Nintendo Wii Music to mimic 60 instruments Posted on July 21st
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Wii sales have beaten those of more technically advanced and expensive consoles, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3, with its motion controller that can be swung like a bat or a sword, broadening its audience well beyond hardcore video gamers.
Wii Music will let players simulate more than 60 different instruments. Activision’s Guitar Hero turned the music-playing genre into arguably the hottest category for video games.
Guitar Hero already plays on all three game consoles, including the Wii, helping to build the industry’s appeal among players beyond core fighting and race-style titles.
“A true paradigm shift has taken place in the global games market,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told the E3 video game conference, the biggest annual event in the industry.
A more sensitive Wii MotionPlus controller add-on also will debut next spring with a new suite of Wii sports games from the company.
Nintendo widened the uses for the console with its Wii Fit balance board and also this week announced the upcoming launch of Wii Speak, a group microphone that works with its Wii game console and can be used for online games.
The company also said it also planned to release a much-hyped game called Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii this year before the start of the holiday shopping season. The game lets players serve as caretakers of a virtual world that continues to function even when the game isn’t being played.
This is the first time that the Animal Crossing franchise will be available for the Wii. It was already a hit on Nintendo’s past game platform, the GameCube, and the hand-held Nintendo DS.
Nintendo said the DS would also get a version of Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto this winter – Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.
The company expects to have sold about 100 million DS units by the end of its fiscal year next march. It had sold about 70 million in the fiscal year through March 2008.
The rise in music-based video games has led the recording industry to target games as a revenue source, in a bid to replace fading sales from CDs.
The world’s most popular heavy metal band, Metallica, will release its next album Death Magnetic as a download for Guitar Hero III on September 15 – the same day the CD arrives in stores.
“It’s exciting, 27 years into your career, to be doing something first,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said this week.
“In five to 10 years it’ll be a normal thing to release an album to Guitar Hero the same day as the record.”