At an investor meeting, Nintendo President and Satoru Iwata made the announcement that Nintendo will be working on an online gaming network for their Nintendo 3DS and forthcoming Wii U systems. For those not exactly aware, Nintendo’s current “online network” (quotation marks entirely necessary), the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, is something short of a fully functional online gaming network like Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. Don’t take it from this jaded former Nintendo fan, take it from Nintendo’s President himself, who said the new network will be “Unlike Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, which has been focused upon specific functionalities and concepts.”

The Nintendo 3DS isn’t as portable as one would think a portal gaming machine would be. Sure, you can physically move it around when playing it, and you can easily bring it somewhere without detaching it from your entertainment center and stuffing it into a big duffel bag like you’d have to do with a console, but if you want to actually use the 3D feature — the whole point of the handheld — you can’t actually move the unit or your head around, or else the screen will be rendered visually indecipherable. Now, with the Japanese release of Kid Icarus: Uprising, the Nintendo 3DS will make use of a stand. That’s right, a thing you plop down on a table, then attach the 3DS to while, amusingly for people who don’t actually have to use it, actually holding the unit anyway.

The Entertainment Software Association announced yesterday that its support of anti-piracy legislation in general and the Stop Online Piracy Act in particular is unwavering, despite the dissenting opinions of many of its members. Many of the companies in the ESA like Nintendo, Sony and Electronic Arts have fought to be removed from lists of SOPA supporters as a reaction to the horrible consequences the bill could have if passed and the significant PR problems they’d face as supporters, but if the ESA still supports SOPA, it’s pretty much all for naught. No matter what they say, they’ll be supporting SOPA, at least tacitly, unless they leave the ESA or get it to change its tune.

A recent update to the Judiciary Committee’s list of top supporters for the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, more commonly known as SOPA or “that horrible law in congress,” suggests that alliances may be shifting behind the scenes. The refreshed list shows that top game makers Nintendo, Sony, and EA have dropped their support the law.

First, the good news: Nintendo will be releasing a new entry in the stellar turn-based strategy Fire Emblem series, for a spring 2012 release in Japan. Now, the bad news: It’s going to be releasing on the Nintendo 3DS, a system that isn’t selling too well, and one that at least one writer doesn’t want to have to buy just to play a new game in one of his favorite strategy series. The mixed news, now: This new Fire Emblem will be Nintendo’s first game to have paid downloadable content. After years of pushing against it, for better or worse, it looks as though Nintendo will embrace the DLC era.

There are a lot of Nintendo characters. A lot. And of course, when there are a lot of a things, what do you want to do with them? Cram them all into the same visual space. Luis Carrasquillo did just that, creating a massive, 3,000 pixel wide panoramic containing pretty much every major Nintendo character ever, the ones you love and the ones you didn’t even know had any relation back to Nintendo. Check out the whole, massive thing after the jump, and head on over to Luis’ Deviant Art page if you want to see the comprehensive list of characters in the picture.

If anything has consistently been in contention regarding The Legend of Zelda series, it is if each game coherently fits into one single universe. Nintendo always said yes, gamers always said there is no possible way. Nintendo never really gave us many hints, but an accepted working theory was that Ocarina of Time was supposed to be the first in the timeline, and the original NES The Legend of Zelda (and its sequel) was supposed to be the last. Working with this information, and the fact that a few games in the series (Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask, to name two) were directly related to other games in the series, gamers came up with the working theory that if you split the Zelda timeline in two, everything fit into place. Now, with the release of a new Zelda art book, Nintendo has released the official timeline for the series, both satiating our thirst for chronological Zelda order, and also really bugging us that Nintendo has regularly said all these years that everything fits into one timeline when this official timeline shows that, what do you know, there are three separate timelines.

Remember that ridiculous Slide Pad thing Nintendo is releasing for its maligned 3DS handheld? Well, some enterprising soul managed to snag one of the devices early in Japan, where the peripheral went on sale yesterday, and made a startling discovery. Apparently the manual for the device claims that although the Slide Pad runs on a separate AAA battery, it will last some 480 hours before needing to be replaced.

Shigeru Miyamoto was once, and occasionally still shines as, an entertainment genius. He’s the father of Mario and Zelda, and has pretty much been Nintendo’s creative force ever since he began his work there. Though Nintendo has its ups and downs more than any other console developer in the gaming industry, and even if Nintendo has left a bad taste in your mouth for years, it’d still be pretty difficult to imagine a gaming landscape without Shigeru Miyamoto. In an interview with Wired, Miyamoto revealed that we’re one step closer to that kind of landscape, for better or worse, as he stated he is stepping down from his current position at Nintendo and will be focusing on making smaller games.

When you’re coming up on the 7th game in a franchise that hasn’t really changed too much since its second iteration, you need to do some pretty seriously advertising. That’s why Nintendo went all out for their Mario Kart 7 promotion and had West Coast Customs create some life-sized models of the actual “Mario kart” as well as the bee kart for the L.A. Auto Show.