Those of you familiar with Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge will be happy to know that the next release of the game will include Wii Balance Board support. Earlier this month I posted an entry about rumours of RTL Winter Sports 2009 and RTL Biathlon 2009 having balance board support and this further confirms that since they are essentially the same games but distrubuted in the US by Conspiracy Entertainment as Winter Sports 2 and Ski and Shoot.

For more details, read the Conspiracy Entertainment press release at betanews.com.

Keen to cater for everyone, and one of the less hyped announcements coming out of Ubidays is Babies Party for Wii, a logical extension of the already popular Imagine Babies DS title.

Babies Party and its 'babysitting academy' is said to include 30 mini-games that are based on a baby and carer's typical day and include memory games, puzzles, colouring and cutting up activities. The game is also said to include Wii Balance Board support although for which activities is unknown.

Since the announcement I've seen a lot of comments from gamers about this being nothing more than shovelware from Ubisoft. I'm certainly not going to rush out and get it but then it was never intended for a bloke like me so each to his (or in this case her) own I say.

Watching Ubidays live last night, I just couldn't help being amazed by the Far Cry 2 and Brothers In Arms demos but the really exciting news for me was confirmation by Ubisoft that, as I suspected, Shaun White Snowboarding is coming to Wii and will include Wii Balance Board support. Up until now, EA Skate It has been my most anticipated balance board game but SWS trumps that. Check out the latest ign first look. The game looks awesome and while I know that graphics on the Wii will not match the Xbox, balance board support will go a long way towards making up for that.

The other news of course is that Rabbids will be back in the form of Raving Rabbids TV Party - with balance board support as everyone suspected.

Examples of DIY balance board-like controllers have been doing the rounds online for some time, but this clip on German youtube has to be the first example of using an actual Wii Balance Board for non-Wii applications.

Techie readers will know that the Wii board communicates wirelessly with the Wii console via bluetooth which means that essentially, the board can communicate with any bluetooth enabled device. Now, after a beer and Bratwurst (one would imagine) fueled moment of inspiration, it seems that two boffins at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence have developed a C# application that allows the Wii balance board to control any PC-based application.

In principal it's quite simple. The application, on a bluetooth enabled laptop, receives signals from the four balance board sensors and converts these signals into events which can, for example, be mapped to particular key events like pressing the left, right, up and down arrows on a keyboard.

So far, the video shows them using the Wii board with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth as well as controlling the movements of a Second Life avatar but the possibilites are endless and not just for gaming and fun stuff. You could almost see this going mainstream - endless rows of cubicle workers frantically tapping balance boards under their desks as they shift our personal details from one department to the next.

Update: turns out I was wrong about this being the first example of a Wii Board hack. Check out this wiki stub from the end of April.

With Ubidays now less than 48 hours away, we should finally get some official word on the release of Rayman Ravings Rabbids 3 and confirmation on whether or not the game will indeed have balance board support.

But now, something else has caught my eye. On Ubi's teaser site, Uplay, there's a snowboarding teaser clip which I can only assume is news on the upcoming Shaun White Snowboarding title. That game's been tipped for a Winter 2008 release on Xbox but what I'm really keen to hear is news of a Wii version that includes balance board support - now that would be cool.

The word on the Ubisoft forums is that Rayman Rabbids 3 has been confirmed by Gamestop for a November release and is supposedly available for pre-order in store. They also seemed to imply that it does have balance board support but whether this is fact our just assumption based on the teaser trailer is unknown. There's still no official word from Ubisoft so this has to remain a rumour for now.

On the subject of teaser trailers, that was some marketing genius. It's a well known fact that Rabbids fans have been disappointed with the game since Rabbids 2. By supposedly including balance board support, Ubisoft most probably hope that the game will now appeal to the growing number of casual gamers thanks to Wii Fit. Whether Rabbids 3 will appease the diehard fans remains to be seen.

Now that Wii Fit is done and dusted, let's hope that Nintendo have been concentrating more on Wii Music. Wii Music was originally announced as part of the Wii Series which included Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Wii Chess and although there have been hints of the game since 2005 and a confirmation by The Shig of a 2008 launch, definitive information has been scarce.

A recent post by revogamers has hinted that the game will in fact be released before November this year and it's also rumoured to include Balance Board support with the Wii Board used as a drum pedal.

For now, this has to remain in the rumours category but I wouldn't be surprised to see an announcement about Wii Music at E3 in July.

With WiiWare opening up a whole new world of channels for the Wii console, it was only a matter of time until there was talk of Wii Balance Board support.

It looks like Hudson Entertainment is first off the mark. In a recent interview on Siliconera, Kentaro Murayama, Hudson Entertainment’s Executive Vice President in Japan had this to say about Tetris for WiiWare:

"It features a number of new rules and items. Currently, we’re tossing around the idea of using the Balance Board."

Ok, not exactly cast in stone but it's a start and you can be sure that if Hudson are considering it, other WiiWare developers are too.

There's been talk of a sequel to EA Boogie for some time now but we seem to be one step closer with rumours that EA Boogie Superstar has been spotted on the EBGames pre-order list for 14 October 2008 in the US. I couldn't find it myself but there's a screenshot on Wiiz.

There's still no official word from EA so for now this has to remain in the rumour category although it has also been reported in the UK Nintendo magazine, NGamer, so it's most likely true. I guess we'll have to wait for E3 before we really know.

Call me impatient but I'm having a tough time waiting for Family Ski to come out here in the UK. It's due on June the 13th but I don't quite understand the logic in that Wii Fit was launched in the UK before the US yet We Ski has been available across the pond since May 13th and as far as I can tell, it's the same game.

So if you're in the UK and really can't wait, you could consider spending a few pounds on Datel's Freeloader for Wii and then buying the US We Ski. Freeloader's basically a utility that will allow a PAL Wii console to play American NTSC games so unless you've imported your Wii from the US you're going to need Freeloader to play We Ski and other US games. Be aware however that this is an unofficial utility but since it doesn't require any console modifications, you can't damage your Wii. Something else to bear in mind is that future Wii firmware updates may stop Freeloader from working but since this little utility is helping to sell more Wii games, I don't really see why Nintendo would want to disable it.