Post date: Apr 11, 2016 4:30:39 AM
I'm very excited by the Nintendo NX, but I'm saddened by the lack of rumours, speculations, and hype. I believe that the truth of the Nintendo NX's out there, and once you pick up the hints, it becomes obvious.
We know that consumers of Nintendo's traditional casual games are increasingly choosing smartphone games instead, and that Nintendo will have to differentiate their future console offerings to offer a unique experience compared to smartphones and tablets. So one obvious way to improve from power-hungry smartphones is to create a gaming device without batteries or wires, and that allows limitless play without worrying about charge.
The president of Nintendo, Tatsumi Kimishima, noted in a recent Time interview that Nintendo wants people to encounter their IP more frequently, citing his desire to "increase the population of those people who have access to our IP". Currently, electricity supplies in Sub-Saharan Africa is decreasing due to population growth faster than infrastructure development, so a game device that does not use electricity will be able to capture an audience that could not interact with Nintendo's IP in the usual way. This is the same approach taken by the Wii and DS - both amazing successes for Nintendo. Those consoles targetted people who would "otherwise not come into contact with a form of entertainment like gaming" by using novel motion controls and casual games; the NX can do the same by allowing people who can't even turn on a light or charge a phone to become gamers.
So how would a device without power operate? Recent Nintendo rebranding efforts - replacing the gray Nintendo logo with the traditional red-and-white - signals that Nintendo wants to go back to its roots. Nintendo was founded as a Hanafuda playing cards company, and its first success in toys came in the form of the Ultra Hand, a simple mechanical toy that sold a million units. This suggests that Nintendo's new console will be suitably retro and use the technologies that made Nintendo what it is today - cards and ingenious mechanical contraptions.
But how would Nintendo IP integrate with mechanisms and cards? In the same Time interview, Kimishima notes that "Amiibo are being picked up more as a collection item than, say, as an interactive item with software", and promises new ways to interact with Amiibos to "enhance the play activity". This strongly hints that the new console will offer novel ways to engage the Amiibo in the play experience. As we noted before, the new console's roots in cards and mechanical toys is perfectly suited to Amiibo - Nintendo already has Amiibo cards and devices that hold Amiibo! Thus, the electricity-free console will use Amiibo directly in games, removing the barrier between the virtual world and the real one.
So what types of games can we expect on the electricity-free Nintendo NX?
- Super Mario Maker
This continues the idea of asymmetric multiplayer first introduced on the Wii U: one player draws a square grid, and adds pipes that connects squares together. Other players roll dice to see how many places to advance their Mario, Luigi, Toad, or Peach Amiibo; if they land on a square with a pipe, they travel through the pipe to the connected square. The first player to reach the last square wins. Online play is accomplished by sharing your best grid layouts on Miiverse.
- Super Smash Bros
Each player chooses their Amiibo, place it on a spinning top, and launch it into a stage (a concave bowl) where each Amiibo's top will bump against the other Amiibos. Knocking a top over counts as taking a stock. Testers found that the Fox Amiibo, due to its even weight distribution, is currently the most suitable for this game, but that Nintendo is considering balance changes and patches in the form of small lead stickers that can be applied to Amiibos to make them harder to knock over, and polishing cloth to buff your Amiibos. According to an industry insider, many stages will be produced with a novel feature where the bowl can be replaced with a flat surface for an Omega version of the stage.
- Hearthstone
Yes, that's right: there's unprecidented third-party support at launch. A source at Blizzard confirms that the Activation-owned studio behind the blockbuster World of Warcraft and Hearthstone franchises will launch an iteration of Hearthstone for the NX. The gameplay will consist of drawing cards, each with an action such as "open the Hearthstone app", "tap the Buy Card Pack button", and "Get hit with an unexpected IAP bill". Blizzard is confident that this is the first card game faithfully reproducing the experience of a mobile app faithfully reproducing the experience of a card game.
- Splatoon
A leaked version of Splatoon for NX was found in Korea. Sources do not confirm whether it's in the best Korea.
- Zelda NX
Each player will try to guess the release date of Zelda NX. The fun comes from watching another Nintendo Direct and finding that it's delayed again.
Thus, it's plainly obvious that an electricity free console will return Nintendo to its roots as a cards and mechanical toys maker, introduce new demographics to gaming, and integrate Amiibos as a core part of the game experience. All signs point to Nintendo successfully bringing this concept to market, and even third-parties are pledging support. Because, really: the most powerful gaming device... is you.
tldr: No electricity needed for NX. Your imagination is the only limit.
tldrtldr: literally this