Publisher Oxygen, which is based in the UK (as you may have gathered from the title of this post), has decided that they need a new internal team focused solely on Nintendo. This new internal crew of miscreants will be working with both the DS and Wii, in the hopes of capturing some of that mainstream appeal each of the systems already enjoy.
The reasoning behind the move is simple for Oxygen: they want to get as big a slice of the mainstream market pie as possible. "Today the DS is the ascendant mainstream format, and it looks like the Wii will repeat that awesome success," says Kevin Hassall, Oxygen's publishing director. They aren't the Nintendo fanboys you'd believe them to be, though, as Kevin further adds "Oxygen's objective has always been to cater for mainstream audiences. So, if we had set up Oxygen Studios a couple of years ago they would probably have started with a PS2 title."
Whatever, we'll take all the publishers and developers we can get!
Take Two's Strauss Zelnick sat down with Dean Takahashi recently, where his new role as company CEO was discussed. Of course, Dean also finds time to grill him on hot topic Manhunt 2. Then the discussion moves along to companies he admires, as well as the Wii and E3. As far as interviews go, it tackles a lot of ground.
Zelnick has some interesting things to say based on the ESRB ratings, though, especially when it comes to the subject of self-censorship. Zelnick thinks that, in regards to the AO rating, "I'm not sure it is good for consumers either. The AO rating was not intended when it was developed to mean a non-rating. That wasn't the point. If you can't market it because you aren't allowed by the licensors or the retailers won't carry it, then the rating doesn't have any meaning."
"Maybe next year sometime, we may have new characters in the same way we came up with Pikmin when we introduced the GameCube."
These were Miyamoto's remarks to Dean Takahashi during E3 this year, as Dean manages to get his lengthy interview online. During the interview, Miyamoto touches on a variety of subjects, focusing most on Wii Fit, naturally, but does stray to discuss other things about his work life at Nintendo. And, while the remainder of the interview is interesting, as with most times Miyamoto conducts one, we can't help but come back to that quote up top there.
What kind of new characters could we be seeing? What new franchise (or, dare we say, franchises) are we going to be looking to in the future for those fun experiences Nintendo is so wonderful at providing?
In another section of Stephen Totilo's E3 interview with Reggie, this chunk focuses mostly on Nintendo's perceived favoritism to the Japanese market. With that region receiving lots of titles that we only get to hear about, Stephen asks Reggie if we should even be hopeful that such games will be localized.
The discussion then moves to Wii Ware, where the question of storage space on the Wii arises. Stephen asks Reggie about the possibility of a Wii hard drive, to which Reggie responds "could there be a market for a Wii hard drive? There certainly could be."
Nintendo's SVP of Marketing and Corporate Communications, George Harrison, conducted an interview with GameDaily during E3 where he spoke on a number of subjects (seriously, this interview is long). What we were interested in hearing from the interview, however, was talk of a Wii revision to the hardware in the works. George, in expert fashion, manages to provide an "answer" to the question without really answering it.
George doesn't completely dash our hopes of a bigger, badder Wii, though (we'd like more space to save our VC games, please!), stating "whenever we feel like it's time or have an upgrade, we'll do it, whether it's an improved screen for the handheld or slimmed down like the DS Lite – those types of things. So it's not out of the question on Wii, but we're not even to our second holiday yet, so it's kind of premature to talk about any revisions to the hardware itself." So, by that logic, we'll see a new Wii in 2009?
MTV's Stephen Totilo managed to not only take down Reggie's name, but also got him to plant himself in a seat for 15 minutes so that an interview may be conducted. Divided into smaller bite-sized chunks, the first-part of the proposed three-part interview has Reggie tackling many a subject. Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii and Endless Ocean are all discussed, but what we found most interesting were Reggie's comments on Project H.A.M.M.E.R.
Turns out, the game isn't canceled, but has just been put on the back burner. While the game could very well become lost in limbo forever, we're kind of excited to see what some time away from the project could do for the game. Because, frankly, what we initially saw at E306 was nothing worth writing home about.
Being the Nintendo maniacs we are, often the thought of finding and capturing Shigeru Miyamoto so that we may have him all to ourself crosses the darkest recesses of our mind. Of course, we realize these are just crazy thoughts and don't have them written down anywhere in the same book where we keep all of our homemade sketches of the iconic gaming legend. We would never do that.
But, given how much we read about Shiggy, his latest interview with Chris Kohler is one of his best. Shiggy manages to touch on an icnredible variety of subjects, including price point talk for Wii Fit, the upcoming Wii Ware channel and even took time to offer his opinions on the violent video game debate.
If you're going to read one interview from E3, this should be it.
When Sony's Jack Tretton thinks of consoles, he thinks of food. And, who can blame him? Whenever we think about consoles, we think of food, as well. Maybe it's because we are rarely fed, instead left only to enjoy the delicious liquids that are injected into us intravenously to keep us from dying as we blog away in Joystiq's dungeons our basement offices. Oh, how we would like to eat!
Jack Tretton has some wild notions of what each console can offer consumers, commenting "I think the PS3 is the Surf 'n Turf, the PS2 is your favorite burger restaurant... [Wii] is a lollipop, and I'm too old for lollipops. And the [Xbox 360] I get sick from once in a while because the cook isn't always reliable." Wii is a lollipop? It certainly doesn't look like one and offers content greater than the supposed satisfaction that comes from consuming a lollipop, so we can't exactly understand the analogy. We actually find ourselves liking the analogy one commenter came up with over at Joystiq.
If you're one of those folks who still finds themselves lost in a thick fog when thinking about the split between Silicon Knights and Nintendo, Dennis Dyack might be able to clear things up. In sitting down for a lengthy chat with NintendoWorldReport, the man explains why Silicon Knights split with Nintendo and touches upon the prospect of the two working together in the future.
Turns out, the way that Nintendo was planning on taking the company with the then upcoming Wii console didn't jive with Silicon Knights. They didn't like the fact that the Wii wouldn't be competitive, graphically, with the other consoles on the market. Silicon Knights wanted to make games with jaw-dropping graphics and high production values, but Nintendo's new approach wasn't helping with that. So, they turned to what they believe is the best hardware on the market, in Microsoft's Xbox 360 console.
The interview is a very good read, so be sure to head on over and check it out.
We've been privy to undocumented Wii features like the 192-Piece Picture Puzzle and the elusive Help Cat for a while now, but did you know that there's a secret Shopping Channel animation of Mario and Luigi swimming together while you're at the download screen?
During a recent roundtable, the developers behind the Wii Shopping Channel talked about how they overcame obstacles with the project, which elements they're proud of, and what they hope to see implemented in the future. One little touch that the developers were pleased to include was this Minus World-esque scene of the Super Mario Bros. paddling through and collecting coins while you download games. It doesn't show up very often, so don't be too upset if you've never come across anything besides the Fire Mario animation before.
We didn't even believe it at first, but Nintendo included a video with the interview transcript to prove its existence. It's a good thing they did too, or we would've gone through our life savings downloading Virtual Console titles, trying to get this alternate animation!
Well, today your Mii may only cross the Plaza a few times and stop to chat with Walter about bowling and Vietnam, but tomorrow, the sky may be the limit. Shigeru Miyamoto, in a recent interview after GDC, indicated that Nintendo may well craft their own Home-like system, a la the coming PS3 interface. But it's not a matter of copying from Sony; Miyamoto made a great point when he said that the idea of Miis is certainly not new. He referenced other examples of avatars over the years, and also said that he hopes more developers work along these lines.
For Nintendo's future, Miyamoto indicated that they may move in a Sims-type direction, which sounds an awful lot like 'Mii Crossing' to us. But some of the most interesting parts of the interview come when Miyamoto compares the Mii creation experience to game development. Making Miis, he says, is almost like putting the player into the developer's position, and that's something he would like to expand in the future. We're pretty sure we could get behind that as well.
During an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, MTV's Stephen Totilo threw out a speculative question: Had Nintendo experimented with using Miis in Zelda: Twilight Princess? Miyamoto answered that, in fact, the developers at EAD had in fact been playing with that feature! After completing the game, the team started experimenting with putting Miis into the Twilight Princess engine, just for fun.
So, working at Nintendo is so awesome that programmers continue working on their games after they've shipped for recreational purposes. That is a shining endorsement if ever there was one.
The MTV Multiplayer site is set up so that it's impossible to link directly to the story; you'll have to scroll down or search for "Nintendo's Miyamoto On One-Handed 'Mario,' Miis In 'Zelda".
In an interview with GameDaily, id Software's Director of Business Development Steve Nix spoke a little about the Wii. While he had nothing but praise for what the Wii is doing to grow the gaming market, he also remarked that id's latest works couldn't perform on the less powerful console. He didn't close off any chance of the company's franchises appearing on the console, however; Nix said that "some" of their brands could show up on the Wii, even though "there's just not a lot of horsepower there."
While Nix indicated that these might be "older technology," don't expect a rough port if any of id's games make a Wii showing. He was careful to stress the care id Software will take if they do work on a Wii title. As they are cautiously interested, so are we cautiously optimistic about id on Wii.
During an interview with Kikizo, Sega's Sonic Team Producer Yojiro Ogawa spoke about the team's latest game Sonic and the Secret Rings. What gamers may not know is that the title was originally going to be a port of the Xbox 360 and PS3 title Sonic the Hedgehog. Thankfully though, this did not come to pass once Sonic Team got their hands on the hardware and decided to create a whole new game. Ogawa takes us back to a time before the game was under development when "the team looked at the controls and the hardware, we realised that the hardware was very different compared to the 360 and PS3 version that was under development, and that we wouldn't be able to convert the game to Wii. So we started a completely different title."
The rest of the interview talks about the team's decision to play Sonic into the story 1,001 Nights and how the 'Revolution' code-name for the system gave them inspiration to revolutionize Sonic and the way we play him. Thank our lucky stars they did, because we do not want to think about what could've been.
ABC News' "Be Seen Be Heard" is preparing a segment about the Wii, in which they'll be interviewing Amber McCollum, a product tester at Nintendo. In a very lazy Web 2.0 move, they're asking viewers to send in videos containing questions for Ms. McCollum.
So if you have any questions about the Virtual Console, please send them in! And if you happen to accidentally, you know, say the name of the site, we wouldn't object.
We personally want to know about the development process: are the games basically dumped ROMS or do they have to be reprogrammed for the Wii? If so, why? These are the best questions we can think of, because repeating "RONDO OF BLOOD" over and over again while staring intensely into a camera isn't a question.
