Nintendo Confirms Mario, Smash Bros. Coming This Year 63
Some excellent news for Nintendo fans: two of the 'big three' games are coming out this year. At an event held in Washington state Reggie Fils-Aime was able to confirm that Smash Bros. and Super Mario Galaxy will be released before the end of the year. Excellent to hear such news, of course ... but other people had different priorities. For Metroid fans, it does indeed look like Samus will have to wait until 2008. Other than that, the company was all good news in general: "Typically, about half of home consoles in Japan are placed in the living room -- with Wii that figure is 75%. In France, 15 of the top 15 games recently were Nintendo. In the US, Fils-Aime says they are seeing 'early signs of significant market change.' The number of female purchasers of hardware are up 42%. The number of people over age of 30 purchasing Nintendo DS is up 127%. Tighten that age range to people over 35, and the number is up 212%. 40% of Wii owners have connected to the internet. 3.3 million plus Virtual Console downloads." Game|Life has hands-on impressions of Brain Age 2 and Mario Strikers Charged , two of the new games shown off at the event.
Re:Metroid Prime 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
My killer app (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now the wii suffers from a lack of good games, especially games that are sequels to earlier blockbusters. Paper mario was good, but it wasn't the level of smash brothers, any super mario brothers or metroid. The Wii's sale numbers are spectacular, but it's still not getting the respect it deserves. Nintendo needs to put out a few serious, long titles exclusively for the Wii and shut the critics up.
Re:For European Slashdot readers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all seem to consider Europe as a minor, nagging detail with delayed releases and arbitrary price increases. Seems to me the market might need a major European console player to step up and call their region their #1 priority before the other three will stop dragging their feet.
Full disclosure: I'm in the US. I care because, well, I don't know. Call it empathy. Call it dreaming of a future where I won't have to hear complaints like the above (not that they aren't warranted).
Metroid Prime 3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, once Prime comes out, I'm fairly certain it's control scheme will becomce the defacto standard for FPS WII games. It's be nice to play an FPS (Ok, Ok, so MP3 is technically an FPA) on the Wii with a decent control scheme; this bounding box crap just isn't cutting it.
Also, I think that half the reason they haven't shown anyone anything about Prime 3 in the last 6 months or so is because they're doing a graphical overhaul. If there's one thing that Nintendo deserately needs, it's a game that takes full advantage of the increased graphical power of the Wii. It only makes sense to do this with Prime 3; which isn't a casual game by any means. Also, at no point in Metroid Prime 3 do I want to have to "waggle" the Wii-Mote. Waggle != Gameplay
Re:For European Slashdot readers... (Score:2, Interesting)