A lot of delightful Nintendo news making headlines this week.

Newsletter

Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly.

Enter E-Mail Address Below:

The Week in Review

March 25, 2006

After a very slow last few weeks, we finally had a nice big industry event to wake us all up from our post-Christmas hibernation courtesy of GDC. There have been plenty of things going on at the show, like Darwinia’s creators giving a big middle finger to the current publishing establishment, and it looks like Microsoft and Lionhead are about to get real chummy, much to the chagrin of Ubi Soft. However, it was Nintendo and Sony who made the biggest waves this year, as they both continue to gear up for the launches of their new consoles. That in mind, it’s these two companies on which I intend to focus this week.

As the Nintendo conference approached this week, there was a lot of wonder as to just what the company would announce at GDC. Of all the console makers, it's Nintendo who has been the most quiet as to what they plan to do in the coming generation. While some were expecting the company to drop plenty of bombs at the show, most were happy for some simple clarity, and that’s more or less what we got, with a few pleasant surprises thrown in for good measure.

We were treated to some info on the Revolution’s OS, and people mistaking it for being the new name for the console, but was particularly nice to hear was that not only are old Nintendo games going to be downloadable for the new console (via micro transactions), but also games for the Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 (the later is

Advertisement

borderline shocking). While I can see the Genesis games being popular, I’m skeptical of who, outside of the old school, hardcore nerd crowd will readily download the TG-16 titles. Now, I personally am quite pleased to hear that I can download Military Madness, Splatterhouse, and the like, but I remember back in high school that very few people much cared for the TurboGrafx, and only see this being more so 15 years after the fact. But in the meantime, yay me!

Advertisement

Despite all of the hoopla over the Revolution, though, what was the most pleasing to see was that Nintendo has a new Zelda in the works for the DS. Sure, it was inevitable that this would happen, but actually seeing something concrete just exudes a warm, happy feeling. I’m not too keen on the Wind Waker-esque art that has been shown so far, but certainly curious as to how the touch screen functionality will play out.

While Nintendo was unloading this information on gamers, Sony had plenty to talk about with the PlayStation 3. What was probably a relief to many is that the company will indeed not be using that god awful Batarang-esque controller they had on display last year at E3. They also haven’t said what the actual controller for the console will look like, but it’s a relief to know that someone over at Sony has the good sense to not go with that design. I don’t care how ergonomic that thing might be, the Batarang is a vile, vile look.

From there, plenty more good news came in the form of vague confirmation that all PS3 games will support a hard drive, discussion of Sony’s answer to Xbox Live, and a vague hint that maybe games won’t have regional lockouts (though it will be up to publishers’ discretion whether or not they implement lockouts). It isn’t all smiles and sunshine, though, as Sony’s Phil Harrison confirmed that it won’t be easy to track down a PlayStation 3 at launch. There should be about 1 million units ready to go for release, but obviously demand will be much greater than that. Sony is planning to pump out about 1 million PS3s per month from the time the console is released, but it’s hard not to look at this as a bit of rhetoric for now. I’d love to be proven wrong on this matter, but I’ll need to see it for myself, not just have someone try to convince me otherwise.

With Nintendo and Sony alone, the Game Developers Conference turned into a very nice primer for what to expect at E3 this year on the marketing front. Of course, there was plenty of design theory and whatnot discussed as well, but there’s no way of getting around the fact that two of the biggest players in this industry have a couple of juggernauts heading our way in the next twelve months.

Mr. Nash


PC \| Gamecube \| DS \| Wii \| PlayStation 2 \| PlayStation 3 \| PSP \| Xbox \| Xbox 360
News \| Reviews \| Previews \| Features \| Classics \| Goodies \| Anime \| Forums