Leipzig: Nintendo Conference – Full Rundown

No. Before we start, we’ll not keep you waiting with some pointless filler text. They didn’t announce the final price or the release date of the Wii, and yes, we are gutted. It looks likely that we are going to have to wait until next month’s Tokyo Game Show for the news that everyone’s chomping at the bit for.

There were some interesting announcements made though, so more of those below, whilst SPOnG’s team on the ground out in Germany heads over to the Microsoft conference (more later from that).

Sitting dejectedly on the floor at the packed, chaotic conference over on Nintendo’s stand was an inauspicious start for SPOnG’s man on the ground, as he joined the rest of the media hordes (whores?) who had gathered, mostly in hope of the major Wii announcements many were expecting.

The presentation was given in German by Nintendo’s German MD Bernd Fakesch and translated into English via special 'Nintendo Translata-tron' headsets, and after SPOnG soon realizsed a Wii price/release announcement was not on the cards, we started instead to pay attention to what they actually were telling us, which turned out to be news of two rather cheeky little new Wii games and a pink DS for Europe this Christmas.

Fakesch rolled out the always-expected but admittedly impressive sales stats, noting that Nintendo now has over 5 million DS owners across Europe, and that females make up 44% of all Nintendo DS owners in Germany. He continued to ram home the key message, which we’ve heard countless times now; that with Touch! Generations, Nintendo is demonstrably appealing to and winning over both traditional gamers and non-gamers.

German quiz show host Joerg Pilawa was wheeled on to give a testimonial about the amazing-ness of the DS. If you are not aware, Pilawa is the German equivalent of the UK’s Chris Tarrant (he hosts the German equivalent of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’). At this point, SPOnG’s attention span snapped and we began eyeing up the ‘old-school’ dancing girls that had been wheeled on, purely for the purpose of bored journos like us to shamelessly ogle.

Anyways, snapping our tongue back into our mouth and wiping away the dribble, we began to scribble some more hasty notes about those new announcements, the Kuju-developed Battalion Wars II for Wii and Mario Strikers Charged (the Wii version of Mario Smash Football). German footballer Philipp Lahm gave a short video message introducing the latter, which seemed to raise a small amount of Teutonic excitement amongst the natives in the press throng. And as for Battalion Wars II, we remember mainly that Nintendo is very excited about the control mechanism.

Oh, and Europe will get a pink DS Lite in October, so there’s something you can buy all the females in your family and circle of friends. Unless of course, they are lesbian feminist avengers, in which case they might take offence. Plus, it’s not as pink as the already-announced pink PS2 and PSP, not that we really care, but that was what we observed.

So all in all, an interesting couple of new Wii titles, which SPOnG will of course bring you more info and assets on as soon as we get them. And a pink variation on DS Lite. It was fairly low key and, dare we say it, disappointing.