The latest news about the successor to Nintendo's Wii – currently codenamed 'Project Café' – is that the Japanese gaming company plans to stick with traditional buttons and directional pads (d-pads).
According to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the company is unlikely to abandon these traditional and well-loved forms of game controls.
Even so, the rumours about Project Café do seem to indicate that Nintendo is planning on integrating some form of touchscreen tech into the console, with the controller allegedly set to feature a 6.2-inch touchscreen.
Nintendo will make the big unveil at E3 in Los Angeles this coming June, when gamers will finally see what the company has in store for Project Café.
Buttons and d-pad paramount
"Whenever we make a new game console, we've done it without throwing away buttons and the directional pad," Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told an analyst this month.
"The reason for that it's better to have them, because buttons and directional pads benefit gameplay response."
Iwata added that Nintendo plans to stick with what it knows its customers like, and "isn't planning on completely ditching buttons, nor …thinking of taking tablets as they are today and implementing them in a game console."
Thank god for that! That sounds like it would be an awful idea (and is clearly a sideswipe at Sony, with Nintendo's number-one competitor announcing its own tablet computer plans earlier this week).
Stay tuned for lots more on Project Café in the run up to E3 2011 over the coming weeks.
Via CVG
