Nikkei – Wii successor features ‘portable game controller’ with six inch touchscreen and ‘camera functions’ June 3, 2011

And so it begins.

This is big news. In fact, it’s such big news that I’m not even afraid to start this post with a conjunction. The Mario Bros. plumbing company must have been busy over the last couple of weeks; despite there only being about 4 days until Nintendo’s E3 Keynote, there hasn’t been a single, notable leak. Until now.

Nikkei – a Japanese publication centred on technology, business and finance – has let slip a few details about the upcoming Project Café. Interestingly, it’s all stuff we’ve heard before, which consequently seems to lend credit to a few other rumours. The publication informed us of Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS features and specifications before their official unveilings, and were spot on both times.

The report claims that the Wii’s successor will feature a controller that doubles as a portable console. The translation is somewhat hazy – it’s unlikely that the controller will be truly portable as this would alienate and potentially eat into the 3DS’ market share. Additionally, the controller would then require its own CPU and other innards, resulting in an insultingly expensive peripheral. The controller will feature a six inch touch panel for ‘tablet-like controls’, a camera and a built-in rechargeable battery.

No other comments were made in relation to the controller’s form-factor, or interestingly, the console itself, which seems to suggest that the emphasis is once again on the innovative controller.

Nintendo will show off the console on Tuesday, June 7th at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

– Rory

Who we want to see in Super Smash Bros. Strife May 25, 2011

No, fear not; you have not accidentally wandered into the list-littered minefield of Kotaku, fortunately for you. However, it is with a certain sense of disappointment and guilt that I present to you, my readers, a list of sorts. Inevitably, a new Smash Bros. game attracts a ridiculous amount of hype, speculation and sheer fanboy-founded fervour, and we couldn’t help but get the train rolling – in no particular order, here is our character wishlist for the rumoured Super Smash Bros. Strife.

Super Smash Bros. is the industry’s best example of pure, unadulterated fan service, and it all starts with the characters. The game works because it’s a miraculous montage of some of the world’s most recognised faces, mixed with a myriad of lesser-known, but still just-as-loved characters, all united by one common interest – kicking the living daylights out of each other. So, who, other than the 35-man-roster from Brawl, would we like to see occupy all that extra disc space? Remember, variety is the spice of life.

Don’t be fooled by his nerdy demeanour; armed with a positively badass katana beam, a badass hairdo and a pair of badass shades, this Otaku badass means business. Badass business. From the brilliant mind of Suda 51, Travis Touchdown of No More Heroes fame is our number one contender. With an awesome art style, Travis would not only look right at home in the frantic free-for-all that is Super Smash Bros., but he’d also give those other pesky swordsmen a run for their money as well.

Did we mention he’s a total badass? We did? Oh. Okay then.

Another one that fits right into the badass category is Jack from MadWorld. Look at him. He’s smoking a cigarette. In black and white. That’s not only cool in France, people; it’s cool everywhere. Do you know where else it’d be cool? In Super Smash Bros. He’s got a chainsaw strapped to his arm. Even Fred Durst wouldn’t mess with this geezer in fear of having his arse skinned raw. Again, this Capcom creation boasts a unique art style that would add a bit of visual splendour to proceedings – if any more was needed – while also bringing something to the table that the series arguably lacks. Brutality.

Did we mention he’s got a chainsaw strapped to his arm? We did? Oh. Okay then.

She’s a Goddess, she’s a wolf and she’s from Okami. Enough said. What? You want more? Tough crowd. Well then, apart from being another aesthetically gorgeous piece from that artistic bunch at Capcom, Amaterasu is at once a gentle and caring soul, a benevolent Goddess and, most importantly, a fearsome warrior. With her inclusion, she would present the opportunity for a genuinely beautiful and creative stage, and some of the best music ever burned to disc.

Did we mention she’s a Goddess? We did? Oh. Okay then.

Another one for fans of brilliant videogame music; Blob, from THQ’s 2008 quirky Wii platformer de Blob, may, at first glance, appear to simply be a blob of paint. Look deeper though, and you’ll find tha-. Okay, no, he really is just a conscious, sentient blob of mastic composition, but he’s still a pretty awesome chap. He has the ability to change the physical appearance – namely, the colour – of anything he touches, which could make for some pretty cool-looking effects.

Did we mention he’s a blob of paint? We did? Well then, I appear to be suffering from some form of anterograde amnesia.

Another character from Capcom, another character from an AAA game – that is, Aesthetically and Artistically Awesome. With this little guy, the clue is in the name. Would you really want to battle against Mega Man? Really? For those of you who are out of the loop, ‘Mega’ falls somewhere between ‘Super’ and ‘Uber’ in the Official Adjectives Rankings 2011. Do you understand what that means? It means Mega Man is more of a badass than Superman. If that isn’t reason enough, then frankly, you’re batshit insane.

That about wraps it up for characters. In hindsight, I guess I’m just a sucker for some quality art design, but after all, Super Smash Bros. is definitely a clash of wildly varying styles, so shaking it up a bit further surely can’t hurt.

And no, we don’t want Cloud fucking Strife.

– Rory

Watch the first Modern Warfare 3 gameplay trailer May 24, 2011

Infinity Ward just posted up your first glimpse at Modern Warfare 3. Luckily for them, all the countries in the trailer just so happen to have an ‘E’ in their name somewhere, which they have oh-so-cleverly exploited, using the titular 3 as that ever-popular vowel/entactogenic drug.

The trailer ominously ends with the logo ‘WW3’ before the former ‘W’ flips on its head, to its final resting place – MW3. It’s coming this year and it’s going to own your soul. Spooky stuff.

– Rory

RUMOUR – Super Smash Bros. Strife to be shown at E3 May 23, 2011

Based on the rather naive assumption that you’re currently viewing this post on a 15.6″ laptop screen as I am, I’d like to ask you to divert your eyes and your attention approximately four inches above this very line, to that word – rumour.

Annoyingly, despite that tag being in capitals on every rumour I post, I see comments flaming the blog for giving ‘teh false inf0z’ pasted all over the web. So, just a heads up – take this with a massive pinch of salt; it’s very likely to be fake, but that’s not going to stop me from sharing it with you all.

A report from Great Gaming Crusade claims that ‘Nintendo will be showing off the next Super Smash Bros. game at this year’s E3′. That’s it. I mean, it’s really basic; anyone with a keyboard could have written that. However, that doesn’t change the fact that every Nintendo console since the 64 has had a Super Smash Bros. game shown before its launch, so it’s entirely feasible. A representative of Great Gaming Crusade assured me that “the rumor is from a reliable source in the industry”.

The game is apparently being developed for ‘the Wii’s successor’. From a completely unrelated source, we see a rather shady looking image of the game’s supposed logo, revealing its somewhat awkward title – Super Smash Bros. Strife. Could that be a reference to the inclusion of a certain spikey-haired emotional swordsman?

– Rory

Project Café to compete with PS4/Xbox 720 graphically? May 15, 2011

For some unjustified reason, Nintendo have an image problem when it comes to their machines’ graphical capabilities. Granted, its handheld consoles have often been trumped in the horsepower department by competing products (think DS vs. PSP) and the Wii was a generational gap behind the 360 and PS3, but before Nintendo employed this new strategy, its consoles were always very competitive in terms of graphical fidelity.

The GameCube boasted arguably one of the most efficient architectures ever found in a console – its power surpassed that of the PS2 and was pretty much on par with the Xbox, even outperforming it in some areas. Further to this, Nintendo were able to produce the Cube at a fraction of the cost of its competitors’ offerings while still fitting the whole thing into a much smaller shell and having a much lower operating temperature. The Nintendo 64 was an absolute powerhouse compared to the relatively modest PS1 hardware, but its success was ultimately dented by a lack of 3rd party support.

Despite this misnomer, it’s kind of understandable, based on the Wii, why many were expecting Nintendo to skimp out on the hardware again and simply compete with current gen offerings, and leaked specs, whilst a bit vague, seemed to suggest that the next console would again be a beefed up version of what’s already on the market.

However, IGN built their own custom rig using equivalent parts to those supposedly being used on the Project Café, and the implications are pretty exciting. The results themselves were fairly impressive; the rig could run Crysis 2 on ‘Very high’ at full 1080p at 60fps. This in itself is practically what a lot of people were expecting from the console, but the test was a little unfair. Whilst the test utilised 2GB of RAM as opposed to the rumoured 1GB in order to compensate for the taxing Windows 7 OS, it’s likely that a console with similar specs would perform better still than this test would suggest.

Here are the components:

• CPU: 3.2 GHz AMD Athlon II X3 with a custom Intel Triple-Core processor
• Graphics card: XFX Radeon HD 4850
• RAM: 2GB

IGN make a special and important note – “Nintendo’s system will be drastically different than ours, using custom-built processors, a streamlined OS and running optimised games.” While the rig did offer some improved textures, it’s likely that the console itself will be a pretty big leap above what the video shows due to this very fact.

Undoubtedly, the 720 will boast a few higher specs than the Café, but in the end it won’t account for much. The PS3’s Cell processor puts it quite a bit ahead of the 360 in terms of pure grunt, but it was never really utilised, except for in titles like Killzone 3 and Uncharted 2. To cut a long story short, the Café will be competitive. It will be able to run PS4/720 games without too much of a graphical hit, and, if it supports 1080p via HDMI, the differences will be negligible, unless everyone decides to go out and buy UHDTV sets in the next 3 years.

The difference between the Wii and the 360 was an ocean, the difference between the Café and the 720 will be more like a puddle. For Nintendo gamers especially, it’s looking set to be one of the biggest ever graphical leaps between consoles; the jump from Wii (a beefed up GameCube) to a console that’s reportedly 5 times more powerful than the 360 is going to feel more like a double generational leap.

This means that the Café will get very competitive versions of multiplatform games, such as Call of Duty, and, given Nintendo’s ability to squeeze the best out of their consoles, coupled with some of the best artists in the business, it means that we’ll be playing some of the most beautiful looking games ever burned to disc come 2012.

– Rory

RUMOUR – Nintendo to make ‘major announcement’ this week May 10, 2011

According to Games Maya, four of the industry’s big names will be holding retail meetings this week; Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft and Sony will apparently be accompanied by ‘leaks from attending retailers’, and, in the case of Nintendo, a ‘major announcement’. The dates are as follows:

• 5/11: Sony Computer Entertainment

• 5/12: Nintendo

• 5/13: Microsoft

• 5/13: Sega

Could we finally hear something concrete about Project Café in the weeks running up to E3?

Source – Games Maya via andriasang

– Rory

Nintendo confirms date and time of E3 Keynote May 9, 2011

The Nintendo Keynote date for E3 2011 has been announced, and rather unfortunately for my friend, it lands on his birthday. I’m sure he’ll understand. Nintendo will be delivering their 2011 press conference in the Nokia Theatre at 9am PST (That’s 5pm for us Brits) on Tuesday, 7th June, 2011.

The Japanese gaming giant is expected to show off a trove of 3DS and Wii titles, including Mario Kart 3DS, Super Mario 3DS, Animal Crossing 3DS and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. There are also rumblings of an official North American announcement of Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story. Throw in a brand new home console, and this year’s E3 is looking pretty damn tasty for Nintendo fans.

We will be liveblogging the event to the best of our abilities. Excuse me one moment.

Hello? Yes, is that front desk? Yeah, I’ve just had a foreboding vision in which I got mercilessly run over by a bus on the way to College on the morning of Tuesday, June 6th…

– Rory

Nintendesign – what will the next console look like? May 7, 2011

You don’t buy a console to look at it, but we all like our gadgets to look sexy. That’s why there’s been countless mockups of Nintendo’s new console hitting the internet over the weeks, and we’ve brought you the best of them. First, let’s take a look at the console.

Nintendo Beem

We’ve heard reports of the Café looking like a modern day SNES, and while this shares more in common with the NES, it at once captures that retro feel and retains some modernity, reflecting the sleekness of the Wii. This is a winner.

Nintendo Accel

Now, this looks rather familiar, doesn’t it? Combining the styles of the Wii with the suspiciously fake-looking Café SDK we saw floating around recently, it retains the connections for GameCube peripherals in line with those backwards compatibility rumours.

Nintendo Current

Looking like an afterthought for the Tron: Legacy film, the Nintendo Current is essentially a Wii with a bright orange strip pulsing around its shell. Not the most original design we’ve seen, but when the Wii is one of the most aesthetically pleasing consoles to date, why change it? A classic Nintendo lesson in ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

Unnamed Concept

Another one from the Tron scrapbook, this one is definitely the most unique of the designs. The question begs – what the hell is it?!

Console mockups are always interesting, but in the run up to E3, all the talk has been circling around the Café’s controller, and there’s been some impressive concepts knocked up to conceptualise what route Nintendo might be taking with it. Let’s take a look.

GameCube Mk. II

Probably the most traditional mockup so far is NeoGAF user Retro’s take on the Café controller. Essentially, it’s a GameCube controller with a 6 inch screen slapped in the middle. There are other minor ergonomic changes, though, such as the inverted handles which look like they’d make the pad a bit awkward to hold.

DS Doppelgänger 

The sleek stylings of this pad would surely please fans of the DS Lite’s look. With a full set of face buttons and dual analog sticks, it brings back all the functionality of the GameCube era. Parallel sticks are a personal peeve, though.

PSP Go Doppelgänger

Another NeoGAF submission here, this time from Fernando Rocker. Featuring a sliding design similar to the PSP Go’s, it boasts a huge screen but still leaves room for those all-important buttons. Again, the parallel sticks look like something that’d bother me, and I’d imagine this beast would be a bit top-heavy. It looks sleek as hell, though, and it’s the first one to feature a slide-away control pad.

A tablet I’d swallow

My personal favourite; it’s got everything I want from this controller – all the face buttons you could ask for, dual analogs in the right position, the classic D-Pad, speakers, a camera, the screen itself, a sleek, Apple-esque design, and, of course , some super-sexy LEDs. I’d buy this. This one deserves to be viewed full size, so click on it. Click on it now.

So there we have it, the best of the console designs we’ve seen so far.  I’m sure Nintendo’s designs will be completely different to anything anyone could have envisaged, but we’ll have to wait until E3 to find out. June 9th, please hurry

 – Rory

RUMOUR – Grand Theft Auto V to be announced at E3 2011? May 4, 2011

Grand Theft Auto – Fox News’ favourite game franchise – is one of the biggest in the gaming world. With over 120 million sales worldwide, most people have at least heard of Rockstar’s carnivalesque sandbox success, for one reason or another. Safe to say, it’s a pretty big deal. With that being said, Rockstar are almost guaranteed to be working on a sequel to 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV.

So, where best to announce one of the biggest games of the year? Why, at one of the biggest gaming expos of the year, of course – at E3 2011. Certainly, if GTAV were to be announced this year, it’d be at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles of June this year. That’s pretty much a given, but what evidence do we have, and what is the likelihood of seeing it there?

Well, let’s first look to the GTA series’ release timeline. Between what I would refer to as ‘main’ releases, – GTA, GTA 2, GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas and GTAIV –  discounting handheld titles or those which may be regarded as spin-offs, – Chinatown Wars, Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony – then releases in the GTA series seem to come once every three or four years. As mentioned previously, GTAIV launched in late 2008, so a release in 2012 would seem to be very much on the cards based on the history of the franchise, so that’s a good, if somewhat flimsy, indicator – if a 2012 release was at hand, a 2011 announcement seems natural.

Along with recent evidence, a Tweet from superannuation who claims to have inside contact with several gaming developers, suggests just that.

It is my understanding that the new GTA will be unveiled at E3 in some capacity.

Again, it sounds pretty flimsy, and it should definitely be taken with a (un)healthy dose of salt, but if this guy does have the links he claims, then it just might hold some weight. What’s most exciting for us at least, is this rumour when taken and combined with several others. Firstly, Nintendo are apparently recapturing the hardcore market with the Café and there’s arguably no better title to do that than Grand Theft Auto. Secondly, Rockstar were apparently one of the first developers to receive the Café dev kit. Thirdly, after the securing of Chinatown Wars, Nintendo were apparently strengthening relations with Rockstar.

The information on the second rumour comes from 01net, the site who sparked the whole Café speculation and seem to be largely well informed. Bold statements such as ‘hope to have it ready for launch’ also seem to make sense – the new console has a predicted launch of Q2 2012 and GTAV would nestle into that timeframe quite nicely.

GTAV at launch of the Wii HD would already put it a huge notch ahead of the 3DS’ in my eyes.

– Rory

Skyward Sword’s GDC trailer music holds a little surprise May 4, 2011

The Easter festivities may well be over, and the chocolate eggs all but devoured, but that hasn’t stopped Nintendo from extending their Lent loveliness for another couple of weeks; they’ve given us all another Easter Egg to feast on.

For us, The Legend of Zelda music always manages to strike home that buried sense of nostalgia with its beautiful arrangements and triumphant melodies. The Twilight Princess trailer music in particular pulled at the heartstrings, conjuring up long-buried memories of playing Ocarina of Time as a child. Skyward Sword’s GDC trailer music reminded me of that long-treasured game as well, but for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until now.

Kevin Cassidy of GoNintendo found time out in his busy blogging schedule and realised something astonishing; we’d all heard the music before. Played backwards, the trailer’s music sounds very familiar. I won’t ruin the surprise for you, but rest assured, it will send you skyward. Sorry.

– Rory