Last week in San Francisco, home of three Destructoid writers and our resident camera guy, Nintendo held a Media Summit showing off a ton of their upcoming games for the Nintendo Wii and DS. Some of our friends in the industry got a chance to play a bunch of the games and have written up a thing or two on them.
Wondering where Destructoid’s coverage is? Yeah, we are too. Our invitations must have gotten lost in the mail among the flood of robot love letters we constantly get. In any case, there’s a ton of information out there and I’ve compiled some of the more important games for you to check out after the jump.
OK, so when I say I’ve compiled everything you need to know, I mean RawMeatCowboy over at GoNintendo compiled everything. Who better to get some Nintendo coverage assistance from than by the biggest Nintendo dork on the planet?
The big game we keep hearing a ton of buzz on is Steven Spielberg’s Boom Box. RMC thinks it was the best game of the summit, in fact. Seems that everyone that attended the summit tried to play this game the most. The controls sound to be extremely simple with the controls only requiring you to aim and throw. I’m still a tad on the fence with the game, but I can’t really say anything until I get my hands on it.
RawMeatCowboy’s other big game from the show floor was Mario Kart Wii. We’ve already heard and seen a ton of stuff on Mario Kart Wii pop up all over the place so I’m just going to focus on RMC’s impressions of the Wii Wheel and the motion controls of the game. I’ve had my fears that the game might not control so well thanks mostly to Excitetruck. RMC shared my fears too, but as it turns out, we actually have nothing to fear. The controls are very tight and RMC never had any type of issues when it came to steering the karts with the motion controls. I’m still not truly sold on the Wii Wheel concept though. Charging anything for just a plastic shell is ridiculous to me.
Zack Stern over at Joystiq got a chance to check out Sonic Chronicles for the DS. I know everyone is still a little confused over this RPG crossover on the usually speedy hedgehog, but it looks like it won’t be all that bad. You can create your own party and each character has unique abilities and attacks. Characters can also team up and do combo attacks in battle. Some attacks will also rely on the touch screen for timed based attacks in the same fashion of Elite Beat Agents’ timing system.
A WiiWare game we should be excited about? That’s what Michael McWhertor over at Kotaku thinks about LostWinds. It sounds extremely interesting actually. You take control of two characters at the same time. One being a little guy named Taku and the other character being wind. Yes, your second character is actually the wind. The only way Taku can move around is by the wind which you can control around on the screen with the Wiimote. Taku can move, but his motions are limited. There will be puzzles and such in the game as well requiring the wind to take care of it. Damn Michael, I’m really interested now.
Jennifer Tsao over at 1Up gave a quick little preview of Guitar Hero for the DS. The main differences here other than the obvious (four buttons and touch screen strumming) is that to activate your Star Power, you need to scream/breath into the mic on the DS. You can also tap the Star Power meter on the touch screen but it’s always fun to shout into your hands in public when playing the DS. Hey, hobos in San Francisco do it all the time! Multiplayer will be similar to Guitar Hero III where you can gain items to attack your opponents after you complete combos. The game will come with over 25 tracks with 20 of them being completely original for the DS version.
There were plenty of games that were shown off at the Nintendo Media Summit and to get the full list, just check out GoNintendo. These were more or less some of my highlights from the entire event. What looked the most interesting to you all that came out of this event?
