It’s hard to start a review about a Zelda game without reflecting on the franchise’s legacy. A staple of the gaming scene since the NES days, while gaming has evolved Zelda has stayed largely the same. Graphics and controls have evolved, but Zelda’s core elements of classic action/adventure gameplay, intricate dungeon design and beautiful story-telling remain.
Spirit Tracks is the fifteenth official Zelda title and the second to be released on the Nintendo DS. As is now tradition, we have a hero, a princess and a world in peril. This time …

Since the Wii’s release, Nintendo have sought to draw in a broader audience with a variety of games sporting the console’s name in the title. Wii Sports, Wii Play and Wii Fit are the three biggest sellers on the platform outselling established Nintendo heroes Mario and Link by several million.
Just over a year ago, they released another game in the Wii [Blank] arsenal with Wii Music. From a simple conductor’s demo at E3 2005, the project had grown into a product which featured more than 50 songs and 60 instruments …

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 …

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. …

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 …

Alongside the big Mario announcements, Nintendo had another major player lined up for the rest of this year and the beginning of next. Non-Mario conference highlights for 2009 included Wario Ware DIY, Wii Sports Resort (more on that tomorrow) and Wii Fit Plus. But next year looks even better.
Though Cammie Dunaway deserves a bit of a slap for glossing over Spirit Tracks on DS like it was old news (okay, it was – but there was a trailer they could’ve shown to keep wild fanboys happy), adventure lovers were given …