At the Hollywood & Highland complex in L.A. Nintendo held its annual press conference to set the tone for the show which begins for real in the morning. There were one or two surprises on-hand, and between the cheers and cries of the crowd, the Big N finally lifted the lid on its upcoming next-generation console, still dubbed the Revolution. Along with the world debut of the incredibly slick and tiny Game Boy micro and of course, a lengthy new trailer of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the press conference had more than enough to keep the faith of Nintendo's commitment to video gaming as strong as ever.

The event kicked off when Satoru Iwata arrived on stage and claimed to have been playing a little Smash Bros. last night. He said, "last night I kicked some ass... Reggie, who's your daddy?" The comedy subsided and the segue meant that Reggie Fils-Aime took center stage to give the anticipated overview of the state of Nintendo's affairs since this time last year. Fils-Aime noted that Nintendo is the only company out there that had both vested interests in hardware and console development and also software creation. Stating that Nintendo as a company has sold well over two billion games over the last 20 years, he noted that this is just the beginning and certainly not the end.

Nintendo remains one of the top two game manufacturers and publishers in the world, so there's a distinct advantage of having to look at gaming as a whole from two totally different perspectives at the same time. With that in mind, Reggie launched into a statistical diatribe regarding the current state of the handheld gaming scene. In no uncertain terms, he informed the crowd with unflinching confidence that Nintendo has been, and always will be the leader in this market.

With 28 million GBA units sold to date in the U.S. alone, Nintendo firmly believes it is the winner of the most recent handheld wars to date: the battle of the DS and the PSP. Although PSP has yet to launch in Europe, Fils-Aime commented that "it wasn't his problem" and that he was tremendously happy with the success of the DS so far.

Behold the Revolution

Pimping the notion of its games becoming more and more creative, there followed a cool demonstration of the upcoming musical audio title for the DS, ElectroPlankton. So confident in its abilities to create cool tunes, Nintendo also brought up on stage famous David Hollands, a well-known DJ -- who proceeded to mix up and crank out some wicked tunes via two DS units. The results were quite impressive.

But not as impressive as the prospect of the upcoming wireless online gaming service for the NDS. As you all probably know, Nintendo has partnered with GameSpy technologies to create this service which will launch sometime in the fall. Nintendo is hoping to achieve a user participation rate of around 90 percent of DS users, which seems like quite a loft goal. Stating that the service will indeed be cost-free for all first-party Nintendo games, there are currently around 25 independent publishers working on online Wi-Fi compatible DS titles.