New details about Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse have finally emerged from a demo being shown at PAX East 2013. Destructoid provided the information, which we’ve summarized below.

– Uses sprites from Shantae: Risky’s Revenge as a base
– Adds more colors and frames of animation
– More intricate environmental puzzles
– More enemies on screen
– More action in general
– Shantae has lost her former half-genie powers
– Because of this, she has to team up with Risky Boots in order to try to get them back
– Risky ends up rubbing off on Shantae in more ways than one
– Shantae learns pirate-styled attack and abilities
– Gradually begins behaving more like a pirate as well
– Shantae still attacks with her hair
– Still knows how to dance as well
– New move lets Shantae suck up items into a lamp
– This makes it easier to collect loot and other enemy drops
– 5 dungeons (most in the series thus far)
– WayForward will be shortening the length of the bits in-between dungeons
– More ideas in a smaller space than the original GBC game

Source

We have additional confirmation that an Ambassador program won’t be coming to Wii U.

Although a Nintendo customer service representative recently said that there aren’t any plans, that was hardly an official confirmation. However, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime shared a few comments with Kotaku explaining why there isn’t anything in the works.

Here’s the full conversation between the two:

Reggie Fils-Aime: The focus on making sure that this holiday, [the Wii U’s] second holiday, is really strong is actually quite consistent with the way that we always thought about our hardware launches. Look at Nintendo 3DS. We lined up Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land to make sure that its second holiday was as strong as possible.

Kotaku: Right, but with that one, the precedent set there was that you guys dropped the price by a third, I think under the recognition that the machine wasn’t moving. And then, once that happened, that seemed to really propel it along. But, I mean, the Ambassador program and all that certainly sent a signal to me that Nintendo had miscalculated the appeal of the system at its initial price point. Lowering it seemed to solve it, right? Lowering it dramatically and doing those types of things [worked]. Are you guys doing any sort of Ambassador program for Wii U owners to thank them for coming in early and withstanding some of the [software] drought?

Reggie Fils-Aime: So, we have nothing to announce in terms of an Ambassador Program. And what I would do is reinforce what you just said. The situations are very different not only in terms of the timing, not only in terms of the level of the reduction… it’s a very different situation.

Source

Source

Source

Black Forest Games says that its implementation of off-TV play in Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, in which sound is not emitted from the GamePad, is not a bug. The studio is working on a patch, however.

Responding to a fan on Facebook, Black Forest acknowledged the issue. It’s a “problem” that the studio intends to fix “as soon as possible”.

Black Forest’s message in full states:

The missing sound is not a bug, it is a known behavior which does not violate the technical guidelines of the WiiU.

We love all our fans and are working on getting a patch for the sound problem. Nintendo does not demand that the sound is there on release and by such we released it to keep our release deadline. We agreed that we wanted to keep our deadline and then work towards fixing the sound as soon as possible, atm we have a lot of things going on in the company but the WiiU sound is in the works and hopefully we will have a patch to fix it within a reasonable timeframe, it is our first release on a consol like the WiiU so the work is a bit different than what we are used to. All in all we are working on the problem and ask for your patience while we get used to the console market/patching as well as fixing this issue.

Source

Nintendo is working on a patch for Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. It’s coming soon to the Japanese 3DS eShop, though I’m sure any issues with the overseas release will be looked into as well.

Here’s what Nintendo will be fixing with the patch:

Read More