Today, Nintendo assembled not a few journalists into a conference room at its Redmond, WA US headquarters. Our mission: to be educated about Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection – Nintendo's Xbox Live-style full-service wireless gaming service – as well as be privy to a few new game announcements for the next five months.
Behind the cut tag below you'll find the following observations.
1. Mario Kart DS is the new hotness.
2. So is Wi-Fi Connection, by all appearances.
3. Revolution reticence.
4. DS: games for grown-ups?
5. Mixed feelings about 20th Anniversary Micro...
6. ...but the future of Game Boy is surprisingly bright.
1. Mario Kart DS is the new hotness.
This blog's only been public for a day and already there are accusation of rampant fanboyism. Let me stress that the love felt by all attendees for Mario Kart DS was an unbiased, bipartisan, universal affection.
Nintendo encouraged everyone to bring their own DS hardware. They then passed out copies of Mario Kart for us to keep. To prove that the Wi-Fi Connection service, which launches with the game on the 15th, was indeed functional, we played against opponents in Canada and Germany.
But everyone was having so much fun that we continued to play against each other (in local matches, not online) pretty much until about thirty minutes ago when we all got back to the hotel. Racing. Battling. Throwing shells. Power slides. A massive amount of racetracks and a balanced, skill-based, absolutely insane racing engine.
I'll save the rest for the review.
2. So is Wi-Fi Connection, by all appearances.
Apart from simply demonstrating to us the actual use of the Wi-Fi Connection (games will share a common menu, and setup is streamlined and efficient) – Nintendo showed the web page (which will be up soon at www.nintendowifi.com ) and how deep the user experience will be. You'll be able to go to the official page and see user rankings and game stats for every compatible game. Not only that, if you're having any trouble at all setting up your connection, Nintendo has tested most major wireless routers and provides detailed help for each.
Games of Mario Kart ran surprisingly well – I was competing against both a European and a Canadian in a single race, and there were only a few instances of lag and only once did I hear anyone say they'd lost the connection.
Obviously, I need to play it a LOT more in a real-world environment that is not the office space of Nintendo. But so far, Nintendo looks to have – after years of neglecting online – worked up a seriously robust service.
3. Revolution reticence.
Nintendo's executive VP of sales and marketing Reggie Fils-Aime took the podium later in the day to talk about the Revolution, the new home console that Nintendo will release next year.
As I expected, he didn't really reveal much more than what was already known. But he did give shape and form to some of the broader ideas that Nintendo has been discussing over the past few years: the shrinking of the games market (in Japan and, quite possibly, in the US) and the need to seek out new audiences for videogaming.
Some numbers and arguments presented by Nintendo:
- Although there are more consoles out there this generation vs. the 8-bit days (52 million vs. 31 million), if you look at the percentage of households with a gaming system, it's still only about 32% - the same as 20 years ago. The growth, Fils-Aime argued, is driven by population growth and duplicate console ownership (something that wasn't really a factor in the days when everyone just owned a NES.)
- In the fall of 2004, 64% of teenagers surveyed said their interest in videogames was declining. In the spring of 2005, 66% said so. This fall, 75% said so.
Obviously, this is a remarkably contentious topic – some gamers believe that a Revolution or maybe just a small-r revolution needs to happen, while others bristle at the very thought and call Nintendo insane.
I'll just pass on some suggested reading that Reggie says will clarify Nintendo's mindset going into next-gen. I'd spoken with Nintendo VP Perrin Kaplan about these books in Tokyo, but they weren't worked into president Satoru Iwata's keynote. Today, they were included in the speech:
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Ren?e Mauborgne, and
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.
Rather than comment further at this time, I'll promise to go out, buy the books, read 'em, and write about 'em later.
4. DS: games for grown-ups?
To grow the market, Nintendo wants to reach out to oft-ignored demographic groups. This year, they hit females with Nintendogs (and will continue to do so with a US release of Super Princess Peach on February 27, they announced today).
Next year, sometime after the January 9th release of the music game Electroplankton, they'll release the two Brain Training games that have lit up Japanese sales charts since last summer. Tentatively titled "Brain Training" and "Brain Flex," the games' mental-agility challenges have attracted lots of middle-aged men and women to the DS in Japan.
Between them, they've pushed over a million copies. That's huge when your install base is barely thrice that. Whether they can do the same here is up in the air... but hey, they did it with Nintendogs.
And remember Game Boy's launch? Advertisements in in-flight magazines selling Golf to businessmen?
5. Mixed feelings about 20th Anniversary Micro...
The surprise what-the-hell announcement of the day was that the Famicom version of the Game Boy Micro hardware – the top-selling, red-and-gold handheld done up to look like the controller from Nintendo's first console – would be released in the US at the end of this month.
Now, I think this is great. I really am jealous of my friends who bought the Japanese versions, because it's a gorgeous design. But here's the problem. They're calling it the 20th Anniversary Micro here in the US, because it's being released about a month after the 20th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System launch.
But...
What on earth does a red and gold Game Boy Micro have to do with the anniversary of the grey and black NES? There's no nostalgia whatsoever attached to it unless you're Japanese. I kind of wish Nintendo was celebrating the anniversary of its pivotal, world-changing system launch with... something more appropriate.
But hell, I'm still buying one of these.
6. ...but the future of Game Boy is surprisingly bright.
And if you do go out and buy one, you'll still find a decent amount of software to play on it. Especially if you love RPGs. I had pretty much given up hope on ever seeing the well-known Japanese RPG Tales of Phantasia in the US – Namco, the developer and publisher, had actually passed on it three times. It was released on the Super Nintendo (Japan-only), the PlayStation 1 (Japan-only), and the Game Boy Advance about three years ago (Japan-only). Until today, that is, when Nintendo announced that they would bring it over on March 6.
And then there's Final Fantasy IV (December 12), an expanded Game Boy version of what some call the best Final Fantasy title ever made (and I'm not going to be the one to try and prove them wrong).
We'll actually be able to play these games tomorrow – today was entirely focused on DS – so I'll report back with impressions then. There will also be a few GameCube games on hand, although as expected, it's gonna be slim pickins' on that system for pretty much the rest of its life.
