Nintendo Japanese Fall Conference – PUNCH OUT!

Last night consisted of me running around the house, hollering, fist pumping, and scaring my dog. All of these things were put into motion because of Nintendo’s Japanese Fall Conference. In case you couldn’t tell from the post title, my dream has come true. Before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s look at the overall scope of the conference, and all of the announcements.

I’m not much of a ‘I told you so’ kind of person, but for the doubters, haters, and whiners that have done nothing but do those things since E3….Told You So. I’ve been saying “wait and see” ever since the end of E3.

I knew that Nintendo was smart enough to realize that E3 just isn’t “the” conference that it used to be. I think it was very business savvy for Nintendo to have their own conference to announce their huge news bombs. Ok, enough of my gloating, onto the news.

Nintendo Wii Hardware News

One of the huge problems that people have been voicing concerns on is hard drive space. It has been two years, and for the true hardcore audience that has meant a lot of downloading. With the Virtual Console, space wasn’t as major a factor because the files sizes weren’t insanely large. The WiiWare came along, and for anyone that downloaded LostWinds a huge red flag went up when you saw how much it shrunk your hard drive space.

Nintendo has mentioned briefly that they were aware of the concern, but no concrete ideas were given for a solution. At the fall conference in Japan, Iwata finally gave an answer, even it’s not the one that Wii owners were looking for. Downloadable titles will now be able to be installed straight to an SD card. This will undoubtedly help with the the run around of having to copy and paste games to the card, and then deleting the game from your system.

The Games

Nintendo delivered the goods with the ‘hard drive space’ issue, but did so even more with their game announcements. The announcement of one single game alone, was enough to make Nintendo’s Fall Japan Conference better than their E3 debacle.

Here’s a video showing off all the games that were presented at Nintendo’s Fall Japanese Conference. Most of the titles can’t be understood (unless you know Japanese), others have an English translation, or can be deciphered with previous knowledge of games.

List of Games in Video
Sin & Punishment 2
Punchout
Sonic & The Black Knight
Trace Memory Wii (pending title)
Lost Magic Wii (pending title)
Castlevania: Judgement
SNK vs. Capcom (I think, couldn’t tell from the language)
Fragile
Harvest Moon: Rune Factory Wii (pending title)
Wii Music
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Wii (pending title)

If you were able to find other games in the video I missed, please feel free to let me know.

The two games that instantly jumped out to me, was of course Punch Out!, and also the ??? vs. Capcom title. I’m assuming that it’s SNK vs. Capcom, but not entirely sure. If you rewatch the video a couple of times, the graphical style looks very similar to SFIV which will be coming out on the Xbox 360 and PS3. I hadn’t heard a whole lot about the game, except the rumors that a Street Fighter based game was coming to the Wii. But in that video, I saw something that looks pretty amazing.

On top of the Wii game announcements, Nintendo dropped another bit of news our way. They will be working on projects to take Gamecube games, and bring them over to the Wii. They were careful to let people know they won’t be ‘ports’. Instead they will take the game, and completely revamp the controls to make them playable on the Wii. The first two games that were mentioned; Pikmin & DK Jungle Beat are pretty safe choices.

So who else was able to check out coverage of the Nintendo Japan Conference? After seeing this, I can’t wait to see what Nintendo brings to the American version today, in San Francisco. Did you come off as impressed as I was. Or are you still waiting for your Kid Icarus announcement, ?