Nintendo’s conference kicks off the 2nd day of E3. Of all the conferences, Nintendo’s is the most intriguing to me for two reasons: First, Nintendo plays its cards much closer to the vest, so they are more likely to have big announcements that have not been already leaked out in the days preceding to E3. Second, Nintendo has the biggest opportunity to either completely wow the crowd or to fail miserably. For the past two years, Nintendo has been amazingly disappointing to traditional gamers looking for the sort of games appealing to them. This year a lot of people have hung their hopes on the announcement of a new Zelda or Mario game. Personally I think Nintendo is going to come out with some big games to please the hardcore gamers this year.

And things begin. We’re starting off with a typical montage of people of all ages waggling. Nintendo points out that Mario has appeared in over 200 games(!) and now we’re going to see a montage of all of them…. This follows by the announcement of New Super Mario Bros for Wii. It’s a 2D mario game with 4-player support. Zelda Four Swords was pretty cool, so this game could be fun. It doesn’t really look as interesting to me as Four Swords or Little Big Planet, but not bad. Certainly Nintendorks will go nuts over it.

Now that Nintendo has thrown us a bone, we get to hear about Wii Fit for like 10 minutes. A new WiiFit game called WiiFit Plus is announced, as I had expected. I don’t really know how this game compared to EA Active which was just released last week. Let me take this time to mention for those of you not watching at home that regardless of the game being discussed, this presentation is extremely wooden and low-energy. It doesn’t seem like Nintendo’s presenter is actually interested in games.

Reggie is coming on now to talk about WiiMotion Plus. It occurs to me that this controller was announced at last year’s E3 but we still haven’t gotten a game based on it yet. We get a video montage of WiiSports Resort which isn’t really that impressive. Fortunately they’re following up with an on-stage demo. The first game is WSR is skydiving. You orient your Wiimote to orient your skydiver. Not really much of a game, but kinda pretty. The next sport is archery which “controls just like in real life” - sure thing Nintendo. Again, it looks pretty, but it doesn’t seem like there’s really all that much interaction. You can pull back the nunchuck as if you’re drawing back the string, but it’s really just pantomime it seems. Last up is basketball. This one seems like more of a surprise since I wouldn’t expect it to work with the Wiimote. There’s a 3-point competition which involves you making the motion of doing a jumpshot. If that’s all there is to the game, it looks pretty boring. None of the games they showed looked as interesting as golf or tennis from the original WiiSports. Pretty disappointing. However Tiger Woods and Virtua Tennis will support WM+, so get one of those instead.

Nintendo wants to focus on RPGs now. Excellent, please wow me Nintendo. Something from Matsuno or Monolith? Actually it’s Final Fantasy Crystal Bearers for Wii and Kingdom Hearts for DS. Both games that were announced at least a year ago so not too exciting. It looks like Mario & Luigi 3 is coming to the US on DS. I’m not sure if this was announced before, but either way, I’m glad to see it. I may buy this game. The RPG presentation finishes off with an announcement of Golden Sun DS. Another good franchise that I’m glad to see going to the DS. But this one is not coming until 2010.

Nintendo is talking about James Patterson now. Maybe it’s time for my sister to buy a DS. She has pretty much every one of his books. I’m glad to see that Nintendo is giving more attention to the DS at this year’s conference. Patterson’s game is a text adventure. Not sure about the quality, but nice to see more adventure games.

We’re getting street interviews about the DSi now. DSi has sold 1 million units already, which is kind of ridiculous since it’s more expensive and doesn’t really offer much of value yet. The focus seems to be on content creation, which already feels so last year. I think we’ve already decided with Little Big Planet that the average user quickly gets tired of user-generated content. The new WarioWare game will allow for user-created games. Given how short and silly those games are, they may actually work well with user-created levels. Oh gee, you can also upload your photos from the DSi to Facebook. I really hope Sony doesn’t have any sort of Facebook integration in their conference.

Iwata appears on stage accompanied by a guitar riff. Iwata says that the biggest challenge is to create games that appeal to people of all skill levels. Nintendo is releasing some sort of biometric peripheral. This is very odd looking. It’s some sort of box that you insert your finger into…called ‘Wii Vitality Sensor’. I don’t think he’s going to say anything more about that - kinda surreal. I have no idea what they are going to do with it.

Apparently there is yet another Mario announcement. It looks like Mario Galaxy 2? I guess I was totally proven wrong on this one. I would not have expected another Mario game so soon. The game looks pretty cool. Of course, I’ve never gotten around to playing the original Mario Galaxy yet. I should see if I can do that this summer. This announcement finally gets a loud cheer from the audience.

Reggie is out now and claims that he reads blogs. Now we’re going to talk about exclusive third-party games for the Wii this year. The first one is The Conduit. This game has been covered in-depth for a long time now, so there’s not too much to say about it. It comes out this month. Next up is Resident Evil: Dark Side Chronicles. Not much gameplay shown. Finally Deadspace: Extraction. The graphics look pretty good for a Wii game. I’m not really sure why players who enjoyed Deadspace on 360 would want to have the next game on Wii, but whatever. Now Reggie is claiming that Nintendo itself will be creating an ‘edgy’ game. It’s a sci-fi game being developed in conjunction with Team Ninja…another Metroid game! It looks like a third-person shooter? Didn’t see too much gameplay, so it’s tough to judge.

And with that the conference is over. Despite a boring style from their presenters, Nintendo delivered well in terms of games, so long as you were not looking for original IPs. We’ve got 4(!) new Mario games coming between Wii and DS, a new Metroid, and a new Golden Sun. There’s also WiiSports Resort and WiiFit Plus which don’t appeal to me, but will have an audience. In a way it was a little sad to see that Miyamoto has been working on a direct sequel to Mario Galaxy right away rather than trying to come up with a new franchise to inject some original blood into Nintendo’s stable of games, but probably the majority of Nintendo fans just want iteration after iteration on ancient franchises.

Third-party support could have been a little stronger in the conference, as there were really only about 5 third-party games shown, and I think that every one of them had been announced quite a while ago. I was not entirely impressed with the WiiMotion Plus demos. The only one we saw in action was WiiSports Resort, and every one of the minigames they showed looked extremely limited. I was hoping for something a little more dramatic showing off the power of the new motion sensor to try to counter Microsoft’s Project Natal. The Natal demos were head and shoulders above the WiiSports stuff.

Still, I would say that Nintendo succeeded in coming out with some good surprises, which, for me, gave their conference more punch than Microsoft. I was also glad to see a larger variety of genres on display from Nintendo, though at this point Mario is practically a genre unto itself. I think the average hardcore gamer will probably have been more impressed by Microsoft’s conference, but Nintendo played well to its base, as they like to say in politics.

Time for a short break in preparation for Sony’s conference in half an hour.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.