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:For European Slashdot readers... (Score:3, Insightful)
They do so because in Europe there is such a huge sector of languages. The games are usually rushed to market anyway and the time it takes them to translate every portion of text is very time consuming. Also the majority of games are written in English , Chinese , or Japanese. Not many in other languages.
He also went on to say that if they were to produce the volume of discs needed to fill that demand for a global launch it could be a disaster if it launched with a critical bug.
Personally I agree we should see global launches. They should be developed and translated in the same pass , however I feel they may never be able to meet global demand for a true blockbuster game.
The Wii is hot and very hard to get right now. And they are pushing the manufacturer for more. I don't think anything could have prepared them for the response they are getting with the wii itself either.
Re:Wii needs strong third party games too (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see any evidence that Nintendo is unwilling to share the spotlight. Instead, it seems like third party developers just like to shovel crap games onto Nintendo systems. If they made good games, then they'd get acclaim. Look at Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube for example.