Nintendo Press Conference: Highlights
Product announcements and hardware reveals from the Wii and DS manufacturer's showcase event
Games - DSi
After the revelation that the DSi has now sold 1 million units in the US, to go alongside a virtually identical announcement for Europe from earlier in the day, a few DSi-specific pieces of software were unveiled.
Flip Notes Studio, the movie-making application, will be available in the US in the summer - although no word of a European release as yet - while Nintendo's attempt at providing tools for user-gen content were also revealed.
Mario vs Donkey Kong: Minis March Again will feature a level builder, while WarioWare DIY goes one step further, and will allow users to create entire games from scratch.
Elsewhere the handheld is going to allow the upload of photos, taken with the DSi's camera, to be uploaded to Facebook - along with the option of a little bit of graffiti on them as well.
Hardware - Wii Vitality Sensor
Company president and fans' favourite Satoru Iwata took to the stage halfway through proceedings to talk a bit of philosophy about where Nintendo is looking for its next step in complete world domination, before unveiling a curious piece of kit - the Wii Vitality Sensor.
He began by talking about the global population, and how the company splits it into three sections: those who actively play games, those who say they will never play and those who say they might some day - with the 'maybe' group the most likely to grow the gaming audience (as, you'd argue, they did with the Wii).
He estimated that while there are currently about 295 million people playing games today, there are 149 million more people to mine: "We have been able to erase the viewpoint that those who never played games in the past will never play them in the future," he explained. "Our next goal is to create individual titles which satisfy every type of game player."
So while Brain Training was about the brain and Wii Fit about the body, the previously unannounced Wii Vitality Sensor was presented, looking a lot like the little white box that they clip onto your finger in hospital to measure your blood pressure, pulse, and so on.
In fact, it looks a lot like one of those, because that's what it seems to actually be - Iwata-san explains: "The WVS intends to help you see the information relating to the inner world of your body. People would be able to use the product we are developing with this to aid greater relaxation. Maybe everyone under pressure could use this as a way to relax with a videogame."
He ended by noting that while games have traditionally been developed to excite and stimulate, "in the future they may be used to make you relax and even fall asleep." Once, the world might have scoffed at such a notion, but post Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Brain Training, nobody would be quite so brave just yet.