Without being a huge surprise – but still a reason for joy – Nintendo has announced that a new Zelda game is in development for the Nintendo DS, after the immense success enjoyed by The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. The new title will be called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and, as you can imagine, not too many details were revealed.

This is what Nintendo said, though: “The concept behind this Zelda game includes utilizing a steam locomotive to travel around the world, switching Phantom and Link to explore the dungeons, and solving puzzles using new items.”

So, all in all, the Spirit Tracks does sound a little like Phantom Hourglass: it features dungeon maps on the top screen of the DS, gameplay on the bottom screen, and some trains in between. There was also a trailer presented at GDC in which Link was presented as the engineer of a cannon train. Pretty cool, huh?

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is scheduled to be released by the end of the year, exclusively on Nintendo DS.