Today, Nintendo held a pretty big press conference, possibly to apologize for saying “screw you” to their core audience at E3. I would have loved for them to unveil a new Zelda game, an updated re-imagining of Kid Icarus, or a Wii hard drive–even though I no longer have a Wii, I’d go out and buy another one next week if Nintendo finally unleashed all of that console’s potential (or just hit up my little brother, who I kind of gave my Wii to).
Unfortunately, what we got was even more…stuff that…well, it does all kinds of stuff is what it does. Nothing particularly useful or enjoyable, nothing that moves the industry forward, but it’s…well, let’s look at the highlights.
- The New DS. The Nintendo DSi will be slimmer (no backwards compatibility), have a digital camera, and support SD cards. You can load MP3s onto that SD card and play it back over the console. It’s not a bad piece of hardware, if you don’t already own a Nintendo DS…and a digital camera…and an MP3 player. I don’t know what Nintendo’s thing is for re-releasing their portables a hundred times (Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color followed by Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP finally to be wrapped up with DS and DS Lite), but it’s getting old. Real old. I understand that the Big N has to constantly draw in a new consumer base, but I’d much rather they spend more time developing hardware and let it loose when it’s at its peak.
- The Wii Speak channel. Wow, a place where you can talk with your friends online–after exchanging 97-digit friend codes and buying a $30 peripheral. Cutting edge that is. It’s called Skype, Nintendo. You might have heard of it.
- Club Nintendo. You get free stuff for spending money; you earn points when you buy stuff, and you can trade those points in for swag. Unless that free swag is more games or really sweet collectibles, I just don’t see how it would be worth the effort–not to mention that it’s quite obvious that this is just another way for Nintendo to print more money, not to reward their loyal fan base who has kept them afloat when they were the laughing stock of mainstream gaming (the Gamecube years).
- The “Play for Wii” collection. These will be Gamecube games revamped for game play on the Wii and re-released for the white box. I have to say, if Nintendo uses this as a way to get some obscure Gamecube titles back on the market, I can’t complain. Pikmin is the first game scheduled to come off the line. I can’t hate too harshly on this, other than Nintendo has done this before (Game Boy Advance Classics Series), and I’d rather have dev teams coming up with all new titles–considering that the Wii plays Gamecube games just fine.
- Finally, the biggest joke from the whole thing was that Nintendo is now allowing downloading of games to and uploading games from SD cards. Seriously? This is their solution to a constrained hard drive on the Wii? Not a USB hard drive, which would have made a whole lot of hot, steaming sense? Talk about screwing over your consumers. The Wii only works with 2 GB or less SD cards; the MSRP on a 2 GB SanDisk card is $39.99, while a Microsoft 120 GB HD costs $180. You would have to buy 60 of those cards–at forty bucks a pop–to get the same amount of storage space. Mind=blown. The only comfort we can take in is that there is probably not 120 GB of content worth paying for on the Wii Shop channel.
So, there’s Nintendo’s big press conference. There were a few announcements about games–a release date of March 2009 for MadWorld and Nintendo is going to be the publisher of The Conduit–but that’s your big news. Terribly underwhelming I know.
