Here's a second diary entry from Blitz Games co-founder Andrew Oliver, including some comments on the keynote from President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata...
Thursday "The second day of the Game Developers Convention expo saw a keynote talk by Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo. As with Sony yesterday, the audience packed in, this time to see where Nintendo would be taking gamers in the coming years.
"Iwata-san talked about how successful the Nintendo DS has been to date, selling more than 15 million units, thanks to incredible titles like Nintendogs, Mario Kart, Super Mario etc. And they have just launched a new restyled DS, looking more akin to an iPod and with bigger better screens.
"However, Nintendo sees that they are still targeting gamers, and they want to target people that don't traditionally play games, so they decided to find what 'games' non-gamers play and found it was things like crosswords and Sudoku. So the company has decided to use the DS to create this style of game. Now that isn't revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, but as always, Nintendo have managed to make their 'Brain Train' game so 'addictive' that within months of launch in Japan, it has sold more than 4 million copies. And to launch the game in the US today, under the new name of 'Brain Age' they gave the few thousand strong audience all a free copy.
"Following this trend Iwata-san then went on to talk about their next home console the 'Revolution'. He argued that so many people don't play games because they find the controller intimidating with 16 buttons and 2 joysticks. And yet everyone feels comfortable using a TV remote. So Nintendo are designing their next console to use what looks like a remote control. But, whilst it may look simple, it certainly hides it's complexity well. It's a wireless device that can be used as a pointer on the TV screen, but also knows it's position, tilt etc., in 3D space.
"Now, whilst it's a little difficult to imagine how that works for controlling games, I can tell you, as a developer of a launch Revolution title, that it works brilliantly. You have to re-design games to take this into account, but a 3D wand pointer is far more descriptive than two joysticks and some buttons. Nintendo have not only shown some traditional games working well with the new controller, but also hinted at some 'work in progress' of game types that wouldn't have been possible before.
"The Nintendo Revolution doesn't have the same massive processing power of the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, but then the DS has less processor power than the PSP, but features like the Microphone and touch screen have made it a clear winner, although a lot is owed to the originality and creative thinking of Nintendo.
"The 'Revolution' will be fully on-line with emulators for older game systems, so you can download your favourite old Nintendo games, and also announced that you would also be able to play classic Sega games from the older systems."
.png?w=600)
