Ubisoft has been praising Switch for several months, and that continued during the company’s financial conference call today. Speaking about the platform in general terms, CEO Yves Guillemot said it’s “great” and “a true innovation.”
Guillemot noted:
“The March quarter will also see the release of the Nintendo Switch. As we already said, we think the platform is great. For the first time ever, players will continue their home console experience on the go while traveling or commuting. That is a true innovation.”
Guillemot later talked about how Switch has the capability of benefiting from the demand for Nintendo games on a dedicated handheld platform – as was the case with 3DS.
Nintendo Impact Gaming has given us a look at Ice Station Z with some off-screen gameplay. Find some footage of the new 3DS eShop title below.
The Harvest December visual novel series has been quite successful. Combining sales with all regions, it’s now surpassed 100,000 units sold.
Most of Harvest December’s sales come from Japan. That makes sense, as the region has had access to it for a longer period.
Circle Entertainment shared today’s news on Twitter earlier today:
Also we Harvest December series has sold over 100k+ copies in Global 3DS eShop. Most are came from Japanese. Anyway, thx for supporting!🙏 pic.twitter.com/NEoHtGNxuK
— CIRCLE Ent. (@CIRCLE_Ent) November 3, 2016
3DS owners can now obtain Ice Station Z from the 3DS eShop. To do so, you’ll need 346 blocks of free space on an SD card. That amounts to 43.25 MB.
Twisted Fusion, which is out today on the Wii U eShop, has received another round of footage. Check a video containing 35 minutes of gameplay below.
The Verge recently spoke with Niantic’s Dennis Hwang, who was previously in charge of designing Google Doodles. Much of the conversation revolved around Pokemon GO.
At one point, Hwang was asked if he considers the game to be a social network. His response was as follows:
“I think we would like for it to be. That’s kind of part of the way we envision our platform, is really bringing people together. It’s not really about the specific game title or mobile phone app, it’s how do you create a shared experience that brings people together. So for Ingress, when we did start seeing boyfriend / girlfriend, husband / wife, people who are having kids after meeting each other playing our game, it was super satisfying and we were overjoyed to see that actually happening.
We’re sort of trying to paint an optimistic future, where technology is really bringing people together, not like you’re strapping a screen in a dark place to your face, where every interaction becomes through a camera, through a computer, through a network — that seems a little too dystopian to us. So we’re trying to see if there’s a better way to do things.”
Hwang later took on a question about Pokemon GO’s design and whether he’d change anything. This prompted him to speak about wanting to incorporate “more heads-up play.” Niantic wants players looking less at their phones rather than more.
Hwang said:
“Oh, there’s a lot that isn’t perfect. We had a pretty tight timeline to build this. I think just generally speaking the biggest element we’re looking to improve is allowing more heads-up play. It saddens me a little bit when I see a lot of hunched over people outside. They’re having fun, they’re outside in a great public park, but we’re always wanting a little more direct engagement with our immediate surroundings. So those are design choices we’re looking at carefully to keep improving it.
Like let’s say in the current interface, some of the information about a pokémon that spawned is in fine detail and the icon is really small. It’s going to make you go closer to the screen. We may just iterate on the design until you feel like the information is being presented to you in a way where you’re not having to stick your nose on the screen. It could be a simple size change, or the way the notification is animated, or it could be auditory cues instead of visual cues. There are a lot of options we’re going to explore.”
Having announced Dragon Quest VIII’s western launch of January 20 a couple of hours ago, Nintendo now prepared a new English trailer for the game. View it below.
Video game voice actors and stunt performers are currently holding a strike against developers in hopes of negotiating better conditions. The union SAG-AFTRA is representing these people, and shared a list of projects that they are no longer allowed to work on. Some interesting information was shared as a result.
On the list, something known as “LEGO Marvel 2” is mentioned. What is that exactly? Well, it’s a bit unclear. Warner Bros. did publish LEGO Marvel’s Avengers as a follow up to LEGO Marvel Super Heroes earlier this year. We may not know what “LEGO Marvel 2” is, but it looks like we can count on another Marvel-based LEGO game in the future.
Nintendo UK added a new interview to its website today centered around the new Animal Crossing: New Leaf update. General producer Katsuya Eguchi and Animal Crossing series producer Hisashi Nogami spoke about various topics, including why camper vans were chosen. You can read up on Eguchi and Nogami’s various comments below.
Nintendo released a new video today showcasing a few European digital game highlights from October 2016. You can watch it below.
