It wouldn’t be a new Nintendo console without a new Mario game. Nintendo has let it slip that a Wii U New Super Mario Bros. sidescroller and Pikmin game will be shown at E3 this year, which takes place June 5-7, 2012. The confirmations are somewhat related, but both can be traced back to Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s famously loose-lipped game designer. As the man who created both game series, it seems only fitting that he’d accidentally reveal their sequels, no?
Mario Bros. Wii U
During an interview with Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Miyamoto confirmed that a new Mario game will be unveiled in June. Eurogamer got a hold of Nintendo, who confirmed the report.
“In a recent interview, Mr. Miyamoto confirmed that a new Super Mario Bros. game for the Wii U system will be shown at this year’s E3 Expo,” a Nintendo spokesperson told Eurogamer. “We’ll have more to announce about our plans for the E3 Expo at a later date.”
According to a number of sites, this Mario game will be based on the multiplayer Super Mario Bros. Mii demo shown at E3 2011. The game played like a classic Super Mario sidescroller, but allowed one player to use the main Wii U tablet controller, which has its own screen that duplicated the action on the TV. If you were playing single player, you could actually play the entire game on your controller. Other players who joined in used Wii Remotes and could customize their faces with their Mii — an avatar that you create when you get your Wii. Read more about last year’s Wii U demos in our roundup.
Judging by Nintendo’s recent Super Mario games, this one will likely be a straight sidescroller that mostly looks like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, though it will undoubtedly have some gameplay elements that make it unique to Wii U.
Pikmin Wii U
Pikmin may have been born on the GameCube, Nintendo’s worst-selling game console, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great game. In the El Mundo interview Shigeru Miyamoto also said that a Pikmin is in the works and Kotaku managed to squeeze a similarly bland confirmation out of Nintendo of America.
“In a recent interview, Mr. Miyamoto confirmed that a new Pikmin will be shown at the E3 Expo in June,” said a Nintendo representative. “He believes that anyone who has played Pikmin games in the past will enjoy playing.”
While we don’t have any general gameplay details, Pikmin has always been one of Nintendo’s franchises that would have best benefited from the motion control in a Wii sequel. Nintendo re-released versions of the original games, but has taken its time in developing a sequel. It’s unknown how much of the core gameplay will remain. In the original, you play as Olimar, a tiny alien who crash lands in a garden. To repower his ship, he has to pluck little pikmin and have them pick up and carry parts of it back for him, while avoiding huge monsters. Half of the fun of the game is tossing the Pikmin and exploring the world, which often has huge versions of real-world items (Olimar is very small) like CocaCola bottle caps or Duracell batteries.
Pikmin seems a natural fit for the secondary Wii U tablet screen, which could allow you to see a view of the map ahead or allow you to reorganize your Pikmin or manage items. It could also serve as a screen for the Piklopedia, which gives information about the world around you.
