New submitter DeanCubed writes “In a Nintendo investor meeting, CEO Satoru Iwata confirmed a new Nintendo Network for the company’s 3DS and upcoming Wii U game systems. This includes multiple user accounts per console (not tied to hardware, a first for Nintendo) and digitally distributed retail software releases for their online store. Iwata also noted that the Wii U’s tablet controller will feature NFC (Near Field Communication) functionality, allowing the ability to use figurines and cards to input visual data to the console. They are hoping to use this to make micro-transactions for paid DLC easier.”
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mayberry42 writes “Finally, the wait is over — for European fans, anyway. After months (well, over a year) of delays, the latest adventure of Link is finally out. Reviews for the game are consistently favorable. Famitsu magazine has given it a perfect score. IGN says it’s ‘the greatest Zelda game ever created,’ and even the best game for the Wii. Of course, some of you may have already known this, given that it has already been hacked to run on an emulator (and yes, it looks even better in HD). I would love to hear the opinions of you Europeans who’ve played it. Is it as good as they say?”
(Skyward Sword doesn’t come out in the U.S. until Sunday, and not until next week for Japan and Australia.) While still complimentary, Giant Bomb’s review goes into a bit more depth on the game’s shortcomings.
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redletterdave writes “PETA believes Nintendo’s iconic plumber Mario takes a ‘pro fur’ stance” because he ‘wears the skin of a raccoon dog to give him special powers’ in the new handheld game released Nov. 13. PETA illustrated its disgust with Nintendo in an online campaign called ‘Mario Kills Tanooki.’ The page includes a side-scrolling Super Mario-style game called ‘Super Tanooki Skin 2D,’ where you play an angry, skinless tanuki that must chase a bloody raccoon-pelt-wearing-Mario across a 16-bit world and try to reclaim its fur.”
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An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the Opposable Thumbs blog:
“It doesn’t take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MHz of processing power. But emulating those old consoles accurately — well, that’s another challenge entirely; accurate emulators may need up to 3GHz of power to faithfully recreate aging tech. … As an example, compare the spinning triforce animation from the opening to Legend of Zelda on the ZSNES and bsnes emulators. On the former, the triforces will complete their rotations far too soon as a result of the CPU running well over 40 percent faster than a real SNES. These are little details, but if you have an eye for accuracy, they can be maddening. … The primary demands of an emulator are the amount of times per second one processor must synchronize with another. An emulator is an inherently serial process. Attempting to rely on today’s multi-core processors leads to all kinds of timing problems. Take the analogy of an assembly line: one person unloads the boxes, another person scans them, another opens them, another starts putting the item together, etc. Synchronization is the equivalent of stalling out and clearing the entire assembly line, then starting over on a new product. It’s an incredible hit to throughput. It completely negates the benefits of pipelining and out-of-order execution. The more you have to synchronize, the faster your assembly line has to move to keep up.”
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Daetrin writes “Nintendo has announced a large loss for the first quarter of the year and lowered its annual profit forecast. In the three months prior to June 30th Nintendo lost 25.5 billion yen ($328 million) and the forecast is being reduced about 80%, from 110 billion yen ($1.4 billion) to 20 billion yen ($257 million). Nintendo is blaming poor sales of the 3DS and is responding by announcing a price cut from $250 to $170 on August 12. In order to mollify early adopters of the system Nintendo also announced that anyone who has logged into the Nintendo eShop before the price cut will receive 10 free NES games and 10 free GBA games. The GBA games won’t be available until later in the year, but Nintendo claims they will be exclusive to the ‘3DS Ambassadors’ and will not be available for purchase on the store in the future.”
A related op-ed at Wired suggests the new price is still too high, given the rise of cheap portable games on various app stores.
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Speaking at a shareholder meeting yesterday, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata discussed the company’s goals for the Wii’s successor, which aims to pick up the subset of gamers turned off by imprecise motion control. He said, “Wii was not accepted by core gamers because they did not want to abandon their preferred control approach. Additionally, Wii did not use HD because HD cost/performance at the time was low. Wii U makes it easier to use conventional controls. Also, the Wii U controller is not as big or heavy as it looks.” Earlier comments from Shigeru Miyamoto indicate the new console will have more to offer in terms of online capabilities, but Nintendo isn’t going to focus too heavily on that.
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jdkramar was one of several readers to write with news of the Wii U hardware information that’s been trickling out since E3. The new console will run a multicore IBM processor based on 45nm architecture (technology currently underpinning Watson), and will have an AMD R700 GPU chipset found in the Radeon 4000 line of video cards. Apparently it will, in fact, run Crysis. Nintendo has confirmed that the Wii U will use a proprietary 25GB disc format, and won’t support DVD or Blu-ray playback. A spokesman said, “The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such that it didn’t warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies.”
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An anonymous reader writes “Nintendo’s recent update for the 3DS brought some interesting new features, including something the company may not have intended: the capacity for homebrew coders to create their own software on the platform.”
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Gamespot spoke at length with id Software’s John Carmack at E3 about upcoming FPS RAGE (which is now only a few months away from release), as well as his thoughts on the new console offerings revealed by Nintendo and Sony. He seems optimistic about the Wii U, and rather less so about the Vita. “But you know the technology level on [the Wii U] brings it up to parity with the other consoles, which is nice for us. Previously, the Wii was not a target. Id Tech 5 was just not suitable for the Wii at all. … now that we’re looking at another platform that is eminently suitable for the technology, I’m sure we’re going to try and bring it up on there.” On the other hand, Carmack and Tim Willits both expressed concerns about whether Nintendo users were the right demographic for id games. Of the Vita, he said, “I wouldn’t want to be the executive making the decision to launch a new portable gaming machine in the post-smartphone world. I think that they’ve picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that. … But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they’re shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it’s going to look pretty pokey.”
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Published by
timothy on
Jun 07, 2011
_xeno_ writes “Nintendo has announced the official name for what had been known as ‘Project Cafe:’ the Wii U. It is an HD console, it retains backwards compatibility with the Wii (it’s unclear if this includes GameCube software), and the controller does, in fact, have a touch screen on it. Nintendo demoed moving a game off the TV and playing it solely on the Wii U controller.”
Also in E3 news, cylonlover writes “At its E3 press conference Sony finally revealed that its next generation handheld — previously codenamed the NGP — will carry the official moniker of the ‘PlayStation Vita.’ The PS Vita — which is Latin for ‘life’ — will come in two flavors: a Wi-Fi only version priced at $249 in the US, JPY24,980 in Japan, and EUR249 in Europe, and a 3G/Wi-Fi version going for US$299, JPY29,980 and EUR299.”
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