Nintendo's post-E3 shakedown

By Guy Cocker on 15 June 2005, 9:23am

When Nintendo asks you over to play all of this year's biggest games, you can't really turn them down. So Crave locked into kid-in-candy-store mode and headed to central London to check out the GameCube as it enters its last big Christmas push.

The clear highlight of the day was The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which although not set for release until November is already looking pretty smooth. The preview allowed us to sample the brand new horse-riding sections first-hand, battling a group of enemies across a beautiful grassy terrain, and then rounding up animals into a barn. As you'd expect from Nintendo, the horse riding feels perfectly in tune with the rest of the game, and after a few minutes it felt like a perfectly natural extension of the experience.

The graphical style of Twilight Princess has unfortunately reverted from the beautiful cel-shading of The Wind Waker to look more like Ocarina of Time, only filtered through the graphical powerhouse of the GameCube. However, it plays just like The Wind Waker and is one of the best-looking games on the console. To the mass of PlayStation gamers out there, a new Zelda title might not mean much, but anyone serious about gaming will be pleased to hear this is shaping up nicely.

After the success of Mario Golf and Mario Tennis, Nintendo seems to be going the way of EA by releasing loads of other sporting titles based around the mascot, despite his portly figure. How long before we see Mario Fight Night, where you can smash the plumber's mustachioed face into a bloody pulp? Crave tried out both Super Mario Baseball and football title Super Mario Strikers and found them ideal multiplayer fodder. While fans of realism will have to leave their statistics and realistic ball physics at the door, both games had enough polish to put Mr Sheen out of business.

Three more games caught the attention of the Crave game gurus. Battalion Wars is based on the best Game Boy Advance game of all time -- Advance Wars. While Advance Wars was a turn-based strategy game, Battalion Wars had a lot more in common with Mercenaries. It plays out in real-time, and you control a number of different units at once, from tanks to soldiers. We were more excited about the idea of Advance Wars in 3D, to be honest, so perhaps we'll have to hold out for Advance Wars DS instead.

Killer 7 has been on our radar for a while, not only because it's being developed by Capcom, but we love games that look different to everything else. And we certainly haven't seen a game this abstract since we fell in love with Rez. As an assassin with seven different personalities, you run around in a third-person room and then kill members of the Heaven's Smile organisation in the first person. We couldn't understand a single minute of it, but it looks like it could be the gaming equivalent of an arthouse movie.

The final game to catch Crave's beady eye was Geist -- which is effectively the first ghost simulator. As a member of the spirit world, you can control humans and objects, using the former to play through the game as an out-and-out shooter and the latter to set up strategic traps. Our play through one of the levels revealed that it actually feels very similar to N64 classic GoldenEye, but the 'possession' element felt like it could be the first big innovation since telepathy in Psi-Ops.

In other news, Nintendo has said that its upcoming Revolution console won't be high-definition compatible. Despite Sony and Microsoft saying that this is the way of the future (which we'd wholeheartedly agree with), Nintendo seems to think there aren't enough people with compatible televisions. This clearly echoes the GameCube's lack of online play, which Nintendo thought no one would be bothered about. Talk about irony -- the big selling point of the Revolution is to be its ability to go online and download Nintendo's back catalogue. -GC