So Leipzig Games Convention has been and gone, as has the long awaited Nintendo press conference at GC. And what did we learn? Not much. Sequels to Super Mario Strikers and Battalion Wars, both of which should be fun, but neither of which will set the world alight. Oh, and the DS is coming out in pink and black - sorry, Onyx and Coral Pink - for pretty much everywhere, which was obvious.
It seems a lot of people went into Leipzig really expecting to know the price and date for the Wii by the end of the conference. Instead, we now have a date for a Reggie Fils-Aime-hosted press event on the 14th of September in New York, which is also hardly surprising, given that Nintendo did indicate that they’d be revealing everything in September.
So now everyone is talking up that event. I just wonder, is there really much point getting so excited about every little hint of news about the release? Yeah, I’m excited, but we already know that it’s going to be under US$250, and it’ll be released in Q4. This will be before the PS3, I guarantee it. What I’m saying is, we already know it’ll be cheap, and that it’ll be released in less than three months - I just fail to see why everyone is still waiting for “the big news from Nintendo”. We have the big news already, really. Just not in one bite size piece.
Speaking of waiting, Press the Buttons pointed out today that IGN has claimed “that Nintendo will not release Wii Wi-Fi Connection libraries to third parties until early 2007, which means that no third party launch title will have an online mode”.
Firstly, I’m sick of IGN’s “developer insider contacts” and so tend to take everything published on that site with quite a bit of salt.
That said, assuming it is true, it does seem a bit odd, and I’m not really sure I’m really understand the motives behind such a decision. I guess there’s the posibility that Nintendo want to make sure the titles that do come out at laucnh with online capabilities are of the highest quality, but I’m not sure why they’d want to effectively cripple months of future developments like that. Odd.