Friday, November 16, 2018

Spirit Tracks on Smartphones?


About two weeks ago Nintendo has renewed their trademarks for both Mario vs. Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (see here). The interesting part is that it lists ‘program for smartphone’ under the purposes... Of course this is all just standard procedure, but if they currently were to remake both the Nintendo DS Zelda games, the Nintendo Switch wouldn't really be a suitable platform. A smartphone, however, would be.

You would simply display both screens as one big screen, where the lower half is the one for the input. Smartphones come with microphones that could be used for the audio inputs as well, though it would be best to find an alternative for that, because playing the Spirit Flute was especially annoying. The other problem would be drawing on maps, because without stylus controls this wouldn't be all that accurate. But otherwise the games could work really well on a phone.

This brings us even back to the topic of a Nintendo 3DS successor, where one idea was to attach a controller to a Smartphone. That way they could make a majority of the Nintendo DS and 3DS library accessible again. The Nintendo Zelda games are in the special position that they don't require button inputs, however, so they could work on a Smartphone without any attachments.

Well, I personally would still prefer a new Zelda game on smart devices over a remake of Spirit Tracks, which is one of my least favorite Zelda games. A sequel to the game could be interesting, still.

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