Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Yesterday, along with companies including Sega, Square Enix, Capcom, and Game Freak, Nintendo earned awards at the CESA Development Conference in game design (for the Super Mario series) and sound (for the the Zelda series). Shigeru Miyamoto was awarded his own CEDEC Special Prize. Miyamoto was in attendance to give a keynote anyway, and so he happened to be on hand to give an impromptu acceptance speech.

"Well... Tomorrow I'm going to talk for about an hour," Miyamoto said, "so today I didn't think I'd have a speech." In his brief speech, Miyamoto described his hope for the game industry to continue to grow so that "the number of the children who want to enter the industry multiplies." Presumably children with well-trained brains.

[Story and translation via Kotaku]

So, let's say someone just handed you the keys to a game design studio, and with it came a never-ending pile of cash, with which you could buy the rights to any characters or franchise. Hey, it's a fantasy scenario; we can't have road blocks like laws getting in the way here. So there you are, king of your own gaming castle. What do you direct the legions of programmers to work on?

We haven't talked much about this since the earliest box art pictures debuted, but now that you've had a chance to get used to them ... what do you think of the look of Wii boxes? Does the white line across the top and the simple logo do it for you? How about the white boxes? Do you feel that the look suits the system? How does it compare to similar GameCube boxes? What about to the box art designs for the other latest consoles?

We enjoyed reading your ideas last time, so we thought we'd have another brainstorming session. Let's hear your pitches for possible Wii games. Get creative, and see if you can come up with something totally new! The only rule is that it has to be completely awesome, or not.

Frantic sets of microgames have been the standard of every entry in the WarioWare series, forcing gamers to assess and complete outlandish objectives at a frightening pace. While each title has its own "gimmick" with its microgames (e.g. Twisted!'s motion sensor), WarioWare Touched! and WarioWare: Smooth Moves have the responsibility of proving the newly-launched systems they debuted on. Working with these quick bursts of gameplay, these two games promote how the features of the DS and Wii can be taken advantage of, providing hundreds of examples in an enjoyable, playable format.

The New Gamer has an editorial on the steps Smooth Moves takes to successfully advertise the Wii remote's capabilities. Each five-second game manages to quickly retrain us on how we're interacting with the controller and what's on our screens, using condensed levels of popular games, memorable stances, and familiar situations for these brief vignettes. Because of these design decisions, adapting to the 100+ microgames ends up being more fun than intimidating, vindicating the Wii remote with each satisfying bite of gameplay.

We like the white. It's classy, Apple-like, and pleasing to the eyes. Still, many fans were quite perturbed at the lack of color options at launch, and without varying color schemes for at least the Wiimotes, it can become difficult to differentiate consoles and controllers if you ever get some friends over with their own controllers.

We know you cheated by reading the headline, so yes, there are fancy skins available for your Wii! (For the portably minded, they also have quite a few DS Lite skins.) There are currently 99 designs available, made of a thin material designed to cover as much of the console as possible. Moreover, for a few extra bucks (the console skin itself costs $14.99), you can get matching skins for your Wiimotes and nunchucks. Awesome? We think so.

Also, after contacting the company, we've learned that they plan to open up the floor to custom designs sometime in December. So you can, you know, put a picture of your hot girlfriend on the Wii, or something. Whatever.