E3.

Computer and Videogames is reporting that 2.4 Million copies of Burning Crusade were sold on the first day of retail sales. Those numbers are just for North American and the EU, too, which totally discounts any sales the box may have had in Asian markets. Even without our eastern brethren, that number pretty much destroys every other launch-day sales number for a PC game. Meanwhile, the same gent that teased us with the next StarCraft game has tossed out this bone as well: Blizzard's next MMOG 'won't be another WoW'. From the article: "'When we announce our next MMORPG it's not going to be another WOW--we're not a company that tends to tread the same ground,' he told British film magazine Empire. 'It'll be something innovative and new that really brings entertainment to another level.' American Blizzard reps declined to expand on Bassat's comments, although the fact that the company began hiring real-time strategy developers last summer might offer a clue." So ... another Blizzard MMOG. Huh.

1up has the news that Doug Lowenstein has stepped down from his position as President of the Entertainment Software Association. In the same year as the 'retooling' of that organization's Electronics Entertainment Expo, the 12-year veteran and founder of the organization has announced his intention to leave the organization thiscoming February. Gamespot reports he's heading for a position with a trade organization for investment firms. GamePolitics, meanwhile, reconfirms that Lowenstein is not headed for the Entertainment Consumers Association, nor will ECA founder Hal Halpin be taking Lowenstein's place. From the 1up article: "Back in 1994, (Bungie was still making games for Macs, that's how long ago we're talkin'), Lowenstein founded the Interactive Digital Software Association, which one would day become our own beloved ESA. The organization's purpose wasn't to create a money-draining spectacle that would become the bane of gaming journalists' existence, but rather to serve as an advocate for antipiracy legislation. Once it became the ESA, the group's mission grew to include the support of the ESRB."

kaizokunami writes "A company named Interlink Electronics, Inc., creator of interface devices has filed a suit in US District court against Nintendo of America, claiming the Nintendo the trigger on the bottom of the Wii controller infringes on their patent. The article includes images submitted with the patent application." From the article: "The complaint alleges that the trigger on the bottom of the Wii controller infringes on Interlink Patent No. 6,850,221 (Trigger Operated Electronic Device), which the company secured on February 1, 2005. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata first presented the Wii controller to the public not too long after that date, during the 2005 Tokyo Game Show."

I'm not really one to link to reviews or previews, but 1up is running pieces looking at three really, really interesting titles slated for next year. On the theory that at least one of these is going to interest you, I direct you to Matt Leone's look at God of War 2, Shawn Elliot's piece on Assassin's Creed, and the first preview, anywhere, of BioWare's Dragon Age. From that article: "Large-scale combat is also on the top of Greig's mind--no surprise for a game where here, one naturally assumes, there be dragons. 'Remember the cave troll fight in The Fellowship of the Ring? That's what our large creature combat is going to be like. You've got the party guys running out, one guy jumping up on the back and stabbing, the other guy ducking between the legs.' Objects in the environment can be manipulated in your bid for tactical supremacy: Knock over a table to fire arrows or shoot fireballs from behind cover, but only where it makes sense--emergence be damned, in BioWare's reckoning. 'There will be a lot of ways of going through combat, and lots of different ways to interact with the environment...but our philosophy is that handcrafted is always better than random stuff.'"