Tomorrow in Japan, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata will give a presentation to media and investors. Hours later, executives from Nintendo of America will hold an event for U.S. media in San Francisco.
Bloomberg says that the Japan event will begin at 1:30 p.m., meaning a start time of 9:30 p.m. Pacific. So I'll still be awake and will be watching the Internets with interest for any news. Then it'll be time to grab a few hours of sleep before tomorrow's early morning start time for the American event. What's going to happen at these? Here's what the 'tubes are shouting about.
As Nikkei reported Sunday, Nintendo is likely to announce a new model of Nintendo DS that features a camera and music playback functions. Certainly, if Nintendo does announce this in Japan, Nintendo of America will have to address the issue. Whether it simply acknowledges its existence but say that it has no plans for a U.S. release, or go whole hog and give it a release date and let us try it out, is up in the air.
Square Enix has just announced that it will ship the next *Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles *game on Wii and Nintendo DS simultaneously, this January. Certainly this could be part of the presentation, especially as it has more general implications for the Wii/DS relationship beyond simply being a new game.
Bloomberg's story attempted to find some new details but ended up overreaching, saying in its headline and lead paragraph that Nintendo "may" introduce new accessories for Wii. But when you actually look for supporting evidence of that in the story, you see that it's just speculation from analysts who point to Nintendo's success with products like Wii Fit as a reason it might introduce a new accessory. So that's pure guesswork.
Kevin Gifford reports on 1up that Hudson is still planning to release its Joysound karaoke application for Wii this year in Japan, which will let Wii owners log in to the karaoke company's vast network of songs and stream the karaoke videos directly to their living rooms. It's certainly an interesting way to compete with Singstar and Lips -- junk the gameplay, concentrate on the karaoke only, and thereby increase your "playable" song list to hundreds of thousands of different tunes. Again, since this has broader general implications, it's ideal for the Japan conference.
Speaking of speculation and guesswork, who's up for another crazy rumor? Gamekyo says in no uncertain terms that Nintendo will announce the return of "an old franchise that everyone has been waiting for." IGN has said, leading up to E3, that Kid Icarus for Wii definitely exists. Could this be its unveiling? Certainly this would mean more to the assembled U.S. audience of hardcore gamers than it would to Japanese investors. Again: total crazy rumor, take with an entire shaker of salt.
But I would expect the vast majority of the news to take place during the Tokyo conference. The primary focus of the media summit in the U.S. is to let us get hands-on with... games. Probably Wii Music and Animal Crossing, for sure. And I have it on pretty good authority that upcoming WiiWare games will also be there. Other than that, we'll all find out together.
Image: Nintendo
