In a recent conference, NoA's president Reggie Fils-Aime said, "[Our message is] that everyone's a gamer. Whether it's bringing joy and happiness to mothers and fathers as they experience Wii for the first time playing Wii Bowling or Wii Tennis, or whether it's bringing a game like Nintendogs to a fifteen or sixteen year old girl who has a puppy that responds only to her voice. That passion is what's driving us, and that passion to be part of shaping the future is really why we're here."
Whether you agree with Nintendo's school of thought or not, the company's way of thinking has certainly helped put it on top this year.
Daniel DeMatteo, COO of GameStop, says that the casual gaming market is going to change the way that his company does business. Devoting spaces to both family-friendly, casual titles and rhythm-based games, he hopes the company will be able maximize profits. Also, he says something kind of crazy in that he thinks the PS2 is the "only one real value video game machines out there."
As far as "powerful storylines" and "strong well-written characters" go, there haven't been many releases on the DS that we could direct you to. 
Just in case you didn't know, the DS owns the Japanese market. At today's Nintendo Media Summit, Reggie Fils-Aime dropped a major bomb: so far in 2007, half of all games sold in Japan have been for the DS. Yes, that was half. It may be time to move beyond the "it prints money" joke. We're not sure that really communicates this level of success. Also, the numbers of people over the age of 30 who are buying the DS are up -- if you look at DS adopters over 35, the statistics are huge: the numbers are up 212%.
Pogo Island isn't a particularly terrible game; there just hasn't been much we've heard about it worth discussing. 
Continuing its praiseworthy support for the Nintendo DS, 
Why, it seems like we were just talking about Touchmaster DS, and now we've got all sorts of advertisement goodness! Well, some goodness, at least -- it's not the best DS ad we've ever seen, but it does do a good job of communicating what the games is and why you should buy it this summer, but in a Pepsi challenge, we'd probably take 
If you've ever spent any time hanging out in bars (something we would never, ever do -- did we mention never ever?), then it's likely you've stumbled across Midway's touch screen games at some point. Now, in a marriage of gaming goodness that seems so obvious in retrospect that we're surprised it took them so long, Midway is bringing a collection of some of their best touch screen games to the DS. Entitled Touchmaster DS, the game will include 23 different games from the arcade machines, including trivia, card games, and puzzlers.
It seems Nintendo's opinions on older folks wanting to play games may not totally be without merit. While chances are should you shove a DS in front of your grandparent's face and demand they play, you'd only receive a puzzled look before said grandparent went back to their game of bridge, this new study shows that it's likely your grandparent already owns the DS and game, and is playing bridge online.
