Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

In a special Electronic Entertainment Expo edition of its Nintendo Direct webcast today, the Japanese publisher announced two new entries in its over-the-top fighting series in which its many beloved mascots try to punch each other into the stratosphere: Super Smash Bros. Wii U and Super Smash Bros. 3DS.

The trailer showed off a number of familiar faces, including Mario, Samus, and Bowser, before introducing its first new combatants: an unnamed villager from Animal Crossing and the Blue Bomber himself, Mega Man. It looks like Mega Man will be able to use weapons stolen from Robot Masters throughout the Mega Man series, and one quick scene showed him facing off against the Yellow Devil boss from the original Mega Man game.

Meanwhile, the Animal Crossing villager can trap people in his butterfly net. It looked cooler than it sounds.

Nintendo later announced during an event at its E3 booth that the Wii Fit Trainer will also join the roster. OK, she’s no Blue Bomber, but … new characters and all that.

Both games are set for release in 2014, and we’ll have more information as it becomes available. Until then, check out the reveal, Mega Man, and Wii Fit Trainer trailers below:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

During its special Electronic Entertainment Expo edition of the Nintendo Direct webcast today, CEO Satoru Iwata took a moment to run through a few of the third-party games that will be coming to Wii U and 3DS.

In a quick montage trailer, Nintendo showed off Wii U versions of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut, Just Dance 2014, Rayman Legends, Scribblenauts Unmasked, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Sonic: Lost World, Watch Dogs, and Disney Infinity. Sprinkled throughout were the 3DS versions of Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, Scribblenauts Unmaked, Shin Megami Tensei IV, Skylanders Swap Force, and Sonic: Lost World.

Nintendo consoles have been infamously light on third-party support over the last few years, so hopefully this marks a welcome change of pace.

Most of the games have October release dates, and we’ll have more information as it becomes available. Check out the montage below:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Nintendo announced Mario Kart 8 during today’s special Nintendo Direct live stream during the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show.

“We have implemented antigravity throughout the courses” said Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata. This enables players to drive along walls and upside down through the environment using hover wheels. Karts also have gliders and can race underwater, as in Mario Kart 7 for the 3DS. Iwata says that Nintendo is adding more multiplayer modes for this Mario Kart than ever before.

We even saw one course that had a green cable car.

Mario Kart 8 launches spring 2014 for Nintendo’s Wii U console.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

During its special Electronic Entertainment Expo edition of Nintendo Direct this morning, Nintendo announced that it is giving a certain fat little plumber another 3D platformer, and this time it’s on the Wii U.

Super Mario 3D World will let you play in co-op as Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad, each one with character-specific abilities. Nintendo also showed off a new Cat Suit that Mario can use to climb on walls (and look adorable in). The characters can hover while jumping, and Toad can run faster. We also saw that one player can throw another — in some ways, we see callbacks to the original Super Mario 2 on NES.

Super Mario 3D World will be available for the Wii U in December, and we’ll have more information as it comes available.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

“Our overall growth in billings was 68%,” Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro told me last week. “That’s while our competitors were somewhere between flat and negative growth.”

Shapiro’s talking about videoconferencing pioneers Cisco and PolyCom. He’s talking about Innovator’s Dilemma-style growth. And he’s talking about $17 million in new funding the company is announcing this morning to expand even faster, building its total venture capital raised to $116 million.

Vidyo, the company that supplies the technology for Google’s Google+ Hangouts and Nintendo Wii’s videoconferencing, is disrupting the fast-growing video communications world on at least three levels, Shapiro said.

One is technology: moving from the big, expensive telepresence rooms to simple, cheap, built-in components. Another is moving from on-premises solutions to the cloud, and the third is Vidyo’s business model: revshare partnerships with carriers and other partners, like NTT Telecommunications in Japan, Google, and 24 other new telecom partnerships inked recently.

The technology transitions are key, the company says.

“PolyCom and Microsoft say they’re doing it, but not well,” Shapiro states. “We are by far the leader here.”

And his model, he says, is also much more competitive than innovative upstarts like Blue Jeans Network, because he’s betting on a lower price point and higher numbers. Blue Jeans Network, which offers in-browser video conferencing that connects to legacy systems as well as integrations with partners like Salesforce, charges $.30 per minute per leg of the call, Shapiro said, meaning that a five-person one-hour call on Blue Jeans costs as much as an all-inclusive, unlimited $30-a-month subscription to Vidyo.

“I believe the price point is just starting to erode,” Shapiro says.

Which is why Vidyo’s sales model is partners, who then leverage the power of their own networks for Vidyo and grow its sales without Vidyo having to maintain a large sales staff. The strategy seems to be working: Vidyo partners like Arizona State University, which is using Vidyo on its Internet2 deployment, are increasing their usage of videoconferencing by an average 18 percent per quarter. And CERN, the European science facility with the world’s largest particle collider, uses Vidyo so intensively Shapiro told me it has 15X Blue Jeans call volume alone.

“We want to price equivalent to a voice call,” Shapiro says. “Our competitors offer an inferior product for more money: Blue Jeans 15 time more, and other competitors 300 times more.”

I’m sure his competitors would have something to say about that, and it’s certainly the case that Blue Jeans and others offer features that Vidyo does not. But with $17 million new cash in his pockets, Shapiro is focused on the future.

“Things are going great, but we always find ourselves working on many things,” he said. “We want to make sure we have the resources to take advantage of the opportunities we see … it’s almost a land grab in the industry.”

The $17 million is almost all from existing investors, including in some cases general partners’ own money. Two-thirds of it is from Triangle Peak Partners. With the new cash, Vidyo will grow headcount from 285 to about 320, CFO David Kaminsky said.

photo credit: courosa via photopin cc

Every few weeks, Nintendo digs out enough downloadable content from its virtual warehouse to put something new on all four of its online-enabled systems. Of course, that usually means something cool for the 3DS and Wii U and something weird/dumb/boring for the Wii and DSi, but not this week! Yes, for the first time (and let’s be honest, probably last time), one of the more high-profile releases is for WiiWare, but you can still find the usual cool stuff on the Wii U and 3DS and a game with a weird title on the DSi. So not everything is different.

First up is the Wii U, which gets full and demo versions of Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, the sequel to autoscrolling platformer Bit.Trip Runner. Like the rest of the Bit.Trip series from developer Gaijin Games, Runner 2 boasts a hip techno soundtrack timed with your actions that makes it feel more like a rhythm game than a straight platformer.

History has shown us that, prior to 2010′s Lords of Shadow at least, the 2D side-scrolling Castlevania games are usually the only ones worth paying attention to. Will Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate carry on that legacy? You can find out for yourself today in its new demo, or next Tuesday (March 5) when the full title is available on stores and on the eShop.

If whipping vampires to death isn’t your thing, you can get a pair of new eShop games: Coaster Creator 3D, which lets you design and enjoy your own thrill rides, and Mahjong Mysteries: Ancient Athena, a mahjong game. Also, two-screen action title Fractured Soul is on sale for $7.99 (down from $11.99), and this week is your last chance to download the Champions of Yore 1 DLC for Fire Emblem: Awakening. So, get on that.

Thankfully, the much-hyped (by me) new Wii release is not a Virtual Console port of a game you forgot about 10 years ago, but it is a WiiWare port of a game you might have played a few months ago: Retro City Rampage. The faux 8-bit Grand Theft Auto-style shooter is essentially “References To Things You Like: The Game,” and the WiiWare version includes the new ROM City Rampage mode, which envisions how it would work if played on a Nintendo Entertainment System. For now, ROM City Rampage is exclusive to the Wii and PC versions, so you can hold that over anyone who bought it on Xbox 360, PS3, or Vita.

Finally, on the DSi, Easter Eggztravaganza takes hidden-object and spot-the-difference games to their logical conclusion with an actual Easter egg hunt. It’s not the same as the real thing, but at $4.99, it is certainly cheaper.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nintendo has gone demo-crazy this week as the company is devoting almost half of its weekly eShop update to letting you try things out before you buy them.

First up is the Wii U, which is getting demos of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and Trine 2: Director’s Cut. Both are available now in addition to a classic Super Nintendo racing game that is way better than Mario Kart (despite what everyone I’ve ever met thinks): F-Zero. As you may recall, Nintendo announced last month that Captain Falcon’s debut would be part of the company’s anniversary celebration. That means for 30 days (starting yesterday), you can download F-Zero for only 30 cents and play it offscreen with the Wii U’s tablet controller.

Not to be outdone by its big brother, the 3DS is also getting a demo of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate this week, along with a demo of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, both of which are downloadable now. Also, if you’re jealous of the Wii U’s Nintendo classic this week, the 3DS eShop has something for you as well: the slightly less fondly remembered Nintendo Entertainment System puzzler Yoshi.

Fans of very descriptive titles can check out Viking Invasion 2: Tower Defense, which is a tower-defense game about invading vikings, while those of you looking to scratch your first-person-dungeon-crawler itch can download Picdun 2: Witch’s Curse. Of course, you could also wait until Sunday, which is when the full version of Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan comes to the 3DS eShop.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nintendo may not be planning on cutting the Wii U’s price anytime soon, but if it wants to get more crazy tablet controllers into people’s homes it’ll have to do it by continuing to support the system with extremely exciting eShop updates. Of course, the more exciting updates are almost always on the 3DS, but at least the Wii U is getting some new content this week.

The main addition to the Wii U’s eShop this week is liquid-based puzzle game Puddle (previously available on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Vita, and PC), which comes with some new enhancements specific to the console’s touchscreen capabilities. You can also get a demo version of Double Fine and Ron Gilbert’s newest adventure title, The Cave, the full version of which came out last week.

As stated above, the end of January (and beginning of February) are a bit more exciting on Nintendo’s latest handheld. Starting today, the 3DS eShop gets a port of Ikachan (a formerly PC-exclusive underwater action game from the creator of Cave Story), Ice Climbers (the NES classic that you only remember because its characters are in Smash Bros.), and two more full retail games: Witch’s Cat and Bloody Vampire, the latter of which is a platformer with role-playing game elements about someone who is half-human and half-vampire, so it’s basically Symphony of the Night. Basically.

“But enough talk. Have at you!”

Also, Sparkle Snapshots 3D gets a pair of DLC packs that might interest you more than you think, so don’t just ignore this paragraph because you’re “too cool” for Sparkle Snapshots 3D. Both sets, “Mario Core” and “Mario Kart 7,” allow you to pretty up your 3DS photos with Mario decorations, which is cool. So there.

The final 3DS update is surely the one that most people are excited about, even if they’ll have to wait a few extra days for it: Fire Emblem: Awakening, which GamesBeat’s own Mike Minotti referred to as “one of the best games Nintendo’s released for the 3DS yet” in his review. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait until Monday before you can download it from the eShop.

On the DSi, the only new thing for its stalwarts to download this week is 99 Moves, a game in which you must escape areas using only, you guessed it, 99 moves. It boasts “incredible enemy patterns” on Nintendo’s official site, so that’s something.

Wrapping things up is the original Wii, which gets one measly Virtual Console title: Metal Slug 4.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nintendo completely forgot about some of its systems in last week’s eShop update, so today it’s going to make it up to each and every Wii U owner with a small amount of new stuff. You can also get another full 3DS title and a Virtual Console game for the Wii, so it’s a good week for everybody. Sort of. You’ll see.

First up is the Wii U, which does get two additions to its digital download service: a pair of demos, one for ZombiU and one for NBA 2K13. For those who aren’t familiar, the former tasks you with navigating a zombie-infested London and features permanent character deaths, and the latter is a basketball game that constantly promotes the fact that rapper Jay-Z was an executive producer on it. As Nintendo adds more demos to the Wii U eShop, maybe someday it will decide to actually make them easier to find.

The big update for the 3DS is another full retail game: Hello Kitty Picnic with Sanrio Friends. If you’ve been thinking about picking that one up and want to avoid the judging eyes of a GameStop clerk, now’s your chance to have some minigame fun with Keroppi and Badtz-Maru like you’ve always wanted. If you have no heart and don’t like Hello Kitty, maybe this week’s 3DS eShop offerings are for you: Reel Fishing Paradise 3D Mini, Wild Adventures: Ultimate Deer Hunt 3D, and 101 DinoPets 3D. The first two are self-explanatory, but the third one is about dressing dinosaurs up in hats and is “more fun than a puppy,” according to Nintendo.

Seriously, of all the fake names to pick… .

As usual, the weirdest update of the week comes from the DSi. Its only new piece of downloadable content is an app called Biorhythm that somehow tracks your physical, intellectual, and emotional “cycles.” It sounds like the dream that the Nintendo Vitality Sensor still lives on as we all hoped it would.

Finally, another old 2D fighter comes to the original Wii’s Virtual Console, and for once, it wasn’t developed by SNK (though that studio did work on it, so it’s basically the same thing): World Heroes 2, which features characters based on various historical figures like Captain Kidd and … a football player. It was the ’90s — that’s what video games were like.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nintendo is all about dual screens in this week’s eShop update, and specifically the ones attached to the 3DS and DSi. Technically, the Wii U also uses two screens, but it doesn’t get any new content this week, so I don’t care about it.

The biggest additions to the 3DS’ eShop are dungeon-crawler Unchained Blades and the full retail version of role-playing game-flavored beat-em-up Code of Princess. You can also check out Gunman Clive, a side-scrolling shooter set in the year 18XX (maybe it’s a Mega Man prequel?), and Air Battle Hockey 3D, which is a fancier version of those first-person Pong Flash games.

You can also watch a Best of 2012 collection on Nintendo Video, which features fan-favorite clips from the service’s comedy and music offerings. My personal pick? That Skrillex video from last month. Wub wub.

Moving on to the DSi, it gets a pair of new titles as well: Snowboard Xtreme, a game that will teach you how to “use the snowboard,” according to the official site, and Galaxy Saver, which is not a chain of discount grocery stores but a Space Invaders-style shooter that lets you team up with a friend to kill waves of incoming aliens.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Nintendo doesn’t have very many exciting surprises in its eShop updates for this week, but you can at least find something new for all four of its online-enabled systems. Yes, even the Wii!

First up is the 3DS, which, as usual, receives the bulk of the new content. Starting today, you can download full versions of Mario Tennis Open, Pilotwings Resort, Pokémon Rumble Blast, and Bit.Trip Saga. With those five additions, the amount of 3DS games you actually have to buy in a store drops even further, which is good news if you’re reading this in the Midwest, because you’re probably buried under a mountain of snow right now and may never be able to leave your house again.

Two more DLC packs come to New Super Mario Bros. 2 this week as well: The “Mystery Adventures Pack,” which sends you through a series of courses filled with hidden secrets, and the “Impossible Pack,” which claims to have the “highest difficulty ever.”

If you prefer your 3DS games more bite-sized, you can get a handful of eShop titles this week as well, including the Game Boy classic Wario Land 2, the formerly WiiWare-exclusive EscapeVektor, pixel art puzzler Pix3D, horse simulator Riding Stables 3D: Rivals In The Saddle (which is an awesome name), and a demo version of 2 Fast 4 Gnomz.

Moving on to the Wii U, its only new additions this week are full downloadable versions of the recently released Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune games, both of which are based on extremely successful and long-running shows that encourage you to yell at your TV about stupid people.

As for the DSi, it gets a holiday-themed spin on a popular slicing series with Cake Ninja: XMAS, strategy game Castle Conquerers: Heroes 2, and Anonymous Notes Chapter 3: From the Abyss. Despite that name, it’s actually not some kind of Nietzschean sexting application, but a “real action RPG with preeminent exhilaration set inside an infinitely-extending dungeon” (at least according to Nintendo), which is slightly more descriptive.

Finally, the Wii gets full and demo versions of Vampire Crystals, an isometric zombie-shooter that supports four-player co-op and looks pretty crazy based on the trailers at its official page.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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YouTube announced this morning that its app is now available on the Nintendo Wii U. This is obviously a big deal for Nintendo, which is trying to own the living room entertainment experience, as the app is not just available for free download — it’s featured right on the Wii U’s main menu.

Users can use the soft keyboard on the Wii U’s GamePad, which also doubles as a remote control for your standard TV content, to search for videos:

Videos will play on your big-screen TV in full high-definition at up to 1080P resolution, and while the video plays on your TV, the video details, description, and author data display on the GamePad. Naturally, since you’re signed in to your Google account, you’ll also have access to your channels, favorites, and history.

Whether this will help Nintendo in its attempt to make the Wii U the center of the living room entertainment experience is hard to say, but it is at least a statement that the company is here to play. With standard TV, online video, video conferencing, gaming, and more, the statement is getting bigger and bigger.

But the competition is fierce and has been there for a while.

Good luck!

photo credit: wiiu-spiele.com via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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According to a new poll by Nielsen, kids just want iDevices … and a Wii U. Half want an iPad, and roughly a third of all kids also want an iPod Touch, iPad Mini, or an iPhone under the tree. Almost 40 percent also want a new Nintendo Wii U, and 31 percent want a Kinect for the Xbox 360 they got last year.

Source: Nielsen

Toys kids 6-12 want most

Of course, some kids still absolutely need an Xbox 360 or a Sony PlayStation 3: almost a quarter of all kids want one of the major console games this winter. And another 29 percent want a non-Apple tablet to waste Christmas break on.

Older kids, however, have somewhat different tastes. Or they’ve learned to control their burning desire for new techie toys to a degree.

Electronics still top the list, but for kids aged 13 and older, only 21 percent want an iPad, with a computer coming in at second place with 19 percent of the vote. A non-Apple tablet is proportionately much more in demand with teens: 18 percent want an Android or other type of tablet – just three percent fewer those who want an iPad.

Microsoft Surface, alas, languishes in the hearts and minds of  just 3 percent of teens — although six percent of kids age 6-12 want Microsoft’s new tablet.

Source: Nielsen

What teens want most …

The question now is whether what kids want will translate into the products parents buy.

Somehow — speaking as a parent — it usually does.

photo credit: ze_bear via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Nintendo Wii U video game console is now hitting homes everywhere gamers who must have the newest new thing out — and it’s coming with high quality video-conferencing technology built-in. That technology, I learned last week, is actually the basis for a content delivery platform that its provider thinks is a billion-dollar opportunity.

Until now, it’s been a mystery who was providing the video-conferencing technology in the Wii U. It turns out that Vidyo, the same company that powers Google Hangouts, helped Nintendo deliver living-room teleconferencing.

Vidyo is “disrupting” business-to-business video conferencing with a fairly radical price point — free — and is now looking to expand its reach in business-to-consumer, via the living room.

“We’re trying to bring video-conferencing to the world,” Vidyo chief executive Ofer Shapiro told me last week. “We want to carry it to the masses.”

That’s not because Vidyo wants to display Skype for simple person-to-person video communication. Rather, it’s because it sees a whole new consumer platform based on simple, high-quality, living-room teleconferencing capability.

“Imagine the yoga teacher doing online yoga to 50 people,” Shapiro said. “Think about an audience of 100 million people … for instance buying a subscription for an online Zumba class.”

People have that capability now, Shapiro admits, on devices such as laptops, tablets, and netbooks. But when it’s in the living room, on the big screen, it’s different, he argues. Different enough to create a new way for content creators, teachers, coaches, speakers, and others find and build an audience for live video content.

“The big screen,” he told me,” is more social. You can move around … certain things are better in that environment. Also some people are still more fearful of computers — this reduces the barrier. It’s a market expansion.”

The first uses of Vidyo’s technology, of course, are the in-game experiences and the video chat built into Nintendo’s Miiverse. It’s a software-based solution that runs on Wii OS and does not require any special hardware, Vidyo’s senior VP Amnon Gavish, told me.

Gavish would not reveal the quality of the Wii U’s video-conferencing technology, saying only that it is “excellent, but not trying to have the same quality as a professional system.”

With this deal, Vidyo now has more than 25 partners including Google, NTT, Philips, and others who are bringing its technology to market. Most of those are revenue-share deals focuses on expanding the market for video-based conferencing. Now with Nintendo, Vidyo has a unique opportunity to hit the mainstream — and the living room — at the same time.

That all depends, however, on whether the Wii U is a market success or not.

Nintendo is probably hoping you’ll save your money for something else this week, but that hasn’t stopped it from putting a few more full 3DS games on the eShop.

First is Epic Mickey: The Power of Illusion. Unlike its co-op-enabled 3D platforming big brother on consoles, Power of Illusion is a 2D sidescroller inspired by Sega’s classic Castle of Illusion for Genesis. In keeping with the Epic Mickey franchise’s mechanic of using paint and thinner to create and destroy objects, you can use the 3DS’s touchscreen to draw items and help Mickey in his quest to defeat all of Walt Disney’s less popular characters.

The next title on the eShop this week is Hotel Transylvania, the tie-in for the recently released movie from renowned animator Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Star Wars: Clone Wars). According to Nintendo, Hotel Transylvania tasks you with helping a human make his way through “the scariest hotel on the planet” and features 18 different monsters and 1,400 hidden gem to discover. Now, considering its setting and that it’s a 2D platformer with a very familiar-looking map on the bottom screen, you might end up confusing this for another Dracula-based series. Unfortunately, I’m going to assume that this one doesn’t end with you defeating Adam Sandler’s true form and unlocking the secret upside-down Hotel Transylvania.

For any of you admiring all of the diplomas on your wall, you can download the Brain Age-style intelligence tester American Mensa Academy, the third full 3DS title new to the eShop this week. Mensa International is an organization for people who have a high IQ, so playing this game is probably a good way to prove how smart you are.

Of course, you could also do that by uncovering the decades-old secrets of a mysterious island in the classic PC adventure Myst, which is also on the eShop this week. The game features new 3D artwork and, according to Nintendo, is “more entertaining than the original.”

As for digital-only games, 3DS owners can check out Monster Shooter (which looks like a very accurate description), while DSi fans can buy platformer Jump Trials and a puzzler that features a frontrunner for the best title of the year, Working Dawgs: A-Maze-ing Pipes.

Finally, if you prefer to use your 3DS to watch videos, you and your family can gather around it on Friday for a new Thanksgiving episode of CollegeHumor’s Dinosaur Office.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: It’s funded at $21,395 with two hours to go.

Nintendo Power magazine is dead. Print is dead. Yet someone is trying to start a new print magazine focused solely on Nintendo games and hardware.

Pure Nintendo is a digital publication that has just a few hours left to raise a total of $20,000. If it hits its goal, it will begin to ship out subscriptions of physical copies of Pure Nintendo Magazine.

As I’m posting this, Pure Nintendo’s Kickstarter clock reads “8 hours to go” with $15,775 raised.

“Pure Nintendo Magazine currently exists in a mostly digital form,” Pure Nintendo editor-in-chief Justin Sharp told GamesBeat. “We have developed the magazine’s layout and design over the last year and are gearing up for full-scale print production for our subscribers from the Kickstarter project.”

Sharp and his crew plan to ship a new mag every two months. Subscriptions net customers six issues a year.

“We’ve definitely positioned Pure Nintendo Magazine as continuing the legacy of print magazines such as Nintendo Power, but we also realize that consumers need options,” Sharp said. “With Pure Nintendo Magazine, we will offer print issues and also digital versions available through our website, iOS, and Google Play.”

Nintendo Power is the long-running official publication for the Japanese publisher. It will close its doors after 24 years once the December 2012 issue ships.

The proceeds from the Pure Nintendo Kickstarter will go directly toward funding the print costs for its first issue. If the funding campaign succeeds, then the first mag will go to the presses and immediately out to subscribers.

After that, Sharp hopes the enterprise can survive on ads.

“We have a number of advertisers lined up for our next six issues of the magazine and even more that have backed our Kickstarter that we will work with for future issues,” Sharp said.

As nice as it is to attempt to re-create Nintendo Power, in the end, readers are going to judge Pure Nintendo Magazine on the writing. Sharp thinks his team has that covered.

“The magazine already has a number of exclusive articles from game publishers such as THQ, WB Interactive, Ubisoft, and Nintendo,” Sharp said. “Our team is now comprised of 10 passionate people responsible for different areas on both the website and the magazine.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If Movoto’s calculations are correct, Mario isn’t in it to save the princess. According to the real estate blog, each gold coin in Super Mario Bros. is worth more than half a million dollars. By the end of world 1-1, the dude has more money than most of us will ever see in a lifetime — combined.

You can figure out exactly how much you’d be worth in the Mushroom Kingdom, the fictional world of Super Mario Bros., by using Movoto’s Gold Coin Converter. Unless you’re very rich, it’s probably not much.

Movoto based their estimates on  Super Mario Bros. 3. It did so by estimating the size of a gold coin in the game against Mario’s body. It found that a single coin is about the same size as small Mario. Then it factored in Bob Hoskins’ height of 5-foot-6, (Hoskins played Mario in the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 13 percent percent by the way). It then figured out the width and thickness of the coins and used real-world value of gold to estimate what the Mushroom Kingdom coins are worth: about $508,000 each. How Mario and Luigi manage to carry around so many is anyone’s guess.

Movoto even managed to figure out a real-world value for Bowser’s Castle a few weeks ago — he bought it for less than one gold coin.

I contacted Nintendo, and a spokersperson said, “I don’t think we have any sort of official value for the coins — sorry about that!”

Check out the converter at the Movoto blog.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This is part 2 of our interview with Wikipad’s James Bower and Fraser Townley, the company’s CEO and president of sales. Click here to read part 1.

GamesBeat: Getting back to partnerships, are you working with OnLive as well as Gaikai/Sony?

James Bower: We’re in discussions with OnLive as well. One of the key things of Wikipad is that we’re approaching this as a very open platform. We’re willing to work with a lot of various players. The most important thing for us is that our customers have content and that there are various ways for them to get content. There’s the traditional way through Google Market. And then there’s the streaming games, like Gaikai, which was just bought by Sony, and OnLive. We’re in discussions with what our relationship is moving forward.

We also have other forms of content that are interesting, forming on the horizon, that I can’t share yet. We’re not concerned that there won’t be enough content on the Wikipad to get started, and it’ll only get better over time.

GamesBeat: What is Wikipad’s funding? Is the company self-funded?

Bower: The core founders have funded all of the capital to date–

GamesBeat: And the core founders are yourself….

Bower: Myself, Matthew Joynes, and one other founder that we’ll be announcing shortly. We haven’t discussed him as a founder because of who he is, but that will be coming out shortly. It’s a higher-profile person. A lot of the financing of the business is through banking relationships for the purchase orders we have, and things like that.

GameBeat: You previously worked at Master Image. What was your position there?

Bower: President/COO.

GamesBeat: And when was the company acquired?

Bower: Master Image was acquired from Korea and moved to California in November 2009.

GamesBeat: Do you think you’ll have to look for outside funding, perhaps getting closer to the product release?

Bower: I think it’s a question of how fast we want to grow. As of today, they’re fine. So to answer your question, yes, we’re open to look at that and how it can accelerate the business, but it’s not something we’re overly concerned about doing in the short term because of where we’ve come with doing it ourselves.

GamesBeat: Why go with Tegra T30 instead of the more powerful T33, like in the ASUS Transformer Prime Infinity TF700T?

Bower: One of our goals was to ensure that the Wikipad was both lightweight and thin as possible. The T30s is Nvidia’s smallest, high-powered, component CPU. The T33 is a larger component requiring a larger PCB and would have added addition thickness and, in turn, additional weight to the Wikipad. An additional benefit to the T30s is that it draws less power from the battery. This results in the benefit of longer battery life for gamers using the Wikipad compared to the T33, which draws more power from the battery.

GamesBeat: From my own research, it seems like Wikipad is a secretive company. The company has put out so little information. Is this intentional?

Bower: We really had the intent to come out with the stereoscopic version of the Wikipad. And we made the announcements at CES. With some of the decisions we’ve made to make a better tablet, faster platform, that gamers will take very seriously, some of that strategy had to shift a little bit. We’re being very cognizant and careful about what we announce and when we announce it. We don’t want to mismanage the expectations of our future customers. As you’ve seen, there are a lot of people who are excited with what’s coming, with the potential of Wikipad, of what it means. And we want to be very careful and cautious on what we say, and we want to deliver on what we say.

But you’re going to see a shift in the chatter coming from us, and we’re going to amplify things considerably, going into the launch of the company. It’s just us being cautious.

GamesBeat: Are there any game partnerships, like with developers or publishers, that Wikipad has to release titles specific to the Wikipad?

Bower: We’re working with some of the [graphics] engine guys, like Unity and a couple of other guys that build the engines for other guys. We’re in some discussions for unique game designs for the Wikipad, but there’s nothing to the point where we can make an announcement. We’re going to see a lot of content coming from a lot of directions.

GamesBeat: What can you say about the manufacturing of the Wikipad?

Bower: We’re working with the top two manufacturing plants in the world, that have embraced us as a newer company and have taken us on.

GamesBeat: Can you announce who they are?

Bower: Not yet. But we can sleep at night knowing that the guys who sleep at night are the guys who are manufacturing it for us are manufacturing some of the best brand names in the market.

GamesBeat: Several products similar to the Wikipad have been showed over the last year. The Wii U uses a tablet controller but targets a home audience. Razer’s Project Fiona concept device is a laptop-in-a-tablet with a built-in controller running Windows 8. How would you differentiate Wikipad from these?

Bower: It’s challenging to come back with a very poignant answer to that, because one’s a concept and the other people have only just started to see and play with. The unique factor that we have is that we’re really a bridge between a historically mobile console and the invention of the tablet. We do everything as good or better than other tablets on the market, and very easily you can transform the Wikipad into a very efficient, easy-to-use video game device that’s very comfortable.

How we’re different is that we’re not just about gaming. The focus of the company is gaming; that’s who we are, and that’s our pedigree. But when this comes to market, people are going to realize that, wow, I might as well just buy the Wikipad to do all of this plus have fun with games and have a control mechanism that I have on my console.

GamesBeat: Apple holds 68 percent of tablet marketshare with the iPad. Amazon’s Kindle is the next best, and it’s not even close. Android isn’t even close, even though it’s riding smooth at 50 percent of smartphone marketshare. Is that a concern?

Bower: Not really. Apple’s done such a fantastic job with their products, and we all love them. What we’re coming to the market with is a different concept; it’s not just a tablet — it’s a mobile gaming platform that can do all of the functions that you can with a tablet with all of the advantages you have for gaming. So we’re competing right down the middle with what a tablet is, with what people expect out of a tablet, and with what people expect out of a mini console device.

And it’s a space that isn’t populated by very many, or anybody, because we’re really the first ones to market on this. And the other aspect of this is if we’re as successful with this as we believe we’re going to be, from the indications from retailers, from the orders we already have, we don’t have to dominate a market to do really well, because we’re new, we’re relatively small, and we’re innovative, we’re agile. We have a roadmap for the next 24 months. We don’t have to make 2, 3, 10, 20 percent of the market to do really well. One percent of the market is tremendous success. But I think we’re going to do better than that.

GamesBeat: Do you also see the Wikipad competing with portable game consoles, or does it hit the middle ground so users can have a tablet, a game console, all in one device?

Bower: That’s what I would say. What we’re proposing to the market is a bridge between the two. We’re saying if you get this, you can still do all of the things you love to do with a tablet, and you’re also going to have access to all of the great content that’s historically only been able to get through a console-only device.

GamesBeat: What do you think about newer game technologies like Microsoft’s Smartglass? Or the large number of upcoming Android game controllers? And the recently announced Kickstarter success home Android-based game console Ouya?

Bower: What’s coming from Microsoft is great. We’ve seen some of the prototypes of Windows 8 and RT, and it’s great. The interesting thing about the future of that platform is going to be the access of some PC content. There’s not much I’m going to talk about in relation to our company at this point, as it relates to Microsoft’s platform, but it is something that we’re looking into. It’s something that we’re open to, not to replacing the current platform we have now, but maybe as an additional product. But it’s exciting. I think Microsoft has finally got a hit with this new OS. And behind the scenes, retailers and manufacturers behind the scenes, are really excited.

GamesBeat: And that’s notwithstanding Valve chief Gabe Newell’s recent remarks about how Windows 8 is just awful?

Bower: Everyone’s going to have their own opinion. I think Android has done a fantastic job on getting out there. If you look at the global numbers, Android has outpaced everything. You then talked a little bit about…?

GamesBeat: Android game controllers?

Bower: You know, for me…I can only speak for myself because our product isn’t on the market yet. If you’re dealing with a mobile product, if there’s separation between the screen and the your person, then it’s an unengaged experience. I think in order to have the experience, on a device that is personal, that you’re willing to put your credit card into, the game experience on controllers has to be directly connected because you’re expecting it to be totally personal. I would rather use this [holding an Xbox controller] than this on a tablet that I have to prop up and play. That’s all I can say. The market will determine who’s the winner at the end.

And since I mentioned Ouya, we’re really excited about Ouya. Them talking about and launching on Kickstarter, and the results that they have, is a really interesting and solid sign for us. The games that are going to play on that are going to work on the Wikipad, and the games that will work on Wikipad will work on the Ouya. The more content that is prepared for them is going to help us, and the more content prepared for us is going to help them. It’s a very interesting concept that they have.

What I think it’s really going to come down to is how can these devices, and how can our partners like google and others, begin to fix the piracy issues? Because the big game developers, the Epic’s of the world, the Crytek’s, they won’t invest the tremendous amount of money they spend to create these great games for consoles until the piracy issues are fixed. Because it’s a lot more difficult to pirate something for a Playstation or an Xbox. It’s just a lot more work. And the discussions that we’ve had with them is yes, the concept is great, but fix the piracy so that our investment of $30 million, $40 million, $50 million, $80 million in marketing and development cost isn’t going to go to a waste and everyone is going to steal it. Fix that problem and we’ll develop everything for this platform.

GamesBeat: But you’re not concerned at this point about piracy….

Bower: Not for us. But I think as far as the experience on these devices, the game publishers need to know that their investment in these high-quality products is protected, and then we’ll see more of that content come about. We’re very involved with the dynamics behind the scenes with our partners like Nvidia and Google and others about how we can help…we’re people’s art that they create is protected, and respected, and paid for. So that there’s enough money so they can develop their next games.

GamesBeat: Have you been in contact with Ouya, maybe for a partnership?

Bower: We love what they’re doing, I’m sure we’re going to have a conversation at some point, but there’s nothing in the works right now. There isn’t anything worth talking about, or even speculating about.

GamesBeat: What about, since we already spoke about potentially going outside of the company for funding, using Kickstarter since Ouya was so successful. Is that something that you’re considering?

Bower: Frankly speaking, we’ve considered that from the beginning. We decided not to because of the significant adoption that has been relayed to us from retailers around the world. Would Kickstarter have helped us or hurt us? We want to see the retailers make money with us. Right now we’re really focusing on the retailer relationships that we already have in place.

GamesBeat: When will the Wikipad ship?

Bower: We’re looking to release later this year.

GamesBeat: And that’s just in the U.S.?

Bower: For now, yes. We’re also actively looking at the European and Asian markets.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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There are tablets, and then there’s a gaming tablet. The Wikipad, an Android handheld that promised to be the first mobile device with a gamepad built specifically for the device, is set to launch later this year. Venturebeat recently sat down to talk with CEO James Bower and President of Sales Fraser Townley in a local design office in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Here’s an edited version of our interview. For details on the Wikipad’s specifications, see our report from late last month.

Venturebeat: What is Wikipad, and what is the history of the company?

James Bower: Last year we (Bower, Matt Joynes, and one more founder) started thinking about what type of consumer device could make a difference. What’s something that we could do that would really get good market acceptance as well as being a game changer?

We all started getting smartphones and tablets and we’re playing games and whatnot, and it just doesn’t quite have that experience as when you’re playing with a controller. The touch experience is okay, but it doesn’t quite get you there. So we thought what can we do to take the concepts of tablets and create a much better gaming experience.

VB: When did the company get started?

JB: We officially formed the company in September. But as a team, we’ve been thinking through concepts, I would say, since back in the spring of 2011.

VB: What was the team doing back then if it wasn’t a company?

JB: Matt [Joynes], who is the chairman of the company, previously bought and sold companies. He and I partnered up on this, and he was twiddling with some of the business planning of creating a consumer device. I was involved with the restructuring of a company called Master Image, which was acquired and restructured and moved to California. That company created stereoscopic 3D for cinema and screens for tablets and smartphones.

The market dabbled in [3D in mobile devices] for a little bit. We saw LG come out with its 3D version (the LG Optimus 3D) of a phone, and the Nintendo 3DS, but there hasn’t been a tremendous market push to adopt this from a tablet and smartphone perspective. In some cases, from my standpoint frustratingly so, anyone who loves stereo sees this as a huge potential market that hasn’t really been opened yet. We see this in the television market; most TVs support stereoscopic in some form, and we see a lot of the market shifting to that.

The fact is, there’s a lot of 3D content that is still coming out. What’s different when it comes to a personal device, when you don’t have the challenges of putting glasses on that becomes a socially inhibiting event — you know, you’re not going to sit with friends and put glasses on in your house. It’s a little bit awkward. When you remove that barrier and enable stereoscopic 3D, it starts to change.

VB: So the original idea was to have the Wikipad be a stereoscopic tablet, and as time went on the 3D got pushed out?

JB: Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s the nature of how fast we can get to market with the price points that we need to get with the market research we’ve done, you know, for the first version [of the Wikipad]. [3D] is in our DNA, if you will, and in our future plans.

VB: Why the name “Wikipad? What exactly does that mean?

JB: ‘Wiki’ actually means fast [in Hawaiian], and so we were thinking about what are we going to create here? We’re going to create a tablet that’s really fast, that’s really edgy for the gaming community, and ‘wiki’ is such a representative name of what we want to be, which is a fast pad. And it’s catchy. Sometimes there’s an educational tone associated with it, and if we come out with a tablet that people may think has educational benefits as well, we start to hit a brand that’s accepted across a lot of mediums.

VB: If I’m not mistaken, you’re currently partnered with NVIDIA, as well as Gaikai. Does that mean Sony as well now, since they purchased Gaikai?

JB: Gaikai has been a great relationship for us, but we’re under NDA with Gaikai and Sony. That’s about all I can say right now, but we know what’s going on and we’re still close to the situation, and the transaction is just in the completion stage as we speak. Stay tuned.

VB: What about Sony Mobile Certification, where Playstation titles can play on some Android devices, mostly from Sony and now some select HTC smartphones?

JB: Sorry, I can’t comment.

VB: Fair enough. So you’re working with NVIDIA as well. Why go with Tegra?

JB: For a number of reasons — a few secret ones that I can’t talk about, and a few that I can. When it comes to a brand of processor that is close to the hearts of gamers, NVIDIA has been there a long time. They have a very good, integral brand; they have a very good relationship to content, and content is key for us, as it relates to our product. So there are a lot of advantages to Tegra as it relates to gameplay. They’ve been working on a lot of things behind the scenes that they haven’t talked about regarding gameplay. They also were one of the front-runners in the development of stereoscopic 3D support, integrating their 3D vision capabilities into the Tegra processor as well. So it became much more of a turnkey easy solution for our future as we look at stereoscopic 3D.

VB: So you’ll be working with them for 3D support?

JB: Yes.

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NeoGAF, one of the Internet’s most popular video game message boards, received over 16,000 posts during the three major Electronic Entertainment Expo press conferences. Now that E3 is over, we can take a look back at how these hardcore gamers reacted and draw interesting conclusions on what they thought of the industry’s biggest trade show of the year.

We’ve already seen how NeoGAF reacted to Microsoft and Sony’s press conferences, but what did the gaming community think of Nintendo’s? The below chart scores the members’ reactions, as posted in real-time:

Click for a full-size version. For a more detailed explanation of how we analyzed this data, please see the explanation at the end of this article.

What NeoGAF liked about the Nintendo press conference

Only three games registered as positive. The forum members received Pikmin 3 very warmly, and they gave it the highest reaction score of the press conference, while New Super Mario Bros. U and Scribblenauts Unlimited received largely positive comments for a very brief amount of time.

Otherwise, NeoGAF absolutely loved Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s legendary game designer, and Reggie Fils-Aime, president and COO of Nintendo of America.

The only other item that received a positive score was the announcement that the Wii U will support two GamePad tablet controllers at the same time.

What they didn’t like

NeoGAF reacted poorly to just about everything else. Posters lambasted established franchises such as Paper Mario and New Super Mario Bros. They dismissed revitalized and new intellectual properties such as Luigi’s Mansion and ZombiU, respectively. They outright destroyed any talk of motion-controlled games such as Wii Fit Plus and casual titles like Sing and Just Dance 4.

In fact, after Reggie Fils-Aime acknowledged the popular meme “my body is ready” in the 34th minute (which everyone thought was good fun), Nintendo did not generate a positive score for the rest of its morning press conference.

The worst individual minute occurred during the trailer for Sing, reaching a score of -117, which is extraordinary. To put this in perspective, I performed this same study in 2009, and the infamous Wii Vitality Sensor introduction scored only a -80. Sing’s lowest point was the worst E3 2012 press conference moment, beating out even Sony’s Wonderbook (though that scored lower overall due to it being a much longer demo).

Perhaps more interestingly, while the scores for the other conferences went up and down and back up throughout, Nintendo started very strong and then steadily went down from there. One could argue that this was just a result of what they showed and when they showed it. The 6,000+ posts of the NeoGAF thread on Nintendo made it clear that, as the press conference progressed, gamers were becoming increasingly disillusioned by the Wii U. By the end, the majority had lost faith.

This may have major ramifications for Nintendo. The Japanese company lost a big opportunity to court hardcore gamers during this press conference with a console many hoped would engage that very audience. With predicted new console launches next year, Microsoft and Sony could learn valuable lessons from Nintendo’s conference if they want to get core gamers excited.

That could be a big “if.” Video game consoles are much more versatile entertainment devices, engaging a much wider audience. Perhaps, as many members of NeoGAF fear, E3 is not for the hardcore gamer anymore.

Next year’s E3 press conferences should prove very interesting. With the possibility of new game systems, will Microsoft and Sony seek to please hardcore gamers? Or will they continue their momentum in search of more casual audiences?

The most valuable lesson they can learn here: Don’t try to appeal to gamers — as Nintendo repeatedly claimed to do throughout its 70 minutes on stage — and not deliver. As we’ve discovered, hardcore gamers are very hard to impress.

For more on how NeoGAF reacted to the E3 press conferences, check out the Microsoft and Sony studies.

How the scoring works

NeoGAF hosts a single message board thread for each press conference, where dozens of members comment throughout each show. I graded each comment as positive or negative, giving them scores of 1 or -1 respectively. Then I totaled the sum of these reactions for each discrete minute and plotted in the above chart. A high score means that the NeoGAF community liked what they saw; a score close to zero represents mixed reactions; and a low score means that they were not enjoying the show at that moment.

Some notes on how I scored each response:

• I made no distinction between really positive or somewhat positive comments — likewise for negative comments. Each was given either a score of 1 or -1.
• While I made every effort to understand the various memes and inside jokes that make up a large part of the responses, if I could not understand a response, I would not score it.
• In the event that a comment employed obvious sarcasm, I scored it to reflect the original intent of the commentator. If the sarcasm was not clear, I relied on the literal meaning of the comment. Fortunately, the very expressive NeoGAF community rarely employed subtle sarcasm.
• When comments included positive and negative observations, I accounted for the more immediate reaction to preserve a more real-time response. An example: “I liked the game that was shown at the beginning of the show, but this game now is bad” would have a negative score.
• Many comments weren’t scored as they offered no opinion. These included clarifications, questions, discussions between members unrelated to the press conference, and inquiries into whether one game or another would be shown at a later time.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The journalists have been wined, and the buyers for retail have been dined, and the hangovers are just beginning. That means E3 is done for this year, and we enter the long wait until the holiday release season starts.

Oh well, to pass the time, let’s remember all the games Nintendo mentioned in passing (or not at all!):

Miyamoto talked about Wii U,
Hardcore gamers try not to say “P.U!”
An extra screen
May disrupt the scene.
Wait, didn’t DS do this too?

Pikmin 3 was not so much a secret.
A year ago Miyamoto leaked it.
Little small guys,
Sight for sore eyes,
Looks like they only tweaked it .

And then appeared the man named Reggie,
Nintendo of America’s boss, who is edgy.
Won’t kick some ass,
He’s not that crass,
But not above giving a few wedgies

The Wii U Gamepad is here,
To spread Nintendo’s brand of cheer.
Two analog sticks
With touchscreen schtick,
But to me, it still looks like Game Gear.

Batman Arkham City is back,
Putting Wii U on last gen’s fast track.
Who would buy this?
And that’s not a diss,
Everyone’s already had a crack.

The exclusive Scibblenauts Unlimited
Will allow Wordsmiths to be uninhibited.
Anything you can think,
Created in a wink.
“Penis airplane”? I think I’ll win with it.

Who in the world can I thank
For an idea that can be brought to the bank?
An amazing game,
With an amazing name.
I’ll buy Wii U for Tank! Tank! Tank!

Wii Fit U may seem kind of rad,
To your mom or maybe your dad.
Gameplay disguise
For more exercise.
But please don’t step on that Gamepad.

Paper Mario is back in 3D.
So excited that I could probably pee.
I better be quicker,
With all those stickers.
Or a wet stain will extend to my knee .

Luigi’s Mansion returns to 3DS,
To clean up a supernatural mess.
A long time waiting,
For fans that be hating.
And finally requests for a sequel will rest.

Excuse me if I think it’s lame,
But ZombiU is another zombie game.
Innovative features
To kill undead creatures.
Bah! It’s just more of the same.

NintendoLand could be a light in the dark
To eliminate every gamer’s snark.
Imagine a place
With smiles on every face.
Wait! It’s not a real life amusement park?!?!

Catch up on the rest of the E3 press conference by checking out the limericks for Microsoft and Sony.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Legendary prankster Google is out with some early April Fools’ tomfoolery ahead of schedule, teasing nostalgic gamers with an 8-bit version of its near-ubiquitous Maps application.

“In our pursuit of new digital frontiers, we realized that we may have left behind a large number of users who couldn’t access Google Maps on their classic hardware,” Google said in a blog post on the phony product for NES.

Maps 8-bit for NES (and soon Game Boy!) is the dream cartridge for the sentimental gamer who still totes around her classic Nintendo Entertainment System. The application features low-res graphics, an 8-bit-themed soundtrack, and even monsters.

“With Google Maps 8-bit, you can do all the things you already do on regular Google Maps. Search for famous landmarks and sites around the world. Take an epic journey with 8-bit Street View. Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures,” Google said.

The accompanying how-to video, embedded below, is a must-watch and includes appropriate instructions for operation — think blowing on the cartridge to fix bugs.

The Maps gag is no Google TiSP, but it’s quite clever and likely just one of many new “products” launching this April.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Previously only announced for Japan through Uprising designer Masahiro Sakurai’s Twitter account, Nintendo has now confirmed that the stand will be available in all territories.

The stand is designed to hold up the handheld while the user plays the game. The Kid Icarus control scheme requires one hand to be on the Circle Pad and the other to use the stylus. Playing Kid Icarus requires fast movements and aim, and holding the 3DS with one hand can apparently become a bit uncomfortable for some users.

When we inquired about the accessory Nintendo issued the following statement:

Nintendo is including a free stand with all copies of the Kid Icarus: Uprising game for the Nintendo 3DS system. The stand holds the Nintendo 3DS at an angle above any flat surface and provides players with a comfortable option for playing. The game’s control scheme was designed to fit the game’s unique blend of flight, shooting and melee combat, and offers tremendous precision. Our product testing demonstrated that players found the stand to be comfortable and enjoyable.

While that is nice for sitting around at home, it’s probably not as convenient for use on the road. The 3DS is a handheld, and that usually involves being able to open it up and play a quick game, then drop it back into your bag or pocket.

Can you play without the stand? Of course you can, and this does feel a bit like a workaround for a control scheme that may not have been as simple as the designers had originally hoped. Add a second Circle Pad, and soon this little guy will become more like a Virtual Boy than a successor to the DS. Either way, like the additional Circle Pad, it does feel like a bit of an afterthought.

[Image via Masahiro Sakurai/Twitpic]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Mario has been the face of video games since his creation in 1985. The kind of popularity that Mario and Nintendo have received from him is unfathomable, and I have no doubt in my mind that his newest reiteration, Super Mario 3D Land, will continue to keep Mario’s popularity and legacy in tact.

From its first release on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Mario has stopped at nothing to be the best. Upon starting its legacy in the 80’s and 90’s, the popular plumber has rocketed his way to the top of the best selling games list on each of Nintendo’s platforms to date.

Now, in 2011, Nintendo has turned to Mario again, as it needs to resurrect sales of its flagging 3DS gaming handheld. Fortunately, not only is Mario in eye-popping 3D on the 3DS, but the two worlds of 2D and 3D collide to make for a definite redefinition of the series and yet another new way to play Mario that people thought impossible.

With Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario Bros. Wii, the pinnacle had been set for Mario. All three of the titles were well received and had a massive amount of sales. As Mario’s success furthered, the newest platform, the 3DS was announced and released.

As the 3DS has had a bit of a rough start since its debut in March, Nintendo is in an absolute bind and definitely needed one of its franchise games to reintroduce stability into their newest handheld. After cutting the price of their 3DS only months after its introduction, it seemed gamers were reluctant to trust the newest DS, as glasses-free stereoscopic 3D seemed like a gimmick.

Considering Nintendo’s past tries at true 3D, the comments were somewhat justified, and in general, gamers have yet to fully embrace the 3DS. However, the potential is still there for the platform and it is still surviving.

Some thought Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D would help the budding platform, and it did to an extent, but what better way to put absolute faith back into the new platform then with the man that made the original Nintendo fly off the shelves. Yes, Super Mario 3D Land may be the answer for Nintendo’s newest handheld.

Redefining the Mario series       

It is completely astounding to me how Mario keeps wowing players with each and every game Nintendo releases. From Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario Galaxy, I have never once grown out of playing Mario or decided it just wasn’t that fun anymore. The reason for that is each and every Mario has gotten significantly better than the last. Of course, the Mario faithful will say, “What about Super Mario Sunshine?” But even Sunshine brought joy to a lot of people in the way of a beautiful environment and new gameplay with F.L.U.D.D.

Looking back, Mario and friends were already beloved by their second title on the NES. The 2D side-scrolling platform was a hit and it didn’t matter who you were. Back in the 80’s, Mario was your favorite game, period. The 2D world of Mario was way ahead of its time, and it showed, as this was how Mario was successfully designed through Nintendo’s first two systems, the NES and SNES.

Then, Mario did something that changed video games altogether. With technology advancing, Nintendo wanted to do something different with Mario on the Nintendo 64, and boy, they did. Mario was thrown into 3D, and it was done with absolute perfection. Super Mario 64 is still the one step in the series when everyone says, “Wow, that was really something.” It redefined how we played Mario.

Now Nintendo has done it again, in 3D on the 3DS. All factors come into play when being thrown into the 3D world and suddenly switching into 2D mid-level. Not only does it present a small challenge, but it will also allow for a new style of exploration to happen as you make your way through each level.

Mario Goes from 3D to Eye-Popping 3D

Thinking back, I remember how jealous I was when one of my good friends received a Virtual Boy for Christmas and I had to watch the fun ensue right before my very eyes. At the time, I was convinced it was the way of the future. It looked so futuristic with a red outer shell and I couldn’t get over that it actually produced a 3D world inside.

Then, after playing it once or twice, while my friend took a moment with his other Christmas gifts, I slowly began to realize it wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. My eyes instantly began to strain and all the games were just red…what?!? I was heartbroken, but deep down inside, I thought maybe there was a chance 3D would make it back into a Nintendo platform and actually hold its own.

Well, it turns out I was right, and Mario’s return to the true 3D world was more fun than I ever could have thought up or have imagined in my younger days.

It is hard to really describe the overall experience of Mario in true 3D. Seeing it for the first time is truly an experience. The overall detail and magic of Mario literally jumping out of your screen or Bowser’s fireballs coming directly at you is something pretty spectacular. Not only that, but Nintendo did wonders on the level design to integrate the 3D capabilities perfectly.

There are so many areas in the game that wouldn’t have been as great without 3D. From your enemy’s boomerang being thrown through the screen to levels having specific obstacles to emphasize the 3D offers a little something extra to the experience, and helps to maintain the staple of Mario games, fun.

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Applications that are part of the “-oid” family, which include console emulators Snesoid and Gameboid, were removed from the Android Marketplace overnight without direct explanation. Developer Yong Zhang has had his developer account revoked as well. This isn’t the first time Google has unceremoniously booted a significant gaming application off the Android Marketplace, but it doesn’t seem like the applications violate the company’s terms of service because owning a console emulator isn’t illegal.

Google plans to add PlayStation games off the PlayStation store to the Android Marketplace as time goes on. That means Android devices that are running PlayStation games — ones that are available on the PlayStation Store and can be played on PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 devices — will essentially be acting as emulators with copies of the games. That’s how emulators like Snesoid and ZSNES operate, except gamers are expected to own hard or soft copies of the games they are emulating on their computers or mobile devices.

A few other emulators appear to be still available on the Android Marketplace, so it appears the “-oid” family was pulled because it used freeware code as the basis of the emulators and then charged for downloads. That said, the “-oid” family was by a very wide margin the most accessible set of emulators.

Emulators have been a bit of a gift to the Android Marketplace. They’ve opened up the mobile operating system to thousands of games that now have the chance to go mobile instead of forcing gamers to carry around consoles or cartridges. They’ve turned Android devices into one-stop devices for gaming.

The controls aren’t perfect on these emulators. I’ve tried them on three different form factors — a 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab, a 7-inch Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy S smartphone — and haven’t found the sweet spot. Neither a chiclet keyboard or an on-screen touchpad layout seems to work. I usually end up firing a gun when I want to jump or dashing off the side of a screen to my death while shrieking a nice loud “what the heck!” every three or four minutes. (Luckily the apps feature save states.)

Sure, it’s frustrating getting smoked by Wheel Gator, who is supposed to be one of the easiest bosses in Super Nintendo (SNES) classic Mega Man X2. I’ve beaten that game at least a hundred times and it’s reached the point that I can blitz through it without taking any damage with a Nintendo Wii classic controller. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the extreme mobility of the tablets and smartphones, and I love being able to carry around a hundred SNES games.

Google will soon let gamers everywhere use third-party controllers with their Android devices. There are already a few third-party applications that let gamers sync their Wii controllers to the device and play games, but adding third-party controller support would push emulation to a whole new level on Android devices. It was the announcement that I was most excited about when the company made it at the Google I/O conference earlier this month.

There are just so many options available to classic gamers through emulators, and they have the ability to drastically increase Android’s popularity over other mobile operating systems that don’t feature emulators. Snesoid and Gameboid have accrued more hours of playtime than every other app combined across every mobile operating system I own — save perhaps text messaging and email, if you want to call them apps. That’s after owning an iPhone for three generations and a tablet for a full generation. I’ve gone through at least every SNES and Gameboy Advance game I own as either a hard copy or a soft copy through the Nintendo Wii store.

Apple has a notoriously tight policy for mobile application approval — and that’s worked to its advantage. The Apple App Store has more apps than the Android Marketplace and every other app marketplace. That means that anything that is even tangentially illegal — or even in a grey area — is rejected from the App Store. The Android Marketplace is a little more lenient and has allowed applications like emulators because they aren’t strictly illegal. It’s not illegal to own or operate emulators, but it is illegal to own copies of ROM files, the files for the actual video games, if you don’t own a hard or soft copy of the game.

Apple has the advantage of getting first access to some of the best game developers in the business, like Epic Games. It has some beefy hardware, and developers don’t have to deal with developing a game that will fit multiple form factors and multiple devices. The best independent games will usually end up on the Apple App Store before they make it to other app stores like the Android Marketplace. So the only real edge Google has with gamers is that it’s able to bend the strict rules that Apple applies to its own app approval process.

I’ve said before that I just don’t think Google understands games. It banned the Kongregate arcade — an application that lets Android users access hundreds of flash games — rather nonchalantly. The Kongregate arcade broke the Android Marketplace’s terms of service, but it wasn’t really obvious because the application never technically downloaded the games to the phone. It just stored the flash games in the Android device’s cache. That’s about two levels of abstraction away from “behaving like an app store,” which is against Google’s Android terms of service.. The Kongregate Arcade has since reappeared on the Android Marketplace as a suped up browser.

The emulators are now available on third-party app marketplace SlideME. Moving to a third-party marketplace is basically the same route Kongregate went at first when it decided to throw its application up on GetJar. Those marketplaces are becoming more appealing now that Google has become a bit more heavy-handed in its app approval and removal activities. But Kongregate still ended up changing its application to suit Google’s requirements — because the Android Marketplace is still the most popular and most widely-used mobile app marketplace for Android devices.

I don’t plan on throwing away my emulators — in fact, I would pay the developers even more for access to the emulators if they aren’t available on the Android Marketplace. I just hope Google eventually gets the message — there are a lot of Android gamers, and we are still waiting for some great games. In the meantime, don’t give us an excuse to turn away from the Android Marketplace and Android devices.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The new version of the portable game handheld will have a 93 percent bigger screen and sell for $189.99. The screen is viewable from the side and so it will create a more social experience, said Cammie Dunaway, head of marketing and sales at Nintendo of America, at the company’s media summit this morning.

The DS remains the most popular handheld game system, selling a record 11.2 million units in 2009 worldwide. But Nintendo isn’t resting on those laurels.

Nintendo also set a record in December for Wii console sales, with 3.8 million units sold in the U.S. alone in that month. Nintendo also sold 24.9 million games on the Wii in December.

The company also showed a demo of its upcoming Wii game, Super Mario Galaxy 2, one of the biggest games coming for the industry in the first half of 2010. The 3-D platform game has new features such as the ability to drill through a planet to move quickly to the other side of a world. It will also have Yoshi dinosaur characters to let you move faster and fly through worlds. The game launches May 23. The other big game of the first half, Metroid Other M for the Wii, will debut on June 27.

New titles for the DS include an America’s Test Kitchen cooking game and book-reading app that gives you 100 classic books to read on your DS. That, of course, is a nod in the direction of the popularity of electronic book readers such as the Amazon Kindle. We’ll see if all of this is enough to stave off growing competition from Apple with its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad products.

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor, a follow-up to a successful downloadable WiiWare title, will launch on the Wii on June 7. That’s a shooting game. FlingSmash for Wii will arrive in the summer. Pokemon Heart Gold and Pokemon Soul Silver will launch on the DS on March 14. Puzzle game Picross 3D on the DS will debut in March.

New downloadable WiiWare games will be coming as well. There are 127 WiiWare titles already. WarioWare D.I.Y. arrives on March 28. Artist games Light Trax and Rotozoa are also coming for the WiiWare platform this spring. Nintendo is publishing those titles.

Capcom is releasing its Megaman 10 game on March 1 on the WiiWare platform. Max the Magic Marker is coming on March 8. Cave Story, an indie hit on the PC, makes its debut on WiiWare on March 22. Super Meat Boy arrives on WiiWare in the summer. And Yet It Moves, which started as a student project, will be out this summer on the WiiWare platform. Rage of the Gladiator comes this spring and takes advantage of the Wii Motion Plus.

Downloadable DS Ware titles include Metal Torrent. Photo Dojo for the Nintendo DSi will take advantage of the DSi’s built-in cameras.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Final Fantasy series (except for 11) was a Sony exclusive for many years. Now Microsoft has knocked that out, to some degree, by winning over Square Enix to make Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360, at least in Europe and the U.S. That’s just as important as eliminating Sony’s exclusive lock on Grand Theft Auto IV. Microsoft also got an exclusive for Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360.

And it cooked up a deal to hurt Apple, as fellow VentureBeat writer MG Siegler has noted, by getting Netflix to make its movies and user queues available on Xbox Live as downloadable movies. But the Microsoft games that are focused on Nintendo’s broader market audience — for casual gamers — aren’t going to hurt Nintendo all that much. One title, Lips, has a motion-sensitive microphone. But there is no motion-sensitive controller for the Xbox 360, as was rumored. And there were no Halo games announced (a disappointment).

Here’s the live version of the post:

We’re live inside the LA Convention Center where Microsoft has bathed a big ballroom in acid green Xbox lighting. The press is piling in. They’re running a “street talk” video on gamers and how they talk and what they like. Do we all know what “pwned” means? (owned, getting beat or beating someone).

Don Mattrick, head of the Xbox business at Microsoft (and pictured above), took the stage briefly to mention Microsoft’s big titles and introduce a video clip of them. Well, Microsoft knows its audience, as it has now gone into a demo of the hardcore and bloody “Fallout 3” action-role-playing-game/shooter from Bethesda Softworks. We’re just a couple of minutes into it and the body parts are flying, thanks to weapons like the “fat man gun,” which lobs a big bomb at enemies in slow motion. The first live demo of the game will have exclusive downloadable content for the Xbox 360. The flying body parts are non-exclusive.

Next up: online quad gamer play in “Resident Evil 5″ from Capcom. This game is set in Africa and for the first time you can team up with others in online play as you slay hundreds of zombie-like monsters. But too bad. This game slipped until March 13, 2009.

And then comes the eloquent Peter Molyneux of Microsoft’s Lionhead Studios, who says that “Fable 2″ is now finished. Fable 2 will be out in October. It’s a role-playing game and a sequel to an Xbox hit that sold millions. A new feature that Molyneux described is the ability to meet others in online play and invite them into your game party easily, inside the game, with no Xbox Live matchmaking screens.

Cliff “CliffyB” Blezinski of Epic Games is showing off “Gears of War 2,” where you can pick up a dead Locust body and use it as a human shield. But watch out for the flamethrowers. There is a new “five-player” cooperative mode. It will be available Nov. 7. They got some “whoops” out of the audience on that one.

Mattrick says that Xbox Live now has 12 million members, up from 6 million a year ago. And since 2005, it has generated more than $1 billion in revenues. There are 10,000 movies and TV shows on Xbox Live now. NBC is joining today, adding its TV shows such as “Heroes” to the Xbox Live marketplace for downloading. Universal is also adding its movies, as are Constantin Film and MGM.

John Schappert, corporate vice president at Microsoft and head of Xbox Live, software, and services, has taken the stage to talk about “innovation in social services.” Um, the gamer kind, that is. Schappert has confirmed the rumor that Microsoft will now have avatar characters for Xbox Live gamers. These “Mii-like” avatars are customizable with hairdos, clothes, etc.

There have been more than one million downloads of free game development tools. Microsoft is preparing to launch Xbox Live user-generated community games in the fall. And Schappert says that Netflix movies and queue lists will now be available on Xbox Live, doubling the number of movies available. You can now share your movie queue with your friends.

Shane Kim, the business development chief at Xbox, says that 1,000 new titles will launch by the end of 2008 for the Xbox 360. One new offering is the downloadable content for “Grand Theft Auto IV.” But Kim says there are titles for broader audiences too, like “You’re in the Movies.” In that title, you can get yourself into your own campy movies, using an Xbox Live webcam to record live video.

On average, 3.5 million songs are downloaded every month. One of the reasons is Guitar Hero. There’s a new version of that game coming from Red Octane, “Guitar Hero World Tour.” The Lips karaoke/sing-along title rumor turned out to be true, as a singer is ably demonstrating on stage now.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Nintendo Wii is still on top with sales of 432,000 consoles in February in the U.S., while the PS 3 sold 280,800 units and the Xbox 360 came in third with 254,600 units sold. The Nintendo DS sold 587,600 units, widening its lead over the PlayStation Portable which sold 243,100 units. Year over year, Sony’s PS 3 numbers are up 120 percent.

Total video game industry sales were up 34 percent to $1.3 billion, year over year. Hardware was up 19 percent, a strong showing in spite of recent price cuts. Software was up 47 percent and accessories were up 36 percent. Year to date, the industry was up 26 percent.

Anita Frazier, an analyst at NPD, predicts another year of record-breaking sales in spite of the tough economy. That’s surprisingly strong, considering this year will be the fourth year in the next-generation product cycle (at least for Microsoft). The year will likely get a big boost starting April 29 with the launch of Take-Two Interactive’s Grand Theft Auto IV, which analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan believes will sell nine million copies.

The PlayStation 2 continues to sell strong with 351,800 consoles sold during the month. That’s a strong indicator that price-conscious mass market consumers are still a big factor in the market. But the Wii is probably capturing more of those consumers, judging by its numbers.

Microsoft said in a statement that it is still in a supply-constrained shortage. It also says that consumers are still spending more dollars on the Xbox 360 than they are on the Nintendo and Sony next-generation platforms. Life to date in the U.S., the Xbox 360 platform now has a U.S. installed base of 9.6 million; the PS3 ha.s 3.8 million, the Wii has 8.1 million. Microsoft has more than 10 million Xbox Live subscribers, compared to 3.3 million for the PlayStation Network. Sony pointed out that if you combine spending on all of its platforms, it is generating the most monthly sales.

It is still disturbing that Microsoft can’t get enough consoles out. That means that the console manufacturing problems, which resulted in a billion-dollar write-off last year, still haven’t been conquered in spite of the fact that Microsoft has moved to new boards and chips. I can’t think of another explanation for a shortage at this stage in the life cycle, unless Microsoft was exceedingly cautious with its inventory planning a few months back. On the positive side, Microsoft had six Xbox 360 titles on the list of the top ten games during Feburary.

Activision had three titles in the top ten best-selling games list in February, including the No. 1-ranked “
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” title. (I have a Major I rank on multiplayer now). Notably, Electronic Arts had only one title, “Rock Band,” in the top ten.

Start-ups may not care about the console war per se. But good news in the core console market means that VCs will continue to notice the growth and see games as a good investment opportunity. These numbers don’t even include strong growth in areas such as PC massively multiplayer online games, casual games and mobile games.