The announcement of Nintendo’s DSi XL handheld got a lot of attention today. But the games that the Japanese company talked about are equally as important to its plan to continue its domination of the video game market in the first half of 2010. Here’s some hands-on impressions of the up-close-and-personal demonstrations I saw today of the upcoming games.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii
It’s been a long wait since Super Mario Galaxy debuted on the Wii in the fall of 2007. This game is well worth the wait and is looking very polished. It stars the same goofy Mario character, flying through outer space in a three-dimensional platform game. You visit planets that a super-sized Mario can walk around in 3-D in the course of a few seconds. I tried out a couple of levels today and the adorable fun just never stops. One of the bright new additions is a simple drill. You drop it into the ground and it drills a hole through the planet and lets you emerge on the other side. It’s quite useful in scaling tall towers or getting away from enemies.
Another good addition is Yoshi, Mario’s pet dinosaur that you can ride. Mario sits atop Yoshi and gets to zoom through levels after Yoshi eats a hot pepper. That lets Mario jet up giant walls or loops. You can land on power-ups that turn Yoshi into a big air bag that rises into the air and slowly loses its air, allowing you to fly from one place to another. I don’t know who thinks up this stuff, but it’s so zany. And it will make for hours of fun. This game is sure to be one of Nintendo’s blockbusters for the year. The only disappointment is that it’s a single player game; my family got used to playing four at a time with the debut of the New Super Mario Bros. game last fall. This game comes out on May 23.
Metroid Other M for the Wii
On some levels, this game is a disappointment. It’s a shooting game, but as a standard definition game with somewhat limited 3-D graphics, it can’t hold a candle to a lot of shooting games on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. It’s not particularly easy to control, using a Wiimote with a Wii Motion Plus attachment.
On the other hand, the game has a lot of emotion to its story. Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Nintendo of America, said that the emotional hooks built into the introductory videos in the game could bring in a broader audience beyond the pure hardcore Metroid fans. She thought that more female gamers might be drawn to it in particular. That could be a stretch. But her argument made sense. I watched through the opening videos. There were a lot of plot developments to follow, since the game really starts mid-story with Samus, the hero, asking herself, “Why am I still alive?” She talks about destroying Mother Brain, space pirates and the Planet Zebes — and a baby. Then she wakes up, goes through some basic training, gets in a spaceship and runs into a crew of Galactic Federation soldiers, which apparently includes an old flame of hers.
The game is a sequel to Super Metroid, also known as Metroid 3, which was released back in 1994. It was released again as a downloadable WiiWare title in 2007. As such, it reaches deeper into the past of Samus, the bounty hunter.
Metroid Other M combines several kinds of game play. Some of it is more like a two-dimensional side-scrolling shooting game, where you fire Samus’ arm cannon. That mode is the easiest when it comes to shooting. You automatically target the enemies that flood onto the screen and press the 1 button while holding the Wii Remote sideways. Then you can switch to a stationary first-person mode, where you point the Wii Remote at the screen and move it sideways or up and down. You hold the B button to turn your facing. To shoot a missile at an enemy, you hold down the A button and then let go. It takes getting used to, and it’s not as easy to target things. You fight cooperatively with the other soldiers in a boss battle. You fire missiles at a big purple beast while they shoot it with “freeze guns.” It’s fast and furious, but not as fun as other kinds of shooters that you play with traditional controllers. Nintendo still hasn’t quite figured out how to do good first-person shooters with the Nintendo Wii Remote. It takes time getting used to the game play modes, but I suppose it’s fun once you have mastered the different styles. This game comes out on June 27.
Sin & Punishment Star Successor
A follow-up to a WiiWare game, this title was a more pleasant surprise. It is non-stop shooter action, but in the style of the Nintendo Wii. I played it with the Wii Motion Plus. But to shoot, you don’t have to constantly mash a button. Rather, you simply hold down the B trigger button on the Wii remote. Then you spray out a steady stream of fire at your enemies, which come to you by the thousands. You never run out of ammo, so your best bet is to constantly shoot at whatever is ahead of you. I would put this in the category of a casual shooter because it’s much less complicated to play than Metroid Other M. It moves faster, but it might get boring as well. This game comes out in the summer.
Monster Hunter Tri
A franchise popular in Japan, this game has sold more than 11 million copies. But I didn’t care for it. It was hard to control, even with the traditional game controller that is a substitute for the Wii Remote. The dinosaur graphics are quite primitive on the Wii, and the perspective gets messed up quite easily when you’re in close combat with a dinosaur, trying to kill it with a sword. I kept thinking that it’s truly time for Nintendo to launch a new game console for high-definition graphics fans. This game debuts on April 20.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by some of Nintendo’s smaller games. I thought that FlingSmash was a cute title. You basically take a ball and fling it back and forth as you swing the Wii Remote from left to right. You try to fling the ball to smash bricks and other obstacles that lie in your way as you scroll from side to side. It’s a lot like pinball, with the ball bouncing in unpredictable directions. The balls have little faces with bright smiles, so it fits Nintendo’s style of being cute for kids. It is creative, but I’m not sure how long it can hold your attention. It will launch on the Wii this summer.
The WiiWare titles, which are downloaded to the Wii via the web, had some stand-outs. The Art Style: Light Trax and Art Style: Rotozoa games looked like fun. In these games, you use the Wii Remote to control artsy images. In Light Trax, you take charge of a white beam of light as it races against other colorful beams across a dark track. In Rotozoa, you play a tiny organism, like you do in EA’s Spore, trying to take on other microorganisms.
There are lots of cool DSi games coming soon, including a couple of Pokemon titles, Picross 3D, and a bunch of other cutesy stuff. Photo Dojo, a downloadable DSiWare game, lets yo take a picture of yourself with the device’s 
camera. Then you can incorporate it into the game as your avatar. The game can take as many as 13 pictures in various kinds of poses. You can also record your voice with 10 different sound effects. Then your avatar is inserted into a dojo fighting arena, where you can take on your friends in a two-person match. When you fight, the sound effects play accordingly. If you get punched, for instance, your character can utter your own words like, “Don’t hurt me.” It looks like it’s good for a lot of laughs, but the images are not cropped so well, so they look pretty fake on the screen.
Is this enough to make for a great year for Nintendo? Not quite. Microsoft has some eye-popping titles like Alan Wake and Halo: Reach coming, while Sony has God of War III and Heavy Rain. These games could be far more entertaining for hardcore gamers. At least, with Metroid Other M, Nintendo is trying to satisfy that audience. The questions is whether these more casual and cutesy games are going to satisfy the broader mass market consumers that Nintendo has so adeptly won over in the past few years. It is absolutely critical for Nintendo to grow its overall sales this year if the game industry itself is to grow. I suspect that it has the titles to make that happen. But the lineup could have been better.
I have to admit that these upcoming releases do look better than what Nintendo had in the first half of 2009. But we’ve come to expect more from the company. Its top marketer, Cammie Dunaway, said in an interview that Nintendo will show off more new titles at the E3 trade show in June. This could include the debut of the Nintendo Heart Monitor that the company showed off at E3 a year ago, as well as the next iteration of the Zelda franchise. These efforts are probably the biggest productions underway at Nintendo, and they will make or break its fortunes this year.
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