14 DAY TRIAL // The most awaited talks at the Game Developers Conference came, no surprise, from Nintendo representatives. While Masato Kuwahara, the project leader for hardware development on the Nintendo DSi, talked about what his company was aiming to do with the new version of the handheld, Satoru Iwata, the president and the Chief Executive Officer of Nintendo, was talking about the Wii, videogames development and storage solutions. Oh, and he announced a new Zelda game.
The first order of business in the talk was showcasing the success of Nintendo products. The DS was already said to have sold more than 100 million units world wide, and now Iwata has confirmed that the Wii, the home gaming console, has gone over the 50 million sales barrier and is still selling strong. He commented that “When veteran gamers and new consumers make the purchase decisions, one rule always remains the same... software sells hardware.”
To make sure that gamers are satisfied with their Wii, Nintendo is also announcing that there will be more storage space available on its device, with players being able to use High Capacity SD cards to store WiiWare titles that they have downloaded and games that they have gotten from the Virtual Console, with the aim being to free up space on the internal storage of the home gaming console.
The only catch is that, when a player wants to run some games from a High Capacity SD card, he/she must have “an equivalent amount of internal Wii memory” available. Most Wii owners will likely not be satisfied with the solution and will probably continue to push for a true hard drive storage system for the Nintendo console.
Another highlight of the talk given by Iwata was a detailed description of the way Nintendo tends to create its games, complete with tales of how Shigeru Miyamoto would “kidnap” employees in order to get them to play new games, watching if they were excited or bored by them. The same system was probably employed in the creation of the new Zelda title, Spirit Tracks, unveiled by Nintendo.