Nintendo decided to hold a 2 day press conference to make some important announcements today, of course Nintendo of Japan had to show up the US division and hold a conference 12 hours before the American one. Well at least there was one thing good about waiting for 12 hours, we didn't have to sit through Miyamoto babbling on about Wii Music (does it even count as a real game?) for half of the event like the Japanese had to (casualties still being counted).



The biggest news from the event is clearly the new DS model, the DS-i (lolapple). First I'll stick the bad news out there, no game boy advanced cart slot, it was the only way Nintendo could make the DS-i smaller than a DS lite. The new model also comes with two .3 megapixel (640x480 resolution) cameras, one on the front of the screen and one on the case. You will be able to use the touch screen to edit your pictures, but its announced if their will be any games that take advantage of it, so as of now its basically a glorified game boy camera. Ok here's the thing that will really interest the people who actually want to play games on their handheld, the DS-i will feature an SD card slot. You can do things like play .ACC's (an audio file format) from this, or do more useful things like download games and save them onto SD cards through Nintendo's WIFI (which they are also buffing up, expect WIFI to be faster, WIFI shop, and an opera based web browser). We can only hope that SD cards bring a whole new range of home brew games (just picture something like Gang Garrison 2 on the DS) and applications. Unfortunately, due to the exceptional sales of the DS lite in the US, you won't be seeing this new DS till well into 2009 according to Reggie.

The main issue with the Wii has been its memory limit, which is now being fixed with a firmware update (thankfully they didn't go the USB hard drive route, because I just love buying more Nintendo products) allowing the Wii to take advantage of its SD card slot. A few unimportant Wii channel updates and that was about it for hardware.

Now to software releases, Nintendo may have focused on the casual gamer during E3, but they sure pulled out strong for the core gamers here. Things kicked off for the Wii with a preview of Punch Out!!, following along the lines of the old NES title of the same name. Conduit, a Wii exclusive FPS, will be released Q1 of 2009 with 16 person multiplayer (watch Nintendo require a friend code to shoot at people) capability looks pretty exciting with the Wii's controls. Sin and Punishment 2, a new Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, Rayman, Madworld, “Tales of” game, Harvest Moon, Endless Ocean 2, theres just way too much to talk about, you really should just watch this video.

The DS line up is even crazier. Here's some things you can expect sometime this year, Age of Empires, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Techmo Bowl, and Chrono Trigger (Frog owns), 4 huge titles ready for the holiday rush. The big announcement was the new Fire Emblem game, which will include WIFI play this time around, and a huge graphic up haul. Expect a new Mario and Luigi RPG and a new Pokemon Ranger game in addition to Pokemon Platinum which was already revealed, along with a whole slew a 3rd party games seen here (I see some Kingdom Hearts in there)

You can see the whole conference here, it's the Japanese one (in English) since I was unable to find a video of the Nintendo of America press release, so you get to experience all the joys of Wii Music (by joys I mean random button mashing and waving controllers around in chaotic fashion of course.) I'd suggest you get a friend and use the buddy system to try to get through the segment, for beyond it you shall find the sweet salvation of ownage 3rd party software previews. Good luck, you'll need it.