Tokyo Keizai Online recently posted an article in which Japanese companies were ranked by the amount they spent on advertising during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2015.
Nintendo was the only game company in the top 50 having spent 54.8 billion yen on advertising. For what it’s worth, that amounts to roughly 10 percent of the company’s total revenue. Nintendo was one of two companies in the list to spend more than 10 percent of total revenue in this area. Additionally, the Big N ranked number 20 overall.
In case you’re curious, the top three companies on the list are Sony (444.4 billion yen), Toyota (435.1 billion yen), and Nissan (336.7 billion yen).
Before this year, Starlight Fun Centers in hospitals across North America and other areas included Wii units. Sometime in around April, they were swapped out with Wii U consoles.
The Starlight Fun Center has the Wii U (with related controllers) and a flat panel screen. 25 games are pre-installed, including Mario Kart 8 and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze.
Nexis Games passed along a new batch of screenshots from UCraft. We’ve rounded them up in the gallery below.
Teku Studios recently prepared a video showing lengthy gameplay from its upcoming title Candle. You can watch it below.
A classification from Australia reveals that NDCube is developing Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival. In the past, NDCube has worked on the Mario Party and Wii Party games.
Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival is set to arrive this holiday. It will be a free download from the eShop, but a retail version will also be made available which comes with a game disc, two figures, and three amiibo cards.
Update: Bumped to the top. The maintenance period has changed, as things have been bumped up two hours earlier. Here are the new times:
– 11 AM PT – 3 PM PT
– 2 PM ET – 6 PM ET
– 7 PM in the UK – 11 PM in the UK
– 8 PM in Europe – 12 AM in Europe
All of Nintendo’s shops will be experiencing online maintenance next week. The Wii U and 3DS eShops, Wii Shopping Channel, and DSi Shop will all be down while this is taking place.
Here’s the relevant times for the maintenance:
Kirby: Canvas Curse (Kirby: Power Paintbrush in Europe) has been rated in Australia. You know what that means – a Wii U Virtual Console release should be happening in the future. We don’t have a date of course, but hopefully the DS game will be heading to the eShop soon.
Shea Sparling is a 10-year-old boy with polyarteritis nodosa, a life-threatening condition. Thanks to the charitable organization Dream Factory, Shea’s wish was recently realized.
Shea took a trip to Nintendo of America’s headquarters, and also met company president Reggie Fils-Aime. The two even played a round of Mario Kart together.
Shea’s mother spoke very positively about the experience, saying:
“We had so much fun. They had signs welcoming us and we went on a tour of the building. We met with Reggie and the kids even played a game of Mario Kart with him. He was so gracious and relaxed and spent time chatting with Shea, answering his questions.”
Mario Golf for the N64 made its way to the Wii U Virtual Console on Thursday. Take a look at some footage from the game below.
A third trailer for Animal Gods recently came online. View the video for the upcoming indie Wii U game below.
