interview

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 37 Comments

We’ve seen a wide array of Super Mario Maker since its launch last month. Quite a few of the user-made levels have proven to be particularly difficult.

Takashi Tezuka, a well-known developer of the Super Mario Bros. series, told EDGE this month that he isn’t surprised that many tough courses are being made. He also mentioned that these creators don’t truly realize how difficult they are for other players since they are already aware of the design and how things will play out.

He said:

“When you design levels for a product, you need to take into consideration a wide range of users. This limits the amount of extremely difficult courses to only a fairly small part of the whole game. I expected that the users who wanted to play more of the hard courses would be attracted to Super Mario Maker, so it’s not surprising to see that a lot of difficult courses are being made.”

“There is a tendency for the courses people make to be a little harder than they think they are. The creator already knows the design, where they have placed their traps, and the best route to take. So it would generally be easier for them to play through than someone trying it for the first time. As a result, the course ends up being more difficult than the creator meant it to be.”

Tezuka also noted the following when asked if any levels have caught his eye thus far:

“I’ve been watching lots of different courses on YouTube. It was quite a surprise how much fun it was to watch the videos, without even playing myself. There are so many intriguing and inventive courses, like one which you couldn’t beat if you picked up a mushroom. It’s been a huge motivation for us developers to do better.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 16 Comments

Last month’s issue of GamesMaster contains an interview with well-known Nintendo developer Takashi Tezuka. There were a few interesting topics that we wanted to highlight.

First, here’s what Tezuka said when asked about why Mario resonates so well with people and the key to his longtime success:

“Personally, I think that even before people come to like Mario as a character, it’s the gameplay of Super Mario that really resonates with them. We created Super Mario Bros paying close attention to intuitive feelings – things that anyone in the world can relate to – which users feel through the gameplay; running is fun, jumping high is something you want to do, falling is scary and spikes hurt you if you touch them, etc.

I think it all started with how the gameplay resonated with players. From there it’s been how we’ve continued to make Mario games for so long, and all the work we have put into making sure that Mario is never used in an inappropriate way, that has allowed him to slowly become such a well-loved character.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 7 Comments

Wii U will be getting a Minecraft game at some point soon in the form of Minecraft: Story Mode. Interestingly enough, the game is built around the actual Minecraft engine, which has been ported over to Wii U.

“The sets and the environments and everything that looks like Minecraft is actually built in Minecraft and that gets shifted over to all the different platforms,” Telltale’s director of creative communications Job Stauffer told Family Gamer TV.

Given that information, one would think that it’d be easier than ever to bring the core Minecraft experience to Wii U. Maybe one day…

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, General Nintendo, News | 16 Comments

SEGA and M2 have worked together to recreate many classic titles on 3DS. We’ve seen the likes of 3D Sonic the Hedgehog, 3D Gunstar Heroes, and 3D Streets of Rage – among many others. But there’s one title the two companies wish they could have recreated for the handheld: the arcade version of Virtua Racing.

Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with SEGA producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 president Naoki Horii:

Is there a title you wish you could have converted?

YO: That would have to be the arcade version of Virtual Racing for me. It hasn’t ever been faithfully ported. There’re four ports to date: Mega Drive, 32X, SEGA Saturn, and Playstation, but none of them stayed true to the original.

The Mega Drive and 32X versions were amazing at the time, but I wish more attention went to Virtual Racing rather than Virtual Fighter. I wasn’t too impressed with Winning Run (racing game developed by Namco at the time), which was released earlier, butVirtual Racing really caught my attention. The 30 FPS framerate gave it a smoother effect compared to other games like Hard Driving and Winning Run.

There was also a Grand Prix mode, where people could play 15 rounds for 200 yen when popularity started to die. I remember having so much fun playing with three other people and figuring out when to replace the worn out tires at the pits. I do feel that I want to re-experience that some day. Many have told me that there’s no reason to bring it back when there’s so many amazing racing games out there, but I’ve got a lot of great memories associated with that game, so I’d love to bring it back if I had the chance.

NH: I got to say, I agree. I’d say Virtual Racing since I like to work on those primitive era games.

– Despite this maybe being the end of the SEGA 3D Remaster Project, I really hope you can make those happen.

YO: Seriously! But I wonder how many of these “final episode” interviews we’ve had regarding this project. Back during Batch 1’s 3D Streets of Rage episode, I was the one who suggested to put “Farewell!” as the title! I thought that was going to be be the end of the interviews.

You can read up on the full interview here. There are lots of interesting comments about the development of 3D Sonic the Hedgehog 2!

More: interview, M2, Naoki Horii, SEGA, Yosuke Okunari

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 39 Comments

Last month’s issue of GamesTM has a lengthy interview with Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. As you would expect, the discussion is largely focused on the Super Mario Bros. series.

A few interesting comments came about when Miyamoto and Tezuka were asked if they ever made any choices that they were concerned about being controversial. Miyamoto started things off, and spoke about how it’s difficult catering to both advanced players and beginners.

He said:

“For me one of the things was maybe the gap between the really advanced players and the first-time players. The difficulty balance is always something that I hear frustrations about from the public, whichever way we decide to go. We always have the testing team test our game, but whatever they say is really fun, the first-time players might consider to be very difficult. One of the things I do sometimes at the later phases of development is go in and hear the testing team’s requests and actually pull that away and lower the barrier or change what it is they want. Sometimes I even hear from the testing team, ‘You’re destroying the fun’, but on the other hand, the flipside is you hear the first-time players saying ‘If I can’t clear a level it’s not fun for me. If I can’t complete a game it’s not fun for me’. The more years that have passed, the gap between advanced and first-time players has become wider.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 126 Comments

GameSpot recently spoke with Platinum Games’ Yusuke Hashimoto, one of the directors working on Star Fox Zero.

First, here’s what Hashimoto said about working with two screens:

“Those two screens, you can’t find that anywhere else. When we were doing Bayonetta 2, we just used that screen as a touch pad. With Star Fox, Miyamoto originally had the idea that he wanted to create a shooting game that used both of these screens, and then we said, okay, how can we combine this with Star Fox? Just having to use those two screens makes things interesting.”

“We’ve been working with action games long enough. We understand how the players play an action game, how they respond to an action game, how they’ll move, what they’ll do in the situational stuff. What we’re making here now, it’s totally a new learning experience for us, which is kind of fun to find out.”

Hashimoto also discussed the importance of nailing a solid 60 frames per second. The game not only runs at this speed on the television, but also on the GamePad.

“We’ve got them both moving at 60 fps, which is big for a lot of people, I think. But I think that it’s kind of a milestone in gaming, in a way. It’s not something that we have done ourselves before at Platinum, and it’s just not even something that has been done in gaming before. So it’s a lot of new challenges.”

Finally, Hashimoto briefly touched on Star Fox Zero’s delay. The decision was made in order to give the game more of a “Platinum feel”.

“We want to make it feel as great as possible. It’s easy to say [it was delayed] to increase its quality, or whatever, but that entails a lot, whether it be visuals, or controls.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii | 25 Comments

Microsoft is publishing Scalebound, a new Xbox One title from PlatinumGames. But as fate would have it, the project was originally imagined for Wii.

Director Hideki Kamiya recently spoke with GameSpot about his original ambition for Scalebound, which would have had players using the Wii remote to provide orders to dinosaurs rather than dragons. It also starred a little girl rather than the current protagonist Drew.

Kamiya said:

“If you look at the long span of it, the first idea [for Scalebound] was when we started the company and were thinking of ideas and games that we want to make. The idea popped up there, but then we made Bayonetta. Then after Bayonetta, we revived the idea and made a prototype but that prototype failed and the game got cancelled. It was put on a backburner for a variety of reasons and we moved on to The Wonderful 101.”

“When they first started, the idea was for a Wii game and we wanted to use a Wii remote to do the orders for the dinosaurs. You were in control of the dinosaurs, you were ordering the dinosaurs around, and they’d do cool things. Then after we made Bayonetta, we started the prototype. The first thing that I made a change to was making it a dragon game.”

“We changed the dinosaurs to dragons, but at that point the lead character was even weaker than [current protagonist] Drew is in the context of Scalebound. She was actually a little girl who was with these dragons. As we were making this prototype, I realized that I didn’t want to just be watching the fight, I wanted to be more participatory in the fight. And I started talking with the staff about how maybe we should change this to be a swordsman or someone a little bit older. This was when the prototype got put on the backburner, so to speak, and the project was halted. Then we made The Wonderful 101.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 5 Comments

Although a little bit of doubt has been cast on the future of the Chibi-Robo series, there is at least one developer out there who wants to see the series continue, and in its traditional form. Chibi-Robo!: Zip Lash assistant producer Risa Tabata told USgamer in an interview that she’d like to see another adventure-style entry.

Tabata’s words in full:

“I actually wouldn’t call this ‘smaller’ at all, especially in terms of the game’s scope. I think a lot of people will be more than satisfied with it. Personally, however, I think it’d be great if we could release another adventure-style Chibi-Robo.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 34 Comments

Nintendo has tried a few different concepts with Chibi-Robo over the years. We know that it started out as an adventure game of sorts, but the series has since dabbled with photographs and now platforming. This is all intentional, as Nintendo seems to have struggled making the character a mainstream success.

Kensuke Tanabe, a producer from the company, recently spoke with The Verge about how it hasn’t been easy making Chibi-Robo resonate with all players. He also suggested that Zip Lash could be the last entry in the franchise if it doesn’t perform well.

“To be honest, this might be the last chance for us.”

“I’ve continually thought about ways to build this into a mainstream success. We’ve challenged ourselves in assorted ways along those lines, but I can’t say that we’ve found the answer yet.”

Tanabe went on to discuss Zip Lash’s origins:

“The first thing we decided upon was that we’d make an action game that took advantage of his plug and cord. We then placed the core of the gameplay on using it like a grappling hook, throwing it into a faraway edge and using that to traverse gaps and so on. As we kept thinking about ideas, we naturally settled on the 2D side-scrolling format. If the character can gain more recognition, I believe we’ll have a chance to produce another adventure-style game for a large number of people. I’m hoping that we made the right choice for this game’s play style.”

“Instead of trying to come up with a character we thought would be a commercial success, it was more like we first had the Chibi-Robo character, and then we thought about what kind of game we could make that’d portray this character in as attractive a way as possible. It’s kind of fun along those lines, like taking an artist I’ve found and trying to mold him into a famous creator. That, of course, also creates its own unique challenges.”

If Chibi-Robo does manage to capture success, it’s possible that he’ll appear in other places… liker Smash Bros. perhaps? Tanabe said: “If we receive an offer, we’ll think about it.”

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Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Switch, Wii U eShop | 0 comments

YIIK may have a chance of landing on NX. Andrew Allanson, who is AckkStudios’ co-director for the project, told Nintendo News that the port is likely to happen if the Big N’s new system supports Unity.

Allanson said:

“Oh man, I know as much about NX as everyone else. If Nintendo’s new console supports Unity, we’ll bring YIIK to it. Unity is sort of like “program once, port everywhere,” so it’s a matter of, I’d say, around six weeks per console. It’s pretty short!”

Allanson also spoke about how YIIK will use the Wii U GamePad:

“… one example is the record. When you fight with Alex’s main attack (the spinning record), there’s a Wii U-specific move called Record Scratch where the GamePad becomes a virtual turntable.”

“You can do a bunch of DJ-style things that are exclusive to the Wii U version. The other moves have been tailored, so you execute them on the GamePad as well — albeit in a slightly different manner.”

YIIK is on track to launch via the eShop and other platforms this winter.

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