Capcom’s E3 conference was a bust of sorts, but here’s some great news: Dead Rising will be coming to the Wii. In spite of Christian Svensson’s comments on the game moving to other platforms, Famitsu confirmed in its latest issue that the break-out hit which landed on the Xbox 360 will be coming to the Wii. Is as the case with nearly all Wii ports, the game will feature waggle attack controls. Capcom is trying to replicate the graphics as close to the 360 as they can, too. No release date has been set at this time.
Pikmin Wii
“There isn’t anything that we can announce right now, but I’m sure we’ll probably do something with it. The Pikmin team is, of course, still there and maybe we’ll have something to talk about before too long.”
Mario DS
“That team is also working hard. The thing that’s difficult is that, as you know, the way we handle our announcement is we work on product and once the product is at a state where we feel it’s ready to show to people, then that’s when we’re willing to talk about it. Which is why it’s difficult for me to talk about different projects in interviews. I have a lot of different teams and those teams are all at different points in their experiments or development, so it’s typically once they’ve finalized something that we’re able to talk about it. But for me to go into too much detail would be a little bit irresponsible in an interview. All that I can say is that that team is also working. Maybe the best thing for you to understand is that all of the leaders of those teams — of the Mario team, of the Zelda team and of the Pikmin team — all sit within 150 feet of my desk. The Galaxy team is the only one that’s farther away — they’re in Tokyo. But I do have video conferencing with them.”
Responding to a question asking for a Super Mario Galaxy sequel…
“Leave it to me.”
The father of Zelda, Shigeru Miyamoto already spoke on a number of key issues surrounding the Wii and its games. Just recently, however, Miyamoto continued to answer questions and elaborated on Satoru Iwata’s comment this morning in which it was explained that the Zelda team is “hard at work.” Said Miyamoto, “The Zelda team in particular always works on Zelda titles. The core members of the Zelda team have for a very long time now been focused on Zelda games, and continue to focus on Zelda games, so they are hard at work and working away. And then, of course, we have the DS Zelda team as well, so even there we’re having some switching of people in and out where the DS team is mixing in with the Wii team and working on the Wii version. I don’t necessarily think it will change that drastically, but I think that Zelda is a franchise that does need some big new unique ideas,” he said. “And so the team right now is very focused on trying to find those ideas.”
“There isn’t anything that we can announce today, but we have been thinking along a variety of different lines regarding this matter for some time now. So my hope is that sometime in the not too distant future we will be able to discuss some concrete solutions.”
“In all honesty, it’s just in relation to cost. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who want to play Animal Crossing over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Maybe just as it is. There may be some people who want to use a USB keyboard to chat and we’re fine with that. And there may be others who want to use something like WiiSpeak. So just from a cost perspective and being able to provide the game to everybody, we thought that was the best way to go. Basically, our idea with WiiSpeak is rather than to just provide a voice-chat function, we want to really connect living rooms to each other. In that sense, the microphone in WiiSpeak is really designed to be able to clearly capture many different voices being spoken in a room at the same time and convey that over the Internet. It’s a very capable microphone and it’s designed with that intent. And so that’s why WiiSpeak has taken on the form that it has.”
This year’s E3 has been all about ups and downs…Initially, many Nintendo fans anticipated that Kid Icarus would be unveiled at Nintendo’s press conference, only to be let down yesterday when IGN’s Matt Casamassina said the game would not be appearing. There still is some hope for the game, however. IGN managed to bump into the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto and approached the Mario creator about Kid Icarus. Obviously, Miyamoto would never give out explicit details on an unannounced project, but his words were encouraging: “Yeah, I’m not the producer of any Kid Icarus titles. There are some people who have some different ideas, but since I’m not the producer I can’t comment on anything.” Miyamoto was pressed further, yet still gave out the near-same reply, “I’m not the producer of any Kid Icarus game, so I really can’t say anything. Sorry.”
“What I can say is that typically games like that take anywhere from two to three years to finish those up. We do have the teams together and the teams are all working. The other thing that I can say is that in the past we haven’t really had much opportunity to release two Mario titles or two Zelda titles on a single hardware system. Our plan is to try to do that with Wii. With that in mind, the teams are working hard at this point.” – Shigeru Miyamoto
So, how long will we have to wait? If previous comments have any validity, a new Zelda title should be well under way at this point. Hopefully Nintendo will debut a new Zelda or Mario title at next year’s E3.
