LOS ANGELES — Nintendo closes out this year’s E3 Expo press conferences with a big question: What’s it’s new console going to be like?

All will be revealed on Tuesday morning at the Nokia Theater when the maker of Wii and 3DS unveils its latest game machine. The successor to the Wii couldn’t come at a better time: Nintendo needs an HD console now that more and more consumers are buying high-def TV sets, and Sony and Microsoft have both pinched motion control for the PlayStation and Xbox 360 systems. So Nintendo, driver of innovation in the games business, needs something new that none of its competitors can claim.

Apart from that, it’s said absolutely nothing about the new machine, so it’s sure that a great part of its conference will be devoted to it. But Nintendo also has a big gaping hole where its 3DS and Wii release schedules should be, and so it will need to show a lot of new content for those systems as well. The company’s Japanese studios have turned out some excellent games like The Last Story and Xenoblade, so hopefully we’ll get U.S. release dates for those in short order. We’ve got to have something until that new console in 2012, after all.

Wired.com’s live blog coverage will begin at 9 a.m. Pacific, below.