Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 28 Comments

Nintendo has filed a new trademark with the USPTO. On April 2, the company picked up “Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. Strike Team Eliminating the Alien Menace”.

That’s a pretty interesting name, to say the least. I wonder what it could be about…

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 1 Comment

There’s a lot to like about the Game Boy Advance Virtual Console for Wii U. For instance, each game comes with the title’s original instruction manual. As shown above, this even includes old advertisements… like one for the Game Boy Player!

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 1 Comment

German website Nintendo-Online has researched the development of Super Mario Land and Super Mario Bros. Here’s a summary of the site’s report passed along to us:

Super Mario Land:

– Development was handled by a team consisting of eight R&D1 members; noone from the Super Mario Bros. development team – not even Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto – was involved.
– The core development team – producer Gunpei Yokoi, director Satoru Okada and designer Hirofumi Matsuoka – had worked together with Intelligent Systems on Famicom Wars before Super Mario Land. Famicom Wars was released in August 1988. That means that development of Super Mario Land started around August 1988 and did take approximately six to nine months.
– Compared to Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, the development time was short. Also, the development team did not have experience developing a Mario game. These two points caused the game to be glitchy, short and a bit weird.
– Yokoi and Okada were also the main engineers working on the Game Boy. Super Mario Land might have started as a kind of intern tech demo.

Super Mario Bros.:

– It is often claimed that the development team of the original Super Mario Bros. consisted of the following six people: Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka (designers), Koji Kondo (composer) and Toshihiko Nakago, Kazuaki Morita and Yasunari Nishida (programming).
– While there are sources proving that Miyamoto, Tezuka, Kondo, Nakago and Morita were involved in the project (e.g. Iwata asks), there is now such proof for Nishida.
– The operator of the website Kyoto-Report.wikidot.com that deals with the history of Nintendo confirmed to us that Nishida was in fact not part of the development team.
– We believe that this misconception derives from a misinterpretation: The pseudonym “Yachan” which is listed as a programmer in the credits of The Legend of Zelda was interpreted as “Yasunari Nishida”, but in fact the Nintendo programmer Yasunari Soejima was behind that pseudonym.
– Because of that, the development team of Super Mario Bros. only consisted of five developers, and Yasunari Nishida was not one of them.

Source 1, Source 2

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Images | 3 Comments

We’ve already seen Nintendo’s company handbook for 2014. Today, photos have surfaced from the 2013 edition.

It’s quite interesting to look at. The latter pages are particularly impressive, as one of the final sections can be folded to look like Nintendo’s HQ in Kyoto.

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 1 Comment

Game sales experienced a rather large increase in Japan last week, even though there was no special occasion/holiday. So what happened here?

The rise can be attributed to three factors. Consumers were spending more prior to a 3 percent increase in consumption tax starting on April 1, many Japanese schools were holding a spring vacation, and gamers were receiving payments from Japanese companies, which usually take place on the 25th of each month.

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Random, Videos | 2 Comments

Have to admit this is a pretty neat video!

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 6 Comments

Square Enix is teasing another new title known as “Stella Prisma”. You can find the official website here as well as a “New Game’s Voice and Sound” video above, which is the “first public voices and sounds for a new game”.

Stella Prisma is not to be confused with Square Enix’s other teaser launched earlier this week. Some may have assumed it was an April Fools’ joke given that the page launched on April 1, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Podcast Stories | 0 comments

Masato Masuda, known for his work on Fire Pro Wrestling, has died at the age of 48.

Suda51 passed along the sad news on Twitter today, writing:

The creator of Fire Pro-wrestling, Masato Masuda, has passed away. He was 48 years old, still young. I genuinely pray for his happiness in the next world. He was one of the greatest creators of video games and he was my direct teacher. Thank you for giving us our favorite Fire Pro-wrestling. You are the god of it.

In addition to Fire Pro Wrestling, Masuda worked prominently on a number of other titles and series, including F1 Triple Battle and Vasteel.

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More: Goichi Suda, Masato Masuda, Suda51

Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 3 Comments

Ripstone is due to make “a sneaky announcement” sometime within the next few days.

The company wrote on Twitter a short while ago:

Anyone have any guesses as to what Ripstone has in store? Hopefully it’s Nintendo-related!

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Posted on 10 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in GameCube, General Nintendo, News | 4 Comments

The Mario Kart series has yet to see the return of dual racers since Mario Kart: Double Dash. Yet even though this feature hasn’t been revisited, Nintendo is still open to the idea of featuring two racers per cart.

Mario Kart 8 producer Hideki Konno said during a GDC 2014 roundtable session:

“It wasn’t just a simple case of, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do that again.’ We really think the two racers together in one kart of Double Dash was really unique, and we thought it worked really well.”

“We’ve got that in our pocket, so if we come up with any new, cool ideas that utilize having two players racing together, we will definitely grab that and possibly bring it back out.”

“Having two players racing together, it does have a pretty high cost in terms of processing power, so that is an obstacle. That being said, if we could come up with some ways around that processing cost, we may have two players, maybe even three players, racing together. If we could come up with some cool ideas, we’ll definitely use them.”

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More: Hideki Konno, interview, Mario Kart: Double Dash, top