In a recent interview the chief of Sega West, Mike Hayes, sat down to talk about some of the company’s plans for the future. Some of these plans involved their history with the Nintendo Wii and the comments he had to share gave some interesting hints to how it will shape their future.
The classic perception of Shigeru Miyamoto is that of a friendly, cheerful man-child, who is representative of the “nice” face of Nintendo. He is a man who creates games just for spreading the joy of playing them and who is just so friendly that it is hard to imagine him ever truly being angry.
Of course, like all people, this is not the reality of the matter. While he certainly has an undeniable love for games, this can translate into his being a very harsh taskmaster with the developers working under him. This is especially true when things are not going to his liking.
See an example beneath the cut.
Hudson Soft has a much closer relationship with Nintendo than most people realize. The company helped co-design the GameCube, is behind every game in the top-selling Mario Party series, and was even one of the first third-party publishers making games for the original NES.
Knowing all this, it's not really surprising that Hudson Soft has become one of the most prolific publishers on WiiWare. The company expects to release its 10th North American WiiWare title soon, anticipated to be Adventure Island: The Beginning.
To complete our picture of where WiiWare is one year after it began, we sat down with Associate Brand Manager for Hudson Soft USA Amar Gavhane to see what kind of insight we could get into Hudson's North American operations. Gavhane's role is often primarily in localization since many of Hudson Soft's WiiWare games are developed in Japan.
Hit the jump to find out exactly why casual gamers have flocked to WiiWare, why Deca Sports sold so many copies, and what the heck was up with Onslaught.
Since Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People was a WiiWare game so big it had to be five games, it seemed fitting to give it two interviews as part of the "one year of WiiWare" feature. This time we're talking to Telltale Games's Mark Darin, Lead Designer of the Strong Bad series. Darin has since moved on to other projects at Telltale, ones he says he's not allowed to speak about yet. He's evasive when asked about whether they might be for Wii or WiiWare, of course...
The interview starts behind the cut. Click onward if you want to read about the ideas Telltale had to leave on the cutting room floor, why Telltale likes using licensed IP so much, and why Telltale wanted to bring Strong Bad to Wii to begin with.
Matt and Mike Chapman, a.k.a. the Brothers Chaps, are the creators of the Homestar Runner series. They were also essentially co-creators of the great WiiWare adventure game series based on their cartoons, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, developed by TellTale Games. As part of OMG Nintendo's celebration of WiiWare's one year anniversary, the Chaps sat down to talk with us about the making of the game, its effect on the Homestar Runner universe, and why the ESRB won't let you decapitate people outside of M-rated games.
In general the Chaps are definitely big fans of Nintendo and WiiWare. During the course of the conversation Mike mentioned World of Goo as a personal favorite while Matt also mentioned really liking Megaman 9 and wanting a sequel to LostWinds. Of course, both brothers own a Wii and also play adventure games avidly on the PC. In fact, Matt says he was playing through the first Sam & Max series when he received the initial email from TellTale Games talking about the possibility of working on a game togther.
The interview starts below the jump. Sadly I had to omit some really amusing but not-quite-relevant tangents about how game journalists like to lie to each other, how I ended up playing the games completely out of order, and exactly how much space all the Strong Bad chapters would take up if you downloaded them to a single Wii. Don't worry, I left all the best stuff in.
You get a lot of great interviews out of events like GDC, but this one takes the cake. Nintendo's Vice President of Corporate Affairs is supposedly being interviewed by Matt Casamassina of IGN, but she basically spends the entire interview shutting him down with scathing condescension. Probably her most pricelessly cold - and interesting - response comes about when Casamassina tries to ask her about certain M-rated titles not selling well on Wii.
"Yes, I don't know what the last mature title that placed top 10 on NPD on the Nintendo platform [was]. Nothing comes to mind on that one," [Kaigler] says. "But I'm not going to make an argument for why certain M-rated games, as you say, don't achieve a certain amount of momentum on the Nintendo platform. We're broader than that. And that's what our contribution to this industry is. We are making sure that we make games for a broad consumer platform from age five to 95 and that really has worked well for us."
Basically: M-rated games not selling on Wii isn't a problem for Nintendo so long as lots of other types of games are selling. This makes it clear that Nintendo has no particular interest in making sure M-rated games thrive on the console and doesn't believe they're important to the future success of Wii. So if you ran out and bought MadWorld a few weeks back, great-- but Nintendo doesn't much care if you didn't.
Resident Evil 5 will be in stores about a month from now, which means the Capcom's main Resident Evil team is out of "make a game" mode and into "convince people to buy the game" mode. All kinds of interesting things get said during these pre-release barrages of interviews, and Eurogamer's recent interview with RE5 producer Masachika Kawata was no exception.
"Personally I would like to create something on Wii in the Resident Evil family," [Kawata] revealed. "At the moment we don't know and have just been working on RE5, so watch this space."
To date, Resident Evil on Wii has mostly been a barrage of ports (RE4) and remakes (Umbrella Chronicles), excellent through they were. A new, Wii-specific Resident Evil game would go a long way toward apologizing to Wii owners who aren't too thrilled that they'll be stuck with a slightly sparse port of Dead Rising while the rest of the world is gearing up for high-def co-op zombie-shooting goodness.
Arkedo is a developer doing great work on the Nintendo DS. Their first game, Nervous Brickdown, is far and away the best BreakOut clone for the system, and Big Bang Mini is the first DS shooter I've been able to really get into.
Of course, Big Bang Mini's core gameplay - which revolves around flicking the stylus to shoot - is a pretty far cry from, say, Shin'en's attempts to do DS shooters in Nanostray. How'd Arkedo come up with such a radical interpretation about the genre? Arkedo head Camille Guermonprez has the answer.
We wanted to review all the gameplay that we put in Nervous Brickdown and say, "Okay, what's the most enjoyable feature? What's the feature that was most intricate and that could only be done on the DS?"
And funnily enough, there was one boss in one world, which was a shmup in Nervous Brickdown already. We liked this one the most because the stylus was really precise, and we had a lot of fun doing that.
Basically, if you like Big Bang Mini (and if you're not some sort of communist, you do), you probably want to go check out Nervous Brickdown. If you can find a copy, anyway.
So Nintendo wanted to get the word out a bit more about Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, which ships in the US early next week, and invited GamePro (in the form of yours truly) to participate in a big roundtable telephone chat where a lot of journalists from a lot of outlets got to speak with three of the most influential figures in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon's development.
Our developers were:
Hit the cut to learn everything you could want to know about Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, including why it's a very special game for Intelligent Systems, the new ways it's going to try and be a little more player-friendly, and how the DS's unique hardware features make Fire Emblem gameplay quicker and smoother than ever before.
The global boss of 2K has predicted that publishers bringing non-licensed games to Wii this year could struggle – as the console’s market is “flooded by crappy titles”.
Actual quote from an interview with 2K global boss Christoph Hartmann, on the subject of challenges facing Wii publishers. 2K has unexpectedly found itself in control of one of the Wii's few third-party megahits, the bewilderingly popular Carnival Games, which itself only rates a 56% on Metacritic.
Still, Hartmann has plenty of room to call out the over-100 titles that litter the very bottom of the Wii's critical ranks, the likes of Castlevania Judgement (47%), Escape From Bug Island (37%), and Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal (27%). These 50%-or-less games make up roughly 1/3 of the Wii's entire software library as of this writing, and that's counting WiiWare. Here's some more from Hartmann about them
“Where people go wrong in the casual market is that, while the development costs are exploding on the casual side, they’re treating the Wii like the old PC market – making cheap, accessible games. They think if they make ten titles and two are hits, they will finance the other eight. But they forget these eight crappy titles will flood the market and will lead to problems in terms of production – and upset retailers. Also, the consumer will be pissed off because they’ll be confused.”
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