Nintendo NX & Zelda Rumors

[A Black Falcon]

On top of everything else, there will be no E3 Direct, only a Zelda Treehouse stream.

The biggest problem with this isn't the delay, or not having a E3 Direct, though those things are both really sad and I'll miss having something to watch from Nintendo at E3 Zelda stream aside, it's that all this speculation about the NX has gotten really old. I, like most people, just want to see what it is already, and we should have learned that at E3... but how long will we have to wait, how many more months before we learn what it really is? It's kind of agonizing...

And yeah, not good for Nintendo, given how Sony and MS should have lots of stuff about their system updates, while Nintendo will have nothing until... who knows when. Maybe it'll all turn out fine in the end for Nintendo, everyone will pay attention to them whenever they do say something after all, but it is a missed opportunity. I think E3 does still matter, even if it's less than before.

On the other hand though Zelda is one of my favorite series, so I'm definitely excited to see much more of the next major Zelda game!

Put shortly, I've given the whole "Nintendo enters the cell phone market" a lot of though, and all these compounded problems with multiple different ways Nintendo could approach that challenge are.... thorny... very thorny... Frankly, I'm not at all surprised Nintendo's avoided it so far. Every direction I look I see it as an impossible situation. Well, unless.... Unless Nintendo decides to do something very un-Nintendo-like and simply go third party when it comes to portable games, working out a major deal with both Apple and Google to officially promote a special well-built "controller addon" as the official recommended controller addon for their main cell phone lines. Even then, that's going to be tough as the market for such controller addons can testify to. It's very hard to make a "one size fits all" solution with the endless variations of cell phones out there (blame that one on Google).

True, Microsoft's attempts at a cellphone OS have not worked out too well. Some Nintendo-only thing probably wouldn't do great either... and Nintendo, focusing so much on third-party stuff for Apple and Google phones? That market is so volatile, it's even more boom-bust than the console industry probably...

If they "opened up" extra space on these carts for users, they might as well just use SD cards flat-out.

Having the read-only data be on something separate, for added security and maybe lastability, seems like a good idea though if possible...

I'd be for it, but among other things Nintendo's gotta go through a dramatic shift in how they approach user "ownership" of their consoles. That is "side loaded apps" becoming a thing. The PS3 ALMOST got us there, but one little hacking scandal and they went and removed the custom OS feature from the system.

I just want Nintendo to give up on hard region locking. Absolutely nobody in this industry does this anymore other than Nintendo, and it's terrible. I have no expectations for it as Nintendo is very stubborn, but they REALLY need to ditch region locks.