Image & Form on SteamWorld Heist’s difficulty levels
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, News, Wii U eShop | 0 comments
SteamWorld Heist will come with a few different difficulty levels. Based on comments from Brjann Sigurgeirsson, it sounds like there will be five in total, ranging from “Easy” to “Impossible”.
When cranking up the difficulty, players will encounter more enemies. There are also plans to implement more intelligent enemies. Sigurgeirsson believes that just “a few people on the planet” will be able to finish SteamWorld Heist on its hardest difficulty.
He told Nintendo World Report:
“… in SteamWorld Heist, we have difficulty levels so you can play Easy, Medium, Hard, Elite and Impossible… that’s the name of the difficulty levels today. So that’s the thing – you have to play it well, or you won’t complete it. I think that’s good, you’re supposed to put your soul and body into playing a game. It’s going to be as tough as you want it to be, but the game’s not going to give you anything. You’ll have to take it.
I might be missing a few things here, but there are various aspects that make it more difficult. We can introduce more enemies, but also the terrible notion of having better enemies. Like suddenly their aim is right on target. Like you say, less loot, you have weaker guns… there’ll only be a few people on the planet who can complete the game on the hardest difficulty.”
Miyamoto reiterates that Nintendo is open to pursuing movies going forward
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 9 Comments
E3 2015 was held a couple of months back, but Fortune just put up a few more quote from Shigeru Miyamoto today. This time around, we’re able to read up on some additional thoughts from Miyamoto when it comes to movies.
Here’s what he shared about the topic:
“We’ve had, over the years, a number of people who have come to us and said ‘Why don’t we make a movie together—or we make a movie and you make a game and we’ll release them at the same time?’ Because games and movies seem like similar mediums, people’s natural expectation is we want to take our games and turn them into movies. … I’ve always felt video games, being an interactive medium, and movies, being a passive medium, mean the two are quite different.”
“As we look more broadly at what is Nintendo’s role as an entertainment company, we’re starting to think more and more about how movies can fit in with that—and we’ll potentially be looking at things like movies in the future.”
This isn’t the first time in recent months that Nintendo has talked about the possibility of pursuing movies. Before his passing, during the company’s 75th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, Satoru Iwata mentioned that character licensing “may take various forms including, for example, images or even movies or TV programs.”
More: interview, Shigeru Miyamoto, top
Team behind Mega Man Legacy Collection thought about including RockBoard
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 4 Comments
The team behind Mega Man Legacy Collection considered including Wily & Right’s RockBoard: That’s Paradise – a Japan-exclusive title from the Famicom days – in the digital package. That’s according to Capcom’s Rey Jiminez and Digital Eclipse’s Frank Cifaldi, who divulged the nugget of information in an interview with USgamer.
Take a look at this excerpt from the discussion:
USG: It also makes sense from a tech perspective to just go with the NES games because they’re the same hardware being reproduced. I know it’s not emulation, technically, but it’s working to the same spec. Did you consider throwing in [Japan-only Famicom game] RockBoard as a sort of bonus, given that it’s the odd one out on the same technology or platform?
Rey: The answer isn’t no. We definitely had thought about it, but there wasn’t really a way for that to fit in for us, especially since it was in Japanese, right? So…
Frank: We even looked at translating it, if I could speak to that for a second.
Rey: As close to the technological images, you could theoretically do it, but you’re starting to go away from everything we’re trying to do, which is to keep everything authentic. We couldn’t release an all-Japanese board game here in the U.S., so…
While Mega Man Legacy Collection doesn’t feature RockBoard, it still has a fair amount of content. Players can experience the first six Mega Man titles as well as a challenge mode and museum.
Possibility of Dementium III depends on how the remastered versions are received
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, News | 1 Comment
Renegade Kid is currently working on bringing the original two Dementium games to 3DS. The studio has interest in making a third entry, but that doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing to happen.
Speaking with GameSkinny, Renegade Kid co-founder Jools Watsham said that the studio has “wanted to develop Dementium III for many years.” However, since a project would “require a huge investment in time and money”, we’ll only be seeing the game if the remastered versions perform well.
Watsham said:
“We have wanted to develop Dementium III for many years. Dementium III will require a huge investment in time and money, so it will depend on how well Dementium Remastered and Dementium II Remastered are received in the 3DS market.”
More: Dementium, interview, Jools Watsham, Renegade Kid
Year Walk devs on bringing the game to Wii U, future Nintendo interest
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment
Simogo director Simon Flesser and Dakko Dakko lead Rhodri Broadbent have opened up about bringing Year Walk to Wii U. The two commented on the origins of the project, how the game is taking advantage of the console, and future interest in the eShop/Nintendo in general.
Head past the break for excerpts from the interview. For the full discussion, visit the original piece on Nintendo Life.
More: Dakko Dakko, indie, interview, Simogo, Year Walk
3D Gunstar Heroes devs on why it was chosen to be ported
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, News | 2 Comments
SEGA has been up a translated interview about 3D Gunstar Heroes on its blog today. Producer Yosuke Okunari and M2 president Naoki Horii were interviewed.
During one part of the discussion, the two developers commented on why Gunstar Heroes was chosen to be one of the ports:
Yosuke Okunari: When we first began work on the SEGA 3D Remaster Project, we decided to go with a few arcade titles and a few Mega Drive titles. We believed that if we are able to perfectly emulate the console itself, similar to how we worked on the Virtual Console, we wouldn’t run into as many architectural problems and thus development would proceed according to schedule. Out of the eight titles during the first batch, five of the games were Mega Drive titles and the other three were from the arcade. The intention was to ensure we could actually develop (the much harder) three arcade titles. You see, we made the overall schedule easier to manage by buffering things with the Mega Drive games. Since arcade games tend to vary from game to game in the way they interact with the hardware, by adding these predictable Mega Drive games in, we could better handle delays caused by unforeseen issues on the arcade games. I mentioned this in a previous interview as well, but the reason why we picked the titles that have previously been ported to PS2 or Wii was also to mitigate any unexpected issues. But even taking that into consideration, just having these Mega Drive games in the lineup really helped lock in the schedule. That’s why we had those five titles originally. Since we successfully released the ports for the arcade titles during the first batch, we had a better idea of what the schedule would be for subsequent titles, and that gave us lee-way to work on titles we’d never touched before for the second batch, like Out Run. And now here we are releasing three new games for the second batch, games we decided to pass on the first time around for reasons other than hardware. These are titles that M2 actually refused to develop at the time.
Naoki Horii: We discussed in our previous article about 3D Streets of Rage 2 as to whether or not we would actually be able to get the backgrounds into 3D or now, and one might expect, there were those who said that Gunstar Heroes’ backgrounds wouldn’t be convertible anyway, so it was removed from the list of porting candidates. For example, the background on the 4th stage is not a true isometric projection, but rather it’s just a simple 45 degree angle line going into the screen, and thus is difficult to put into true stereoscopic 3D.
Okunari and Horii also spoke about Gunstar Heroes’ popularity, which is one reason why it was selected.
YO: Gunstar Heroes has been ported to a variety of game systems to date. The number of times this game has been ported is testament to its popularity, and as far as priorities go, this game was on the top of the list and would have been in the first batch.
NH: Oh yes, absolutely.
YO: It’s just the process of converting a game into stereoscopic 3D is a step above normal porting. Originally, this project stemmed from wanting to make a Mega Drive Virtual Console, but these days just a straight port doesn’t really capture the attention of the 3DS audience. I mean, it’s been a rough time for the Game Gear Virtual Console games [on 3DS], you know. And so Gunstar Heroes was regrettable not chosen for a 3D conversion in the first batch.
Be sure to give the full interview a look here.
More: 3D Gunstar Heroes, interview, M2
Splatoon staff talk about the Inkling design, more on the Squid Sisters, and other topics
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 4 Comments
In a recent issue of Famitsu, the magazine caught up with several of the developers behind Splatoon. The lineup included producer Hisashi Nogami, art director Seita Inoue, and designer Keisuke Nishimori. Toru Minegishi and Yuki Tsuji, who worked on the game’s sound, were also in the discussion.
We’ve been poking through Famitsu’s interview again, and came across a few more interesting excerpts. We now have those ready to share.
During the interview, Famitsu asks if things like the characters’ “heads tall” ratio were firmly decided when characters were still rabbits. The developers were basically asked about body proportions and how big the head was going to be compared to the body as a whole.
Inoue and Nogami replied:
Inoue: “That wasn’t changed to an extent. As this is an action game, if you don’t make the action easy to see to a certain degree, it feels out of touch, so it was decided to have big legs and hands.”
Nogami: “There was also a reason to have a low ‘heads tall’ ratio. You can tell when a character is covered in ink from an attack because the head is big. It isn’t so just to make them look cute.”
Another topic brought up during the interview was the design points of the Inkling boy and girl. Inoue mentioned that they wanted to make elements such as the eyes and tentacles easily visible, but the form and silhouette were given a great deal of attention.
Iwata felt that the games he worked on were sort of like his children
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 10 Comments
Back in July 2013, Toyo Keizai Online conducted an interview with Satoru Iwata. But there was one part of the discussion that was never published.
At one point of the interview, Toyo Keizai Online asked Iwata about the game he likes the most. These comments have now finally made their way online for all to see.
Here’s what Iwata shared at the time:
“Ummm… that’s a difficult question. I was a game developer myself, so I have special attachment to all the products that I was deeply involved in as a programmer or a producer, whether it’s “Kirby Super Star (known in Japan as Hoshino no Kirby)”, “Earthbound (MOTHER 2)”, or “Super Smash Bros. (Dairanto Smash Brothers)”. So it’s pretty hard to name only one.”
“I look at all these games that I produced at very close range, as if they were my children, so to say. The proximity of my perception therefore differs from other people. When I was developing them, I was working almost every day (all night long) till I saw the sun rising over Mt. Fuji. So when I think about them, the memories of those creative endeavors come flashing back altogether as one set?about how I came up with the original concept, what I was thinking at the time to shape it into a tangible form, what portion of these thoughts actually reached the customers and what didn’t, and what kind of struggles and dramatic events I went through during the development process?you know, things like that. These emotions clearly separate my way pf perceiving them from any other person who can get fascinated in these games strictly as one of many ordinary players.”
More: interview, Satoru Iwata, top
Xbox boss: “I don’t think there’s a first-party out there that has the strength of IP that Nintendo has”
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 40 Comments
Eurogamer recently spoke with Xbox boss Phil Spencer. When the site asked if exclusive games are needed to sell hardware and pointed out the Wii U should be selling more if that’s the case, Spencer responded:
On the Wii U, I think people downplay how many units they’ve sold. I’ve got a Wii U, I think there’s some great games on there. I think Splatoon’s a really nice game and I don’t think there’s a first-party out there that has the strength of IP that Nintendo has. They’re always a beacon to me when I look at what it means to build a first-party portfolio of products, they’ve done a great job.
This isn’t the first time Spencer has praised Nintendo. Back in January 2014, he also spoke about the company’s franchises with high regard.
More: interview, Phil Spencer
Atlus on the decision to localize The Legend of Legacy, first-print edition coming
Posted on 8 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 8 Comments
In an interview with God is a Geek, Atlus USA John Hardin spoke about the company’s decision to pick up The Legend of Legacy for localization.
Hardin pointed to a few aspects in his response. He brought up Atlus’ close working relationship with FuRyu, its positive reception in Famitsu, and the fact that it looks like the sort of game that people would be interested in.
Hardin’s full response is as follows:
“Legend of Legacy is officially official now. I can no longer leak anything else. We’ve been working with Furyu for a couple of titles now. We are working with them on Lost Dimension already. We have a great working relationship with them. Furyu’s Legend of Legacy caught our eye because it received positive mentions in Famitsu. It was one of the top new IPs that people were looking forward to. I really like it. It’s a properly difficult JRPG and I think fans of the SAGA series in particular will love it. The text is presented in little speech bubbles and it really has that classic JRPG feel to it. It is one of those games that, a couple of years from now, will end up in people’s collections and they will say ‘If you’re a fan of JRPGs and don’t have Legend of Legacy in your collection, you don’t have a complete collection.'”
“It was really fun being able to show Legend of Legacy and Stella Glow at the same time at E3. They are so unashamedly JRPG but at different ends of the spectrum. I think Legend of Legacy has more subtlety to the story and characters. Stella Glow is super easy to get into. Legend of Legacy also has a pretty aesthetic. When you’re walking around in the world, the background scenery pops in and even though the draw distance is small, the effects are a lot of fun and it looks awesome.”
Hardin also teased a first print edition for The Legend of Legacy. There’s no specific news yet, but Atlus is currently working on plans in this area.
“We are working on it. Nothing concrete to say right now but we are working on getting it taken care of. I don’t think there will be a different priced edition like Persona Q’s Wild Cards Edition but we will do the typical Atlus release with a first run printing. It is nice having something physical to go along with the game. We can’t make an infinite supply of these editions and it is the nature of niche gaming. It is super helpful for our fans if we add something extra for them. I know we sometimes get blasted on the internet for not offering enough but we try and do something special every time. The good news is, there is a lot of time for that. Legend of Legacy is coming out in the back half of 2015. We are also looking at what they did with the music release in Japan. (He confuses Legend of Legacy with Stella Glow here). We are working on getting things sorted out and stay tuned for more info. Thank god that both these games are announced. Haha.”
