WiiNintendo

(The above picture is totally a fake, by the way.  It was a design posted on the NeoGaf forums last year.  I think it looks pretty cool, but it is in no way directly from Nintendo.)

This may seem obvious to you (as it does me), but Nintendo is already at work on their next handheld console.  While there have been several speculations of what this will look like (see above photo), no one really knows.  Will they announce it soon?  It seems like they will within the next 18 months.  Here’s part of Gameplayer’s article, which contains quotes from Nintendo’s PR representative, Rob Saunders:

Nintendo is working on a new handheld and has been doing so since the DS Lite was launched. Rob Saunders, Nintendo’s PR man, told us: “our hardware development team is always at work on the next product after we launch one piece of hardware. It is usual that a new model will be brought to the market when we cannot offer new ideas with the current model.” 

Quite what the Nintendo team is coming up with is not known but Rob says that, in any case, the firm is not ready to reveal it. He added: “we don’t think the Nintendo DS is at that stage yet, and we’d like to keep offering all sorts of suggestions to enrich the lives of people who own a Nintendo DS.” 

So when will the big announcement come? Jay Defibaugh from industry analysts Credit Suisse Securities says Nintendo will need to announce what it intends for the future “before the next 18 months, when we start obsessing about what the next-generation machines will look like.”

[Gameplayer]

Crispy Gamer has posted an article with editor-in-chief of Nintendo Power magazine, Chris Slate.  Here’s what he had to say about the NSider Forums:

CG: How do you feel about the decision to shut down the vibrant NSider forums? Are there any plans to revamp Nintendo Power’s online presence? 

Slate: I wasn’t involved with that decision so I don’t have much of an opinion on it. I know that Nintendo fans tend to be the most excited and involved people in gaming, which is one of the reasons that I’m such a big Nintendo fan myself. Our current Web site — which at this moment is still just the old letter informing people of the magazine’s switch from Nintendo to Future — definitely needs to be replaced. I can’t say by what just yet, or when a change might occur, but we’ve been tossing around ideas. 

For the entire interview, click here.

Check out Destuctoid’s coverage of what Iwata said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal:

“Wii Music completes what Miyamoto wrote in his proposal when he came up with the idea for the Wii,” Iwata told the Wall Street Journal. “He was saying that he needs to think up more ideas now.”

“Most of the ideas for accessories that we had initially come up with are out now. We might think up some more, and we might make them if we do, but we don’t have any plans to release a whole lot more.”

Maybe Miyamoto and Iwata need some help.  :-)  What do you think could be next for the Wii?

[via Destuctoid]

Mercury News: How would you assess how this console cycle has gone so far from EA’s standpoint? Is there anything you would like to see the console makers doing that they’re not doing right now?

John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts: The cycle is a lot like the past. There is a lot of innovation, probably more this cycle than even the last cycle; a lot of growth; a lot of exciting things. And we can choose to take advantage of those things.

One thing that’s different is we typically figured out who the market leader was going to be before the start of the cycle and bet with our development resources on that platform. We made the wrong call there (by betting on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360), which made this transition harder than it would otherwise be. But now we’re catching up, and I think we’re fine. We’ve got some incredibly innovative Wii titles, incredibly innovative DS titles coming. And so I think that issue’s sort of behind us. I am very happy that (the console makers) continue to drive an expanded install base, so I’ve got a bigger universe to sell into. But we’ve also transcended them a little bit. We’ve got a big mobile business, a big PC business, a big direct to consumer business, increasing advertising business, microtransaction business, subscription business - all things that live outside the world of (selling console games).

[Nintendic]

MTV Multiplayer: [laughing] Well, you’ve got to get it in the development kits. What about WiiWare? It wasn’t talked about at all. What’s the story there?

Reggie: WiiWare continues. Every week we have new WiiWare titles coming and that’s going to continue to be the progression for quite some time. We really wanted to focus this E3 on packaged product and product that was happening in the marketplace this holiday season, so that is why WiiWare wasn’t discussed.

MTV Multiplayer: There are going to be a lot more WiiWare games, right?

Reggie: Absolutely. Every Monday.

MTV Multiplayer: To what extent should people be expecting there to be first-party content coming out in the rest of the year. Or is this going to continue to be primarily a third-party service?

Reggie: When we developed WiiWare our focus, as we discussed, was on smaller developers, brand new content, different types of content. Will we put out the occasional first-party WiiWare? Absolutely. But it’s predominantly meant to be much more exploratory, experimental and for these brand new third-party developers.

[Nintendic]

Katsuya Eguchi, Producer of the Animal Crossing: City Folk:

“There’s some noise filtering going on. It’s designed to pick up stuff other than what’s coming out of the TV. If you put this on your TV, if this was a regular microphone, you’d get your TV sound going in. But this is a USB plug-in. So the sound coming out of your TV is going into the Wii Speak, and when it goes back into the Wii, it throws that sound away.

“We really don’t consider ourselves ‘anti-voice-chat.’ One of the things we’ve said for years now is that we’ve wanted to provide a safe environment that people didn’t feel nervous about going into. With games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros., because you can play against anybody, rivals or whoever’s out there, and they’re games where tempers can be frayed and people might use language that’s not appropriate for everyone to hear, we didn’t feel that those titles were appropriate to have a voice-chat feature. However, with Animal Crossing, you’re going to be chatting with your friends. There’s no Animal Crossing “rivals” or any sort of open gameplay like that. So we figured that as long as people have registered each other as their friends and they’re comfortable with that, then we’re fine giving them the ability to chat with each other.”

GamesIndustry.biz: Much has been written about Red Steel - do you think its reception was hampered by unfair expectation on the accuracy and sensitivity of the Wii remote? Does the new Wii remote peripheral give you more confidence for Red Steel 2?

Alain Corre: It was a great announcement, what [Nintendo] showed [in its press conference], because it’s true that on Red Steel it’s the typical product that will appreciate the new device.

Red Steel 2 has been in development for many months now, and this new device will help us be even more precise in what we do with the product. The Red Steel brand is strong - I think we released it on year one, and that people understood that it was a first try on new technology, technology that wasn’t completely finished.

And our game tried to grab the best out of it, and was a bit rushed to be sure to offer something in year one to Wii consumers. But Red Steel is still selling well - at a lower price of course, but still it’s in the top 30 or 40 in every country on Wii.

So Red Steel is a brand, and as with every brand we have, we now have to reach the top quality possible. What was missing was the preciseness of the sabre - and with this new device I think it will change the experience.

More

Multiplayer: Are you hearing this complaint mostly from — and let’s use a nicer comment than “geeks and otaku” — more from hardcore gamers than from your expanded blue ocean audience?

Fils-Aime: From an Americas-centric perspective, here is the reality we see. We have a consumer base who loves virtual console. We have a userbase who really is enjoying WiiWare content. So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on a download basis? As we continue to have things, as you point out, like ‘Mario Kart’ that has its own channel when you’re playing from an Internet perspective, we’re just making this challenge tougher and tougher. So in our view this is becoming much more of a mainstream problem, which is why we have a sense of urgency to solve it.

Check out the entire interview by clicking here.

Take-Two and Rockstar have always wanted to make a Grand Theft Auto title for Nintendo. Fils-Aime explained that after many talks with both the GTA publisher and developer, they are now all looking forward to the response the new title will generate.

Fils-Aime was rather confident about the upcoming title’s potential to boost sales for the handheld. While the idea of a GTA title on any Nintendo platform was previously frowned upon, the company president believed in Take-Two to deliver nothing but the best content for their platforms.

However, don’t hold your breath for a Wii-based GTA title just yet. Any future titles on the console will all depend on the whim of Rockstar and Take-Two. While there were no actual plans of a Wii title in the making, Fils-Aime admitted that he would like to see such a game that will take advantage of the Wii’s capabilities and can push the console to its very limits.

[qj]

In a recent interview, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, apologizes for the “lackluster” presentation at E3 ‘08.  He shares, as both Miyamoto and Reggie have, that E3 was not the best time to talk about upcoming “big titles.”

“If there is any perception that Nintendo is ignoring the core gamers, it’s a misunderstanding and we really want to get rid of that misunderstanding by any means. We are sorry about [the E3] media briefings, specifically for those who were expecting to see Nintendo show something about ‘Super Mario’ or ‘Legend of Zelda.’ However, the fact of the matter is the so-called ‘big titles’ need a long, long development period. … We really didn’t think this year’s E3 media briefing was the time to do so.” - Satoru Iwata

Nintendo seems to have developed the idea that we do not want to wait forever on these games, so they will now start announcing them soon before they are released.  I’m torn, though.  Part of me wants to know what to expect, even if it is 2 years away (Zelda…cough cough)…but the other part of me doesn’t like waiting.

[via shacknews]

FINALLY, some more info on this game.