Nintendo has always been driven by a strong gaming franchise, stoically asserting that great games sell hardware, not the other way round. With long-running titles such as Mario, Zelda and Metroid under its belt, and 2 billion units sold in 20 years, the company has certainly put its money where its mouth is.
"We remain all about the game; actions speak louder than words," said Nintendo's president, Saturo Iwata, at this year's E3, where Nintendo unveiled the first details of its next generation console, the Revolution.
While Microsoft and Sony have been all teraflops and anti-aliasing in the promotion of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation3, Nintendo has taken a more laid-back approach. Even weeks after E3, little has been revealed about the Revolution's capabilities. All the world knows is that it will have 512MB of internal Flash memory, two USB ports, built-in Wi-Fi access and will also allow users to download the company's back-catalogue of N64, SNES and NES games.
However, much of the speculation surrounding the system has been about what form the controller will take. Although Iwata has been careful not to reveal too much about the Revolution -- Nintendo is planning to release more details at the end of the year -- he has expressed reservations about the controllers gamers currently use.
"There are too many buttons and sticks on controllers for novice players, which is likely to discourage them from ever playing games at all," he says. "We want the Revolution's controller to be relevant to everybody and we really want people to feel like they want to touch and play with it."
Capturing the casual gaming market -- something Microsoft also wants to achieve -- should be an easy ride for Nintendo, which remains family-friendly in terms of content. Nowhere is this more evident than in Japan, where gaming is intrinsically rooted in the entertainment culture.
"Nintendo is very good at creating games that can appeal to the whole family," says Iwata. "There have been a lot of games created around excessive violence in the past few years and it seems to be escalating. From the business point of view, it doesn't make sense for us to follow suit.
"We cherish our hardcore gamers, but we always try to attract as many people as possible and expand the existing gaming population."
Nintendo recently unveiled its free-to-use worldwide DS Wi-Fi gaming service. The company has been sceptical about the potential of online console gaming, and Iwata still does not feel that Xbox Live is indicative of success because the number of Xbox owners playing on Xbox Live is still low.
As far as Nintendo is concerned, the future of multiplayer gaming is in Wi-Fi, not the Internet.
"If Nintendo sells 5 million DSs with Wi-Fi capabilities, then we want 5 million people to play with Wi-Fi," he said.
Nintendo is very proud of its portable wing and, as Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer of Nintendo, says: "For 16 years, Nintendo has owned the portable game space. We created it, and we're not moving out."
This has lead to speculation that the Revolution is designed to be portable, as its size and storage cradle suggest.
Nintendo's secrecy has also sparked theories that the controller is somehow contained within the Revolution -- that the machine itself is the controller.
Whatever transpires, Nintendo could use its heritage and innovation to provide gamers with an interesting alternative when the next-generation war finally arrives.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS