Sixty-Four Minute video? Screw that. For this special E3 feature, we’re going to bring you all the important details of the Nintendo’s E3 summit in a manner befitting of level two high school students (and lazy level one students, such as myself).
– Shaun White, American Olympic Gold Medalist snowboarder and Carrot Top lookalike, has a Balance Board-centric snowboarding game coming out entitled Shaun White Snowboarding.
– Satoru Iwata says that there’s a strong trend towards the Wii when it comes to third-party pick-up-and-play games such as Guitar Hero III (though the accuracy of this statement is debatable, as it seems to be strictly based on sales).
– Animal Crossing: City Folk is cool. You can check out the full news article here.
– Reggie Fils-Aime says “WE WANT YO MONAYZ!”
– Reggie also says that according to NPD data, there are over ten million Wii units sold in America and over twenty million in DS units, which totals a whole hell of a lot of money, which is accompanied by an ever-increasing demand for the DS.
– Nineteen third party titles for the Nintendo Wii have sold over 400,000 units (this is an arbitrary statistic, as if you look at the games that reached this benchmark, almost all of these games are ports which were outsold on the Xbox 360 or PS3…or they had Sonic the Hedgehog. Meanwhile, the Wii’s only two good third party exclusives, No More Heroes and Zack and Wiki, missed this mark).
– Three games were highlighted as best summarizing the totality of the upcoming Wii titles. First is Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a fighting game that focuses in on using the Wii Nunchuck for combat based on the upcoming Cartoon Network mini-series-turned-movie. Second Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party, a sequel to the mini-game compilation which will use the Nunchuck and Balance Board. Last is Call of Duty: World at War, which looks to actually be a good version of the Call of Duty franchise on the Wii.
– Female gamers love the DS (and the female-to-male ratio is allegedly almost even).
– Guitar Hero: On Tour Decades is coming out later this year on the DS as a sequel to On Tour. The game will feature more songs and will have an absolutely great “song sharing” mode, which will allow players who own different Guitar Hero DS games to play co-op on songs not available on their game.
– Spore: Creatures is going to be a slick game.
– Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars was announced for the DS, with a custom game engine, open-world gameplay and all that jazz.
– Nintendo is going to add a lot of features to the DS not related to gaming. They talk about how the Mariners’ Safeco Park (the Mariners are owned by Nintendo, by the way), has a network that lets you look up the box scores for all MLB games that day, as well as interactive cookbooks in Japan, and plans to make such things standard for the DS in the future. So much for Nintendo fanboys being able to complain about how the PS3 and 360 are tainted by having non-gaming applications. Who am I kidding? They’ll still complain.
– Wii Sports: Resort was announced. It will use another new piece of Wii hardware, a little block that plugs into the jack on the controller called the “Motion Plus” which will boost the Wii Remote’s motion detection.
– New “sports” included in Resort include throwing Frisbees to dogs, jet skiing and sword fighting.
– Wii Music was shown by Shigeru Miyamoto, who discussed how the title was developed alongside Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Wii Play as Nintendo’s quartet of games specifically designed to be great for the casual gamer. Wii Music is plain-and-simple gameplay that allows you to play music by simply hitting buttons or waving around the Wii Remote. The game has four player support, and allows you to record your songs and make music videos. It will also have some slick drum lessons in it.
– The entire Nintendo of America boardroom made asses of themselves.
And there you have it. Don’t like it? Too bad. I’m right and you’re not and that’s how it happened. But E3 didn’t end there, and it didn’t begin there, contrary to popular belief. Here’s other nice Nintendo info that was announced.
– Mega Man 9 was shown off, it will be a sequel to the NES classic and will use the same graphical style used in the original series.
– What seems to be a Disney knockoff of Rock Band was shown off in Ultimate Band. The game will allow you to customize your band members, play either the drums, bass, guitar, or lead using the Wii Remote and nunchuck. The game is also being developed for the DS.
– A very, very early build of the Konami vampire fighting game Castlevania: Judgment was there, and while it looked pretty, it was very clearly well away from being complete.
– A trailer for Mario: Super Sluggers was shown off, making it the only Mario title to appear at the show.
– A sequel to Tales of Symphonia was also available to check out.
– A new Pikmin was semi-announced, which you can read about here.
And there you have it. I know I’m not alone in never being able to take Nintendo boardroom members seriously again.