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Nintendo Announces New Zelda DS Title and Wii Storage

Nintendo kicked off its presence at the Game Developers Conference with a bang. During his keynote address, President Satoru Iwata today revealed two major surprises: a new storage solution for the Nintendo's Wii home console and an upcoming Nintendo DS game from The Legend of Zelda franchise.

The new Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks game that Iwata announced will utilize the intuitive touch control of Phantom Hourglass in an all new adventure that will please longtime Zelda fans while keeping the game accessible to all DS owners. The concept behind this Zelda game revolves around using a steam locomotive to travel around the world, switching Phantom and Link to explore the dungeons, and solving puzzles using new items.

As the library of downloadable WiiWare and Virtual Console games continues to grow, Wii owners have asked Nintendo to provide expanded storage space. Starting today, Wii owners will be able to save downloaded WiiWare, Virtual Console video games, and Channels directly to High Capacity SD cards, in addition to regular SD memory cards. To play games that have been saved to SD cards, consumers will be able to select and launch them from an SD Menu icon on the Wii Menu. (Note that when launching games or channels from an SD card, an equivalent amount of internal Wii memory is required. To clear space from the internal memory, users can transfer games or channels from the Wii Menu to the SD card). This feature is included in the latest version of the Wii System Menu Update, which owners will receive immediately after performing a system update today.

Gamers will be glad to have that additional storage space, because the Virtual Console is expanding to include the arcade versions of classic third-party games like Tecmo's Starforce, as well as Mappy, Gaplus and Tower of Druaga by Namco Bandai. We hope that this leads the way for bigger and better arcade releases on the Virtual Console.

[Source: Nintendo GDC Keynote]