Nintendo Co. president Satoru Iwata gave this morning, "Discovering New Development Opportunities", at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. Though the audience for these talks is presumably game developers who only care about what Nintendo's doing inasmuch as it gives them either opportunities for Nintendo-platform content or puts the fear of competing against Nintendo's latest into them, Iwata has as of late been using his podium to throw out little announcements here and there.


To wit, once he finished the portion of his speech wherein he spent a lot of time both tooting Nintendo's horn in what has come to be a typical fashion (including the revelation that Wii Fit sales are approaching PlayStation 3 install base) and praising Shigeru Miyamoto, Iwata spilled the following beans:

  • Rock & Roll Climber, having been rumored for some time, was finally shown for WiiWare. This game uses both the Wii Remote and Wii Fit's Balance Board to simulate climbing a mountain. It has nothing to do with Ice Climbers.
  • A new release of the Wii system software (4.0) is now available to address the problem of rapidly-filling Wii storage making it inconvenient to buy Virtual Console and WiiWare titles. There's now a secondary 20-page channels menu, accessible via a little SD icon in the corner, that will load whichever channel you choose from SD to internal memory before launching it—a process that takes only a handful of seconds. Saves, however, must all still reside in internal memory. SDHC is also now supported, up to 32 GB.
  • A whole bunch of Final Fantasy, including I and IV on Virtual Console (Japan gets all the others through VI as well) as well as IV: The Years After and Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord for WiiWare. From Nintendo, Moving Memo and WarioWare Snapped!—previously available in Japan—coming to DSiWare here.
  • The Virtual Console has a new section—Virtual Console Arcade—which will presumably contain arcade-perfect emulations of arcade titles. (Hoping for Bubble Bobble, personally. No port does it justice.)
  • Finally, just as we thought we were done, the sheer power of the Internet hype train seems to have willed an appropriately-themed Zelda title into existence: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. Looking similar to Phantom Hourglass but featuring Link as a conductor of his own train instead of a steamship, this title looks really promising—and never fear, it's not looking like a spinoff.

Nintendo's got Excitebots and Punch-Out!! playable on the floor. The Game Developer's Conference runs through the 27th.