Nintendo oddly pledges support for Wii U and 3DS post-NX launch

Nintendo honcho Satoru Iwata has said that the company would support both the Wii U and the handheld 3DS after the Nintendo NX launches, which has sparked more than a few interesting thoughts as to what the new machine actually is.

Leave it to Nintendo to cause a rumor deluge.

Iwata is of course, the president of Nintendo, and he isn’t afraid to put himself out there in the least. He’s appeared numerous times over the years, not just to investors, but to the gaming public as well in the Nintendo Direct series of ‘press conference’ videos.

Now he’s made a few more interesting statements, one of which calls into the center ring the question of what the Nintendo NX will be exactly. The company’s next piece of hardware, meant to follow up on the eternally struggling Wii U, the NX is a big fat mystery in almost every way.

Nintendo won’t go on the record about the machine’s specs till 2016 (they’ve said as much), but that hasn’t stopped the leaks and rumors any. Just recently, a Korean website spelled out a Summer 2016 launch for the new system and said that Foxconn has secured the production contract for it. While that may or may not be accurate, it is definitely true that Nintendo thinks the NX will deliver something all together ‘new’ to consumers.

It’s just how it’s going to do that, while at the same time making up for the failings of the Wii U, that is the question.

Answers are slim right now as you might imagine, and Iwata reiterated (in a recent talk with investors) that Nintendo wouldn’t be sharing too many tidbits any time soon. He did say though that the company would support both the Wii U and the 3DS after the new console hits. And that’s pretty interesting in and of itself.

While you can’t read anything concrete into it, it would certainly seem that Nintendo is planning on having a split system head to retail. Again, this is pure conjecture, but I could easily see Nintendo offering a system that plays at home as a console, and then has a component that separates for on the road gaming. It seems extremely strange that Nintendo would create something standalone in the realm of the handheld console though, since the New 3DS just launched this year. But why bring up the 3DS at all if that’s not the case?

Well, one option is that we might be looking at a situation like the Turbografx 16 had with its home console and the optional Turbo Express. If you don’t remember the Turbo, basically it was an 16bit home video game console. Nothing too special about that (it did have some great games though), but what was really cool was that console-maker NEC released a handheld system called the Turbo Express.

It didn’t tout a library of its own, but instead played the console’s games natively. So you could literally play at home, then pop the card out of your TurboGrafx and load it up on you Turbo Express for the road. Pretty awesome really. Who knows if that’s where this is heading, but it does present a unique and definitely cool possibility, and something of an evolution for the Wii U’s GamePad gimmick as well.

Iwata also added something else that was odd though, and this one made precious little sense. He said that the lack of third-party support that was seen in Nintendo’s Wii U (and the Wii to a lesser extent) would be solved for the NX via “a Nintendo-like solution” that would be offered to publishers. Read into that what you like, because I have no idea what to make of it. He also said that they “are making various considerations and preparations in order to avoid what happened with the previous generations”, and that particular little bit was undeniably good to hear as a fan.

Still a lot of question marks with what Nintendo has up its sleeve though, maybe more so after this briefing. One thing’s for sure however, it’s getting pretty darn interesting and 2016 can’t come soon enough.

Source: MCV