Nintendo announces Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for DS, along with other new 1st and 3rd party titles. But Mario and Zelda are nowhere to be found.

I and the rest of the world has just finished watching the live podcast of Nintendo’s Media Summit that happened at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2008 or E3. This is the biggest gaming industry event where all gaming companies make presentations of their upcoming games and gaming ideas.

Where art thou o beautiful Princess Zelda?

I wasn’t able to watch the podcast from the very start since I was informed a bit late that the conference was already starting, but I believe I managed to watch the big announcements. Starting with Nintendo’s overall president Satoru Iwata.

Mr. Iwata believes Nintendo has caused another revolution in gaming with the advent of the motion-sensing console, Wii, and the touch screen based handheld, DS. With these two consoles, gamer userbase was able to expand interest even to the confirmed non-gamers. Especially with the female population. Iwata believes this has been successful since it was always their goal to “break the psychological barrier between gamers and non gamers. Wii sports started the trend” but a lot more surprises are in development.

The new upcoming titles announced are the following:

Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii) - basically a sequel to the town life simulation game that first appeared on the Gamecube, followed by Animal Crossing: Wild World on the DS. I am not too excited about this game since I’ve never even managed to get my golden statue on the Gamecube version. My little sister though, is a different story.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (DS) - Probably the biggest surprise announcement from Nintendo during the conference. The audience literally gasped upon hearing this. I’m glad to see more 3rd party support for Nintendo. And it’s NOT A PORT! Nice work on this, even though I’m no GTA fan, I will still try this out.

Wii Music (Wii) - A music simulation game unlike the usual “follow the beat” music sims such as Guitar Hero. Wii Music actually lets the feel the experience of playing actual instruments. Ranging from drums, violin, saxophone, (you name it!) with just using the Wiimote. Game legend Shigeru Miyamoto even personally demonstrated the game onstage as he played a “saxophone” together with a professional drummer who was using Wii music drums. Both were using Wiimotes. After Miyamoto elaborated more about Wii music, his demonstration ended with a six-piece Wii music band composed mostly of Nintendo staff, performing “Super Mario Theme” on Wii Music.

Other games announced but didn’t really interest me too much were Star Wars: Clone Wars, Spore DS, Wii Sports 2, Shaun White Snowboarding and Pokemon Rangers.

As a Nintendo fan, the reason why I always watch out for Nintendo is because I always want to know what Mario’s next game will be. Or what the new Zelda title will be. But for this E3 presentation, I’m a bit sad because I didn’t get to see my Nintendo heroes. But I guess you can’t always get what you want. I’ll just wait for E3 2009 I guess. *grumble grumble* I still love Nintendo though.