This is what happens when, unlike your competitors, you don't leak like a sieve prior to your big press conference. Your fanbase is reduced to taking photos of your booth and running them through Photoshop until things start appearing.
Consensus is that underneath the sheet is a NES-era-styled logo for a new game called "Super Mario Bros. Wii". The last game we had that looked like this was the DS' New Super Mario Bros., a 2.5D outing that was pretty tremendously well-received sales-wise, though not as universally loved by the fans as its predecessors Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World (and if you think I'm going to get into which of those is better, you're crazy.) It's conceivable, at least, that this game—if it in fact exists and we're not all being played for fools—could follow in those footsteps.
The existence of some sort of Wii Mario game fits with Nikkei's earlier report that Nintendo would bring such an animal to try to boost Wii's fortunes in Japan and to maintain momentum elsewhere. And beyond this rampant speculation and photoshoppery, we also do know that Nintendo has Sin & Punishment 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers and Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days in their booth as well.
Nintendo's conference officially kicks off at 9 a.m. PST—that's a little over 4½ hours from now—and if Nintendo's past performance at these things is anything to go by, we'll be waiting 5 hours for anyone to start talking anyway. Regardless, you can expect live updates from our entire team at E3 regarding this and whatever else Nintendo pulls the wraps off of, posted both here at N-Sider.com and on our Twitter feed. Hope to see you then!
Original image by IGN; enhanced by NeoGAF's HAL_Laboratory
Consensus is that underneath the sheet is a NES-era-styled logo for a new game called "Super Mario Bros. Wii". The last game we had that looked like this was the DS' New Super Mario Bros., a 2.5D outing that was pretty tremendously well-received sales-wise, though not as universally loved by the fans as its predecessors Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World (and if you think I'm going to get into which of those is better, you're crazy.) It's conceivable, at least, that this game—if it in fact exists and we're not all being played for fools—could follow in those footsteps.
The existence of some sort of Wii Mario game fits with Nikkei's earlier report that Nintendo would bring such an animal to try to boost Wii's fortunes in Japan and to maintain momentum elsewhere. And beyond this rampant speculation and photoshoppery, we also do know that Nintendo has Sin & Punishment 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers and Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days in their booth as well.
Nintendo's conference officially kicks off at 9 a.m. PST—that's a little over 4½ hours from now—and if Nintendo's past performance at these things is anything to go by, we'll be waiting 5 hours for anyone to start talking anyway. Regardless, you can expect live updates from our entire team at E3 regarding this and whatever else Nintendo pulls the wraps off of, posted both here at N-Sider.com and on our Twitter feed. Hope to see you then!