interview

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

Choice Provisions already has plans to bring the Dragon Fantasy games and Shutshimi to Wii U. The company’s support may not be stopping there, however.

In an interview with Nintendo Life, associate producer Dant Rambo mentioned that Choice Provisions has interest in releasing the PC strategy game Tharsis on the eShop.

Rambo said:

We’re currently hard at work on games called Tharsis and Laserlife. The former is a perma-death, turn-based strategy game about the first manned mission to Mars; the latter is a music game where players are tasked with restoring the memories of a dead astronaut. Both are significant departures from our previous work and we’re really excited about them!

In fact, we’ve been talking a lot about bringing Tharsis to the Wii U! Stay tuned for more info about that.

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More: Choice Provisions, Dant Rambo, interview, Tharsis

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS, News, Wii, Wii U | 12 Comments

GameSpot was able to submit a few questions to the developers behind Xenoblade Chronicles 3D. That includes Monolith Soft’s Testuya Takahashi, representatives from Monster Games, and representatives from Nintendo SPD.

Most of the interview topics were naturally about the New 3DS title, including the technical challenges behind the project and how Monster Games initially tried bringing it to the original 3DS. There were also questions about the decision to port Xenoblade Chronicles to the New 3DS as opposed to remastering the title for Wii U, and what fans can expect from Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Head on below for the full Q&A roundup. You can also check out GameSpot’s piece here.

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More: interview, Monolith Soft, Monster Games, Testuya Takahashi, top

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 17 Comments

EDGE brought us a whole bunch of information about Splatoon in its latest issue. One topic covered by the magazine was the game’s development, and Shigeru Miyamoto’s thoughts on its early days.

Co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi, producer Hisashi Nogami, and director Yusuke Amano spoke with EDGE about how Miyamoto wasn’t originally pleased with what the team had come up with Splatoon. Here’s what the three developers shared:

[After] the prototype phase, we had all these ideas about the height, the ink, the characters, and the image of the character and the squid. But we couldn’t kind of filter it down to a final result that would result in a simple, fun game. And during this period, we were being scolded by Mr Miyamoto all the time.

He was saying, ‘I don’t understand. What do you want to do? There’s no appeal to this game.’

We had the basics and then we were like, ‘Let’s add the hiding [in ink] feature; let’s add jumping; we need height, because it’s a 3D map.’ And then we thought, ‘We need to be able to shoot up and down.’ And we realised we’d added all this stuff, and we got confused. We didn’t know what the game was about.

Splatoon launches for Wii U on May 29.

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More: EDGE, Hisashi Nogami, interview, Shigeru Miyamoto, Splatoon, top, Tsubasa Sakaguchi, Yusuke Amano

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, News, Wii U eShop | 0 comments

SteamWorld Dig could have launched with a couple of additional worlds, but Image & Form ended up shelving them. The studio explained why this was done in an interview with Shigeru News.

Image & Form stated:

Yes, towards the end of the production we came under some pretty severe financial constraints – we were quickly going broke. Anthill wasn’t making much money for us anymore, and we had to be done with Dig by the end of June 2013; we would have run out of money if we had continued over summer. In Sweden, summer works like this: *everyone* goes on vacation in July, and we had to send the game for a time-consuming lotcheck process. The most economic way to do it was to let vacation and lotcheck coincide – and then pray that the game would sail smoothly through inspection.

It did, but that also meant that we had to race to finish the game by the end of June. And there were a couple of worlds that we didn’t have time to finish. It was sad in every way, but we couldn’t have finished it otherwise – we would have gone bust. In retrospect we may have benefited from including them, but we had no idea whether the game would be successful or not. It would have been ballsy to include the extra content and hoped for the best, but at the same time it would have been reckless beyond description. A lot of us have families, and it would have been harsh.

The next SteamWorld game, SteamWorld Heist, is due out this year. Look out for it on both Wii U and 3DS via the eShop.

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More: Image & Form, indie, interview, SteamWorld Dig

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

Nikkei Trendy recently conducted an extensive interview with Akihiro Hino, CEO of Level-5. There was plenty of discussion about various topics, but some of Hino’s more interesting comments came about when he was asked about plans Level-5 has for Yo-Kai Watch aside from developing new installments.

Hino said:

Opening up to global market is a thing that is left to do. We are already refining the strategy of Yo-Kai Watch for global expansion. North America is the biggest market and we are starting to create a system which is required to realize the same cross media strategy (games, anime, toys etc.) as in Japan. When targeting overseas market for a big title like Yo-Kai Watch, we commit to that title 100% and create a powerful system which manages the brand and maximizes business opportunities.

Hino was next asked if North America is the main target of overseas expansion. To this, he responded:

We are spreading out to North America and Europe at the same time. About Asia, we have already started expansion in Korea. Toys have sold very well and the TV anime has higher ratings than other anime programs. As they have been a hit, we would like to bring a movie and other things, too. We are also steadily progressing in reaching out to other parts of Asia.

The first Yo-Kai Watch game launched in Japan back in July 2013. A sequel came out in July of last year. We’re still waiting on a Yo-Kai Watch title to arrive overseas… which hopefully will happen sooner rather than later!

More: Akihiro Hino, interview, Level-5, top, Yo-kai Watch, Youkai Watch

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, 3DS eShop, New Nintendo 3DS, News, Wii U eShop | 6 Comments

Polygon has some extensive comments from Tyrone Rodriguez and Edmund McMillen about The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. There’s plenty of talk about why the game didn’t make it to Nintendo platforms until now, and what changed to make it happen. Additionally, we learn why Rebirth is planned for New 3DS only (rather than bringing it to the original 3DS as well).

We’ve rounded up the various comments below. You can find Polygon’s original article here.

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More: interview, Nicalis, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, top

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

During the latest Fragments of Silicon podcast, Natsume’s director of operations Graham Markay explained why the company passed on localizations of the recent Medabots games. He explained:

[…] not every game that’s made in a particular territory, such as Japan, is always made with a worldwide release in mind. Another thing to consider is that we’d have to use Rocket Company’s engineers and programmers in regards to localizing a game. Even if we were to translate it, they’d have to be available. We reached out to them and told them we wanted to do more. We had a great time back in the day on the GBA releasing those four Medabots games, and on the Gamecube. Unfortunately, the stars have not yet aligned. Hopefully there’s a game that they have time to partner with us on.

[…] I would’ve loved to have brought [Medarot 7 and Medarot 8] over to the US. It just doesn’t seem like the right timing now. Then that begs the question of when would be the right timing. Maybe when their team frees up, but then when’s that going to be? When we’re free, they’re free, is it still going to be viable for the 3DS market at the time? We haven’t given up. It’s not like they reached out and said, “Hey, we need A, B, and C to make this happen.” We both looked at our calendars and unfortunately they were involved with something and weren’t available at the time.

Markay also revealed that Natsume’s GBA Virtual Console games will begin arriving on the Wii U eShop starting in June. This includes the Medabots titles AX and An RPG Adventure.

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More: Graham Markay, interview, Medabots, Natsume, Virtual Console

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, News | 1 Comment

It took some time for Intelligent Systems to settle on the visuals for Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. Speaking with USgamer, art director Takako Sakai explained how the style changed throughout development.

Originally, the team wanted to “recreate the same pen touch” found in American comic art. But “some visual elements made the game a little bit harder to play”, which led Intelligent Systems to make “some light revisions” – resulting in the graphics we see in the final code.

Sakai’s full comments are as follows:

When we set out to recreate the feeling of [American] comic art, and tried to recreate the same pen touch—that kind of feeling to the actual stroke… We noticed that some visual elements made the game a little bit harder to play. So we made some light revisions there, and landed on the style you see in [S.T.E.A.M.] now. At first, we [created] a color palette that was really faithful to the printing technology of the time. But once implemented, we found that it did make the game a little bit hard to play in some situations. So we made adjustments as appropriate—as little as possible—as we went. And where we ended, you’ll notice the enemies have sort of a colder, bluer palette to them, whereas your allies have a warmer palette—a lot of orange and red.”

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More: Code Name: S.T.E.A.M, interview, Takako Sakai

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS eShop, Videos, Wii U eShop | 1 Comment

More: Image & Form, indie, interview, SteamWorld Heist

Posted on 9 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii U | 4 Comments

One of the most prominent difficulties faced by the Mario Party development team was gameplay balance. That’s according to director Shuichiro Nishiya from Nd Cube and Nintendo producer Jumpei Horita.

Speaking with Nintendo Life, the Nishiya said:

Ensuring the gameplay was balanced was indeed the toughest challenge during development. The game is based first of all on the outcome of rolling dice, so depending on your luck, the game could end very quickly, or Bowser might never be able to catch up. We encountered a number of possible issues we had to resolve in order to balance fairness with fun. Through our test plays, we came up with various ways to help those lagging behind. For example, players who are out of the game can provide items to their team mates, Bowser Jr. can offer dice to Bowser when he’s falling behind, and so forth. Thanks to these additions, the outcome of the game is up for grabs right until the very end. Of course, even with all our careful adjustments, if you end up rolling nothing but “1” you still won’t have a chance of winning.

Horita also chimed in. According to him, “the outcome of the roll is 100% pure luck”, even though some have believed that the game controls it by some means.

I just want to add an extra point here. I often hear or read doubts about the fairness of the dice roll, that it might be controlled somehow by the game. I assure you that the outcome of the roll is 100% pure luck. That said, even when you’re down on your luck, you can still take advantage of the minigames to survive Bowser’s onslaught and stay in the running. There are plenty of ways to turn the situation around so I encourage you not to give up until the very end!

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More: interview, Jumpei Horita, Mario Party 10, Nd Cube, Shuichiro Nishiya