The latest addition to the Legend of Zelda series, Spirit Tracks, is almost a month away and though Nintendo had kept most of the game’s secrets under wraps since the playable demo at E3, the news has been coming thick and fast over the last couple of days.
A new trailer last week revealed a whole host of secrets including the origins of the mysterious Phantoms that would help Link on his quest, why our usually green-garbed hero is sporting that natty little train driver’s outfit and, most importantly, the villain …

To say that Mario is pretty versatile for a plumber would be an understatement. Over his two decades of stomping Goombas, ripping Koopas from their shells and bitch-slapping Bowser, the moustachioed maestro has found time for karting, tennis, golf and football (that’s proper football where you use your feet to connect with the ball 90 per cent of the time, my American friends).
But being a hero is what he does best, and alongside consistently impressive platformers Mario has a catalogue of equally entertaining RPGs. After the Square-developed Super Mario RPG …

Only a few days ago I addressed the success which Nintendo had been having with their dual-screened handheld in recent years. The system has attracted a lot of people to the gaming who wouldn’t have touched it with a twelve-foot pole several years ago, never mind a three inch stylus.
Well, the times they are a-changing, and the DS has sold over 100 million units in it’s short life, with three different forms. Now, there’s a new one which goes against the previous two reinventions where everything was physically scaled back …

It’s near-impossible to talk about Nintendo’s new-found success without addressing the massive popularity of their brain training games on DS and the casual gaming audience. While Dr Kawashima remains the name on most people’s lips when they think of the brain-teasing titles on offer, last year a new academic stepped into the picture and brought all manner of mind-muddling puzzles to the more traditional gamer.
Professor Layton’s exploits in the mysterious village of St. Mystere was a clever combination of logic, maths and wordplay puzzles combined with a compelling adventure storyline. …

In a move which would surprise absolutely no-one at all, Sony yesterday unveiled the long-rumoured PlayStation 3 Slim.
Though it had been widely predicted by the gaming press for over a year, and become a hot tip for this year’s E3, Sony waited until the start of the Cologne GamesCom convention to make the latest iteration of their high-definition console known.
Available worldwide from the first week in September, the new model will boast the same features as the current PlayStation 3, but weigh in 33 per cent smaller and 36 per …

For a number of years now, I have been at war with a certain Blue Bomber. Capcom’s iconic android hero Mega Man has been a thorn in my side for so long that a couple of years back I trolled a forum to simply declare that the little blighter “totally sucked”. In size 72pt font.
Not my finest hour.
But I come here today with an admission, I get it. Sort of.
The original Mega Man game was released on the NES in 1987, featuring possibly one of the worst designed video game …

While the original Wii Sports was a solid demo package of the console’s potential and a huge step in the company’s dominance of the casual player market, for core gamers it also revealed the limitations (and, indeed, flaws) of the controls. Two years on, Nintendo has introduced the solution to concerns that we were going to forever waggle our way through their games as Motion Plus provides the true 1:1 interaction we imagined from Day One.
To help demonstrate the potential of the new gadget, Nintendo is packing it in with …

Lets wrap this all up then. Nintendo’s press conference was a mix of hits and misses, but a massive improvement on last year’s show. The news of a new Super Mario Galaxy game and a very hardcore-looking Metroid title will definitely go down as the highlights, while the likes of Golden Sun, Wii Sports Resort and Miyamoto’s roundtable Zelda reveal also provided strong headlines for the day after.
Was their room for improvement? Absolutely. Nintendo don’t seem to have grasped the fact that those who will play Women’s Murder Club and …

It wasn’t all hardcore fan service and technology from Nintendo, however. The company still have to reach out to their casual audience, and for us more core players those segments of the conference can be a giant snoozefest.
In my opinion, there have been some top notch point-and-click adventure titles on both Wii and DS: the Ace Attorney series, Another Code and Professor Layton immediately spring to mind. New entries for all three of these franchises are on the way and would have been heartily welcomed by myself in Nintendo’s presentation.
Sadly, …

Games are always a big deal at conferences like E3 but in recent years, especially with Nintendo, a new peripheral (or two) will be brought to the audience’s attention with wild promises of a deeper and more immersive experience. This year, peripherals were very much making their presence felt in Nintendo’s conference.

The big focus was on periperhals we already knew fairly well about. The release of Wii Motion Plus is just around the corner while the Wii Balance Board is seen as one of the biggest ingredients in Nintendo’s casual …