E3: Nintendoland Puzzles E3 Crowd

[Greg Tito]

E3: Nintendoland Puzzles E3 Crowd

Nintendo spent a lot of time explaining its new collection of minigames for the Wii U.

There was a lot of hope for what Nintendo would reveal for this year's E3 press conference. After announcing the Wii U in 2011, the bar was high for what games would appear on the new console to convince us to buy into a new generation early. The big concept President of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime tried to get across was "asymmetrical gameplay" between players using the Wii Remote and the Wii U gamepad. The flagship title to showcase this new kind of play was Nintendoland, a "digital theme park" as Reggie called it. To the rest of us, a game like Nintendoland is known as a collection of minigames similar to what the company has seen success with in Wii Sports and Mario Party, and Nintendo hopes it works as well.

According to Fils-Aime, Nintendoland is what you need to play to fully understand the dual screens and asymmetric gameplay provided by some players watching the TV and others the Wii U gamepad. "Play it, and you'll understand," he said.

To make very sure we understood, a pair of producers played a minigame in Nintendoland called "Luigi's Ghost Mansion" and explained what was going on the screens in detail. The players using the Wii remotes were human characters in a maze, and the controller would rumble when they got near the ghost but otherwise they had no way to detect it. The fifth player, using the gamepad, controlled the ghost and could sneak up behind the other players to take them out.

No release dates for Nintendoland or the Wii U were announced. There wasn't even a confirmation that Nintendoland would be the pack-in for the new console, but that would make a certain amount of sense given how Wii Sports sold seven bushels of Wiis.

The whole demonstration seemed a little involved for a E3 presentation, but I appreciated the designers actually talking about how the game played rather than the "Bang! Zoom!" showiness that permeates the rest of E3. Unfortunately for Nintendo, the reveal of Nintendoland was not a very good note to end their annual presentation, and the crowd left the Nokia theater in L.A. feeling underwhelmed.

See all our coverage directly from the E3 2012 show floor. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/conferences/e3-2012]

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[Mikael Johansson]

This was a huge disappointment. Sure pikmin, new sidescrolling mario and a few cool third party games but not a real classic huge nintendo title? With all the hype they themself put out, now its for the harcore gamers, we have learnd our lesson.
This was a remarkably failiure from nintendos side. No metroid, no zelda(yes we just had a zelda but they had a zelda showoff for wii-u last year so..).
I would have liked to see something like Xenoblade chronicles 2 and Last Story 2. That's what I thought they learned. They seem almost angry that xenblode did so well even. It also seems more like they see the casual like the hadcore now. But this we have known for a while, I just lost the last glimmer of hope I maneged to squeeze out of me..

 

[OldNewNewOld]

(this is just my opinion about the game)
I think that people don't get why Nintendo made/is making Nintendoland.

The game was never meant to be a hit, nor to be a game that you would be playing on a regular basis.
It was actually made to give other third party developer and gamer ideas of all the things you can do with the "asymmetrical gaming".

It's a game that is meant to be funny when played, but the main aspect is to show the technical part of the controller(s).

And that's why I think that the WiiU will be sold with the game. At least the first year or so.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

whatever, I walked away satisfied. Nintendoland is probably going to be much like Wii Sports; neat ideas that Nintendo pretty much HAS to tell developers since they obviously need to have their hands held.