WiiStroking the WiiEgo.

“We promise to keep people smiling.” I understand that promise, but Nintendo took the scenic route with its new front woman, Cammie Dunaway, whose jaw must have been sore by the end on the conference for all of her grinning. Honestly, it was creepy.

After she talked a lot of rubbish, they finally got to the new games, starting with Shawn White Snowboarding, driven by the balance board, and presented by Shawn White himself. Both played and neither were very good at it, which didn’t speak well of the appeal to casual gamers who don’t want to break their wrist with the real thing, even though it was overly forgiving on the landings. Visuals were sharp and pleasing for a Wii game though. Made by Ubisoft.

Then came Iwata’s brief appearance to gloat in his so endearingly humble way, but hey there’s no one who deserves it more. He talked about how only three years ago, when the “Revolution” was only nebulous in people’s minds, no one expected them to be where they are now, at the top of the console heap. He attributed this to a “true paradigm shift in global game market.” So what has shifted? The explosion of the casual market that allowed them to sell “millions of bathroom scales,” for one. Also, the extremely long-tail sales for certain Nintendo titles, caused by the company’s always expanding player base – drawing women and old women with the promise of intuitive interfaces and Guitar Hero III.

No surprise in the announcement of Animal Crossing Wii: City Folk. This version will allow players to do what they want in their own town, with no goals to answer for. There’s the fashion designer and beauty salon to customize your character, and the ability to send letters with pictures to your friends. However, the big push was online play to invite friends into your towns and engage in mini games, complete with voice communication with the addition of WiiSpeak. Think of it as a Wii version of Home, only that it’s something that will actually see release.

For the worst part of the conference, they bring in Reggie as a ringer. Pure gloating combined with pure numbers, starting with ten million Wii and over twenty million DS sales in the US alone. Included are the promises to get everyone in the world hooked and to keep the current players lining up for their next fix. Nintendo brags also about the sheer number of titles being released, but with its lack of quality control, this is instantly less impressive to anyone forced to review Wii and DS shovelware.

Three titles were given the big pimp. Clone Wars strongly resembled the cartoon from which it’s derived, by which I mean it looked terrible, though the quality of the gameplay was impossible to guess from the trailer. Rayman TV Party is another mini game collection, this time supporting the balance beam and my complete lack of interest. Call of Duty: World at War, however, looked rather slick and mentioned co-op shooting those Nazi bastards, but not a word spoken about online play.

Spore DS is the only console version so far, which sidesteps the issue of the iPhone version. It’s as if Will Wright infected Pokemon, forming a cute little zoo full of bizarre creations designed with the more-than-capable creature creator. What you actually do with these wee beasties wasn’t quite clear from the presentation. They also mentioned the real Pokemon sequel was coming on November the 10th.

GTA: Chinatown Wars arrives on the DS this winter. No screens shown.

The one announcement that might matter is the WiiMotion Plus. Coming Spring ‘09, this Wiimote add-on will finally provide true one-to-one controls with full sense of movement in a 3D space, as so many have complained about the Wii’s lacking in this area. This was shown off in the new version of Wii Sports, set with a Caribbean theme. Players will chuck Frisbees at puppies, pilot jet skis, and sharpen giant pencils. The ultimate show came in the form of a gladiator-like sword duel between Reggie and his subordinate, watching him clearly take a dive in the second match to leave the score even.

WiiMusic might also be big for some, who want to wail on Wiimotes to the tune of Nintendo classics, and who do not mind the fact that a saxophone sounds like a flute and the guitar like one of those wind-up plastic toys. It’s not exactly Rock Band, and it’s not exactly pleasant to listen to a group of non-musicians frantically waving at the air with no sense of rhythm. It should be fun to make music in semi-skilled hands, but it’s a bit of a hard sell on the casual market Nintendo is so focused on. But hey, it’s got fifty different instruments to pretend to play with orchestra mode and other mini games … always with the mini games. You can record your plays and even combine them to up to six parts, and then share the finished composition with your soon to be former friends, so I can’t think of a better game for a night of drunken debauchery.

With that the press conference petered out like the long fade at the end of an 80s rock ballad, and everyone was filing out before the final note. On the whole, there wasn’t much to impress, but with such momentum there wasn’t much reason. Nintendo will continue to steamroll the competition