Natsume on Harvest Moon: Skytree Village improvements and secrets, Seeds of Memories
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News, Wii U | 6 Comments
Siliconera caught up with Harvest Moon: Skytree Village producer Taka Maekawa to chat about the 3DS game. The full interview is located here, but there are a few excerpts worth highlighting.
Regarding feedback from Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley used to improve Skytree Village, Maekawa said:
“We have some loyal and dedicated fans that have been playing Harvest Moon for years and years, so we truly value the feedback we get. It’s hard to narrow down what we are most proud of to just one thing, since there are tons of new features and improvements. We tweaked, improved, and added to all sorts of areas in Harvest Moon: Skytree Village. Such as redesigning the UI menu, making the character controls more responsive, adding a rich and robust story, and new character designs and models. And let’s not forget about the new addition of the Poitou Donkey! There’s just too many features we’re proud of to just pick one.”
Maekawa also shared the following about secrets within the game:
“Fundamentally, all Harvest Moon games are repetitive by nature, so it is extremely important to have a variety of things in the game that keep it new and fresh to drive you to keep playing and moving forward. So, yes, there are all sorts of secrets in the game, some big, some small. I would tell you what they are, but that would ruin the surprise!”
Another Harvest Moon game in the pipeline is Seeds of Memories. It’s out on mobile, but the Wii U and PC versions are still not available. Regarding these releases, Maekawa said: “We hope to be able to talk about them as things become more final!”
NVIDIA CEO talks up Switch again, says “it was such a ground-breaking design”
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch | 59 Comments
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is at it again. After having very positive things to say about Switch during the company’s latest financial call earlier in the week, he’s now spoken about it very positively with GamesBeat, noting that “it was such a ground-breaking design.”
When asked why NVIDIA went after Switch, Huang said:
“We’re dedicated to the gaming market and always have been. Some parts of the market, we just weren’t prepared to serve them. I was fairly open about how, when this current generation of consoles was being considered, we didn’t have x86 CPUs. We weren’t in contention for any of those. However, the other factor is whether we could really make a contribution or not. If a particular game console doesn’t require our special skills, what we can uniquely bring, then it’s a commodity business that may not be suited for us.
In the case of Switch, it was such a ground-breaking design. Performance matters, because games are built on great performance, but form factor and energy efficiency matter incredibly, because they want to build something that’s portable and transformable. The type of gameplay they want to enable is like nothing the world has so far. It’s a scenario where two great engineering teams, working with their creative teams, needed to hunker down. Several hundred engineering years went into building this new console. It’s the type of project that really inspires us, gets us excited. It’s a classic win-win.”
Huang mentioned a few days ago that people will be “amazed” by Switch. He also believes that NVIDIA’s relationship with Nintendo could last as long as two decades.
More: interview, Jen-Hsun Huang, top
Pokemon Sun/Moon devs on the drip-feed of news updates, fan theories, thoughts on hardware, more
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 3 Comments
Plenty of Pokemon Sun/Moon developer interviews have been popping up as of late. In the latest issue GamesTM, the trend continues. Producer Junichi Masuda and director Shigeru Ohmori spoke with the magazine on a wide array of topics.
We’ve included some of the more interesting comments below. Between the two, there was talk about why there have been regular Pokemon Sun/Moon news updates, fan theories, thoughts on hardware for the series’ future, and more.
More: interview, Pokemon Moon, Pokemon Sun, top
Former Sony exec on the cancelled SNES PlayStation CD-ROM, including its last-minute death
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 74 Comments
Many, many years ago, Sony was working on the SNES PlayStation. It would have acted as as add-on for Nintendo’s classic console, allowing it to read discs. But unfortunately, it ended up getting cancelled.
Now in a new interview, we have some rare behind-the-scenes information about what was happening with the SNES PlayStation. Dwango head Nobuo Kawakami interviewed Shigeo Maruyama, who was once the the CEO of Sony Music Entertainment as well as the former chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment. Maruyama talked about the situation with the SNES PlayStation and also offered insight into the mind of Ken Kutaragi, who largely was the person who pushed for the device’s development.
Head past the break for our full translation.
Niantic teases a Pokemon GO secret
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 4 Comments
Niantic CEO John Hanke is teasing a secret hidden within Pokemon GO.
“There will always be secrets in the game that no one has found because we’re always adding new secrets to the game,” Hanke told GamesRadar. “There’s one out there right now and we’ll see how that plays out over the course of the next few weeks.”
Sadly, Hanke didn’t elaborate any further. GamesRadar asked if what he was referring to stems from the Halloween update, but Hanke responding by stating: “I am not giving you any clues.”
More: interview, Niantic, Pokemon GO
Game Freak talks Pokemon – fan feedback, making new creatures, cries, new Sun/Moon online features
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News | 18 Comments
In its latest issue, GamesMaster published an interview with two of Game Freak’s developers working on Pokemon Sun/Moon. Director Shigeru Ohmori and Junichi Masuda were both interviewed. Ohmori’s comments mainly reiterated what we heard in previous interviews, but many of Masuda’s comments were very interesting.
The Masuda interview was more about Pokemon in general. He talked about fan feedback, the process of making new creatures, plus voice acting and Pokemon cries. If that wasn’t enough, Masuda also dished on a couple of new online features being included in Sun/Moon.
Head past the break for a rundown of some of Masuda’s top comments.
More: interview, Junichi Masuda, Pokemon, Pokemon Moon, Pokemon Sun, top
Producer of the Zelda and Pokemon concerts on how the music is chosen
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News | 3 Comments
Jeron Moore is leading the way on Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses and Pokemon: Symphonic Evolutions as producer of both concerts. Zelda Informer managed to secure an interview with him, and asked several questions about the two shows.
During the interview, Moore was asked about how the music is selected for the Zelda and Pokemon concerts. He shared the following in response:
“Chad and I spend a lot of time listening to all the music and generally we have a good prerequisite knowledge of it. We have our own favorites and we kind of will work for the orchestra and what won’t, what will lend itself better for it. We also like to get the input from whoever we are working with. We worked very closely with Koji Kondo to establish what really even through today’s Zelda Symphony with Master Quest is still a very important part of that show. There is a reason it is still a core part of that show, because it was very carefully designed. The same goes for Pokemon Symphonic Evolutions. Junichi Masuda had a lot of feedback and thought some of our original choices were very interesting and was willing to hear what we wanted to do with it. When he did, he gave us the thumbs up. We try to make it a very collaborative process while also staying true to our passion for bringing to the table, the stage, the orchestra… what really sets us on fire and what gets us excited about the music and the game itself.”
If you’re interested in the full interview, you can listen to it in its entirety below.
More: interview, Jeron Moore, Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda
Miyamoto, Tezuka, Kondo on Super Mario Bros. 3 – scrapped overhead perspective, power-ups, music, more
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 6 Comments
Over the past couple of weeks, Nintendo has been publishing new interviews about some of its classic games in celebration of the NES Classic Edition. A couple of these have started to receive official English translations, but one is still untouched: Super Mario Bros. 3. Since it was incredibly fascinating and arguably the most interesting interview out of the bunch thus far, we went ahead and produced our own translation.
Directors Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka participated in the interview, along with composer Koji Kondo. During the conversation, they opened up about how the game was originally planned with an overhead perspective, spoke about the different power-ups including Tanooki Suit’s origins, and touched on the music. Miyamoto also cleared up where the idea for Small Mario came from in the first Super Mario Bros.
Continue on below to read our translation in full.
Takashi Iizuka on the physical toll of making Sonic Heroes
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in GameCube, News | 25 Comments
The development of Sonic Heroes took its toll on director Takashi Iizuka, who is also the head of Sonic Team. Iizuka spoke to Game Informer this month about how difficult it was to create, even labeling it as the most stressful project of his career.
Iizuka was located in the United States as Sonic Heroes was being created. Meanwhile, the rest of the team was based in Japan. Mismanagement was also a major issue.
More: interview, SEGA, Sonic Heroes, Takashi Iizuka, top
13AM Games on why Runbow Pocket won’t have local multiplayer and StreetPass
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in New Nintendo 3DS, News | 8 Comments
13AM Games recently came out and said that Runbow Pocket won’t include local multiplayer or StreetPass support. Instead, the team opted to focus on online multiplayer.
Nintendo Life has now received an explanation from 13AM Games as to why local multiplayer features won’t be included. Here’s what the studio had to say:
The way multiplayer options work on the 3DS and New 3DS can go one of two ways… “local multiplayer features” and “online multiplayer.” Local multiplayer features like StreetPass and Local Play use Nintendo’s NEX servers and API and online multiplayer servers work the way we have things in Runbow.
We’re one of the first teams to bring a Unity title to New 3DS. We already faced a few challenges scaling down the game to fit the full Runbow experience, single player and all, into a smaller machine, and on top of that adding different types of networking to our already complex netcode was a risk that we were not comfortable taking. We were left with a choice: Use the online system we already have in place, something that we know works and is fun, or uproot the code and build it for local features instead, while these features were still being added to the Unity engine. The latter option produced an unknowable: how long would this take us? Will it work? How many New 3DS owners are friends with New 3DS owners in the same square mile? Unity has done a great job in helping us with whatever direction we wanted to go, but at the end of the day we thought it was of greater value to our players to give them an online experience where they can play with anyone, anywhere in the world, just like the original Runbow.
Instead of having to find other New 3DS owners, you and your friends can jump into an online game of Runbow anywhere there is a wi-fi connection. Because of this, we also had to forgo the StreetPass features. We know this comes as a bit of a bummer to our fans, but at the end of the day it was important to us to preserve as much of the original Runbow experience as possible. From our massive single player campaign to those wild online matches with anyone in the world.
