Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Book Club, Features | 0 comments

Well, there you have it: The first ever NEBC game is Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In order to participate in the discussion, you should pick up the game within the next few days. Your options to obtain the game are as follows:

Well, this is the first week of the NEBC ever, so we’re going to take it very slow: Simply obtain the first star piece in the game, and stop there. We’ll all know more about what that means when we start the game I hope!

Since we can’t easily divide by chapters (like you could with a book) we’re better off aiming low and finishing quickly rather than having to scramble and accidentally leaving folks behind. Once we have a better handle on how the game is paced, we’ll adjust our weekly goals.

Also, please do not send us emails discussing portions of the game beyond where the book club is. We want to avoid spoilers and we don’t want to feel unable to answer your questions/respond to your comments, so if you’ve gotten ahead of everyone (which is fine!) do your best to only talk about the parts that we’ve all agreed upon. :]

Hit the break for info on how to participate in a discussion, plus other ‘Frequently Asked Questions’!

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Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News, Podcast Stories, Wii U, Wii U eShop | 0 comments

For those unaware (like I was until this morning!), Nintendo used to host something they called “Nintendo Games Seminar” at the University of Japan where they would help and encourage aspiring game developers to make games of higher quality with a higher success rate. It was a way for Nintendo to not only influence the direction that young developers would take with their careers, but also to find new talent to hire when the seminar was over. Now, they’re restarting the program:

– Seminar will run from July 2013 to March 2014
– Must be an under/post-graduate student at a University in or around Tokyo or Osaka
– 12 participants per location (Tokyo/Osaka)
– Choose between programming, graphic design, or sound
– Seminar will focus on developing games with Nintendo’s “Web Framework”
– More details on May 13th

Via NeoGaf

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

You may have heard the news that Nintendo’s stock is on the rise, up 11% in one day after they announced their third party support over the next couple of months via a press release. Don’t excited though: Japanese stock-buys aren’t suddenly loving the company again. The cause of the jump seems to be a shift in value of the yen against the euro, meaning that anyone exporting products from Japan to Europe will be seeing an increase in gains for the time being.

That’s not to say that people might not be suddenly on board with the Big N again or that the increase isn’t substantial (it’s the biggest jump since 2008), but chances are that this is more of a financial-jargon reason than anything we should be invested (pun) in as gamers. As Renegade Kid’s Jools Watsham put it:

Thanks to Captain N for the tip.

Via Nintendo Life

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in 3DS, News, Videos | 0 comments

Even though the series is known as a tactical strategy action game (or something weird like that– it has large robots!), the upcoming Super Robot Taisen UX will have an interesting downloadable addition: Puzzle-based maps that players will get in-game money, upgrades or other items for solving. They use the same basic gameplay as the main game from what I can tell, only you’ll have specific ways in which you have to “solve” various maps. More clarity is available in the trailer above!

Via Siliconera

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii | 0 comments

Just as with any licensing agreement, there comes a time when a certain content distributor is o longer legally allowed to sell the content they licensed from a particular third party. Such a day has come for Rock Band creator Harmonix, as they will be yanking the much-loved ‘Metallica’ from their store– or at least, one pack of their songs that was released for players to download.

“Metallica Pack 01” (including such hits as ‘Ride the Lightning’ and ‘Blackened’) is now unavailable from the console-accessed ‘Rock Band Music Store’, and soon it will also be removed from first-party marketplaces as well. More songs will likely follow suit going into the next few months or years, but Harmonix says they’re looking to extend an “overwhelming majority” of content licenses they have to minimize the legalese’ effect on their customers.

Via IGN

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Podcast Stories, Wii | 0 comments

As you can see above, this survey sent out by Nintendo’s customer service asks whether or not folks would buy first party Wii Remote charger packs from the Big N, and, subsequently, if they would pay $40 for a single battery pack, charging cradle, and other accessories. The most interesting bit of the survey is that they’re touting a potential 13 hours of use after just 90 minutes of charging, which is something I would love to have!

I’m not sure if I’d pay $40 for just one battery pack though, even if it did come with the cradle, cases, etc. I’d need at least two with the purchase…

GoNintendo via IGN

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News, Podcast Stories, Wii U | 0 comments

These rumors have been floating around for a while now, but a couple of days ago everyone’s favorite Destructoid editor Jonathan Holmes tweeted that he’s heard that Nintendo is giving away Wii U dev kids, presumably to garner long-term support for the console:

Honestly, this is one of those things that more people should be doing with their companies. Taking a financial hit initially in order to get more people on board with your console or idea should keep them coming back in the future, ensuring that they don’t just make games in the short term and then abandon you altogether– which happened with the Wii!

Via Nintendo Life

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 0 comments

Warren Specter’s latest game was Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, and it wasn’t terribly successful either critically or commercially. The esteemed game designer has been very quiet recently, likely deciding what he wants to do with his future in the industry, but just yesterday he spoke out about various topics, the most interesting of which was his opinion on where the industry is going:

I think he hits on a really important point: Speculation is useless. Listening to folks five or ten years ago about talk about the gaming industry, they get more or less everything wrong, and yet we consider them “experts”. Take Michael Pachter for example: That guy said it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong, and he’s said he essentially makes stuff up when he’s predicting things. It’s a silly market niche without a doubt, and I’d argue that it’s more fun to speculate for imagination’s sake than for actually being taken seriously, since… well, you can’t take speculation too seriously!

Via Nintendo Life

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, Podcast | 0 comments

Posted on 11 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, Videos, Wii, Wii Shop Channel | 0 comments

So we’ve finally branched away from first party Nintendo titles with a couple of glitches from Mega Man 2 on the NES. All of the stuff you see here was performed in the Virtual Console version of the game, and it is assumed that they would then work in the NES version as well.

Artwork courtesy of Andrew Nixon. :]