E3: Nintendo Conference

Nintendo had two things going for it going into E3 and the first was the Wii's successor and the second the 25th Anniversary of Zelda. Straight of the bat Nintendo jumped into the former.

A Zelda montage opened the show in a classy way with a full orchestra playing some classic Zelda tunes. We get to hear Skywards Swords Theme performed by an Orchestra before the game is even released which is obviously a cool thing to Zelda fans. Miyamota takes the stage to talk some Zelda and has a few funny moments performing classic Zelda moments like opening a chest and the Orchestra performing the accompanying tunes. Following that we jump into some serious Zelda tunes with the announcement that Links Awakening is coming to the 3DS virtual store on the very day. Not forgetting the 3DS's older brother the DSI we get the announcement that The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is coming to the DSI store for free in September with the obvious 4 player co-op. That was great news to me as I don't have a 3DS yet and I loved that mode on the original released on the GBA. Skyward Swords official release date was a nice follow up to this with the announcement of a special gold Tri-Force Wii mote; Skyward Sword coming this holiday season. Coming back to the cool orchestra if you missed it live or on the live stream don't worry because there are going to be a live 25th Anniversary Orchestra show in each region around the world opening in the fall. Still with the music theme the Ocarina of Time soundtrack will be free for the first to register the game on the club Nintendo website. Closing of the Zelda news Nintendo thanks all who have played it and made it the success it is... Aww shucks guys.

Nintendo then teases the upcoming announcement of a new console and notes that the Wii was mostly a console for casual players and hopes to fix that. There new console is the perform to both the casual (Wii market) and hardcore. The console is 'to serve to every player' and will be coming next year.

A cool 3DS presentation is shown with the announcements of Mario Kart 3DS and Starfox gets a cool clip with the words 'do a barrel roll' echoing  throughout the clip. Mario 3DS and Luigi's Mansion 2 is announced with some Kid Icarus's thrown in.

Mario Kart 3DS is 'a triked out version you haven't seen before' that now has hang gliding and driving underwater. Kart customization is also included beyond the ability to draw a symbol on your Kart like on the DS version. The game general looks good and all the new features look to add a much needed amp to the series.

Starfox gets a release date for September and a feature where the game takes picture of you when you lose online or something like that, it wasn't explained well. But it did sound like what Burnout Paradise did on PS3 if you had your camera on.

Super Mario 3D looks to combine many different Mario elements in one game and is 'coming before the year is over!'

Kid Icarus looks like the best 3DS title coming out so far still and now has online. The online looks simply like battles and team battles that reminded me strangely of Final Fantasy Dissidia. The game is also getting battle card looking things that will be using the same tech as the augmented reality cards that come with the 3DS.

Luigi's Mansion 2 looks like Ghostbusters: Sanctum of slime but better with Luigi sucking up ghosts in a vacuum. The game looks to have allot of potential but the trailer shown wasn't much at all.

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games 2012 was announced and I pulled a sad face but then I remember The Doctor shows up at the 2012 Olympics so confirm the BBC to be involved in that game.

Tetris is coming to the 3DS and that's a okay cool move on and they did move on to Cave Stories which still looks really cool but seems to be taking ages to come out. Resident Evil Revelations looks strangely good but RE Mercenaries looks a bit boring. Pac-Man is about as interesting as Tetris but Tekken and Metal Gear Solid 3 both looks really good graphically on the 3DS.

Game Demos is coming to the E-Store and it was a moment where I felt like I was watching something being announced that should have happened years ago. Gameboy and GameboyColour games will be coming to the Virtual Console. Excite Bike was mentioned but we all knew about that so it seemed useless.

A free Pokedex is coming to the 3DS that lets you build up your Pokedex with swap pass and other things. But it also uses AR images that lets you take pictures with your Pokemon anywhere which is a cool little application.

Nintendo's new console finally got a name a it's the 'Wii U' and it's named that because the Wii was about 'WE' or people playing together and now the U is to add a solo experience also. The console itself is never shown in the whole conference but just the controller which looks really weird but is as rumoured to have the touch screen in the remote. It also has to analog sticks, speakers, gyroscope and a bunch of other stuff. One of the new cool features was the ability to switch from playing on your TV straight to just playing on the screen on the remote. You can also use the the controller to draw and it actually looks to work really well. But not forgetting the audience that Nintendo has built the Wii U will also use all the old controllers for the Wii on the new console. A video is then shown showing of what the new console can do and the video works for what it's trying to do. We see the controller being used by itself for a game and then also the new flick controls where a person was sliding a Ninja star of the controller at the screen and hitting them into trees. The controller can be used like the bottom DS screen showing simply maps and this seems like the best thing for it as it'll be able to put all the HUD stuff on your controller and of your screen. A couple seconds of a non-announced Zelda game are shown and it looks completely gorgeous in HD. The Wii U is also getting backwards compatibility fully for all the Wii titles you may already own. Nintendo then quick squeezes in the note that the controller was note made to be a portable as the content is streaming directly from the console into the controller. Nintendo says it aims to have 'a strong bond between you, TV and the Internet.'

Smash Bros is announced to be coming to both the 3DS and the Wii U and both will interact in an un-announced way.

Nintendo then showed a tech demo showing how powerful graphically the machine is and it looks on par to the current HD consoles on the market with some nice water effects.

Unfortunately the new console appears to still have allot of waggling games being pushed for it so it should go up well against the Kinect.

Lego City Stories is announced to be exclusively for the Wii U as an open world game and will also be on the 3DS. Nothing is shown other than a few pictures but nothing to get you excited enough.

Nintendo then shows a video with heaps of game developers and heaps hyping up the Wii U. Allot of games are announced to be coming to the console in this video like Darksiders 2, Tekken, Batman Arkham city, Assassins Creed, Dirt, Alien Colene Marines (which looks better than AVP) and Ninja Gaiden 3 is announced in the midst of all this.

At the time of the conference I wrote that the games looked as good as they do on other consoles but shortly after found out it was because the footage being shown wasn't running on the Wii U at all.

An EA head then takes the stage to talk up the Wii U in person and announces all EA game will be coming to the Wii U like Battlefield 3.

Nintendo then says that the 3DS, DSI, WII and WII U are all one family, which means they don't plane to stop making games for the former consoles anytime soon.

Nintendo ends it confernece saying that there are heaps of exclusive video content to be found over at e3.nintendo.com that won't be found anywhere else. Then a heap of game titles appear on screen, even some for un-announed games til that moment.

Nintendo's conference was interesting but they seemed to lose out on the hype that they could have got if they had taken the Wii U stuff in another direction, but what'd you think?