EA says it was "on the wrong horse" when it came to next generation game development, promises development of new IPs to promote growth.

Yesterday at its quarterly investor's meeting, EA's CEO John Riccitiello told investors that 2007 was the toughest fiscal year ever for the company.

“[The last transition] was tough because we typically have two to three platforms and a five year period… One of the biggest challenges, of course, was that not a lot of people anticipated the success of Nintendo that they’ve shown with their wand controller and their Wii. That got ahead of us a little more than our expectations." He said.

Here are this weeks announcements from the Dojo blog. Two new stages and a cool new game mechanic are inside!

This week at the Dojo was similar to most other weeks. A bunch of minor announcements were made that are somewhat interesting. Still no brand new characters though.

New Stage: Rumble FallsIn somewhat of a twist, what could end up being the spiritual successor to the oft maligned Icicle Mountain stage was announced on Monday. This time taking on Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat as a theme, Rumble Falls is a level that will be constantly scrolling upwards. Therefore, players will have to climb up while they battle in order to avoid falling off the bottom. The end of the post leaves a cryptic quote, “Hey! What's at the top? Huh? Hmm...I wonder..." Should we expect a giant fruit to dig into? Most likely.

So does this mean I should be a lot richer than I am? Perhaps not, but the rich seem to like the Wii.

Although the Wii is the least expensive console of this generation, it seems more likely to show up in expensive homes. Nielsen’s GamePlay Metrics has found that households that are home to Wiis are more “upscale" and even boasting an annual income of more than $100,000.

Based on the infrastructure of Nielsen’s well-established TV-monitoring service, GamePlay Metrics is a data-tracking service of the gaming industry that gathers information from 12,000 households, that means a rough estimate of 33,000 people.

After hitting Sony with a red turtle shell last month, Mario can start dropping banana peels for NTT and Honda.

After Nintendo released its Q2 financial statement, its stock price went up 3.5%. After it became known that Nintendo Co., Ltd. has become the fifth largest corporation in Japan, it went up another 8.8%. It could have climbed higher than that, if not for reaching the daily increase limit the Osaka Stock Exchange imposes.

The total market value of Nintendo now stands at 8.76 trillion Yen ($72.7 billion). This is more valuable than some of Japan's other big-name companies, namely Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT, the Japanese equivalent of AT&T) and Honda Motor Co, which was actually a more valuable company up until yesterday.

Profits up 400% from Q2 2006; Wii shipment target upped to 16.5 million by the end of next March.

This week Nintendo released its second quarter fiscal highlights, and it comes as no surprise that it's making serious money off of the continued success of the Wii and DS. For the three month period that ended on June 30, the company's net sales total was 340.4 billion Yen ($2.87 billion). That led to a net profit in the quarter of 80.3 billion yen ($680 million), which is an increase of a staggering 416% over the same period last year.

The Nintendo DS sold through another 6.98 million units in the three month reporting period, bringing its life-to-date figure up to 47.27 million units worldwide. Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were the big software titles of the quarter, selling through a 3.55 million units during the period and 8.76 million units in total. As for the Wii, Nintendo moved out 3.43 million more consoles during the three month period, which inches the system toward the 10 million unit mark: There are now 9.27 million Wiis in the world. Super Paper Mario, Mario Party 8 and Wii Play were cited by Nintendo as big reasons for strong hardware and software sales.

Grab three of your buddies and start hunting.

SEGA SHIPS ALIEN SYNDROME ON THE Wii™ AND PSP®SYSTEM

Sci-Fi Shooter-RPG Introduces Revolutionary Gameplay for Up to Four Players

SAN FRANCISCO (July 24, 2007) – SEGA® of America, Inc. today announced today that Alien Syndrome™ has shipped to stores nationwide for the Wii™ home video game system from Nintendo and PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system. Alien Syndrome is a lightning-fast game combining RPG and shooter genres in a stunningly imaginative sci-fi universe. The game offers a dramatic and engaging single player adventure in addition to an infinitely replayable co-op multiplayer mode for up to four players. Derived from the classic SEGA arcade game, Alien Syndrome’s new shooter-RPG gameplay makes it easy to pick up and play, while its depth and wealth of features keeps it challenging for all gamers.

We're extending the current Hot Topic another week. If you want a shot at winning an E3 swag bag, all you need to do is tell us what you thought of the show!

We skipped last week for the sake of E3, and this week we're gonna come right back and ask about it! Like always, we'll get back to the previous hot topic down at the bottom of this page, but first...

This week: E3! What did you think of the show in general? The press conference? The announcements? Nintendo's competitors? Are you satisfied overall? Or super disappointed? Let us know!

DS is number one, Wii is number two; top four games and six out of the top ten are on Nintendo systems. Updated with some factoids from Nintendo.

Here are the hardware sales for the reporting period of June, which was actually a five-week month for NPD's purposes:

Nintendo DS - 561,000

Wii - 381,800

PlayStation 2 - 270,000*

PlayStation Portable - 230,100

Xbox 360 - 198,400

Game Boy Advance - 113,000*

PlayStation 3 - 98,500

*PS2 and GBA figures were not included in the official NPD release. However, IGN is reporting these figures for those systems, so we have included them here for ease of comparison.

14 Wii games and 2 DS games are included among a very competitive field of the best games of E3.

The Game Critics Awards has released its nominee list for the 2007. The GCAs are held every year at the conclusion of E3 and voted on by the heads of major gaming publications across America.

Nintendo-published games have been nominated eight times in seven different categories. All told, 14 Wii (and multiplatform) and two Nintendo DS games have been nominated across all categories. The top nominated game this year is EA's Rock Band, with five nominations. Electronic Arts also picked up the most nominations as a publisher, with 14.

So that's how you play as Zero Suit Samus.

It was an interesting week over at the Dojo. The highlight of the week was probably the official unveiling of Zero Suit Samus. We''ll get to that in a bit.

New Song: Star Fox: Space ArmadaThis is a slightly different arrangement to a song that came right out of Melee. The composition supervisor is Hajime Hirasawa, who wrote the music for the original SNES Star Fox title in 1993. The arrangement supervisor is Kenji Ito, who wrote the music on several Square games, like Children of Mana and Romancing SaGa. To hear the song, check out this post over at the Dojo.