Topic: Nintendo Holds Briefing in Japan

[WackerJr]

Anyone considered the possibility that it may actually make use of the bongo's from Donkey Konga and DK: Jungle Beat? I doubt it, but just thought I'd toss another idea into the fire!

[Ian Sane]

"Besides, online gaming has been around since Doom."

Well 3D gaming has been around since Battlezone and early polygon games like Virtua Racing and Star Fox.  3D existed well before Super Mario 64 came out it just became the standard after that.  I'll agree that online gaming doesn't change games nearly as much as the move to 3D but realitically it's pretty hard to have something of that magnitude happen again any time soon.  Unless they're making the holodeck odds are whatever ideas Nintendo has won't change gaming as much as 3D did either.  Plus Nintendo themselves haven't done much with online gaming yet so at the very least for them it's new.

[mouse_clicker]

My point was online gaming has technically existed longer than 3D- just a semantics squabble.

In any case, don't judge what effect Nintendo will have when you don't know the first thing about it. For all you know they could completely change the industry.

[darknight06]

I believe Sega had something called the "Dream Eye" that they were working with at one point in time.

[Michael8983]

I think it will just use the Kongo Drums.
They'd be more than sufficient for moving around the game board and the creative guys at Hudson could easily come up with a ton of mini-games using them. Actually about a third of the mini-games in old games could easily be done with the Kongo Drums - many of them would actually be BETTER with them too.  

[Kairon]

You're certainly afraid of Nintendo going all radical on us Ian. But I don't see anything to support those fears.

Nintendo is trying to figure out how to create new relationships and interactions that people can have in, with, and revolving around videogames. They're not looking for some sort of gimmick to set them apart from the rest. As long as Miyamoto is involved, it's quite apparent that Nintendo will only dive into a technical innovation when they have a good idea of implementation to back it up.

This goes for online connectivity too. Nintendo isn't going to set up a server farm until they can figure out a way to do something beyond mere player-matching and persistant worlds.

Nintendo isn't necessarily looking to abolish the old-school, and they probably never will as long as the market keeps reminding them of it's importance (like they reminded Nintendo that they wanted a D-pad on the GC controller, which they got). Instead, Nintendo is looking to move videogames beyond the normal boundaries of the medium and open up new frontiers and fields in the way relationships and interaction can be interpreted. They don't want videogames to forever be someone simply looking at pretty graphics and pressing buttons to get more pretty graphics.

Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, I doubt Nintendo will axe support for old game controls, especially with all of this talk about backwards compatibility going on...

[GoldShadow1]

I want Minority Report-style controls.

[Jale]

That would work for some games and would totally rule for turn-based combat games...FIre Emblem on the N5 anyone?

[Iverson7603]

If the "Revolution" truly is a "revolution" then this could be major news. Nintendo has been very stagnant and to change that it needs something big. A duel screen will not do it. Basic online play will not do it. I don't have any great ideas on what they should have, but it needs to be radically different.

[Caillan]

I don't see why Nintendo is so intent on doing so,ething really radical. If they concentrated on franchises that are popular in the West like Fire Emblem as well as those like Mario and Zelda, their future would be pretty secure. I'm completely in leauge with Ian here; Nintendo's 'revolutionary' ideas in the past have sometimes suceeded, but more often flopped.

It's not axing suport for 'old-style' games that concerns me, it's not concentrating enough on them. I'm fine with the DS: by putting so much emphasis on saying that the DS was completely seperate from the GB and console, everyone knows that Nintendo won't lose anything really big if it fails. But if Nintendo release a dance pad or waffle iron or whatever with the 'Revolution' and make most of their launch titles compatible soley with it, I'm going to be really pissed.

There is already a market for games that people make now, and Nintendo's sucess is proven by it. The reason why we are on these forums is because of games made now. Innovation is fine, but something completey new, even if very sucessful in bringing new people to the gaming market, could just as easily alienate the actual gamers. Nintendo had a hard enough time this generation convincing ordinary gamers to buy their console because of a games drought for a bout 6 months. No one wants a repeat of that. If they couldn't handle it normally this generation, what makes anyone think they could handle it when making half their games for a waffle-iron next generation?

[nickmitch]

Now I like waffles as much as the next guy but waffle-iron video games would be more of something that I would do but not tell anybody.
But I'm accually looking forward to seeing what Nintendo has up their sleves just as long as they're not pulling it out their asses.