Miyamoto, Tezuka, Kondo on Super Mario Bros. 3 – scrapped overhead perspective, power-ups, music, more
Posted on 8 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 8 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 8 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.
More: 13AM Games, indie, interview, Runbow
NES Classic interviews with Miyamoto and Sakamoto now officially translated
Posted on 8 years ago by Matt(@OnePunchMaz) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments
A couple of weeks ago, Nintendo published two interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto and Yoshio Sakamoto on their Japanese website. Miyamoto, obviously, created Donkey Kong, and Sakamoto developed Balloon Fight. Both of these NES games are among the games lineup of the NES Classic Mini, which was the occasion for these interviews. Now, Nintendo of America has provided an official translation of both interviews on their website. We’ve already provided an overview of the Miyamoto interview here, but it if you want to check out the official translation, you can find it here. The Sakamoto interview about Balloon Fight is located here.
Niantic would like the game to be a social network, looking to include “more heads-up play”
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in Mobile, News | 3 Comments
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.”
More: Dennis Hwang, interview, Niantic, Pokemon GO
Animal Crossing: New Leaf devs talk about the new update
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 0 comments
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.
Various indie devs on interest in making games for Switch
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch | 9 Comments
Nintendo Life caught up with several indie developers to field their thoughts about Switch. For the final question, they were asked if they’d like to support the system in the future.
Unsurprisingly, that was a resounding yes. These developers are either interested in Switch, or are already working on the platform.
Read up on comments from Yacht Club Games, Engine Software, Drinkbox, Choice Provisions, Atooi, and Shin’en below. Some are very brief as you would expect.
Game Freak still interested in Pokemon remakes, no current plans for Gold/Silver on the Virtual Console
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, General Nintendo, News | 35 Comments
Remakes are a well-known part of the Pokemon franchise. New titles are produced regularly, but older ones are visited fairly frequently. Fans might be interested to hear that Game Freak remains interested in this.
Series producer Junichi Masuda told IGN:
“I think the remakes, like Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, is still an approach we’re interested in. With the Virtual Console releases of the original games, specifically there had never been a way to bring those Pokemon over to the latest generation. It had always been that you couldn’t get those Pokemon out.”
Level-5 trying to figure out how to take advantage of Switch, won’t have any games at launch
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch | 25 Comments
Level-5 has been a staunch supporter of Nintendo platforms for many years. This will continue with Switch, as the company is already confirmed to be on board. Just don’t expect any titles immediately.
In an interview with Vandal, CEO Akihiro Hino said Level-5 won’t have any games ready for Switch’s launch. As for why, he explained that they want to “find out the best way to get the most out of the console” and “how to take advantage of it.”
Hino’s full comments:
“We plan to make games for Nintendo Switch, but I think it’s very important to find out the best way to get the most out of the console. For that reason, we won’t have any titles at launch, but we’ll work with it as soon as we figure out how to take advantage of it.”
Level-5 is working on several projects, including Lady Layton, The Snack World, Inazuma Eleven Ares, and Megaton Musashi. Some of these are planned for 3DS, and a couple may end up on Switch as well. Megaton Musashi probably won’t be ready until 2018, so it might make more sense to create it for Switch rather than 3DS.
More: Akihiro Hino, interview, Level-5, top
Sakamoto on making Balloon Fight, Iwata memories, canned GBA hardware idea, more
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in GBA, General Nintendo, News | 6 Comments
Nintendo recently published another new interview on its Japanese website to promote the NES Classic Edition / Famicom Mini. This time, Yoshio Sakamoto of Metroid fame sat down to talk about Balloon Fight. Nick Mosier translated the piece, which had some interesting talk about how the game was made, memories of the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, and a GBA hardware idea that was cancelled after making it to the mock-up stage.
We’ve picked out some notable excerpts from the interview below. You can read the full translation here.
