A new “Nintendo Direct Micro” was just issued for North America. It builds off on yesterday’s Japanese presentation with news specific to the states. Check it out below.
German website Nintendo-Online published a new piece about the development of the Game Boy. It’s an interesting recap of how the system came together, which includes information about a partnership with Sharp and more.
Here’s a brief summary Nintendo-Online passed along:
– developed by the 40-man R&D1 team with Gunpei Yokoi handling the system’s design and Satoru Okada working on the hardware
– goal was to combine the concepts behind Game & Watch and NES
– system had to be small, technically on par with the NES and cheaper than the NES
– to archive this, the team had to use a black & white LCD display; a color screen would have increased the power consumption and thus made the system more expensive
– system was codenamed “Dot Matrix Game”, hence the console’s model no. starting with “DMG”
– Sharp was approached to manufacture the screens of the DMG because it already supplied the Game & Watch displays
– Sharp was unable to produce the screens at a price low enough for Nintendo so that development of the console reached a dead point
– R&D1 learned about the “Chip on Glass” technique which would make a cheap production possible and approached TV maker Citizen to produce the Game Boy’s screens using this technique
– in the end, Sharp was also able to use the CoG technique and was thus chosen to produce the screens and made a four billion yen investment for that
– the screens Sharp produced at the beginning were of a wrong type and were next to useless for the Game Boy project
– Yokoi remembers Hiroshi Yamauchi’s reaction on Game Boy prototype with wrong screen type: “What the hell is this? I can’t see a damn thing. What’re you thinking? No one’s gonna buy a game they can’t see. Forget it.”
– finally Sharp produced Super-Twisted Nematic displays with decreased motion blur effect
Splatoon is doing very, very well in Japan. Because of the game’s strong sales, the game has been tough to find on store shelves. Nintendo even issued an apology on its Twitter account last week, and vowed to ship more copies in the coming days.
We’re now hearing that Splatoon managed to sell through over 90 percent of its initial shipment in Japan. That isn’t confirmed just yet, but it wouldn’t be terribly shocking based on reports of how its selling out at various stores. This would also likely mean that Splatoon sold somewhere in the range of 150,000 copies in Japan. We should be receiving official data on Wednesday!
Court Records nabbed a live stream recording of The Great Ace Attorney’s demo on NicoNico. Check out the third part of the demo below.
Bandai Namco opened a Japanese teaser site for Project Treasure today. Access it here.
There’s not much to see at the moment other than the gameplay trailer that debuted during yesterday’s Japanese Nintendo Direct. There’s also a confirmation that Project Treasure is built with Unreal Engine, thanks to a logo included on the page.
Marvelous have released a new trailer for their upcoming 3DS game PoPoLoCrois Farm Story. Check it out below:
SEGA have released two new trailers for their upcoming 3DS game Stella Glow, focusing on characters Sakuya and Mordimort. Check them out below:
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