After an E3 conference that kind of left us hanging, Nintendo has an opportunity to make things right tonight by digging in a little deeper in to Wii U specific news that we didn’t hear during today’s earlier event. Instead, it seems like all that was discussed was everything we already knew and maybe one new thing.
The developers discussion, according to various live blogs, focused primarily on the Wii U’s answer to Wii Sports: Nintendoland. Nintendoland acts as a virtual theme park that allows newcomers to get acquainted with what the Wii U has to offer with twelve minigames. Using your Mii, you can walk around the park and see other Miis milling about. The various mini games are like smaller versions of Nintendo classics like Zelda and Luigi’s Mansion. One new game in Nintendoland they did announce was an F-Zero mini game. Also, the difficulty and size of some games in Nintendoland will scale based on how many people are playing. Woop-de-woop. They also mentioned a way to check information about Miis before becoming “friends” with them. No information on what becoming friends actually means though, so that’s nice.
Next, they focused a little bit on the Miiverse features of New Super Mario Bros. U where short messages will show up and float over levels on the world map. The new information here is that there is a system is place to prevent spoilers. When setting up a comment, you have the option to tag it as a spoiler, and if you see a spoiler leak through, you can report it. Same goes for offensive language.
Finally, during the worst Q&A session ever, some really lame reporters managed to miss asking anything about the online system and structure and instead asked questions like, “How do guy come up with so many Mario games?” Yep. Another question focused on multiple GamePads, but the answer of “processing power takes a hit” should have been obvious before asked. The one ray of hope with the Q&A session was that we do know that there will be a system in place to transfer your Virtual Console purchases. That’s good news for us who have spent far too much on that thing over the years.
And that is that.
Updated: Nintendo released a short overview of the discussion today.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1vqyYIKFsU&feature=plcp&w=620]
Something new from the video that the live blogs I read didn’t really mention was that games can prompt you to write a note about a level or experience based on what you are doing. So if you are dying in the same spot or level in Mario, the system might ask if you want to express yourself as a result. We need to get some more clarification on this, but that’s what it sounds like the developers were saying.