Man, am I exhausted! I slept through all three of my alarms this morning, and I’ve just been feeling totally out of energy all day. I guess E3 does that to you! Anyway, we’ve got our final podcast installment for E3 done and up for everyone to listen to. It goes over our time with the Wii U, my meeting with Majesco, some Mutant Mudds talk, and various other things. As always, post questions and we’ll get to em next podcast!
If you consider easter eggs to be spoilers, refrain from watching the video above!
Nintendo has received some negative feedback for basically hiding the Wii U console at E3. That’s because practically their entire E3 presentation focused on the system’s new controller, leading some folks to believe that Nintendo was simply creating a new peripheral for the Wii!
Obviously that isn’t true and pretty much everyone understands that now. But if you have any doubt, perhaps the shots of the Wii U hardware above will convince you!
Once again, this information comes from the eShop Iwata Asks…
Iwata: All right, Nakano-san. Among our various topics today, development of 3D Classics got off to the earliest start.
Nakano: Yeah. We started toward the end of 2009, so we’ve been working on it for a while.
Iwata: How did you come to be in charge of it?
Nakano: My boss said he wanted to recreate classic titles with a focus on stereoscopic graphics for the Nintendo 3DS system. I ended up collaborating with Arika6, since they have experience in a wide variety of fields and are an extremely reliable company when it comes to suggesting and implementing new methods of visual presentation.
Iwata: Several were suggested as candidates for becoming 3D Classics. What was the first one you made?
The 3DS eShop is a significant upgrade over the DSi’s shop. Whereas it took forever just to connect to the service on DSi, Nintendo has sped things up quite a bit for the 3DS.
You may be curious as to how Nintendo accomplished the upgrade in speed. Satoru Iwata and Kazuto Nakaya explained:
Iwata: Oh, I see. And one of the other goals from the start this time was to increase the speed with which the screen changes. The Nintendo DSi Shop was browser-based, so in order to change the screen, the server made information for the browser to read, and that was then constructed on the screen, so screen transition wasn’t very fast. What did you do to speed it up?
Nakaya: We used a method whereby a database of likely content for display is created, then assembled and read first—like with the Nintendo Channel.
The latest Iwata Asks focusing on upcoming Nintendo features is now available. Much of the discussion focuses on the eShop, but Iwata and a few other employees took some time to talk about Nintendo Video as well. Iwata says that the service will be released “in the near future”.
Iwata: Now I’d like to ask some questions to Imai-san. The video download service you are working on won’t be available when Nintendo eShop opens, but this service will become possible via software distributed through the shop in the near future, so I’d like to ask you about it here today.
The world has never seen anything like this service. How did you begin thinking about this?
Imai: This service allows your Nintendo 3DS system to use the SpotPass4 feature to download 3D videos, so users can view new 3D videos each day. Until now, people have only been able to see 3D images in movies. That experience will now become much closer to them. And what’s more, if SpotPass is activated, the videos come in automatically. So first of all, I wanted users to feel that increased accessibility. They don’t have to wear any special glasses to use it in the first place, and I want to make it so that people can use it without feelilng any obstacles at all!
Iwata: They come in before you know it, so you open your Nintendo 3DS system, and even if you’re somewhere unconnected to the Internet, you can watch new 3D videos every day.
