Just catching up on some recent topics that have been stacking up since I started doing NewsBreak duties. Here are some interesting tidbits from the video-game and home-video world:

Mature DS: I recently wrote about the spate of Mature-rated games that have hit the Wii lately, including MadWorld. But the Nintendo DS is growing up, too. Last week, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the portable system. It’s only the sixth M-rated game to come out for the DS. (A seventh, the first-person shooter C.O.R.E., comes out April 14, after being postponed from December.) GTA: Chinatown Wars has been getting rave reviews, with a Metascore of a whopping 94 (out of 100) at Metacritic. I just started playing last week, too. I’ve been turned off by the cartoonish graphics and humor, and I’m not thrilled with any DS that requires the player to wield the stylus at the same time you use the various buttons. But I have to admit that the game is as addictive as any previous GTA title. As soon as you finish a mission, it’s nearly impossible not to want to go on to the next one immediately, no matter the hour.

Game sales: Video games continue to defy the economic conditions. Sales of hardware, software and accessories were up 10 percent in February and up 11 percent since the beginning of the year, compared with the same time periods a year ago, according to the latest figures from the industry-tracking NPD Group. Interestingly, analyst Anita Frazier said, “Unit sales increased even more than dollar sales did, reflecting a slightly lower average retail price for all categories as compared to last year.” The biggest-selling game was Wii Fit, benefitting surely from New Year’s resolutions and the Wii’s continued dominance (753,000 units sold in February, by far the month’s biggest console). Sony’s PlayStation 3 had the biggest sales increase from January among all systems (276,000 sold) – largely thanks to the exclusive shooter Killzone 2, which ranked No. 5 among all games even though it was available only two days of the month.

Amazing PS3: I missed The Amazing Race last night while I was out for the evening. March Madness pushed 60 Minutes back an hour, which then delayed my show — nullifying the time set on the season pass on my DirecTV DVR. No problem. I’m planning to watch the missed episode tonight. I’ll just go to CBS.com using my PlayStation 3 and stream the TV show directly from the website to my big screen. The Wii and Xbox 360 can’t do that.

Warner DVDs: Interesting news that Warner Home Video has decided to sell thousands of unreleased movies from its vaults as custom DVDs ($20) or instant downloads ($15). I don’t see much for me in the initial batch of 151 movies being offered at the Warner Archive, but I’m intrigued to see what’s coming, especially among the TV shows. I have a feeling that Warner is going to rake in some money on this venture, so expect other studios to follow suit. MGM, for example, has a similarly huge catalog.

High-def classic: Speaking of MGM, my favorite movie, Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, has finally been announced for release on Blu-ray. It’s coming May 12, and , well, I can hardly wait. High-Def Digest has the details, such as they are at this point.

What do you get when you cross Kraftwerk and Pong? Probably something a lot like the retro-cool BIT.TRIP BEAT, the newest game for the Nintendo Wii. But you won’t find this cleverly constructed diversion in stores. It’s a WiiWare title that’s available only as an inexpensive download on Nintendo WiFi Connection, one of the online video-game networks that I wrote about in today’s Technobabble column (“Get connected with your game system”). Even better, BIT.TRIP BEAT (pictured) was created by Twin Cities native Alex Neuse, 35, who heads his own game company, Gaijin Games, in Santa Cruz, Calif.

In BIT.TRIP BEAT, you (and up to three other players) move a Pong-like paddle vertically to hit blips that move horizontally across the screen. You control the paddle by holding the Wiimote sideways and rotating it forward and backward to move the paddle up and down. The blips and your paddle deflections groove in time to an ’80s-era electronic soundtrack, which gives you a clue when to position your paddle to make a strike. But it doesn’t tell you where on the screen the increasingly faster-moving blips will appear. As the levels increase the patterns of the blips grow increasingly complex. Then their numbers change. Then their sizes change. Then their cadence changes. And, well, soon you’re doing all you can just trying to keep up. Suffice it to say that BIT.TRIP BEAT is wildly addictive, even if the repetition harks back to the Atari 2600 days — which is intentional.

“My inspiration for the game came from my love for classic games and video game music,” said Neuse (pictured), who attended Irondale High School in New Brighton and Hamline University in St. Paul. “I’ve always thought that the music in games plays a much larger role than a lot of people give it credit for.  Games like Rez, Parappa the Rapper and more recently Guitar Hero (and the like) draw players in just as strongly, if not more so in some cases, than games with the deepest, most intricate stories.  This inspired me to tackle the challenge of creating a game that could draw people in on an emotional level through music alone.  And not just any kind of music either. We decided to go with chiptune music as our inspiration, which helps to maintain the ‘classic’ vibe that we’re trying to rock.”

BIT.TRIP BEAT sells for 600 Wii Points, equal to $6. (To purchase and download, go to the Wii Shop Channel in the Wii Menu and access the WiiWare section.) Neuse said he and Gaijin, as the developer, will get royalties based on sales, as reported to publisher Aksys Games by Nintendo.

“Developers can choose to self-publish on platforms like WiiWare and remove the publisher from the equation, but then they have to be able to incur publishing costs that the publisher would otherwise take care of,” Neuse explained. “In our case, we went the publisher route.”

Neuse said Gaijin is working on a second installment of BIT.TRIP BEAT and plans more episodes “before we broaden our horizons and branch out into less classic genres.”

Neuse has been working in the game industry for more than 10 years, including getting his start with the highly acclaimed LucasArts. After so many years in sunny California, it’s surprising to hear what he misses most about living in Minnesota.

“I miss the weather in the Twin Cities,” he said. “California is so great in so many ways, and a lot of people think that the weather out here is so much nicer, but there really aren’t dramatically different seasons where I live. I miss thunder. I miss inclement weather quite a lot, actually. Other than that, it’s pretty much Earl’s Cheese Puffs that I miss, too.”

In today’s Star Tribune NewsBreak, I discuss my story this weekend about the Nintendo Wii and how the “family-friendly” video-game system is growing up. The evidence? In the first 26 months since its release in November 2006, the Wii has had only 20 games that were rated Mature (for players 17 and older). Yet since Feb. 3, five more such games have come out for it, including the sensational MadWorld from Sega of America. You can learn more about this interesting trend when the story goes online this weekend and by watching NewsBreak.

If you do the latter, please note: I’ve been playing video games for more than 30 years and writing about them since the early ’90s. And, yes, I am holding the Wiimote upside down in the webcast. I just didn’t realize it during the live-recorded segment until it was too late. So don’t e-mail me about it, OK? And, hey, it’s not as if the Wii was plugged in anyway. ;-) 

The highly anticipated Beatles version of Rock Band will come out Sept. 9, its developers announced this morning. Beatles:Rock Band also has a dedicated website now, but there’s nothing there but the release date at the moment.

Besides the game — $60 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Wii — there will be new Rock Band controllers modeled after the instruments played by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The stand-alone guitars will retail for $100, and a limited-edition bundle with the instrument controllers and game will go for $250. You only need the game if you already have a Rock Band setup; the new special-edition controllers aren’t required.

There’s no word yet on what songs will be included in the game. But expect to hear about them soon, along with plans for future downloads.

Two big news items in the video-game world: Nintendo has just announced the latest incarnation of its portable DS system, the DSi. And Grand Theft Auto IV now has a new episode available for download, The Lost and Damned.

Available April 5, the DSi (pictured) is a slimmed-down version of the DS that will sell for $170 and come in blue or black. But it has much more than a new profile. Its features will include:

DSi Camera: There will be two built-in cameras, one pointing away from the user and one toward. Nintendo explains: “As the first truly interactive digital camera in a video game system with 10 different interactive ‘lenses’ that can manipulate your photos, the Nintendo DSi Camera offers an easy way to take and share your photos with family and friends. The cameras also present people with unprecedented ways to interact with their games while giving developers a new tool to devise creative games and experiences. If the touch screen gave Nintendo DS a sense of feel and the microphone allowed it to hear, the two cameras give Nintendo DSi the sense of sight.” 

DSi Sound: The system will have a built-in voice recorder and music player, accessing songs from an SD card. In addition, users will be able to manipulate the sounds by using filters, and varying pitch and tempo. There could be some cool mashup possibilities there.

DSi Shop: This looks to be the portable version of the shop now available to Wii users, complete with downloadable games designed specifically for the DS.

Nintendo said it will announce more features as April 5 draws near.

As far as Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and Damned represents the first downloadable content for the popular game. It became available Tuesday.  The chapter introduces a new main character and a story that intersects with the action from the disc-based main game. Unfortunately, The Lost and Damned is an exclusive download for the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live. Since I have the PlayStation 3 version of GTA IV, I can’t tell you much more about it. But PC World says, “With anywhere from 15 to 40 hours of play time for just 1600 Microsoft Points ($20), it packs more to-dos than you’ll find in most standalone $60 games.” You can read several other enthusiastic reviews via Metacritic.Â

The bad economy is finally catching up to video games, right? Not yet, according to the latest sales figures.

U.S. video-game sales were up 13 percent to $1.33 billion in January compared with the same month a year ago, according to the industry-tracking NPD Group. Sales of just systems were up 17 percent. Nintendo boasted in a separate press release that it was largely responsible for the increase, and it’s hard to dispute that. Sales of the Wii console in January were up 148 percent over January 2008, with nearly 680,000 units sold; the plucky Nintendo DS was up almost 100 percent, with nearly 511,000 sold.  

Nintendo scored on the software side, too, claiming 20 of the top 30 games sold in January. Remarkably, five of the top 10 sellers were Nintendo titles that had been out for months and, in some cases, years. They include the No. 1 Wii Fit, as well as Wii Play (No. 2), Mario Kart Wii (No. 3), New Super Mario Bros. for DS ( No. 8 ) and Mario Kart DS (No. 9). It seems pretty clear that those figures reflect people getting a Wii or DS for Christmas and then going out and buying (probably with gift cards) the best games for the system.

Microsoft and Sony trailed in Nintendo’s dust in January. The Xbox 360 sold 309,000 units, according to NPD, with top 10 game titles of Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty: World at War, Skate 2 and Lord of the Rings: Conquest. The PlayStation 3 tallied sales of 203,200, ahead of the PSP at 172,300 and PS2 at 101,200. (I can’t believe people are still buying the PS2, but what a testament to its cheap price, huge — but no longer expanding — library and longevity.) There were no games for Sony’s systems in the top 10.

The final game among the top 10 sellers for January was Guitar Hero World Tour for — of course — the Wii.