Star Wars Battle Front III for Wii

It seems the rumours that Free Radical are making Star Wars: Battlefront III are true. On Tuesday Amazon showed listings for the game on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, DS and, most surprisingly, Wii.

The Battlefront games are multiplayer-driven, third-person shooters that drop the player into massive battles on land and space in control of numerous troops, ships and vehicles, including both heroes and villains from the Star Wars movies.

IGN has reported that two independent sources that have confirmed the listings to be correct and that Free Radical are the developers. The listings on Amazon have since been taken down, presumably at the request of publisher LucasArts. This comes almost two years after LucasArts announced that they had signed a development deal with Free Radical for an unnamed game.

This comes as great news to Wii owners, as not only are we getting the new installment of a fantastic franchise, but it comes from the team behind the TimeSplitters series and GoldenEye on the N64 - some of the best first-person-shooters of the past two generations, and games that Nintendo fans will no doubt have fond memories of.

However, with the looming presence of a PS2 title, we can hope that we don’t just get a port to the Wii with tacked-on some token waggle controls, as is typical of multi-platform titles. The cheap cash-in has never been Free Radical’s style though, so we can confidently look forward to a game built from the ground up for Wii.

The big question is can they make a game with this much focus on multiplayer and co-op gaming work well on Wii, or will they drop online gaming altogether for the Wii version?

Perhaps LucasArts know something we don’t about Nintendo’s future plans for online gaming or voice chat (Editor’s note: After all, Vicarious Visions was able to recently confirm that Guitar Hero 4 will feature downloadable content, after previously expressing displeasure at Nintendo’s lack of attention to their online flaws in the Wii).

Either way, at the moment it’s safe to be optimistic about Free Radical’s first outing on Wii. We’ll be watching for this one! (Source News for Gamers)