Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, Podcast | 0 comments

Right click, “Save As” to download.

I am so tired of wrestling with blogger and tumblr and feedburner and iTunes and archive and all these stupid websites to try and make the feed subscribe-able. I’ll get it going later but I’ve been at it for nearly ten hours and nothing seems to function properly, so for now you just have to download it the old-fashioned way. Apologies to you guys who asked for a feed to subscribe to! Maybe next week?

News this week: Zelda Wii U rumors (lies), cheap iOS games, Ace Attorney 5 news, and a few other short topics.

“Guess the game” for this week: Here’s the link to the image if you want to play along.

Top ten list this week: Top Ten Gamecube games.

Enjoy, and if anyone knows how to get a podcast feed going and make it on iTunes and all that jazz, please let me know!

~Austin

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in 3DS, Rumors | 0 comments

Well, I’d say that this rumor makes a fair amount of sense! I don’t know anything about the techno-jargen, but it seems that the bottom line is that Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land are headed to the 3DS eShop as downloadable titles. Of course this is just a rumor for now, but it’s one that I’d say has a fair bit of clout given the online strategy Nintendo is pursuing.

For those interested, here’s the forum post that the rumor stems from:

—————————————–

Well I was running my weekly scan of Nintendo’s CDN (the server where Nintendo hosts eShop Titles), and the EUR version of Mario Kart 7’s title ID was added, sometime between now and last thursday.

You might call me wrong, but if you look at the TMD, it says the title has a manual and DLP Child, just like Mario Kart 7. And the NCCH files on CDN are very close to the size of the NCCH files from the EUR version of the ROM:

Executable NCCH: CDN/ROM = 609/611mb
Manual NCCH: CDN/ROM = 2.69/2.52mb
Dlp Child Container NCCH: CDN/ROM = 26.5/26.5mb

—————————————–

You can actually investigate the truthiness of this claim by downloading the “TMD” yourself.

Via GBATemp, GoNintendo

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

This comes from Gamestop CEO Paul Raines…

“We’ve thought about this vintage thing as an online initiative, and that’s where we’re doing most of our work. Part of what we have to do is we have to go source a lot of this product, get customers to trade some of their old product with us, and go find some old consoles, but we also own a lot of old product.”

How much old product do they have?

“Well, we don’t have a lot of NESes or Dreamcasts. That’s some pretty old stuff. But we just took Game Boy Advance out of stores recently, about a year and a half ago. Original Xbox, I think we took out of stores in 2009, as I recall. We’re reducing the footprint of PlayStation 2. We’re thinking about everything. Nothing we’d really want to call out yet. Our dotcom team is right now grinding through a lot of opportunities to see what’s out there and see what we can get our hands on and what we can merchandise.”

“A lot of what we do today is we let the PowerUp community tell us what they want to see, so we’ll be doing some contests around that and you can tell your readers to look for that upcoming pretty soon through PowerUp Rewards,”

“When I talk to PowerUp members they tell me, boy, it would be cool if you could have someone make new versions of old gear and old consoles, kind of a retro version of stuff. That’s an interesting one too. We also have relationships with every major publisher in the world and console maker in the world, that we can talk to about what they have and what they can make.”

Via Joystiq

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii U | 0 comments

I sort of wish I would have typo’d “launch” and instead wrote “lunch” so that it said “Straight Right talks making lunch”. Oh well. Here’s some good stuff about Mass Effect 3 for Wii U, as well as some (re-confirmation of) information that we heard about earlier:

“It’s going to be a launch title, but of course we don’t know quite yet when the hardware will launch. We intend to be there that same day. It’s challenging [to meet an unannounced launch date].” – Straight Right boss-o man Tom Crago

He also talked a bit more about things they’ve touched on in the past and said that the Wii U is “sophisticated”:

“This is the biggest title we’ve worked on in a long time. There’s a significant technical challenge bringing the game from its original format to the Wii U. It’s a new, different and sophisticated piece of hardware, so there’s a good deal of technical energy that’s been expended making that happen. We’ve made a number of bets on the Wii U, so we’re certainly hoping that the platform comes strongly out of the gate. We’ve got two other titles in development. One of them is original, our own IP, and another is based on another big franchise that will come out in 2013. It’s a big title and you will have heard of it.”

New games are always good, especially for a new platform! Here’s to them succeeding with all of their Wii U endeavors.

Via Eurogamer

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii U | 0 comments

You know what I really appreciate in a developer? Humility. The understanding that they aren’t perfect and that they’re trying their hardest to do the best that they can. Self-awareness, I guess would be the way to phrase it, and Mass Effect 3 Wii U developer Straight Right has just that.

“We’re very conscious of not wanting to mess up given the level of expectation and the fact that we’re taking something which, on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and PC, was exceptionally good.” – Straight Right boss Tom Crago

He went on to talk specifically about what their thought process has been with Wii U:

“You look at the game and think ‘how could I possibly make this better?’ The Wii U gives you that opportunity with the GamePad. But first and foremost you say, ‘well, I don’t want to screw this up’. You want to replicate the experience on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as sympathetically as possible. But then you say, ‘how can I enhance this experience?’. We tried to get the game looking great and singing on Wii U, and then use the GamePad to complement this.”

Via Eurogamer

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in 3DS, News | 0 comments

Man, this sort of thing gets on my nerves sometimes! The 3DS rhythm/music game “Rhythm Thief and the Emperor’s Treasure” is getting an iOS port, and- despite charging at least $30 if you buy it on 3DS- users will pay a measly nothing dollars and nothing cents. It’ll be one of those games that’s free to play, but charges you for things like costumes and songs and whatnot, but I’d reckon that even if you bought a multitude of extras, you wouldn’t come anywhere NEAR the price tag of the 3DS version.

Here’s a question for you: Why don’t they make it for iOS, charge $30 there, and then give it to 3DS owners for free!?

Of course we all know why. But it’s still frustrating.

Via PocketGamer

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii U | 0 comments

“It is kind difficult to mention much because we are focusing on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 versions as the PR focus. But we can say this – because we are collaborating with Nintendo we really wanted to create features like [the Mega Mushroom] that are only possible because we are collaborating with Nintendo. That’s just one example and we hope that everyone will be looking forward to the other things we have to show.” – Tekken Tag Tournemtn 2 Producer, Katsuhiro Harada

It sort of sounds like he might be hinting at the fact that there are more little bits of Nintendo-y goodness in the game, but I doubt we’ll learn about them until closer to the launch of the game and console.

Via NintendoLife

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News, Random, Wii | 0 comments

Perhaps my favorite thing that exists in the world is irony, and while I know this story doesn’t actually “mean” anything tangible, it has about as much of the stuff as you could cram into anything particularly related to video games. Why? The actor portraying Sony’s great marketing icon “Kevin Butler” is appearing in a Bridgestone advertisement that contains a tie-in with the Wii.

It’s not clear to me whether this is a contest or a promotion or something less significant, but it is- for what it’s worth- ironic.

Via TheSixAxis

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, Podcast | 2 Comments

So here’s another one! This time actually on time, and I have to admit: Despite it starting really slowly, the discussion we had at the end about how old various Nintendo characters are was definitely my favorite discussion we’ve had so far!

If you want to join in on the fun, listen to the podcast and then decide for yourself: How old are all of the following Nintendo characters?

Mario, Toad, Peach, Wario, Waluigi, Grampa Toad, Windwaker Link, Tetra, Gramma Link, Malo, Spirit Track’s Link, Happy Mask Salesman, Fox, Falco, Peppy, Slippy, Krystal, Samus, Ash’s Mom, Pit, Tom Nook, Captain Olimar, Captain Falcon, Snake from MGS4, Kirby, Dr. Kawashima

Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, Podcast | 0 comments

In the third episode (fifth if you count the one I didn’t put up and the one I accidentally didn’t record!) of ‘Here’s a Podcast’, the people sitting around the iPad talk about New Super Mario Bros 2’s bad 3D, the Miiverse’s potential for success (or failure), potential new Smash Bros. characters, and much more! It’s four people this week instead of three.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This weeks’ Top Ten List: Five characters we’d eliminate from Smash Bros. and five characters we’d add in. Hit the break for each of our lists, and listen to the full podcast for the complete discussion among a lot of nonsense.

Read More