Update: This promotion also applies to The Wonderful 101 and LEGO City: Undercover (for their respective launch weeks).
Those who purchase Pikmin 3 from the Japanese Wii U eShop will receive a discount. Nintendo is slashing the game’s price by 10% between July 13 and July 19.
A small little incentive for folks to go digital. Will a similar offer be made available overseas?
Update 2: Added Denpa Men 3, Chibi Robo Photography (we’ll be using that name from here on out), Wii U network services details.
Update: Looks like that Chibi Robo thing is called “Chibi Robo Live-Action!” and will be out today for 1,500 yen. From what I can tell.
Well, that came out of nowhere! We don’t have any details from this Nintendo Direct yet, but we do know that Denpa Men 3 has been announced for the 3DS eShop and some kind of new Chibi Robo experience is on the way.
Denpa Men 3
– Can make a little house for your characters
– Capture monsters and let them fight for you
– Can fully import your Denpa Men from the previous entries
– Out in Japan on August 7 for 1000 yen
– Demo on July 31
– Capture Denpa Ningen via AR camera while they resist, add to party, get houses
– Travel to different islands as the journey progresses
– Bazaar Island, Rental Island, Auto Antenna Tower for auto-capture
– Denpa Men 1&2 half-off from 1000 yen to 500 yen through 9:59 am 7/17.
Chibi Robo Photography
– For 3DS eShop
– Focused around the camera functions of the system
– Snap real life objections and collect them in the game
– Various minigames
– There is contest for collecting the various items in the game; snap stuff like a print design for Wii U or a Yen Card
– Match up real-life objects against silhouettes on the screen to turn them into “nostaljunk” and add to a museum
– Demo also available
Wii U network services
– YNN: access content like variety shows, drama and anime
– Can watch on TV and GamePad
– Coming in August
– Demae-Can: delivery service channel
– You can order food directly from the GamePad
– Coming in July
– Bandai Channel announced for Japan
– It offers a wide range of Anime programming
– Coming in August
The English version of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team has gone live. Access it here. The discussion has all sorts of talk about the game from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and members of the development team.
Digital sales are becoming increasingly important to the video games industry. Yet, since its inception, the NPD Group has not typically included any of these figures in its monthly reports.
Plans are now in place to change that. NPD hasn’t set any sort of date, but hopes to begin include digital sales in its reports – which will include global sales as opposed to just US sales as is the case with its retail data – later this year. Market research firm EEDAR is on board to make this possible.
David McQuillan, president of the Games group at NPD, told GamesIndustry:
“We fully realize that the market needs the same level of information for the digital categories as exists for the physical business today: SKU-level POS. The progress on that effort up until recently has been slow and frustrating at times, but today I am very happy to share that the pace of progress has changed recently. NPD has formed a leader panel to track digital POS sales of full game and add-on content downloads. It is an important and critical step toward that goal. Leader panels are often formed as a precursor to a formal launch of a POS tracking service.
“We couldn’t agree more with ESA; full market transparency, including digital is incredibly important to the health of the industry.”
“The NPD games leader panel is currently comprised of nine leading games publishers. The initial focus will be on full-game downloads and downloadable content for consoles, PCs and portables. We aren’t at liberty to say who is participating at this time, since we are in the beta (proof of concept) stage.”
“The plan is to have digital POS sales integrated into our US new physical POS retail sales data to enable more efficient analysis for our clients. The timing of when that will happen has not been finalized.”
This month’s GamesMaster review scores are as follows:
The Last of Us – 95%
Animal Crossing: New Leaf – 91%
Game & Wario – 70%
Remember Me – 74%
Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep – 90%
Grid 2 – 74%
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger – 75%
Way of the Dogg – 33%
Hunter’s Trophy: America – :(%
Dorito’s Crash Course 2 – 61%
Poker Night 2 – 75%
Fuse – 58%
Wonderbook: Diggs Nightcrawler – 73%
Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mystery: Episode 1 – 83%
Nun Attack – 66%
Farming Simulator 2013 – 51%
Draw Slasher – 70%
Rymdkapsel – 90%
Project X Zone – 60%
Rayman Legends Challenges App – 92%
Mario and Donkey Kong: Minis on the Move – 85%
Swords and Soldiers 3D – 23%
The Starship Damrey – 45%
Publisher Dream – 40%
Bloody Vampire – 64%
Dust 514 – 69%
Zeno Clash II – 60%
The Night of the Rabbit – 73%
Sanctum 2 – 62%
Rising Storm – 85%
Thanks to joclo for the tip.
also have it for $30.
Watch_Dogs is here to stay for Ubisoft. So much so that the publisher is planning an investment that will span ten years, at the least.
Speaking with The Guardian, producer Dominic Guay mentioned that Ubisoft is approaching Watch_Dogs similar to how Bungie is taking on Destiny. Both IPs will be sticking around for the long term.
Guay said the following when it was brought up that Bungie has a 10-year plan for Destiny:
Honestly that’s what we’re doing too. Here’s the way we think about it: even if we change our minds mid-course or after shipping Watch Dogs and say ‘scratch that, we’ll do something else’, the planning helps to make a strong core. We’ve all seen TV series where after a season there are a lot of mysteries; then at the start of season two you think, they didn’t know what was going to happen – they’re just stringing us along! You feel it! And it’s the same with games. If there’s a clear long-term plan, you’ll have stronger characters, the universe will be more coherent. So when you have the luxury of creating a new brand – which is happening less and less in this industry, you need to do just that. We’ve been doing the same thing Bungie has been doing – we’re trying to see how our characters and world will evolve. That’s always in the back of our heads.
– Ubisoft managing director Nicolas Rioux
The irony of the situation notwithstanding, it would be pretty unfortunate to see Ubisoft’s next gen games skip the Wii U, but perhaps even more troubling (politically) to see the games hit the platform but skip out on the tablet-integration interface. Given that the Wii U is the only console that actually ships with such a device installed, common sense would dictate that it’d be easiest to develop such extra features for. Unfortunately, the case is such that making an iPad app means you’ve covered the PS4 and XBO in one swipe, whereas developing something separate for the Wii U Gamepad requires additional resources.
Such has been the situation with Nintendo consoles for a while now– their unique architecture is designed the help Nintendo stay in the game, but it’s a bit of a turn off for third parties.
