The 3DS isn't all about 3D graphics. Sometimes, you just need something that looks pretty on the new, improved hardware. Like Paper Mario.
While we're sure there'll be 3D tricks involved along the way, the first screens of Paper Mario seem to suggest it's simply a great opportunity to take one of the best-looking series from the N64, GameCube & Wii and slip it in your pocket.
The Nintendo 3DS, just revealed by Nintendo, looks like it's already home to an enviable, rich library. But beyond a new Kid Icarus, a new Pilotwings and a new Nintendogs, what can 3DS owners look forward to?
There's more than just Nintendo content, which ranges from remakes like Star Fox 64, familiar properties like Animal Crossing and something new, known as Steel Diver. Third parties are getting on board in a major way, with companies like Capcom committing to a new Resident Evil game, Ubisoft creating a new Assassin's Creed title and Tecmo bringing fighting series Dead or Alive to the handheld. Some of these games are just promises, but they'll most likely become reality... eventually.
Here's the full list of games and franchises announced by Nintendo and its third-party friends.
Nintendo
Activision
AQ Interactive
Atlus
Capcom
EA
Gameloft
Harmonix
Hudson
Konami
Level 5
Majesco
Marvelous
Namco Bandai
Rocket
SEGA
Square Enix
Take-Two
Tecmo Koei
Tomy
THQ
Ubisoft
Warner Bros.
The Wii Vitality Sensor, unveiled by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata a year ago is a no-show at E3 2010, despite signals iit would be here. A Nintendo spokesperson told Kotaku today that the peripheral wasn't right for the show.
The Vitality Sensor is a device that will read a player's pulse and other biometrics for still-unrevealed pieces of software. That software will be used to help Wii owners relax, making it perhaps the tonally wrong kind of software to showcase at an exuberant circus of an event like E3. At least, that's what a Nintendo spokesperson told us, explaining its absence at this show.
In March, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told us that "our focus is to bring to life how you could utilize the Vitality Sensor and our goal is to do that sometime around E3." Nintendo president Iwata had also described the Vitality Sensor as a late 2010 release, which would have made it a natural for this year's show, at least in terms of scheduling.
Plans changed, it seems, with the Nintendo 3DS taking the spotlight as Nintendo's big hardware topic of the show.
It doesn't take much to remind me why I, why so many people, loved the original Portal.
The game is cheeky, it's fun, it's smart.
Portal 2 is all of that, with a friend.
Standing in the E3 offices of Valve earlier today I had a chance to take Portal 2's coop mode for a spin with one of the developers on a computer.
As you'd expect from a Valve title, there are a lot of really neat touches. You can easily work out an approach to solving one of the games, mind-bending, portal-using puzzles by using the game's built-in communication tools. Just point at a wall or object and select an icon, Place Portal Here, Go Here, Look Here, and press a button. The icon that pops up on the other players screen, showing them quickly what you have in mind.
You still use one mouse button to shoot one part of a portal and the other mouse button to shoot the other part. The e button on the PC I played the game on was an action button.
Another neat feature, you can press a button to split your screen. Half of the screen shows your point of view and the other half shows your buddy's point of view.
That gets us to who you are exactly, which isn't human. One of you plays as a turret, the other as a personality sphere. Both of you move around on svelte robot legs. The devs didn't go into the back story much for the coop, but it appears the two of you have been sucked into a new round of experimentation by GlaDOS. She wants to know how the experience of going through the tests changes when two people, or robots, are going through it together.
The experiments are all much, much more difficult to solve and all of the ones I tried with the developer required two players working closely together, both to solve the the puzzles and to do the work.
Because you can walk through each other's portals, things can get a bit confusing at times, but not in a bad way. You just have to remember not to close a portal that's projecting, for example, a light bridge over a vat of goo while your friend is standing on it.
I worked my way through four or five puzzles and found quickly that playing the game with another person was infinitely more rewarding than playing it on my own. And again, the challenge level is really cranked up.
I also loved how this new dynamic gave GlaDOS another thing to do in her spare time. At the end of each puzzle she did her best to plant the seeds of doubt. Mocking one or the other player, pointing out that one was smart and one stupid by saying things like:
"You work well together as a team. One of you is the brains and the other plods along behind just in case you come across an eating contest."
It's fantastic fun, and remember it's still not the full, single-player experience.
I can't wait for this game to come up.
Portal was such a masterful, smashing success because it was short, sweet and... a surprise.
Even Valve didn't expect the puzzle game with personality to become such an overwhelming, cultural phenomenon.
And it scares Valve a little bit that they're not trying to recapture that success without two of those elements: Portal 2 when it hits next year will certainly not be a surprise and at more than twice the length of the original it won't be short either.
"Portal one was a game that created an emotional attachment stronger than any game we've ever shipped," said Erik Johnson, product manager for the upcoming Valve game. "And it kind of surprised us."
"We spent a fair amount of time thinking about what Portal 2 should and shouldn't be."
What they came up with was that it should still be a game that is deceptively driven by story and a title that makes you rethink the way you move. What it shouldn't be, they decided, was a game so hard that it isn't fun anymore.
My time with Portal 2 today kicked off with a short press briefing and a series of videos, videos that showed off what to expect from the upcoming game.
You play as Chell, the same female test subject who destroyed the computer GlaDOS in the first game. Many years have passed since your escape, but the first video shows you back in the labs, labs now overgrown with vegetation. And a GlaDOS little more than scrap metal on a broken floor.
The next video showed some of what we have in story for us with our return to the lab, a lab that now seems to be rebuilding itself. Moldy tiles are knocked loose and replaced by shining white ones. Walls push out on metal arms and slide into place. Platforms with legs march in to rebuild the floor.
The lab is rebuilding itself.
Then a voice, a very familiar voice cuts in.
"It's been a long time," GlaDOS says. "How have you been? I think we can put our differences behind us... for science... you monster."
Her voice, as always, is charming, polite.
The next scene introduces the second main character in the game: A "personality sphere" with a British accent and wavering courage.
The sphere, a metal ball with a single camera for an eye, is attached to a rail, riding through the dilapidated building. In the cut up scenes the sphere finally breaks free of the rail and you have to carry it with you, as it guides you.
At some point the sphere apparently, accidentally reawakens GlaDOS.
As the malfunctioning robot awakens it notices you.
"Oh, it's you! It's been a long time. How have you been? I've been really busy being dead... you know, after you murdered me?"
"Look we've both said a lot of things you are going to regret, but I think we can put our differences behind us for science, you monster."
The news today that a new version of Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007 was met with cheers at today's Nintendo E3 press conference. I played the game. It's good but it's not the remake you may have thought it was.
The James Bond game is being developed by Eurocom and Activision, not Rare and Nintendo, the companies that made the original Nintendo 64 GoldenEye. That's not a surprise and not necessarily a problem. Eurocom can make a good game.
It is a first-person shooter, based on the fiction of the 1995 Pierce Brosnan movie. But the story of that movie has been changed. GoldenEye is now the adventure of the Daniel Craig version of James Bond and plays up an international banking crisis angle rather than a Cold War problem. Both games, however, send the player, as Bond, around the world to locations important to fans of movie and games: A dam, a statue park, the streets of St. Petersburg, where a chase involving a military tank will occur.
The levels of the new GoldenEye are not necessarily recreations of the original game's. The locations have been changed in some cases the developer told me. Happily, the game's opening dam level gets some loving care in being updated for a modern audience. It opens in similar fashion with a camera swoop that brings us into Bond's point-of-view. It starts with a scramble past some guards into a guard tower (which contains a sniper rifle, of course) and then through a tunnel inside a truck. That's the spot where differences become abundant. Did you play the original GoldenEye dam level and hide behind that truck? You'll be in it, riding shotgun (Alec Trevaylan is behind the wheel), getting stopped by guards and suddenly in an on-rails shootout. You'll be shooting your machine gun through the front window as guards try to run you off the wall. You'll be blowing up a tanker truck that is in the way and out to the dam you'll go, as a rocket launcher flips your truck.
As with the original GoldenEye, the game will require players using harder difficulty levels to complete more mission objectives. New to the game will be forking options to turn the game more into an action shooter or into a stealthy hunt.
Many of Bond's classic weapons are back, including the Klobb, which has been renamed the Klebb. The health system has changed, now using the same regenerative system seen in most shooters.
Multiplayer is presented in four-player splitscreen or eight-player online, with an experience points system that unlocks perks. Maps will be drawn from familiar locations, but the layouts will not be the same as they were in the Nintendo 64 version of the game. After watching the dam level, I was able to play a round of four-player split screen. In the mode we played, the first player to 10 kills won. I got seven and found the gameplay to be smooth. I used a Wii Remote and Nunchuk set-up which used the pointer to aim and mapped a melee move to a shake of the Nunchuk (probably will be changed to a button press, I was told). Other players used the Wii Classic Controller Pro.
I didn't see but was told that sticky mines will be back. I think people will like that, yes?
GoldenEye will be out exclusively for the Wii in November. It was fun, but for better and worse it is not a slavish remake of the original GoldenEye. They are doing the reinvented-for-modern-times thing. Let's hope that is the right thing. The re-imagined dam level had enough callbacks to the original game to make me smile and just enough high-action set-pieces to remind me that we are not in a 90s video game world anymore.
Be optimistic about this one, but pay attention to the pitch.
Nintendo's last 3D console had a Star Fox game on it. It's nice to see the company keeping up tradition.
Sorry, traditions. The second being that, like with the DS, the 3DS will launch with a re-release of an old Nintendo 64 game, in this case Star Fox 64.
One if by land, two if by sea, three if marching past the ESPN Zone promoting Korea-Invades-America video game Homefront
