Well, Nintendo’s had their kick at the E3 cat. How many of my predictions came true? Did Nintendo give me an early Christmas present by addressing any of my Pipe Dreams? Once again in the Kodak theatre, Nintendo had a huge venue from which they could unravel their magic upon a very ready and very large crowd of the press. Read on to find out whether they used their powers, or just left us by the wayside while they went off on a gaming tangent again.
Predictions that came true: 5/8
- more casual 1st party games: Wii Music, Wii Sports Resort, Animal Crossing City Folk
- more Wii MotionPlus info & 1st party game: demoed the attachment with Wii Sports Resort
- longer wii sleeves: one comes free with Wii Sports Resort
- balance board stuff that isn’t mind blowing: Shawn White snowboarding, Rayman Rabbids, Wii Music
- new Animal Crossing with online stuffs: also voice chat!
Pipe Dreams Granted: 0 🙁
I wanted Mr. Iwata to do something a bit cooler than say “Go casual gamez!!1!”. Unfortunately, nothing more than lip service was paid to casual gamers in their entire conference. Sure there was some neat stuff, but Nintendo is still pretty much saying “too bad” to those of us that want them to try to get more games like Bioshock and the like, even considering how they’d have to be scaled-down for the Wii. Core games in this year’s conference get an “invisible”.
WiiSpeak was one of, if not the best surprise of this year’s conference. Full-room voice chat, while not preferable to individual headsets, is a huge step in the right direction for Nintendo. Hopefully this USB microphone that sits on top of the sensor bar will be put to good use with other games, like The Conduit, that are to feature online play.
Animal Crossing City Folk is going to be quite good. The world in which you dwell has been separated into two sections: the town, which is essentially the entire usual Animal Crossing world, and the city, which houses much of the shops and services that used to be scattered around the town. Online play and communication has been furthered, with much the same features as were found in the DS iteration of this series, with the awesome addition of almost proper voice chat. The world also turns as though you are on a small planet in the same way as the world rotated on the DS. I’m not sure why they chose to continue this, because it was essentially created to make up for the lack of draw distance on the DS, but it looks like it will suffice. I’m quite looking forward to this game.
GTA Chinatown Wars for DS was pretty much the biggest surprise at the conference this year. Since it is on the DS, it doesn’t count as proper catering to the core gaming market, but if done properly, this is a good step forward for Nintendo. No screens or anything were shown, but it was made out to be a scaled down GTA taking place in Vice City in full 3D and free-roaming. We’ll see what they can do.
Nintendo’s headlining title to push the new MotionPlus attachment for the Wiimotes is a WiiSports sequel with a summer theme called WiiSports Resort. It will feature things like Nintendogs-style frisbee throwing, 1:1 sword fighting, and Wave Race-style jet ski racing. It promises to be pretty good and will come with a MotionPlus attachment and an elongated Wiimote jacket.
Mr. Miyamoto was brought out near the end like a show pony and enthusiastically played some Wii Music things like the saxophone, guitar, and piano. There was a professional drummer there that demoed the free drumming aspect of the game that also uses the Balance Board for the pedals of the bass drum and the cymbals. They made the game look pretty fun, and it will feature a crap-load of modes and 50 instruments to play around with. It’s all mostly freestyle meaning that you pretty much can’t mess up, so that will be a turn off for a lot of gamers, but I think that it will be immersive and along the lines of Electroplankton.
Cammie Dunaway, or the “Caminator” as Reggie called her was not that great. The first part of the conference was dedicated to nothing but her personal life and a poor attempt at trying to sell her as the “cool mom” figure. One of her first lines was “I am not Reggie…” and she definitely isn’t. I don’t really look forward to further press conferences if she’s going to randomly be at them, because she’s pretty uninteresting. Her general presence was almost as bad as Duffy’s at the Microsoft conference. It was almost painful to watch her feign enthusiasm through the whole thing, and then only win against Reggie in WiiSports Resort when he obviously let her. I think that Reggie was supposed to lose the first time, but he pwned her once just to show everyone that he’s still #1.
Overall, for the lack of meaningful hardware changes and the ignorance of core gamers, this conference gets a:
7/10