In Nintendo’s latest investor relations meeting, Iwata gave us several insights into Nintendo’s future strategies for the Wii U and the 3DS, including his reassurance that the Wii U won’t suffer from the same lack of software that the Wii did. Next up, we’ve got his word on free game demos – one of the many elements of an online service that Nintendo has disappointed on.

Iwata acknowledged that people see the value in a big-name franchise like Mario or The Legend of Zelda, and are willing to pay full price for them, but by contrast, they may be reluctant to risk $60 on a new and original IP that has virtually no recognition in the world. He more or less confirmed that we’ll start seeing free demos appearing on our 3DS’s while we slept, and marked the same feature as a possibility for the Wii U.

[When] Nintendo would like to ask users to try a specific new game, we should deliver it to their Nintendo 3DS, and possibly Wii U, with their prior consent and recommend that they just try it and, if they like it, they can pay for it. In this way, we need to introduce users to unknown products. Consumers are likely to be convinced to pay about 5,000 yen (approx. $60) for a well-established franchise product, but not all the people are willing to pay a certain amount of money for an innovative but unknown product.

Sounds like good news to me. Let’s just hope that Nintendo keeps the demos available indefinitely, instead of removing them after several weeks like they currently do on the Wii Shop Channel.

Operation Rainfall is a stark reminder that software droughts on the Wii are a problem. At a a recent investor’s call, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was asked what steps the company was taking to ensure that the Wii U did not suffer from the same software problems as the Nintendo Wii.

In response, Iwata reflected on Nintendo Wii failures, “at the times the Nintendo DS and the Wii were released, we could not make the software publishers appreciate our systems highly and count on them. At the time, Nintendo was driven to the edge of the ring,” Iwata said to the investors. He then went on to describe that many industry observers speculated Nintendo would leave the hardware business, which forced Nintendo to rely on itself for software production early on. Continue reading…

It’s good to finally have an answer to a question many have been asking since the 3DS’s debut: will the Wii U be able to output a 3D signal to 3D TVs?

Iwata’s official answer to that question is “technologically, yes, it is going to be possible, but that’s not the area we are focusing on.” You may now breathe a sigh of relief.

The reason Nintendo isn’t going to put a major emphasis on 3D graphics with the Wii U is simply because the market penetration of 3D TVs is too low at this point in time to justify it, as Reggie pointed out earlier. But it’s still reassuring to see that it will be a supported and usable feature in the console for those who do have a 3D TV to hook it up to. Just don’t expect to find any games that use the 3D as anything beyond an (admittedly awesome) visual sweetener.

In retrospect, it actually would’ve been more surprising to see 3D omitted from the Wii, particularly considering that both the Wii and even the GameCube were capable of outputting stereoscopic images – the feature was simply disabled on the hardware level in production units because 3D TVs were virtually nonexistent at the times both of those consoles launched.

With the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 already touting 3D output in the current generation, it would be odd to not see the feature come to the Wii U, which marks the beginning of the next generation of home consoles. I expect the market share of 3D TVs will start picking up as they drop in price over time, so it’s great to know that the Wii U is future-proof in that regard.

Much like the issue with not being able to experience the 3DS’s glasses-free 3D without seeing it in person, it might be difficult for some people to acknowledge the gameplay possibilities that the Wii U’s tablet controller holds.

But Reggie is quite confident that getting consumers to realize them won’t be an issue, telling us that he doesn’t think it’s “going to be a hard sell”.

We’re essentially creating a whole new type of game. It’s not handheld, it’s not a tablet, it’s a different type of experience. It’s an experience that most consumers have said, wow, I’d love to do that. I’d love to be able to have my home console gaming experience while my spouse is watching something else, whether that’s live sports, whether that’s some other entertainment option. Once it’s described, people are tremendously excited about it.

If that last line is true, I think Nintendo needs to describe the Wii U a little better. The general reaction I’m seeing on the Internet isn’t one of “tremendous excitement”. Even I will admit that I’m still somewhat skeptical of the Wii U, despite owning this fan site dedicated to it.

We still have no clear details on the Wii U’s online system, but if Reggie’s words from a recent interview with Forbes are anything to go by, it’ll be anything but a unified, consistent experience.

Forbes: Your online services are very different than what your competitors offer. Isn’t something missing, that you can’t offer the sort of experience I can get on Xbox Live?

Reggie: I don’t think it is an issue for us, and here’s why. We’ve seen what our competitors have done, and we’ve acknowledged that we need to do more online, starting with the launch of our eShop on Nintendo 3DS, and we’re going to continue to build our online capability.

For Wii U, we’re going to take that one step further, and what we’re doing is creating a much more flexible system that will allow the best approaches by independent publishers to come to bear. So instead of a situation where a publisher has their own network and wants that to be the predominant platform, and having arguments with platform holders, we’re going to welcome that. We’re going to welcome that from the best and the brightest of the third party publishers.

Perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions, but this almost sounds like Reggie is saying “we don’t want to create a unified network experience, so we’re leaving it up to individual developers to create their own.” What I see here is that every major publisher will have its own network for its own games – perhaps the experience within all of EA’s games will be similar, but Ubisoft’s will be different. One publisher might support achievements, while another will have video chat. I hope they at least tie it all together with a friend code, but we’ve heard that those have been eradicated, too.

We’ve been promised an “extremely robust” online experience, but I’m losing more and more confidence that we’re really going to get one.

In an interview with NowGamer about their upcoming Nintendo 3DS title, Shinobi, Griptonite games have expressed interest in a developing a game for the Wii U. When asked whether they were tempted to develop for the Wii U they had this to say.

It would be awesome to work on Wii U, if just to explore new ideas. That handheld screen could open up some great possibilities for a tabletop kind of experience with friends, among others.

Nintendo has always been known for its innovation and the Wii U is no exception. We’re not only tempted but itching to develop for it!

Time will tell whether their enthusiasm will manifest into physical games for the Wii U.

Will Zelda Wii U look like Wind Waker?

Remember that really stunning Zelda demo that was showcased at E3? How could anyone forget the beautiful demonstration. Not long after that Feld0 reported that Miyamoto had confirmed that a Zelda game would be coming to the Wii U.

But those thinking that the finished game will be akin to that gorgeous demo at E3 might want to think again as Zelda producer, Eiji Aonuma has put across the idea that it might not look like that at all.

This won’t come as too much of a surprise as Nintendo did repeatedly stress that the video demonstrations that they showed were not representative of real games.

“You probably remember that when we introduced the GameCube, we showed a somewhat realistic Zelda demo, and what we actually created was the cel-shaded Wind Waker,”” said Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma in a recent interview. “So when we show a graphic demo, people think, ‘Oh, this is what the next Zelda will look like,’ but that’s not necessarily the case.”

He also went on to say that the demo shown was just an experiment to see what Zelda would look like in HD and to test out the Wii U graphics. This suggests that the final Zelda game could be something quite different.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind cel-shaded, Wind Waker type graphics but I can’t help wanting the art style and visuals we saw at E3.

A sweet-looking trailer for Batman: Arkham City has been released. It’s a meaty 12 minutes long, and features lots of great in-game footage.

However, it should be noted that this is not a trailer specifically for the Wii U version of the game, but rather one that represents all four platforms it will be on – judging by the button icons that appear in the video, the footage shown appears to be lifted from the Xbox 360 version.

The October 18, 2011 release date is also worth mentioning. Warner Bros. may or may not be in the know about the Wii U’s exact release date, but it’s clear that the Wii U version of the game won’t be coming until the year after. Why does this matter? It means that Rocksteady Studios has several months – possibly close to a year – to finish porting the game to the Wii U. Hopefully, this extra time for that particular version will be put into taking good advantage of the touchscreen controller. It also gives us reason to hope for Batman: Arkham City to be a launch title for the system.

The trailer also suggests that you pre-order the game. If you want to do that, Amazon has already started taking them.

Thanks to Arnar and Bob for pointing out my silly error of a 2012 release date.

After teasing a Metroid game for the Wii U and the general direction Nintendo is taking with the console, Katsuya Eguchi has dropped another interesting quote which tells us that it’s up to developers to decide what they want to do with the Wii U controller’s touchscreen – if they even want to do anything with it at all. He says that he only wants developers to use it “if it makes sense for the game to make use of the touchscreen.”

I don’t think it’s necessary for any and all developers working on software for the Wii U to make use of all of its features, including the touchscreen.

Regardless of whether it’s a Nintendo developer or a third-party developer, if it makes sense for the game to make use of the touchscreen, I hope they take advantage of that. If it doesn’t, I hope they don’t.

But it is one of the unique offerings among all of the consoles available out there, so if it does give a distinct flavour to the Nintendo version of a game, then I hope they utilise that to its fullest.

This echoes a previous statement about the 3DS in which we were told that using 3D, while encouraged, was far from mandatory.

I like the sound of this, personally, as it’s extra assurance that we’re not gonna see developers cramming touchscreen controls into games they simply don’t belong in. But it’s a double-edged sword, because it also opens the door for them to get lazy and not do anything with the touchscreen not because it doesn’t make sense, but because they just want to get the game out to start making money off of it. Sadly, I can realistically see this happening with major franchises like Call of Duty which sell millions on their name alone.

Yoshinori Kitase, producer of the Final Fantasy series, has said in an interview that Square Enix ” would seriously consider” putting together an HD compendium of Final Fantasy games.

We haven’t made up our mind about that yet, but if there was a strong voice coming through from the users asking for such porting, then obviously we would seriously consider it, but no actual plans yet.

Nothing specific was mentioned about the Wii U, but it certainly falls into the realm of HD, and a collection of HD remakes of several (if not all) of the Final Fantasy games would be one heck of a boost for the system’s popularity.

Inspired by Operation Rainfall, a few members of our community are now working to get “Operation Moogle” started, which is a campaign to bring together all the Final Fantasy fans who support the idea of someday seeing such a collection materialize. I fully support them, and you can join the effort in their official forum thread.