The Wonderful 101 will not be a short game. Far from it, actually.
Although director Hideki Kamiya and his team at Platinum Games are striving to create a game with a lot of replay value, there is a ton of content waiting for players who only plan on experiencing The Wonderful 101 once. Kamiya estimates 20 hours of gameplay for a “normal play session”.
Nintendo confirmed Pikmin 3 way back in 2008. The game is finally coming out in a few weeks, several months following the Wii U’s launch.
Shigeru Miyamoto told Polygon recently that he had hoped to bring Pikmin 3 out sooner, but doing so wouldn’t have been so easy. It’s true that the title started off on Wii, but moving it to the Wii U was more difficult than people assume.
“I did want to release it sooner. One of the big challenges was that I think that a lot of people, they hear the name Wii U, and because it shares the Wii name, the assumption is, ‘Oh, it would be very easy to take whatever was on Wii and just move it to Wii U.’ But in fact, the jump in a hardware standpoint, both from the development structure and the chipset within the system, it was such a dramatic change from what we had with Wii that development of the game, we had to recreate it to move it over to Wii U. So that was one of the challenges.”
A second wave of Photos Together: Super Mario eShop cards will be available in Japan later this month. The product acts as a cash voucher on the 3DS digital store as well as an application that allows users to take photos with Mario characters. The new cards, out on June 28, feature Koopa, Luigi, and Bowser.
It’s no secret that Nintendo and the Wii U will have a ton of competition this holiday. Two new consoles will be making their debuts: the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Yet, despite this, Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime believes that the narrative of Microsoft vs. Sony with Nintendo being left out on the side is “inaccurate”.
“It’s a very inaccurate narrative. In fact, that was the narrative in 2006. That was exactly the narrative. I think by the end of this holiday… we’re going to be in a very good position.”
Nintendo’s Hideki Konno was recently asked if there is any sort of hope for a new Ice Hockey game. Konno’s response was terse. He said: “We’ll think about it.”
Something tells me that Nintendo won’t be pursuing Ice Hockey anytime soon. Then again, you never know! Reggie did hint yesterday that Nintendo is considering revivals of some of its older franchises.
As many of you know, Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn’t intended to be a Mario game. Doki Doki Panic morphed into Super Mario Bros. 2 – otherwise known as Super Mario USA – due to the difficulty of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (the “true” Super Mario Bros. 2).
Shigeru Miyamoto impacted Luigi’s jump in Super Mario Bros. 2 that was explained by Hideki Konno in a recent interview. According to Konno, it was Miyamoto who suggested adding in Luigi’s flutter movement. That same movement was used in future Mario titles.
When we made this game, the mother figure, who later became Luigi, since this is a really old game, was made with cel animations. They made this mother figure to jump with gravity not influencing her as much as Mario [Imajin], so Luigi had a really slow jump.
When Mr. Miyamoto came through and evaluated it, he said it doesn’t feel right, let’s add something with his legs, maybe they can each shake like this (making a fast back and forth fluttering movement with his index and middle fingers), and adding in that one element, made it feel just right. Then, later on, that became the mechanic that he was known for.
Batman: Arkham Origins’ initial announcement was met with a great deal of skepticism. Understandably, most of the series’ fans questioned Warner Bros. Montreal’s ability to build on Rocksteady’s success with the first two entries.
Creative director at WB Games Montreal Eric Holmes is completely fine with the widespread doubts, though feels like people’s opinions will change as soon as they get their hands on Origins.
“I would say that people have the right to be cynical; they have the option to be cynical. Come and play the game at one of these events where we bring the game. And I think as soon as you’ve got the pad in your hand, you’re going to see that this game is authentic and uses the same underpinnings and core mechanics of the previous Arkham games.”
Origins introduces a number of gameplay elements and a story that will be “great”, according to Holmes.
“And I think we have a great story…I can’t tell you to much about…but I can tell you I’m really excited about our story,” Holmes said. “I think it’s a very important Batman story and I think fans are going to love that probably more than any other thing in the game.”
