Games
Nintendo Bores, Disturbs and Surprises at E3 2009 Media Briefing
By Eli Green June 3, 2009 - 18:00
Nintendo's
Media Briefing at E3 this year was, to put it simply, a borefest. So
much so that a couple of big surprises at the end couldn't even save
it from that designation. It began as most of their conferences do,
with a little intro video showcasing various Nintendo products and
people playing them. After the video, Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo's
Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, took the stage to do
the regular intros and talk about how the industry has considerably
expanded over the past couple of years, thanks in large part to
Nintendo, of course. Finally, before moving on to the presentations,
she introduced the Briefing's theme saying, “It's clear. Everyone's
gaming”.
And
so began the usual onslaught of video game premieres and statistic
reports, except that it wasn't really much of an onslaught at all as
far as the video game premieres were concerned. Dunaway moved on to
introduce the first game, another remake of the original Super
Mario Bros., this time for Wii,
aptly titled New Super Mario Wii,
and introduced Bill Trinen from Nintendo's Treehouse Group to talk
about the game's features while Dunaway and three other players from
the Treehouse Group take the stage to demo the game. Essentially, the
game ends up as a multiplayer version of the original Super
Mario Bros., with some graphics
upgrades, simultaneous multiplayer for up to four players, some new
items and a couple of basic flick motion control elements.
The game looks pretty
interesting on its own and is probably a lot of competitive or
cooperative fun, depending on how you choose to play, but the way
they were playing on stage, even with Trinen explaining little things
as they played, like blocks being able to pop out items for all four
players, the new propeller suit item or the battle for coins that can
result when there are a lot of players, still felt dull and drab. The
game will probably be fun for people playing it, but they sure didn't
make it look that way. Worse yet, the fact that Nintendo is making
the game in the first place feels like a bit of a cop out to me. I've
got nothing against classic games, I really enjoy them. But you can
already get the original Super Mario Bros. for Wii from the
Virtual Console. In any event, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is
slated for release this holiday season.
After
the short demo, Dunaway took back the main stage to talk about the
success of Wii
Fit and
how “some people never played games until they stepped on the Wii
Balance Board” (not an exact quote necessarily, but you get the
gist of it). She continued on to mention some stats about the game
and its popularity – over 15 million copies of Wii
Fit sold,
etc. – and then moved on to introduce Wii
Fit Plus.
She talked a bit about the developers taking different players into
consideration when making the game, how to make the game fit better
for each player and make it more custom fitted to your preferences
and workout style. She also made sure to mention that the progress
tracking will be improved, including keeping track of the total
calories that you burn.
And
she continued to talk, about how it's about more than just working
out and it's about fun too, about the 15 new balances games,
including the new Mario balance game where you'll get to, sort of,
step into Mario's shoes and make your way through an obstacle course
of projectile objects. Aside from a couple of videos playing in the
background as Dunaway spoke about the features in Wii
Fit Plus,
they didn't really show it off. She did mention that it would be
available as a standalone disc, for people who already have the Wii
Balance Board, when it releases this holiday season.
With
all of that out of the way, Dunaway introduced Reggie Fils-Aime,
President
and COO of Nintendo of America,
to the stage. He spoke about all the innovations Wii has introduced
to date – the Wii Remote, the Nunchuck, the Wii Balance Board, etc.
– and finally introduced the Wii
MotionPlus attachment for the Wii Remote. He mentioned that won't
necessarily notice the difference just by looking at it, but you've
got to play it. And so they began rolling the trailer for Wii
Sports Resort (slated
for release on July 26th).
After that though, Bill
Trinen came back out to the stage to actually demo the game. The game
actually begins with you jumping out of an airplane. You can fall in
formation, free fall, do flips or dive. It wasn't all that impressive
to watch, as he was just turning the Wii Remote in his hand, but he
did explain that it gives a good idea of the added accuracy of Wii
MotionPlus and a basic introduction to the game. Fair.
He then went on to some a
slightly more impressive game, Crossbow Archery. He also made sure to
let everyone know that the game was designed for both right and left
handed players, and then continued to show how motions are now
represented in real time with pinpoint accuracy. The Wii Remote acts
as the main bow, and the Nunchuck as the bow string or arrow
(whichever you prefer, it doesn't really make a difference). You've
also got to compensate for distance, wind, and even moving targets.
“It's not about doing the controls. It's about what comes
naturally,” Trinen said before moving on to a one on one Three
Point Basketball Challenge against Fils-Aime.
The
Three Point Challenge demonstrated that you actually have to reach
down to pick up the ball and then shoot like you would naturally. In
other words, no more playing Wii
Sports
by flicking the remote or using your feet. That's about all they
showed, but it did look like the development team has made quite a
bit of progress since last
year's Briefing.
Fils-Aime
then took over the stage to talk about games that will integrate Wii
MotionPlus, including Tiger
Woods PGA Tour 10 (June
8th),
EA SPORTS's Grand
Slam Tennis (June
8th),
and SEGA's Virtua
Tennis 2009.
It would have been nice to see some of those games in action, but I
guess that would have made things less boring (or taken the focus off
of the first party titles?). Film-Aime did take time to mention the
work that Ubisoft has done with Wii MotionPlus on Red
Steel 2,being
particularly sure to point out that it will only work with Wii
MotionPlus. I guess it's a good thing it will be bundled with the
game when it releases this holiday season. He then continued on to
introduce a couple of new titles from Square Enix. The first was the Wii exclusive Final
Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers and the other, Kingdom
Hearts 358/2 Days for Nintendo DS.
Things
then took a turn towards Nintendo DS and DSi titles. Fils-Aime
introduced a new Mario & Luigi adventure for DS, called Mario
& Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story.
It's a new title in the popular RPG part of the Mario franchise. It
follows the story of the two
brothers after they get shrunken down to
minuscule proportions and sucked into Bowser's stomach. If it's
anything like the previous Mario
& Luigi titles,
it should do quite well when it releases this fall.
Finally,
before handing the stage back to Dunaway, Fils-Aime announced that
the Golden
Sun franchise
is coming back, on DS. Dunaway then showed off some images and
footage of female oriented DS titles, including Women's
Murder Club: Games of Passion and
then showed some footage from Ubisoft's new DS franchise, called C.O.P.
Dunaway
went on to talk about the DSi
and some stats. Sales have surpassed 1 million units. The key
difference between the Lite and the DSi is customization, etc.
Flipnote studio animator will be available to DSi users this summer.
Mario
vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again!
will be available as a download only, meaning it will be a DSi
exclusive, on June 8th.
WarioWare
D.I.Y. will
allow you to create your own mini games and is currently slated for
release at the end of the year.
Then came the funniest
announcement of the Briefing. Nintendo's doing Facebook Connect with
the DSi! After Microsoft announced it the day before, the only thing
that would have been funnier is if Sony announced that it would be
coming to Playstation 3 as well. Sadly, they didn't. They showed a
few pictures but, again, no demo!
Dunaway
then introduced Saturo Iwata, Nintendo's
Global President,
to the stage. Making an already boring situation worse, Iwata spoke
about statistics and market strategy for a few minutes, and then
followed it up with talk about where Nintendo is going with the
titles mentioned earlier in the briefing.
Finally,
Iwata says he's going to introduce a new way to get in touch with
yourself through games. That's when I got my hopes up. I shouldn't
have. What I saw on the screens behind him made me shudder from head
to toe. The Wii Vitality Sensor. Attach one end to the Wii Remote and
place the other over your finger, and it takes your pulse while you
play. Sigh. Another accessory. I would be willing to try it out,
depending on the related game of course, but just thinking about the
thing as I write this is making me shudder, not because it's another
accessory, but because the thought of something taking my pulse while
I play is a bit unnerving.
Dunaway
then comes back out to introduce another Mario title. I sighed and
shook my head at first, but then I saw the trailer. This one's got
Yoshi in it! No way! It's Mario
Galaxy 2.
Well, you could figure it out by the gameplay, but it was definitely
the most exciting piece of news from the Briefing by that point.
Fils-Aime
then came back on stage to talk about third party games, specifically
Wii exclusive titles. He showed off some footage from SEGA's The
Conduit, followed
up by Resident
Evil: The Darkside Chronicles,
and rounded things out with an announcement that Electronic Arts is
making a prequel to its recent, highly successful horror game, Dead
Space,called
Dead
Space Extraction.
By
this point, I had just about had enough and was glad that it was
clearly coming to the end of the Briefing. The last few announcements
were cool, but the damage was done. There were so few demonstrations
done, and so many statistics reports, that no matter how cool the
next announcement was, and it definitely was, it wouldn't matter.
Fils-Aime
began speaking about a collaboration with a third party developer
well known for its more adult oriented games. It turns out that the
developer he was talking about is Team Ninja, the folks behind Ninja
Gaiden. The
lights went down and a trailer (below) came on the screens. The style
is clearly Japanese, but it's not easy to make out where they're
going with it, until Samus Aran suddenly appears. The project looks
to be a Ninja
Gaiden style
Metroid game called Metroid:
Other M.
And
that was it. Fils-Aime made the closing remarks and the Briefing
ended. All in all a borefest with a couple amazing, but certainly not
redeeming, surprises at the end. That said, the poor quality of this
year's Media Briefing does not mean that Nintendo will have a bad
year. The Wii is still quite popular, and the release of games like
Wii
Fit Plus,
Wii
Sports Resort
and New
Super Mario Bros.Wii
will
keep things going just fine as far as mainstream consumers are
concerned (and that's a very large market now).
There's
just so much more they could have done, and so much more that they
could have shown off from third party publishers. Even if the games
were multiplatform it would have been worth it to show. And while
Fils-Aime actually took the time to remark that Nintendo isn't
abandoning hardcore gamers, they didn't really take the time to make
sure that message sunk in. They decided to go with statistics charts
and market analysis instead.
For more trailers and other videos from E3 2009, check out our Viddler Channel.