Friday, March 24, 2006

Nintendo Keynote Speech - GDC 2006

[News] [Game design] [Computer gaming]

Yes, it's less than an hour since my last post, but I just found Gamasutra's coverage of the Nintendo keynote speech at the 2006 Game Developers' Conference (GDC).

Unless you've been blind and deaf over the the last six months you've probably already seen something of Nintendo's plans for its next-generation console, the "Revolution", and its crazy DVD-remote-meets-nunchuks controller system. It's aimed to capture the latent casual gaming audience that the DS has already made inroads into, and in my opinion it's probably the most exciting thing happening in the next generation of console gaming.

Nintendo's keynote speech has delivered two main surprises:

1) Nintendo's previously announced online distribution service, which was tipped to make old games from the NES, SNES and N64 available on the Revolution, will ALSO feature first-party Sega and Hudson games from the Genesis/Megadrive and the Turbografx.

2) Gamers can look foward to a new Legend of Zelda title for the DS called Phantom Hourglass.

But no real news on the Revolution. Well, I suppose we're back to waiting for E3 to find out the details.

I have to say though, the PS3 may be my home console in the next-generation, what with its beefy processing power, backwards compatibility all the way back to the original Playstation, native Linux OS, and XBox Live-style online network platform - but I'm getting more and more excited to see what Nintendo have to offer. They seem to be the only ones who are looking further ahead than the current round of consoles, and I really, really hope it pays off for them.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a quick word before I read this post... you do actually work sometimes, right? :-)

Anonymous said...

Also, agree on the much excitement about PS3.
(And before anyone says anything, yes, I have work to do, I just don't have much of it at the moment. :-)