27 Playable Wii Games At E3

The Nintendo conference seemed to be the perfect opposite of Sony's conference yesterday. It was polished, the presenters were poised, and the demos conveyed exactly the message they were aiming for. Notable info includes 27 playable Wii titles on the E3 floor, a speaker in the Wii controller, a StarFox title for the DS, and a confirmation of motion sensor in the nunchuck attachment. There will be two versions of Twilight Princess (one for Wii, one for GC) and they'll both be out on Wii launch day. Launch is slated for Q4 of this year. The presenters kept the launch price and date under wraps as the tone of the event was inspiration, not information. The number of playable games available this week confirms their commitment to a launch date this year, and the hilarious tennis game played onstage by the Nintendo honchos and the contest winner made their 'playing = believing' slogan really hit home. More flash than substance, but a solid presentation overall

Q4 2006

[mysqlrocks]

An important piece left out of the summary but mentioned in some of the articles is that the Wii will launch Q4 of 2006. It looks like shoppers this holiday season will be able to pick from all the next-gen consoles.

Highs, lows, and missing data

[Dark Paladin]

Low: I think the lack of final price and exact launch date was a bad idea. I know that people were bored during Sony's "stock analysts wet your pants with numbers" opening - but those two details were important. It may be that Nintendo's seeing that Sony's final numbers look like and if they really have a market so they're not competing directly - but who knows.

Highs: Lots of games. Zelda looked awesome, and "Red Steel" is up there on my must try. Even the "Wii Sports" game they showed off towards the end looks interesting - I can see my son and I playing with the baseball game, and my daughter will like the tennis stuff. And golf? Well, that's for my wife so I can get behind her and help her with her strokes.

Low: They kept showing a Mario game (Mario Galaxies or something), but I either missed the details or they didn't talk about it. Where's Mario 128? Where's the Kojima new IP?

High: Showing the new guy playing with the Wii controller. "Easy to use, difficult to master" seems about right. The sweepstakes winner seemed able to play around with it without too many problems - with a few more minutes he would have been better I'm sure.

Joystiq

[Southpaw018]

Great 'Live' blog-style Joystiq coverage here [joystiq.com] too (IMO better than the Game Daily one). They seemed exceptionally impressed with everything but the eye candy. And by that I mean it sounds like they and everyone else in the audience wanted to be onstage playing. Night and day difference from Sony's conference.

Text coverage of the conference

[pjcreath]

For those of you at work who want to know what happened without pulling up a (overloaded) video stream, here's a text summary [nyud.net] of everything that happened.

Best console launch ever

[Jerf]

I'm thinking the Wii is going to be the best console launch ever. I'm counting at least six "must own" games for me: Mario Galaxies, Twilight Princess, Red Steel, Metroid Prime 3, FF: Crystal Chronicles (assuming SquareEnix puts some decent effort into it, which I expect they will), and Dragon Quest. Plus I'm interested in some of the other things they didn't talk about during the conference, like Sadness. (Don't know if I'll buy it, but I'm interested.)

Conducting the orchestra in real time as the opening was sheer brilliance.

Definitely more compelling to me than the Dreamcast, which in my (highly-debatable, of course) opinion held the previous best launch lineup, at least in the US.

Re:playing = believing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original expression is "seeing is believing" so they both "copied" it from there.

Re:Could've been better

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wii controller doesn't have the proper amount of buttons, but the GC controller does (and the Wii supports GC controllers).

Re:Might be great games, but...

[casings]

Check them all out at the official Nintendo site: http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html [nintendo.com]

with all the press info one can chew.

These are the games ...

[stylee]

mentioned by name in the joystiq live blog of the event:

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Wario Ware
Zelda: Twilight Princess
Dragon Quest Swords
Disaster: Day of Crisis
Fire Emblem
Sponge Bob Square Pants
Cars
Super Mario Galaxy
SD Gundamn G Breaker
Tony Hawk Downhill Jam
Sengoku Action
Excite Truck
Elebits
Red Steel
Rayman 4
Super Swing Gold Pangya
Hyper Sonic
Project H.A.M.M.E.R.
Finalfurlong Revolution
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
Madden 07
WiiSports

Maybe they missed some, there are only 23 there. If not, there are a few more games not mentioned that will be on the floor tomorrow.

Re:Does anyone have a copy of the event?

[Anonymous Coward]

And with any luck it'll be here [titaniumtorrents.com] [titaniumtorrents] even sooner.

Re:I think I speak for us all when I say...

[FroBugg]

They played two matches. Miyamoto and Dyer swept the first (each match is only three points) and won the second by one point.

Re:Integrated Web Browser = Opera

[Phosphor3k]

Built in half gig flash storage. Expandable with SD cards.

Re:Nintendo, I applaud you

[Hamton]

Did anyone mention the classic Wii control pad [digg.com]? It's a SNES pad with analogue sticks - should be great for the downloaded virtual machine games!

E3 Movie

[Varkias]

Check out the E3 video. http://wii.nintendo.com/home.html [nintendo.com] and click on the Fresh Experiences Tab to see the video they presented. It's awesome!!

Re:Q4 2006

[Guppy06]

Before yesterday they were saying simultaneous worldwide launch [com.com]. Now "simultaneous" has been changed to mean "within the same week or so."

Unless the November 17 everybody-outside-Japan launch is written in stone and signed in blood, I wouldn't put much stock in it.

Re:Nintendo, I applaud you

[Anonymous Coward]

It's from nintendo.co.jp. Unless someone hacked their servers, it is real.

Re:Could've been better

[cakestick]

Classic Wii controller for classic games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wii_classic_con troller.jpg [wikipedia.org]

I didn't know about it either until just now, but that wiki page shows a link to the Nintendo Japan site where they have the image. Looks like a pretty good solution to me, as long as there's a z-trigger in there somewhere!

Classic controller for Wii

[youknowmewell]

http://www.digg.com/gaming/Nintendo_Wii_Classic_Co ntroller_Revealed_ [digg.com]

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/n10/e3_2006/wii/img_con/ photo_classic.jpg [nintendo.co.jp]

http://files.nintendev.com/E3/Wii_classic_0501.jpg [nintendev.com]

It might not have been revealed during the press conference, but I imagine we'll hear more about it tomorrow when people can play with it (I assume there will be games that to utilize it from the Virtual Console).

Re:Pricing

[some guy on slashdot]

Ummm...there's no hard drive in the Wii. It has 512Mb of flash memory, slots for GC memory cards, and a USB port for other external third-party storage. That's probably why its price point is going to be so low; hard drives are expensive.

Re:Nevermind those engadget idiots :)

[BTWR]

But it wasn't like these [thewiitalk.com] high-res pics. Damn!