Nintendo's Iwata Confirms Big Games This Year

1up has comments from Nintendo's President Satoru Iwata, as he spoke to investors earlier this week. When asked about the possibility of hardcore games coming to the Wii before the end of 2007, Nintendo's president assured gamers and moneymen that Mario and Metroid are coming this year. "It will be from around the end of this summer to the end of this year. We will then launch a new title of Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption although the last one is primarily for the [American and European] markets. These will be the key titles for the period ranging from the summer until the holiday sales season of this year, and I think we will be able to cater to the specific needs you mentioned."

Comments

Re:Not just consoles

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go :
http://www.amazon.ca/Nunchuck-Controller-Nunchuk-N intendo-Wii/dp/B000IMYKQ0/ref=pd_bbs_1/701-1685769 -9921158?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1178405533&sr=8- 1

Re:Not just consoles

[SpeedyDX]

OH HEY! Thanks! I just checked that, and that reminded me of Console Watch. I just checked it, and lo and behold, everything is in stock! I just put an order in for 2 more wiimotes and 3 nunchucks.

Thanks again! I guess those hardware problems are temporarily solved.

Re:Not just consoles

[ISurfTooMuch]

Must be a Toronto thing because all my local stores have had plenty of controllers. As for the consoles, it took me about a month to get my hands on one, but a lucky call to Circuit City one day told me that they were getting 18 in the next morning, and they were giving out vouchers before the store opened. Went there, got a voucher, went and had breakfast at Waffle House, and came back and picked it up. A buddy of mine was also able to snag one, which is sitting in my closet until he can figure out what he wants to do with it.

For a few days after that, www.wiihunt.com was reporting that stores around here had them, but they were gone in less than a week, and now we're back to having none anywhere in the state, as far as I can tell.

Re:Too Little, Too Late

[Mr. Hankey]

Try "The Godfather: Blackhand Edition" before giving up. It's quite an experience, and I expect to see more like this with Scarface on the way.

Re:Wiiiiiii!

[ClassMyAss]

Um, the wiimote does have gyro's in it. The sensor bar is only used when you need to point at something on screen. Sword fighting games will work very well with the wiimote.

Nope, no gyros, unless they are hidden deep inside and haven't been used in anything yet. I've spent a lot of time playing with this thing (do a Google search for DarwiinRemote - might be Mac only? - you can read the Wiimote output through a Bluetooth connection). What it has is merely some force sensors that detect x, y, and z acceleration. If the Wiimote is not actually being accelerated, then you can use this to locate the gravity vector in remote space; if it is being accelerated, then you need to be a little more clever to figure out what's going on (and there are some ambiguities - basically you have to determine what direction gravity is in so you can separate the gravity component from the acceleration, and this requires some educated guessing as it's a mathematically underspecified problem). But in essence, the accelerometers are little more than weights on linear springs - each one reads acceleration in a single direction. This is why rotation about the direction of gravity is not detectable, there is just no difference in the accelerometer readings all around that axis.

By the way, it IS true that the accelerometers provide three degrees of freedom, exactly the number you need for full rotational specification; unfortunately only two of them are actually rotational, the third is actually a translational DOF (more or less). And you can't even really use the spatial location very well because the accelerometers only provide 8-bit acceleration data, so it's hard to use this to integrate up from acceleration to position data. All of this explains why a lot of the stuff people had expected to see so soon are still not happening - the thing doesn't quite give you true locatability, it stabs at it and leaves it up to the game developers to figure out ways around the limitations. You might be right that they will eventually figure out some way to make swordfighting games, but the point is, they won't give you quite the amount of control that you have with a real sword.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting controller nonetheless, I'm just sour because I had hoped for a perfect one with true 6 DOF locatability; I guess I'll have to wait for the next generation for that one...