Nintendo veteran hints Project Cafe all-new, HD

Nintendo's famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto in a Dutch interview late this week dropped few but important hints about his company's next console. The Zelda pioneer would neither confirm nor deny the existence of Project Cafe, a game system with a large touchscreen and analog hybrid gamepad, but promised that whatever would come about would be "totally different than usual." Spits was given a clue that the new game system would natively support HDTVs versus the 480p of the Wii.

"To us it is of course a logical step to be doing something with HD," Miyamoto said. "The number of households with an HD television is now large enough to make an HD game console. And of course we are always busy with the development of new consoles. We will not only focus on HD."

The Japanese video gaming giant was rumored to be using the touchscreen to create an experience similar to the DSi on a TV, where the gamepad's controller has secondary info or even its own mini-games. Both the gamepad's basic design and possible support for a Wii-like remote as a second controller type are still unconfirmed and could be wrong. However, Nintendo has a history of reinventing its control schemes with every TV-based system from the Nintendo 64 onwards and may hope to break away once again.

Project Cafe has most often been predicted in the past few days to be shipping in 2012, though a chance exists that it might ship at the end of 2011 if it lined up developers very early. [image via Vincent Diamante]

By Electronista Staff