As the countdown towards the launch of the WiiWare service in North America goes slowly down to 0, Nintendo is announcing more and more games that will be available at launch to the American Wii owners. After the likes of Square Enix, Namco Bandai or Hudson announced games that would be available on WiiWare on day one, Ubisoft has taken the same step by saying that it is bringing Protothea on Nintendo's service soon after the May 12 launch date..

The announced title was hailed as one of the most innovative games featured in 2005 at the Independent Games Festival. At its core is a simple top down shooter. As in all such games, you get to shoot at hordes of enemies, pick up power-ups and battle level bosses.

Original developers Sabarasa and Digital Builders took this formula and morphed it into something different to create the initial PC game in 2005. Then Ubisoft picked up the title to add more polish to it. The enemy AI adapts better to the tactics that the player employs and can present a challenge even later on in the game, after the player learns all the tricks of the game. Some of the various power-up drops on screen have the ability to allow the player to slow down and even stop time flow for the enemies. There are eight different air-to-air weapons and two types of bombs specially designed for ground targets.

The story is pretty simple. A giant asteroid is on course to hit Earth and a shadowy organization, called The Core, is ready to pull all the stops to sabotage all the attempts to divert the asteroid from its course. The player is spawned in the cockpit of a spaceship with a clear mission to take down the asteroid and defeat The Core. Simple but effective, as far as I can tell.

There's no word from Ubisoft on how much the game will cost but after WiiWare launches, we will most likely find out that little detail too.