You've probably read the news from this morning's Nintendo press conference out in sunny Hollywood, CA. I was there as a part of the Advanced Media Network and, to be honest, to be in the audience is to become a semi-drooling fanboy. Put all the hype aside though and you get to today's major developments.
Personally, I consider the biggest news of the day to be the proclamation that the Nintendo Revolution will be completely backwards compatible with past consoles, that is it will be able to play GameCube discs and it can download games from the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, and Nintendo 64. The entire 20+ year history of Nintendo's home consoles will be available at the touch of a button on the as-yet-unseen Revolution controller. While I've heard some grumblings over the idea, I love it. At last there'll be no need to pay those outrageous eBay prices for rare game paks and Nintendo is finally using it's back catalog to a more handy advantage.
The Game Boy Micro is a nifty l'il gadget, but I can't see anyone jumping on-board with it unless they're looking to replace an original GBA unit. The SP isn't small enough? The DS is too clunky? It remains unknown how or if the GBM will link up to a GameCube or allow multiplayer gaming, but at first impression it's probably the next logical step in GBA evolution. For now.
Then came Zelda: Twilight Princess. Amazingly enough the werewolf rumors are true. I'm just glad to get the confirmation one way or the other, although the early buzz here yesterday was that it was Princess Zelda who was the werewolf. Either way, Nintendo's latest trailer for the game clearly shows Link undergoing a rather painful-looking transformation into a wolf, so mark one up for the crazy rumor people. They had to get lucky one of these days. Those who attended the conference were given a Nintendo DS game pak with the latest Zelda trailer on it for play on the DS. It'll make a nice collector's item if nothing else, kind of like the limited edition E3 2005 Xbox 360 face plates that were given out at the Microsoft press conference on Monday.
As for the rest of the conference there were appearances from Iwata and Miyamoto, two horny Nintendogs, an Electroplankton concert, lots of strobe lights, the clarification on Nintendo's DS online policy, and plenty of video snippets of games such as Mario's new soccer and baseball outings, Shadow the Hedgehog's guns of fury, Mario Kart DS (which will be playable here starting tomorrow), and a little teaser clip of Metroid Prime 3 for the Revolution.
The E3 show floor opens tomorrow morning. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have their game faces on again (if you'll pardon the pun) and the winner in the next console clash looks to be the fans.
