Sad smiley face. Nintendo had the chance to blow our mind with some genuinely interesting developments for the Wii but for the past hour all they’ve done is reveal disappointment upon disappointment.

Hit the jump for everything the hour-long presentation had to offer..not that it was much.

Shaun White Snowboarding with exclusive Wii motion controls
Nintendo completely caught me off guard by announcing something genuinely interesting. As I’ve already noted here a stodgy Nintendo PR took to the stage and said how her son adored her because “she worked for Nintendo”, and that the company was all about making players smile. Whatever. Regardless, snowboarding superstar Shaun White took to the stage to debut the Wii edition of Shaun White Snowboarding, which used the Balance Board to shift weight, accelerate and brake on your snowboard and the Wiimote to perform tricks. It looked pretty fun, I gotta admit it! Nintendo were off to a good start!

Flexing the sales muscle, part 1
Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata took to the stage afterwards to flex the company’s sales muscles and bore the audience with statistics by the shedload. Save for a gag about the Wii “bathroom scales” selling millions, it was all pretty boring with Mario and other standard Nintendo franchises pimped to death. And it completely destroyed the image of Nintendo being that nice friendly company with its consumers at heart; it was like attending “a demo of the new Excel” as our very own Eoco commented.

Animal Crossing: City Folk and Wii Speak revealed
The freshly-announced Animal Crossing: City Folk looks to be the DS incarnation Wild World reinvented with some chunkier graphics and the occasional bit of motion-sensitive minigame action. Fishing was demonstrated using the Wiimote to swing out and catch fish, similar to Wii Play. In a move essentially pimping one of the Wii’s standard functions as new, you can send messages to friends in other cities across the Animal Crossing network.

A microphone peripheral was also revealed entitled Wii Speak, a non-directional microphone allowing the entirety of a room to communicate with another room across the internet. Unforunately, in allowing an entire room to speak every last smidgen of background noise will also be perfectly audible unless Nintendo have done some clever trickery or just narrowed the audible sound range so much that only the squeakiest of voices can be picked up in the entire room.

Then, big ole’ Reggie stomped onto the stage and flexed his muscles. More on that over the page.

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