It’s the Christmas that comes in June! In advance of the Monday E3 roundup, here’s a delectable trailer for your consumption: Nintendo came out swinging this year, abandoning franchise conventions and mixing things up. Nowhere is this more immediately visible than Kirby Epic Yarn. The Wii installation in the hoary old series (18 years! I’m…really [...]

There haven’t been a lot of direct sequels to Super Mario games since the late eighties, so Mario’s latest outing is something of an oddity. However, Mario hasn’t lost that sequel magic and comes through with a game that feels comfortable and novel at the same time.

Dust off your Wii, because 2010 is the year that Nintendo remembers that they’re a development house. The Nintendo Summit took place today (via 1up), and the developer/publisher/console manufacturer announced a whole slew of release dates. The biggest by far is Super Mario Galaxy 2, which will arrive on May 23. Nintendo released a new [...]

Nintendo hasn’t betrayed the hardcore gamers they created.

There, I said it and I’m glad.

However, it can be hard to reconcile Nintendo’s culture of accessibility with that position. It seems like every game gets a little easier and steals a little more agency from the player. Even the ridiculous fantasy that Nintendo’s games would play themselves has come true in New Super Mario Bros. Wii with the Super Guide. What’s a gamer to think when Nintendo picks up the controller for us and does all the hard stuff? Well, choke on your pride for a minute and listen to why the Super Guide might be a good thing.

Reggie Fils-Aime gave a presentation earlier this week at the BMO Capital Markets meeting where he claimed that the Wii accounts for 80% of female “primary players.” Put another way, Nintendo just laid claim to 80% of female console owners (though the stats don’t include PCs or portables). The president of Nintendo of America went [...]

There’s been a gradual upsurge in oldschool 2D gaming recently, albeit on the sly. The burgeoning casual and portable markets have converged with increasing visibility for indie developers and digital distribution. Set it all against the recession as a backdrop, and suddenly the cheap simple games of yesteryear start looking pretty good. Nintendo can smell these things coming like sharks smell blood in water, and so we have New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the first AAA 2D console platformer in ages.

Nintendo brought the E3 demo for Zelda: Spirit Tracks to PAX, and it feels awfully familiar. Players of Phantom Hourglass will recognize the cel-shaded art and the draw-to-interact mechanics (and perhaps the faintest whiff of reheated ideas), but old is boring. The demo notably offered vignettes of a dungeon crawl and a train run.

The rumor mill has been running overtime this week, with patents, trademarks, and offhand developer mutterings flying everywhere. You’d think that with BlizzCon only just passed and PAX coming in hard on its heels there’d be other things to talk about. However, I suspect that the gaming press has a deep-seated need to manufacture news. [...]

That’s right! He’s single, Ladies! Following up on the Tingle teaser seen in Famitsu two weeks ago, Nintendo has announced that the fairy-obsessed mapmaker from Majora’s Mask is getting a second game. It seems that Nintendo is trying to emphasize that Tingle doesn’t solely follow around little boys, because his upcoming game is entitled Irozuki [...]

Punch-Out!! is an excellent franchise retread, if a merely competent game. The attempt to integrate the Wii’s gestural controls will do little to entice casual gamers past the first handful of fights as the steep difficulty curve was clearly designed with a controller in mind. All in all, it’s game that’s low on content, but high on nostalgia.