I plan on writing about my impressions of the conference (and the city) once I get through all of my Joystiq coverage. Funny, I thought that would’ve happened by now.
You can find everything I wrote/am writing for the conference here. It’s not a lot, but it feels like a lot.
Yum, yum, blogging by Bonnie on Flickr (even though I took the picture).
Bonnie and I are headed to Montreal, in part to attend the Montreal International Game Summit, and in part just to be in Montreal. I’m very, very excited.
I’ll be covering the event for Joystiq, and my coverage should start appearing on their site on Wednesday. There may be interviews with cool people, there may not be. It’s still a little up in the air at the moment, but whatever happens, happens.
I’m also just excited to be at the conference for myself, independent of Joystiq. I finally get to put my pretty new business cards to use, and hopefully meet some nice people with similar interests. We depart tomorrow morning, after we vote.
Kotaku’s Mark Wilson got a chance to go hands-on with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii. He played nine hours of the game, the first four of which he discusses on the site. But here’s the kicker: according to Mark, “Nintendo claims testers took 70 hours to play through the game the first time.”
Jeezy frickin’ creezy. I suppose this is a good thing for the more “hardcore” gaming audience, but not for me. I was growing mad impatient by the thirtieth hour of Okami. There’s a chance it could be different with Zelda, but the game had better be consistent in terms of its quality, and not stretched out like taffy like some other wolf-based game I know…
Funny that this never occurred to me before, but I’m beginning to wonder if Nintendo’s last big secret regarding the Nintendo Wii has to do with the system’s connectivity with the portable DS.
They’ve been rather tight-lipped about Wii-DS connectivity from the start, which has been surprising considering we’ve all just figured the DS could function as a wireless controller, with extra screens for making hidden moves, or just simply to add real estate for menus, maps and such.
But what if there’s something else?
When used in a “point-and-click” fashion, the Wii and Wii remote resemble a DS and its stylus in terms of their functionality. In fact, games like Trauma Center: Second Opinion are DS control schemes mapped onto the Wii’s unique interface. If the DS can communicate wirelessly with the Wii, who’s to say that the DS can’t be used to control on-screen cursors in Wii games?
It’s most obvious in Trauma Center, but there’s another game which could benefit from this specific kind of connectivity — The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
In Zelda, the fairy cursor is used to lock onto enemies, as well as direct Link’s focus and aim his arrow. What if these movements were moved to the DS? Is it possible that Zelda could become a two-person game, with a DS-equipped second-player acting as the on-screen fairy?
What other games could benefit from this sort of DS-to-Wii functionality?
» Nintendo Wii by Hachimaki on Flickr. Thanks!