Wrapup: What Nintendo Announced at E3 - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Nintendo's E3 press conference is over, and if you were following it on our live stream (and you were, right?), consider this wrap-up a refresher. While Microsoft focused plenty of time on new interfaces and functionality options on Monday, Nintendo was unsurprisingly all about the games: Animal Crossing: City Folk, Wii Music, and Wii Sports Resort are their big announcements for the Wii, and the DS gets another dose of Guitar Hero: On Tour along with -- maybe the biggest surprise of the conference -- Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

But this isn't exactly a staggering litany of new game announcements -- in fact, Nintendo deliberately kept the list of game demos short while assuring that it would be "impossible" to fit in showings for all of the games currently in the works for Wii and DS. Still, even with the short list of games on the schedule, they are mostly games we've already heard of or seen before -- including the two most exciting Wii games shown, Animal Crossing and Wii Music.

Animal Crossing was shown first, with a video of gameplay footage accompanied by series producer Katsuya Eguchi outlining some of the new features. The biggest addition also accounts for the new subtitle -- unlike previous versions of Animal Crossing, City Folk lets you venture out from your tranquil village and visit a (relatively) bustling city, where you'll find an auction house, clothing store, academy, and a beauty salon (which lets you transform your character into a Mii). The game also features online play, which seems to be similar to the online play in the DS version and pretty short of the "Animal Crossing MMO" rumor that has circulated for a while. Nintendo also showed off a new "WiiSpeak" peripheral, which is a community microphone that lets anyone in the same room speak into it.

Wii Music closed the show, with Shigeru Miaymoto himself appearing on stage and playing the saxophone with a Wii Remote. Wii Music, of course, was first revealed at E3 2006 as a mere tech demo, but today's showing is a fully formed game, with over 50 instruments including drums, sax, piano, violin, guitar, marimba, and various percussion instruments. You use the Wiimote, Nunchuk and Balance Board to play them, and apparently, success is based more on simply mimicking the motions of playing instruments rather than any musical talent. We should have more impressions of Wii Music soon, so stay tuned.

Also demoed was Wii Sports Resort, a sequel to the Wii pack-in and the first game to use the Motion Plus add-on (which comes with the game). Wii Sports Resort's activities are beach-themed, with onstage demonstrations including playing Frisbee with a dog, riding a Jet Ski, and, um, sword fighting. Maybe that's not a typical beach activity, but with the help of the Motion Plus add-on, it's the direct, 1-to-1 motion-controlled sword-fighting game everyone's been waiting for since the Wii was first announced. The game is due for release next spring.

The DS got an equal amount of time devoted to it, and easily the biggest announcement is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, set for release this holiday season. It may not be as fancy as GTA4, but it'll be great to see the überviolent GTA series sharing shelf space with Nintendogs.

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