Here's an interesting comment Iwata made recently to
The Street's Troy Wolverton at next-gen.biz:
Quote
However, he is a believer in downloadable content. "We believe it's important for software to be fresh every day," he said. "That is one of the reasons why Nintendo is now introducing the WiiConnect24 mechanism for the Wii. In other words, 24 hours a day, we can always be connected with the Internet, thereby people, before they know it, can actually receive something new all the time."
It sounds like Nintendo is going to WiiConnect24 as a sort of special-surprise service for gamers. His comments about making the software be fresh everyday makes me wonder if games will not just be able to download token items and stuff like that, but be able to dynamically have special events or circumstances everyday.
With this solution, harddrive storage isn't really a problem. A game like Animal Crossing can have a new holiday almost every day with this system and simply overwrite the last holiday's patch. Or we could get temporary holiday themed content and title screens the instant we turn on the system (Sorta like Christmas Nights and Kameo's costumes, but with no hassle).
Or perhaps variables in games could be tweaked on certain days just to make that day "crazy" and make the game feel all new: They might have a "hyper-speed" Wii sports day, or on different days of the week all of Wii Music's instruments become heavy metal, renaissance, latin, or whatever new musical instrumentation they can discover.
The WiiConnect24 is especially interesting if you could also use it to deliver small chunks of re-usable episodic content, like daily Sudoku puzzles, crossword puzzles, or even daily brain-training exercises to keep you sharp. Puzzles games could benefit greatly from this, as well as simple non-gamer titles like Nintendogs or Braing Age.
This would allow for the growth of games beyond what they were able to anticipate at ship-date, and would make the games a slightly new experience each day you woke up. At the same time, this would keep the focus OFF of incomplete games and large patches, but instead on smaller, more frequent, quirky, and interesting on a daily basis daily specials.
~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com