A portion of an N-Sider interview with Nintendo of Canada representative Matt Ryan...

N-Sider: When will we hear more about Nintendo's strategy for the "hardcore" gamers? The press conference touched on a few things, but it did mostly gloss over it.

Ryan: Well, Nintendo defines core gamer in one way and our competitors in the industry define it in another way. So, it really depends on how you define core gamer. Arguably, Animal Crossing: City Folk is a core gamer title. It has a serious time involvement if you want to put a lot of dedicated time into playing it. There are a lot of activities of customization and communication that the core audience is really interested in, at least from what we know.

Super Mario Sluggers for the Nintendo franchise fan is essentially the Wii Sports baseball experience, but with Mario characters, so I would suggest that's a core title as well. There is functionality in it that makes it very pick-up-and-play and very easy to play for anyone in the family. And we will be going after that market, but Nintendo fans out there will love being able to smack a home run with their Wii Remotes.

And that's just Wii titles. On Nintendo DS, one of our core titles that we didn't really talk about at the press conference, but did announce a few weeks ago, is Kirby Super Star Ultra, which is a very core game. It's side-scrolling, it's Kirby being cute, but doing some damage when he needs to. It also has the cool characters like Meta Knight and DeDeDe, which the core audience is really happy about. We've got Pokémon Ranger 2 coming out. I don't think we have a time frame for it yet, but that's another where it's not as RPG style. Did you play the first Pokémon Ranger?

Full interview here