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.

Kooloo-Limpah! Steal Tingle’s Magic words and he’ll cut you! Image courtesy of 1up Anyone who ever doubted the wisdom of Nintendo’s friend codes needs to take a look at the latest issue of Famitsu (via 1up). Within, you can see that disturbing fairy wannabe Tingle has returned to darken your doorstep. So lock up your [...]

Blizzard’s success with games bearing the suffix “-craft” has had some unintended consequences outside the occasional dead man in an internet cafe. Among them is the onset of genre myopia. Take strategy as an example: list off all the strategy games you can think of off the top of your head. You certainly listed off Warcraft and Starcraft, but how far down the list did you get before you reached a tower defense game? Blizzard’s runaway success redefined not only what strategy games are, but what they can be. So you mightn’t necessarily think of other takes on the genre like Dyson, Pikmin, or 5th Cell’s most recent title, Lock’s Quest. Here’s what it is and why you should.

As Nintendo has passed from the Gamecube, through the DS, and to the Wii, they’ve gotten better at bridging the gap between developers and Nintendo’s constantly fluctuating vision of interactivity. Nobody ever really figured out how to make good use of the Gamecube-GBA connectivity, and it took a year and Canvas Curse before anybody really did anything with the DS’s touch controls. It took still less lead time before Wii waggle started catching on. The incredible shrinking lead time derives partly from increasing developer interest as Nintendo’s market presence grows, but it’s also because Nintendo has learned something that authors figured out centuries ago: show don’t tell. If there’s a series that’s as much tech demo as it is video game, it has to be Warioware, and guess what? Warioware: Snapped accompanies the newly camera-enriched DSi as a downloadable game. Read on for our impressions.

It turns out that it’s cheaper to develop games for hardware that’s little more than two Gamecubes taped together (does anyone even remember that slur for the Wii any more?). Seriously though, according to gamesindustry.biz, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata recently said in a conference call that Nintendo is being courted by third parties as they try to develop affordable games in tough economic times. Said Iwata, “Some are reportedly saying that they bet on the wrong horse or that they need to change course.” Nintendo has always been the primary supporter of its own hardware, especially during the N64 and Gamecube generations when third parties flocked en masse to Sony’s consoles.

Although the console has been criticized for a glut of poor-quality bargain bin games, Iwata was optimistic about future support, saying, “Overall, we recognise that our relationships with the software manufacturers are shaping up better than before. So, in the mid-term, we believe that more attractive titles will be launched by them for our platforms.”

A rising tide may lift all boats, but a falling tide won’t sink Nintendo.

The latest in a long stream of Symphony of the Night clones, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia transplants the core gameplay tenets of that venerable PS1 game without rocking the boat too hard. Unfortunately, the sense of place that used to reward exploration gameplay has been replaced with a more homogeneous world, so there isn’t as much to see, even if there is plenty to do.

It looks like Nintendo is getting a case of the ‘me toos’. Gamasutra reports that the casual console maker is following suit with Microsoft and Sony’s Netflix partnerships.

Of course, Nintendo still marches to its own drummer, and it appears that the new partnership will actially be with an advertising company, Dentsu, to provide original streaming content instead of the Netflix video rental model. Although this announcement only applies to japan for the time being, Nintendo hopes to extend the service to the west in 2009.

This announcement follows an earlier one that the Wii would soon see a theater channel. Whether this means that Nintendo plans to offer both movies and television remains to be seen. How long can it be before the Omni-Leisure 5000 graces our living rooms?