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General Nintendo

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The following is a column that Smash Bros. and Kid Icarus: Uprising creator wrote for Famitsu magazine in Japan. He starts off reminiscing about the three years it took to make Super Smash Bros. Brawl:

“When you think about three years like that, that’s the amount of time between entering middle or high school and graduating from it [in Japan]. You have all these people working their fingers to the bone to complete just a single project. The games I make tend to be played for a long time, and whether I’m satisfied with the results or there are things I’m not happy with, it always takes a lot of time to make them.”


Yakuza fans will want to be on the lookout for a “surprise announcement” pertaining to the series on August 18. News will be shared during the “Yakuza Character General Election” in Shinjuku, Tokyo at 4 AM local time.

It’s unclear what SEGA has in store for this mysterious reveal. New game? Some kind of special item? Something else We’ll find out in a little over a week.

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Writing on Twitter, Platinum Games’ Hideki Kamiya posted a series of messages tackling the topics of sales and reviews.

Kamiya seems to believe that, when it comes to western gamers, they focus too much on these two elements. Both are used as ways to evaluate a title.

In Kamiya’s opinion, players should determine a game’s quality by experiencing it “rather than borrowing some numbers”.

“For foreign gamers, games that sell and don’t sell tend to be a hot topic… I wonder why they care so much about sales that it makes them choose what to play. It may be because (sales) numbers are the most obvious way to evaluate a game, and reviews seem to be another… I think that rather than borrowing some numbers to judge the quality of a game, you should decide by yourself.”

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SEGA has partnered with Nintendo to put out three exclusive games on Nintendo platforms. Two have been revealed thus far: Sonic Lost World and Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games. There’s also one final mystery title in development.

SEGA’s European chief Jurgen Post spoke about the deal with MCV, stating:

We have Sonic: Lost World on Wii U and 3DS and then Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics later in the year too. Plus there is a third game we haven’t announced.

Historically Sonic games have always sold very well on Nintendo platforms, so it’s a good fit. And Nintendo and Sega have always worked together in a positive way – the first game Sonic debuted on after we stopped making hardware was a Nintendo platform.

Post later addressed the Wii U’s slow start. It’s a concern for sure, but Post hopes Sonic can help improve the situation:


Some have said that Nintendo should take its franchises elsewhere. This has never been a realistic option, however, and president Satoru Iwata has said that such a move would only be a short-term fix to achieve profits.

“If I was to take responsibility for the company for just the next one or two years, and if I was not concerned about the long-term future of Nintendo at all, it might make sense for us to provide our important franchises for other platforms, and then we might be able to gain some short-term profit. However, I’m really responsible for the long-term future of Nintendo as well, so I would never think about providing our precious resources for other platforms at all.”


Attracting people’s attention isn’t so easy these days, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata believes. More information is circulating than ever before, which places a limit on the ability to pay attention.

Iwata told Toyo Keizai:

What I feel most now is that getting the attention of customers in video games is much more difficult than before. With all of the information that people have access to now, the ability to pay attention is limited. These big differences occur, whether we like it or not.


When Nintendo-published games are hitting western territories and Japan at the same time, localization becomes a much-different beast. So how does the Nintendo Treehouse approach these situations?

Localization manager Nate Bihldorff explained to Siliconera:

“We’re in touch with the dev teams from long before formal localization begins, giving feedback on all manner of game elements, and once formal localization starts, we talk every day. As such, we’re constantly asking questions about the plot, background on characters, and even series etymology on enemy and character names. We feel a real responsibility to curate these worlds and preserve the vision of the developers, so I’m sure we get incredibly annoying as we pester them about whether, say, a particular enemy is related to a Moblin or an Octorok.”

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