Earlier this morning we reported that Nintendo had just announced huge profits, taking in $1 billion in the first quarter of 2008. This led to some reader comments saying that maybe they could spend some of this money catering to the "forgotten hardcore" gamers.
I have to be honest, I'm getting a bit tired of this. I'm as hardcore a gamer as you'll find (I bought a Famicom and Famicom Disk System when I was in Japan just so I could play the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2 the way it was supposed to be played), and I can't really see where I'm being ignored.
The problem is that a large percentage of today's gamers have very selective and short memories. The media's focus on the likes of Wii Fit and Wii Sports have led people to come to the narrow-minded conclusion that this is the only sort of stuff Nintendo is interested in working on now, and the fact that only Wii Sports Resort and Wii Music were shown at E3 did nothing to help this belief.
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The problem is that people these days are too impatient. They're too busy looking forward and worrying to look back and realise that Nintendo hasn't been ignoring the hardcore gamer and hasn't been abandoning its popular franchises. In the past two years we've had the following:
A new 3D Mario game (Super Mario Galaxy) A new side-scrolling Mario game (New Super Mario Bros) A new Paper Mario game (Super Paper Mario) A new Mario Kart game (Mario Kart Wii) A new 3D Zelda game (Twilight Princess) A new handheld Zelda game (Phantom Hourglass) A new Metroid game (Metroid Prime 3) A new StarFox game (StarFox Command) A new Smash Bros game (Super Smash Bros Brawl) A new Pokémon game (Pokémon Diamond/Pearl) A Pokémon Ranger game, with another on the way A new Kirby game (Kirby Mouse Attack) A new Yoshi's Island (Yoshi's Island DS) A new Advance Wars (Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin) A new Fire Emblem (Radiant Dawn) Two new Mario sports games (Mario Strikers Charged Football, Mario Slam Basketball)
How about what's on the way? Well, we know thanks to Miyamoto interviews that there's a new Mario game coming and a new Zelda game. We know Pikmin's on its way, we know Kirby Super Star Ultra's coming to the DS soon. We know about the new Animal Crossing game, and we know that Mario Super Sluggers is a couple of months away. We know that Wario Land: The Shake Dimension will be here in September and looks set to offer proper old-school platforming action.
And most importantly, we know that Satoru Iwata said a few months ago that Nintendo were going to start only announcing games when they're almost ready to be released (Wario Land being a perfect example of this). All I'm saying is this: just because only two "big" games were shown at E3 doesn't mean there's nothing on the way.
What do you think? Are you one of the "doom and gloom" types, or are you willing to trust that Nintendo has some "hardcore" games in the pipeline?
