The Nintendo Conference In-Depth

Yesterday's Nintendo press conference was probably the most subdued and honest of the three major events this week. While they didn't have anything really earth-shattering to offer up, the Gameboy Micro, the Revolution's game-downloading capabilities, and the new Zelda Trailer were all welcome news from a company that has been very quiet of late. Commentary, photos, and speculation available from: Nintendo, Engadget, USAToday, GamesIndustry.biz, 1up.com, Gamespot, Cube.IGN, NYT, BBC, Gamasutra, and CNN. Specific coverage on the new Gameboy Micro is available from Gamasutra, GamesIndustry.biz, and CNN. My two cents about Nintendo's conference are available below.

Last night I took in G4's E3 coverage, and their discussion of the Nintendo press conference struck a chord with me. This last console cycle, with the Gamecube, Nintendo really missed the boat. The GC wasn't released until many months after the PS2 was already in homes lighting up screens, and their attempts to carve out a market share were always muddled by confusing choices. The most confusing choice of the current generation, by far, was their almost complete refusal to participate in online gaming. While the Xbox sailed by with the Live service and the PS2 limped into the arena with the broadband adapter, the GC quietly sailed on with only Phantasy Star to break up its lonely voyage. At last year's E3 Nintendo very specifically said that they were not going to miss the boat this time. They were going to release the next console right around the same time as the other two companies and make sure their name was out there.

I have high hopes for the Revolution, but to be honest Nintendo's press conference was very underwhelming. Even given that the PS3 isn't going to be on store shelves for another year, what Sony showed on Monday was literally jaw-dropping. Even if there was some liberal use of pre-rendered footage in the presentation, the press conference put on by Sony was designed to fire the imagination and get people excited about the possibilities of the next generation. Nintendo offered us Nintendogs. And a new Game Boy Advanced. Yes, I think that downloading old games onto your Revolution is a cool idea, but a...uh...friend of mine tells me that I can emulate those games on my PC for free.

Perhaps all this is just worrywortism. Nintendo has never failed to be innovative in the past, and their support of the DS and quirky games like Warioware is proof that not everything has to be same-old same-old in this ever more business-like industry. They have more than a year to get their ducks in a row, but I'm afraid that Sony and Microsoft may have already beaten them to the punch. In the end, it's not just about making fun games. You have to sell them too.

Re:Oh yay...BLAH

[lowrydr310]

That problem is caused by a worn header (where the cartridges electrical contacts plug into). If you're good with soldering (come on, most of us /.ers are) you can buy a new one and replace it. I did that to my original NES console, and it works as good as new!

Gamecube was not underpowered

[cfalcon]

It fell between PS2 and Xbox, and is a lot closer to the Xbox in power. It also shipped between them, but really at the same time as Xbox.

This system looks to come out last, and be much less powerful :(

Re:Don't be so easy on them

[barawn]

This time around, they look to be a long way behind the curve performance wise.

No, they won't be. They're a long way behind on the "make up random numbers for E3 based on peak FLOPs numbers that could never be achieved" performance curve, but they won't be far behind on the actual performance curve. C'mon. Give me a break. Sony and Microsoft are literally making numbers up here.

Microsoft and Sony were both sloppy in the previous generation when it came to console design, and both of them look to be quite sloppy this time. I mean, really: Xbox 360 has 6 front ends and the system has shared graphics memory. So it needs serious amounts of memory bandwidth (good chance one of those threads is going to evict a cache line) and it's sharing it with the graphics card? What?

Nintendo knows how to make consoles without blunt force. The games will look surprisingly similar to this generation in terms of who's better: Revolution will look pretty much the same, but maybe a *little* worse, PS3 will look the best on some, but worse on others (too high a developer learning curve), and the Xbox 360 will probably look about equivalent to the Revolution on most games, with maybe a few being better.

Nintendo is dying, Nintendo is teh suck...

[leoboiko]

...except that GC and NDS consoles (and games) are selling fairly well in Japan [the-magicbox.com] (unlike, say, the Xbox). I know that Slashdot is USA-centric, but it irritates me that, because Nintendo encourage games fitting to the Japanese gaming style, Americans keep saying that the company is dying. Newsflash: it isn't [yahoo.com], and there are those of us who deeply enjoy its games.

Re:Pah...

[Nataku564]

If you want fast load times, get a cube - that thing loads blazingly fast. XBOX is a distant second, and the PS2's loading time is measured in mass extinctions ...

Re:oh please

[Mattintosh]

No, those games were developed by Squaresoft. Nintendo is the publisher on every game bearing the Nintendo "Seal of Approval" thingy. Sometimes Nintendo would have a sub-publisher that would bankroll a production run (Acclaim did this a lot for smaller developers, like "Iguana", who made the NBA Jam and Turok games), but in the end, every game for every Nintendo system has been published by Nintendo itself.

The only exceptions to this are those odd old games for the NES and SNES that looked different. Tengen had the black carts, and most of their games were "approved" by Nintendo (though that practice went away after the NES died). Camerica had the gold cartridges with the extra connector on the back of the cart. Then there were those blue ones (I think Spindizzy was one of these). The SNES had Super Noah's Ark, which required a piggybacked "real" cartridge to get around hardware lockouts. I'm not sure, but I think that it might've even required Wolf3D in order to use the engine.

In any event, If Nintendo chose to do so, they could probably force Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) to allow those games to be sold on a Nintendo-branded service. It's surely a clause in the "Seal of Approval" publishing contract.