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 …

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 …

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 …

With memories of last year’s car crash conference still in people’s minds, Nintendo needed something special from their E3 conference for 2009 and for the most part they delivered.
Over the next few days I’ll be commenting on the big reveals from Nintendo’s LA conference, Shigeru Miyamoto’s roundtable discussion and the E3 show floor.
At the heart of Tuesday’s revelations was Mario, who was the star of four new games on both Wii and DS. The sort-of leaked New Super Mario Bros Wii opened the show as the first Mario game to …

I could open this post by looking back at the disappointing display Nintendo put on at last year’s E3. I could rant about the lack of solid first part content, the lackluster showing from third parties and Cammie bloody Dunaway, but the fact is we know what went wrong.
Fortunately, Nintendo know that they messed up too. Fingers crossed as E3 builds itself back up to the all singing, all dancing mega conference it once was the Big N will be leading the way with some hot announcements that will restore …

What was I saying the other day about being a Nintendo gamer and being blessed with pangs of nostalgia every now and then? No sooner have we recovered from the highly-hyped announcement of Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver, than Nintendo treat their fans to another healthy dose of fan service.
The Big N have spent a lot of money on their commercials of late. In the UK, this has mostly gone on hiring big names like Girls Aloud, Patrick Stewart, Julie Walters and the Redknapps to promote DS and Wii. …