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Nintendo Announces New Mario Bros, Mario Galaxy, Metroid
Nintendo's E3 press conference was an eventful one, with announcements for a new Super Mario Bros. Wii, a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy, and a new entry into the Metroid franchise by Team Ninja. The new Mario Bros. game will be available for the holiday season, and the other two are scheduled for 2010. Nintendo also confirmed an updated version of the Wii Fit, called the Wii Fit Plus (trailer), due out this fall. A full list of Nintendo's announcements is available, which includes more games and new features. Live blogs of the press conference, with commentary and pictures, are up at Engadget and 1Up.
Golden Sun DS (not mentioned in TFS) is really what I'm most excited about. Golden Sun and its sequel for GBA were possibly my favorite RPG series for a long time. What a brilliant mixture of RPG gameplay with puzzle solving it was, with great graphics (for GBA) to boot! I've been waiting for a third for ages, as the second had a somewhat open ending.
Its nice to see Nintendo actually making an effort to appeal to gamers who want a game more involved than a tech demo, but can we please have something... fresh? Sure, Mario, Metroid, and Golden Sun are good, but it seems like Nintendo has really stagnated in good games that aren't gimmicks. Plus theres a bunch of old IP that isn't being capitalized on such as the old Japanese Fire Emblem games, Earthbound hasn't even seen a US release on the Virtual Console and Kid Icarus hasn't seen a new game in ages.
Nintendo needs to make more "hardcore" games so whenever they aren't in first place anymore they won't go belly up.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This story needs /emphasis
As the type of person who despises media companies that crap out products having never-ending sequels (sims, guitar hero), Nintendo really brings out the hypocrite in me, as I feel compelled to always buy the canonical Mario games.
They had me at at Super Mario World.
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
... nintendo really needs 3rd party games badly. The fact they went with underpowered hardware really killed 3rd party companies ability to port their games to the system. Which means: No final fantasy 13, no Street fighter 4, No soul calibur 4, etc, etc....
Everytime nintendo learns from it's mistakes, it makes another one. It's also a shame that they fucked up starfox series so badly with Starfox Assault and Starfox adventures (was: Dinosaur planet)
I heard the starfox developer got in a tiff with Miyamoto on the direction of the starfox franchise and they went their seperate ways... shame, it appears that Miyamoto thinks he's gods gift, and he outrights ignores the fan's of the games themselves. Pretty awful in my opinion.
It's cool that Nintendo seems to be getting on the ball with Metroid, I hope Team Ninja's metroid is awesome, looks good from the trailers... I wish that they would farm out Zelda to team that does 3D combat well, I wonder what the god of war team could come up with working with Nintendo's own team.
Sure, everyone loves Mario but at this point it's obvious Nintendo is very stagnant. Most of the stuff on the Wii is pure shovelware garbage, and I've yet to be truly impressed with the uses of the Wiimote (although the device itself is fantastic and I even use it with my computer via bluetooth). The Wii is a stagnant system all-around for the more active gamer, and its "environment" is so sterile (less mature games, using the friend code system, etc) and the system is far enough behind the others in terms of graphical and processing ability to not allow for faithful ports of games on the XBox 360 or PS3.
You'd think Nintendo would at least ramp up 1st party games but nope. Most of what is coming out is unremarkable shovelware. The DS is definitely starting to lose some of its luster as only a few good games on it seem over the horizon--though I do think the DS was overall a success with many quality games.
Mario, Mario, and Metriod. And another gimmick, Wii fit. How depressing for us Wii owners.
As an aside, when is Nintendo going to come out with a faithful quality sequel to Star Fox 64?
While there's extremely little information outside of "It exists", a new Wii Zelda has been announced. Supposedly more "mature", though that can mean many things to many people.
All in all, this is a MUCH better showing from Nintendo than last year's "Yay let's flail around faking music!" show. I almost wish they had split what we've see this year between this and 2008 E3s, so that we might see more of each thing.
Personally, I'm more excited for Golden Sun DS than anything else, though I'm sure to pick of SMG2 and Metroid. Too bad that rumored Metroid: Dread for DS never came about.
I agree that the 3rd party situation is abysmal, but I'm scratching my head when you say that they are stagnating. If anything, I'd say they are the only console manufacturer that has truly managed to innovate and break out of traditional "gamer" demographic.
And then there's this:
Translation:
So you want innovation... except when you don't?
They point out in the article that it is basically the same graphics as the DS New Super Mario Bros, so yes, you're right, it looks like something from DS (intentionall). I'm sure it's no where near pushing the limits of the Wii hardware, considering what it has been shown to be capable of in games like Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Galaxy and MadWorld.
The hype is about the 4 person simultaneous multiplayer in a mario game, which is a completely new feature - maybe you should try reading the article instead of just looking at the pictures.
Plus, the Wii is so much cheaper to develop for.
Once you have the devkit. But before Nintendo will even sell you the devkit, you must have a corporation or LLC with a leased office and a track record. That's a lot of overhead for a new business. Compare to Xbox Live Community Games: anyone with a PC, a C# book, and $794* can get started.
* Price of an Xbox 360 plus a 5-year subscription to XNA Creators Club.
What really breaks Wii Fit is the time spent navigating the menus between exercises.
What it needs is a way to setup a simple list of exercises in advance (like a songlist in Guitar Hero's quickplay mode), and then run you through those as quickly as possible (don't explain to me how it worked *every time*, thank you), and with as short load times as possible.
As it is now, you never really break a sweat...
A price cut announced for the Wii console. It has been out for almost three years now, and still sells at the price it was initially released at.
Granted, the console is still selling fine at this same price - and hence demand seems to remain - but this seems like an unusually long time for the components within the system to have not fallen in price.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.