Nintendo Revelation Article

GameCube isn’t pulling its weight: Sales of the console have slowed to the point that Nintendo announced a brief manufacturing freeze to clear inventory. Meanwhile, Sony’s upcoming portable PSP poses the first real threat to Game Boy’s dominance in years.

At its recent strategy meeting, Nintendo outlined a road map for its uncertain future, including a few interesting announcements and some big news to come. According to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the company will unveil a new product “different from anything before,” which he hopes will not only change Nintendo’s direction, but also the slumping Japanese game industry as a whole.

Details of Nintendo’s next big thing are tightly under wraps—Iwata won’t even say if it’s hardware or software (or both). Nintendo’s aim, however, is to buck the trend toward more complicated, advanced, and hardcore games. Iwata reiterated his distrust of online gaming, claiming it’s too expensive and limits a game’s user base, and questioned Sony’s choice of a disc format for PSP, since that raises the device’s cost and complexity. Complexity is not what Nintendo is shooting for with its next major project. Instead, this new trump card is meant to appeal to a broad audience, beyond the comparatively small market of dedicated gamers.

While we wait patiently for more info, Nintendo has some unusual new GameCube titles to tide us over. The company has announced that Namco will produce a new Donkey Kong GameCube title. That revelation barely had time to sink in when Namco confirmed that the big ape would star in his own music game: Donkey Konga. Based on Namco’s Japanese drumming game Taiko no Tatsujin, Konga will use a special conga-drum peripheral for percussion-based rhythm action. It’s due out in Japan before the year’s end; no . release has been confirmed.

Other GameCube plans include the manic minigame collection Wario Ware Inc. A little further off is the sequel to Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, scheduled to arrive sometime before spring 2005.