The following is an excerpt from the latest round of Iwata Asks about the development of Wii Sports Club. Specifically, these quotes relate to the game’s online functionality (Miiverse included) and how the team (including folks from Namco Bandai, who helped the game along) tackled various issues that they came across:
“When we thought about how we want people to have fun with Wii Sports on the new hardware, the Wii U console, there was no way, given the expectations, that we couldn’t prepare online gaming. So as we began development, we set online gameplay of Tennis — the representative sport of Wii Sports — as our first goal. [We wanted to] pour our energy into how we could make [online gaming] fun.”
“In a typical online game, the information of the button presses are sent to your opponent, and the inputs are synchronized between the players, but for this game you have to send complex information from the gyro sensor and accelerometer of the Wii Remote Plus controllers, in addition to information from the buttons, which was a brand new challenge.”
– Nintendo EAD Takayuki Shimamura
Specifically regarding Miiverse:
“So we thought about how [Miiverse] should work. But if we were to simply implement Miiverse to a sporting game, the winners would probably write cheerful comments like ‘Yay! I won!’ But I bet the losers would hardly write anything at all, like ‘Oh I’m so frustrated I lost.’ We were concerned that Miiverse would become a cruel place. We also thought many people who play Wii Sports would have never played competitive games online.”
“Everyone has a hometown or someplace where they live, so we thought about setting it up in a way as if at first you join the sports club in the area where you live, and if we made sports clubs for the various states and provinces, each of the regions could compete.”
– Nintendo EAD Takayuki Shimamura
NIS America will bring Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl to Europe, the company announced today. A release is planned for 2014.
Atlus launched Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl in North America earlier this month. The game originally hit Japan in late June.
Two new Virtual Console games are on track for the Japanese Wii U eShop next week. Clock Tower (Super Famicom) and Donkey Kong 3(Famicom) will be out on November 6. Pricing is set at 800 yen and 500 yen respectively.
Two new games have been confirmed for the Japanese 3DS Virtual Console. Shining Force II (Game Gear) and Mega Man V (Game Boy) will be out on November 6. Pricing is set at 500 yen and 400 yen respectively.
Yacht Club Games has shared the first off-screen image of Shovel Knight running on the 3DS. You can find it below.
CHECK IT OUT: Shovel Knight's adventure on the go for the first time! Dandy's programming wizardry knows no bounds! pic.twitter.com/T230zKpxOf
— Yacht Club Games (@YachtClubGames) October 29, 2013
