A post after a long delay
Well, it has been a fair while since I last posted, so I thought I’d make a post reviewing what has happened in gaming since the last post.
First, there’s E3. I made a prediction that E3 would be huge this year… I was off by a long, long shot. The thing is, had I actually paid attention to how Nintendo would view E3, and Nintendo’s overall strategy, I would have seen what was to come from a mile away. For you see, Nintendo placed a lot of their focus at E3 on peripherals and casual games. The only real “core” announcement was that GTA would be coming to the DS. As you can see by looking a couple of blog posts back, I made predictions of a long list of titles revealed at E3… and yes, I was way off. Most “core” gamers were waiting for a repeat of Nintendo’s spectacular E3 2006, and thus were beyond disappointed when it was merely comparable to E3 2007.
Mind you, the announcements that were made weren’t all that bad – a new peripheral that would make the Wiimote significantly more sensitive to rotational motion, thus allowing 1-to-1 motion control, along with a game that shows off its capabilities. A voice chat solution in the form of the “Wii Speak” microphone, to be introduced late in 2008 along with the newest entry in the Animal Crossing series. Wii Music to be released in 2008 was also announced, with gameplay shown off… albeit rather poorly.
None of this on its own would be a problem. The problem was that they didn’t announce anything else of significance, resulting in a lacklustre E3 presentation. But as I said, we should have seen it coming from a mile away. Why?
Because E3 changed between 2006 and 2007. In 2006, it was the Electronics Entertainment Expo, an event for the gaming public first and foremost. It was also Nintendo’s big coming-out, their chance to show off the Wii in all its glory. In 2007, E3 had become the “E3 media and business summit” – that’s right, a summit for media and business, not for the public. Indeed, the public weren’t even allowed in. In both 2007 and 2008, Nintendo targetted their presentations to who would actually be in attendance – mainstream media and potential investors. And there’s nothing that the mainstream media and potential investors love more than peripherals and simple games that’ll sell hugely well, unless it’s the announcement of an extremely huge franchise showing up on a Nintendo platform – GTA.
What’s more, there was a significant risk that Microsoft or Sony would start actually “attacking” Nintendo by shifting towards the new value system that Nintendo introduced with the Wii. That, too, was a good reason for Nintendo to emphasise their “casual” expanded audience side. However, neither Microsoft nor Sony bothered to attack Nintendo, thus making Nintendo’s defensive mode useless – Microsoft and Sony instead targetted each other, as they have done so many times before.
Disaster suddenly popped up on the OFLC’s classifications board, despite rumours that it had been cancelled. A couple of weeks later, details and screenshots of the game started to show up again, and surely enough, the game was still on its way. It has now been released in Japan, and will be releasing in PAL regions in November. Strangely, Nintendo aren’t releasing it in America until they see how it performs in other regions… an odd choice, given that Disaster’s style best suits the American core gamer crowd, and the game itself is set in America. Suffice it to say, the confirmation that this game was coming in 2008 was a nice surprise.
More games have been announced for the Wii, too – for instance, Cursed Mountain is yet another survival horror title. But most of these announcements happened at the next two significant conferences.
The first of these was Nintendo’s Fall conference, which was really two conferences – one in Japan, the other in America, held on the same day. Some “hardcore” gamers say that this was Nintendo making up for their poor E3 showing. Those with a critical eye, however, see that it was a matter of audience – at E3, it was mainstream media and potential investors. At this Fall conference, it was gaming media almost exclusively. And what did Nintendo announce there?
First Party titles: Punch Out, Sin and Punishment 2, Trace Memory Wii, Endless Ocean 2, Cosmic Walker, Dynamic Slash, Tact of Magic, Spawn Smasher, and Line Attack Heroes, as well as Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Mario & Luigi 3 on the DS, and I believe there were a couple more DS titles, too.
Third Party titles: Let’s Tap, 428, Family Ski World Ski and Snowboard, Dynasty Warriors, Joysound, Tenchu 4, Harvest Moon: Animal March, Rune Factory Frontier, as well as a number of DS titles. And the biggest of the revelations? Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time to release on Wii and DS with connectivity, separate from The Crystal Bearers.
And then there’s the “Play on Wii” line of Wiimakes of classic Nintendo Gamecube first-party titles, like Pikmin, Metroid Prime, and Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. And Nintendo reconfirmed the existence of Pikmin 3, distinct from the Wiimake of Pikmin. And they announced the DSi, which is a half-generation step up from the DS Lite – much as the GameBoy experienced a half-generation step in the form of GameBoy Colour.
And then there’s TGS, where many, many DS titles and Wii titles were shown off, even though Nintendo themselves weren’t there. Arc Rise Fantasia, Little King’s Story, Sonic Unleashed, and others were in attendance… but bigger news came, in the form of Suda 51, who announced that the sequel to No More Heroes, called “No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle”, was revealed to be coming to the Wii exclusively. And it’s not the only info to come from TGS, either… but my post has gone on long enough.
Suffice it to say, the Wii is looking to have a blockbuster year, as is the DS/DSi. And to think, we don’t even know a quarter of the titles that we’ll be seeing next year.
