Word: nintendo
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...Nintendo gave TIME the first look at its new controller--but before I pick it up, Miyamoto suggests that I remove my jacket. That turns out to be a good idea. The first game I try--Miyamoto walks me through it, which to a gamer is the rough equivalent of getting to trade bons mots with Jerry Seinfeld--is a Warioware title (Wario being Mario's shorter, fatter evil twin). It consists of dozens of manic five-second mini games in a row. They're geared to the Japanese gaming sensibility, which has a zany, cartoonish, game-show bent...
After Warioware, we play scenes from the upcoming Legend of Zelda title, Twilight Princess, a moody, dark (by Nintendo's Disneyesque standards) fantasy adventure. Now I'm Errol Flynn, sword fighting with the controller, then aiming a bow and arrow, then using it as a fishing rod, reeling in a stubborn virtual fish. The third game, and probably the most fun, is also the simplest: tennis. The controller becomes a racket, and I'm smacking forehands and stroking backhands. The sensors are fine enough that you can scoop under the ball to lob it, or slice it for spin...
John Schappert, a senior vice president at Electronic Arts, is overseeing a version of the venerable Madden football series for Nintendo's new hardware. He sees the controller from the auteur's perspective, as an opportunity but also a huge challenge. "Our engineers now have to decipher what the user is doing," he says. "'Is that a throw gesture? Is it a juke? A stiff arm?' Everyone knows how to make a throwing motion, but we all have our own unique way of throwing." But consider the upside: you're basically playing football in your living room. "To snap...
...course, hardware is only half the picture. The other half is the games themselves. "We created a task force internally at Nintendo," Iwata says, "whose objective was to come up with games that would attract people who don't play games." Last year they set out to design a game for the elderly. Amazingly, they succeeded. Brain Age is a set of electronic puzzles (including Sudoku) that purports to keep aging minds nimble. It was released for one of Nintendo's portable platforms, the Nintendo DS, last year. So far, it has sold 2 million copies, many of them...
...real demographic grail for any game publisher is, of course, girls. And although females have historically been largely impervious to the charms of video gaming, Nintendo has made inroads even there, with products so offbeat that they barely qualify as games at all. In Nintendogs, the object is to raise and train a cute puppy. Electroplankton can only be described as a game about farming tiny singing microbes (surely every woman's dream?). In Animal Crossing, you take up residence in a tiny cartoon town where you plant flowers and go fishing and design shirts. You can visit other players...