Famitsu Reports

Band Brothers Expansion Cartridge

Nintendo has announced that a GBA cartridge containing extra songs for music game Band Brothers will be released some time this year, and that fans of the game can vote for their favourite songs to be included. The release date and price will be revealed on 11th August.

This is the first use so far of the GBA slot to provide expansion for DS titles, and shows the great potential the system has. As long as the original DS card is designed with expansion in mind, this could be used to offer new maps for first person shooters and strategy games such as Advance Wars, new puzzles for games like Polarium, and something like Meteos could even have new planets and characters.

Game Boy Advance cartridges are, of course, not very big in terms of storage, so I don't think anything as ambitious as PC game expansion packs would be possible. But this is a very interesting development, and it begs the question: will a similar scheme be implemented in the West? In fact, the original game has yet to be released outside Japan, so by the time it comes out Nintendo may have been able to include the expansion pack songs in the DS card.

posted by CTU Kyoto @ 7/02/2005 05:00:00 am