The post Save $30 on this Animal Crossing Nintendo Switch bundle at Dell appeared first on Game News.
]]>We don’t often see too many Nintendo Switch bundles on US shelves these days, aside from smaller discounts on memory cards at Amazon. That makes this Animal Crossing-themed offer all the more impressive, especially if you’re after everything you need to get started from day one.
For reference, the Animal Crossing: New Horizons game itself still regularly sells at its $59.99 MSRP, only ever dropping down to $51 outside of larger sales events. In fact, taking the $15 cost of the case into account, you’re actually getting the lowest price we’ve seen on this particular title. Black Friday Nintendo Switch deals only dropped that cost down to $49.99 in November, $20 more than the $30 price point we’re technically seeing today.
You’ll find more information on this offer just below, and plenty more Nintendo Switch deals further down the page as well.
(opens in new tab)Nintendo Switch Animal Crossing Edition | Animal Crossing: New Horizons | carry case | $344.99 at Dell (opens in new tab)
Dell says you’re saving $40 here, but it’s more like $30 with the Animal Crossing game coming in at $59.99 and the carry case available for $15 by itself. Still, that’s an excellent offer, considering we don’t usually see Nintendo Switch bundles offering this much gear for a discounted rate.
More of today’s best Nintendo Switch deals
If you’re not a fan of the Animal Crossing special edition, or you’re just interested in Nintendo Switch OLED stock, you’ll find plenty more Nintendo Switch deals on consoles and games just below.
We’re also rounding up plenty of cheap Nintendo Switch game sales, and all the best Nintendo Switch accessories to boot. Or, if you’re playing the long game, we’re also getting you prepped for this year’s Prime Day Nintendo Switch deals as well.
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]]>The post These Nintendo Switch deals beat any weve seen all year appeared first on Game News.
]]>Nintendo Switch bundles in the US rarely drop below the $299 MSRP of the console, but you can pick up a standard edition device, 12 months of Nintendo Switch Online, and a carry case for just $295 at Walmart (opens in new tab) right now. That’s a stunning offer, comparable to the rare Black Friday bundles that fly off the shelves in November. It’s also worth noting if you’re after the new version, however, that Amazon and Walmart also have Nintendo Switch OLED stock live for the standard $349.99 (opens in new tab).
Over in the UK, Nintendo Switch deals have shaved £5 off the price of the new OLED model (now down to £304.99 at Very (opens in new tab)). This discount has been around for a few weeks now, but with Amazon running out of stock we’re not sure how long it will last.
The real winner, though, is this £319.99 Pokemon Legends: Arceus bundle at Currys (opens in new tab). That’s an incredible price (just £10 more than the console by itself) on an OLED console, the latest Pokemon release, and a 256GB memory card – the best Nintendo Switch bundle we’ve seen in the UK so far.
You’ll find all these Nintendo Switch deals just below, but we’re rounding up plenty more prices further down the page.
Nintendo Switch deals in the US
Nintendo Switch OLED | $349.99 at Amazon (opens in new tab)
The Nintendo Switch OLED is in stock right now at Amazon and Walmart (opens in new tab), and this drop has held out for a few days now. We don’t know how much longer those consoles will last as these restocks often come in waves, so we’d recommend heading over soon.
View Deal (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)
Nintendo Switch | 12 month Nintendo Switch Online | carrying case | $295 at Walmart (opens in new tab)
This is the best Nintendo Switch bundle we’ve seen all year – packing the console itself, 12 months of Nintendo Switch online and a carry case, all under the usual $299 MSRP. That’s excellent value and certainly not an offer you want to miss.
Nintendo Switch deals in the UK
Nintendo Switch OLED | Pokemon Legends: Arceus | 256GB memory card | £319 at Currys (opens in new tab)
This is the best Nintendo Switch OLED bundle we’ve seen all year – you’re picking up the newly released Pokemon Legends: Arceus and a 256GB memory card for just £10 more than the standard price of the console by itself. That’s excellent value considering other bundles are currently sitting at around £349.
View Deal (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)
Nintendo Switch | 12 months Nintendo Switch Online | £246.62 at Amazon (opens in new tab)
This Nintendo Switch deal at Amazon offers up 12 months of Nintendo Switch Online (worth £17.99) with a console, all for £15 less than the price of the device by itself. That’s a particularly rare offer, so we wouldn’t wait for this one to leap off the shelves if you’re not interested in an OLED display.
View Deal (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)
Nintendo Switch OLED | £309 £304.99 at Very (opens in new tab)
Save £5 – Amazon has run out of stock of the Nintendo Switch OLED at this reduced £304.99 price point, but Very is picking up the slack this week. We’ve seen this price hanging around over the last few weeks, but with Amazon’s supplies running low it might not be available much longer.
More of today’s best Nintendo Switch deals
You’ll find plenty more Nintendo Switch deals up for grabs this week, with all the latest prices listed below. Or, for something a little cheaper, check out the latest Nintendo Switch Lite deals further down.
You’ll need some Nintendo Switch accessories to go with your new toy, so we’re rounding up all the best Nintendo Switch controllers and best Nintendo Switch memory cards to go with your new system. For something to play, we’re also rounding up all of this week’s cheap Nintendo Switch games.
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]]>The post Fan-made Pokemon Uranium adds more than 100 new Pokemon and Nuclear type appeared first on Game News.
]]>The game has been in development for nine years, and it’s been in a playable beta state for most of that. However, version 1.0 was finally released just earlier this month, and is available to download through the Pokemon Uranium forums (opens in new tab).
One caveat: don’t go expecting to fire this up on your 3DS and take a walk around town unless you’ve got some serious modding skills. Other than that, prepare to do what you’d normally do in a Pokemon game: wander from town to town, catching magical animals and battling random strangers on your quest to become the best trainer in the land.
Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have been content to let the not-for-profit game run quietly in its own little corner of the internet, but a 1.0 version might draw some unwanted attention from the copyright lawyers. If you’re interested in checking it out, I suggest you hurry.
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]]>The post How Warioware nailed the minigame formula for generations to come appeared first on Game News.
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In 2003 the idea of a game split into hundreds of smaller ones, each roughly five seconds long, seemed, well, demented. How could you even learn the controls if, after a single bite, the next plate was thrust under your nose like some slapdash taster course? How could you derive satisfaction from such meagre investment? The design turned out to be not only fruitful – kickstarting an irreverent new franchise for Nintendo that later saw releases on GameCube, DS, DSi and Wii (and soon Wii U with the upcoming Game & Wario: see page 51 for a preview) – but also prescient, predating the ethos that now powers the mobile market. That ethos? Gloriously instant gratification.
The rules were simple. Levels contained ‘microgames’ (presumably smaller than mini-games, but bigger than nano-games), which players tackled at random. You might launch a rocket, jump a shark, score a basket, brush some teeth, pick a nose or use a brolly to shelter a kitten. The catch was that you only had four lives. Let your kitty get wet, for example, and you lost one. The longer you survived, the faster the speed got. Survive a barrage of 20 or so and you advanced to the next level.
Halfway through levels lay boss fights, chances to restore a single lost life. These were slightly longer: you might fight a NES-style Punch-Out!! bout, or fly a spaceship in a top-down shooter, or bat balls from a tricksy auto-pitcher. True to WarioWare, these small, but perfectly formed gameplay nuggets stuck around just long enough to offer a challenge, but never outstayed their welcome. Of course, any videogame lives and dies by how it plays, and thanks to WarioWare’s sheer variety, there were a hundred ways in which it could fail.
Aside from a few duds (catching a falling pole, or hammering A to eat bananas were about as riveting as they sound), there were no glaring weak links. This is down to a host of different characters packing 25 microgames a piece. The hyper-intelligent alien, Orbulon, offered Mensa-lite games that rewarded mental agility, rather than reaction times: remembering a dance sequence, say, or quickly completing a sentence (“This game is a) Stupid, b) Great or c) Ridiculous.”). Mona, meanwhile, geared hers around human physicality: threading a needle, perhaps, or using some eye-drops.
Nintendo fanboy 9-Volt’s set was arguably best, taking you on a whistle-stop tour of retro franchises: you blasted Duck Hunt fowl, dodged F-Zero racers, leapt Donkey Kong’s barrels, killed Metroid’s Mother Brain and, in an even more nostalgic nod to pre-Mazza Nintendo, hoovered a mess with the Chiritorie vacuum cleaner and grabbed plastic balls with the Ultra Hand. Impressively, these microgames weren’t just recreations, but were actual slices lifted from the games to which they paid homage.
“WarioWare demonstrated another side to Nintendo, sometimes sophisticated, but also content to roll around in the infantile muck.”
Not every character made sense. Dog and cat cabbie duo, Dribble and Spitz themed their games on sci-fi and ninjas, while, erm, ninjas, Kat and Ana, based theirs on nature. Hmm. Elsewhere was Jimmy T, a disco enthusiast with a penchant for groove, so, obviously, his games revolved around, er, sports. In its scattershot way, WarioWare demonstrated another side to Nintendo, sometimes sophisticated, but also content to roll around in the infantile muck (Dr. Crygor’s level takes place over a toilet). Both sides of this split personality informed the story.
Yes, there was a story. One evening, as Wario chills on the couch watching TV, a news report explains how game sales are exploding. So he joins the dots: make games, make money. That’s what the guy’s all about, after all. Developers aren’t known for their bulging wallets, however, so Wario enlists the help of people, pets and aliens to form WarioWare Inc.
That’s as far as the story went, but if you took it to its logical conclusion and introduced a bit of philosophy (stick with us), it made a weird kind of sense. In a way, players adopted the mantle of videogame tester, trial-running each developer’s scattershot demos without the inconvenience of having to type up a bug report afterwards. Or you might say players were unwary focus group sit-ins during some mad brainstorming session, each microgame a sales pitch for a prospective full-fat title. Whatever theory you favour, WarioWare was a lot cleverer than it seemed.
It was a lot longer, too. Five seconds of gameplay isn’t much, but multiplied by eight characters, each with 25 microgames, you have… well, we were never any good at maths. But we do know each one could be attempted in isolation from the rest and this offered a whole new spin. Rather than spend time frantically working out what to do (a one-word instruction like ‘throw’, ‘bounce’ or ‘pick’ was all the assistance given), you knew what to expect and could therefore chase your own leaderboard records. Microgames didn’t just get faster over time, either. Catching a piece of toast was even harder when a few bites had been taken from it; fleeing giant footballs demands skill when two become four. Master these and there was more fun to be had. After conquering a set of each character’s microgames, you’d unlock a longer mini-game to play at any time. Longer experiences, such as Skating Board and Paper Plane, veered even closer to mobile titles of today, the endless runners in the vein of Jetpack Joyride and Canabalt.
So, while WarioWare, Inc: Minigame Mania was indeed a precursor to the undemanding insta-fun downloadables occupying iOS and Android, it was also, in a funny way, a fitting tribute to where it all started: Game & Watch. Like WarioWare, Nintendo’s 1980s LCD portable offered not just one game, but several – 59 games across 59 dedicated models. Titles such as Fire, Balloon Fight and Vermin made self-reflexive cameos in WarioWare, some lifted wholesale, others slapped with fresh paint to keep with a new aesthetic. The whack-a-moles in Vermin, for instance, were now claymation. The game based on Fire, on the other hand, retained the sparse, retro black and white visuals of the original. The Game & Watch was one of several nods: there were also references to GBA, NES, SNES and even that eye-ruining monstrosity, the Virtual Boy.
Regardless of WarioWare’s link to the past or future, it has firmly stamped its own unique mark in time thanks to one all-important reason: it was never boring. This was gaming without the unnecessary bits, pure nuggets of distilled fun. So while WarioWare at first seemed the furthest thing from a videogame, it ironically had more claim to the title than anything before. When you get right down to the meaning of the word ‘game’, past long cutscenes and exposition-spouting characters, past HD graphics and soul-shaking orchestral scores, it’s about a self-enclosed interactive experience. WarioWare didn’t just adhere to that definition, it embodied it, offering not just one tightly focused experience, but hundreds.
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]]>The post Why does Yoshis Island remain a classic, 20 years on? appeared first on Game News.
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In 1995 Nintendo was facing Sega and, for the first time, Sony, and Super Donkey Kong (Donkey Kong Country in the west), which was released in the same December fortnight that the PlayStation and Saturn hit the shelves, was its response to its rivals’ new consoles. Nine months later Yoshi’s Island shipped, just one week after PlayStation arrived in the UK. With its own next-gen console still another nine months from release in Japan and 18 months from release in Europe, October 1995 was Nintendo’s final push to convince players they didn’t need new hardware to get a next-generation experience.
The rejection of the first Super Mario World 2 prototype marked the point at which simply being good was no longer good enough. Movies were suddenly riddled with CGI and arcades were full of polygons and Nintendo’s biggest games had to redefine the console to fight off two 32-bit machines promising perfect arcade ports and Hollywood cutscenes.
Instead of merely mimicking Donkey Kong Country Miyamoto moved the game towards a hand-crafted style, and, by disregarding the CGI fad, he crafted something that could withstand the test of time. Even in 1995 Yoshi’s Island felt new in a way Donkey Kong Country hadn’t one year earlier. While Rare used the most powerful technology of the day to build a perfectly solid Donkey Kong platformer in a graphical style now as eye-stabbingly ugly as an episode of Reboot, Shigeru Miyamoto’s team used their new graphical style and the Super FX chip to build a living cartoon and a different kind of platformer.
Scaling enabled them to make beautiful animations and morphing sprites that would grow to fill the screen, 3D polygons created rolling platforms built to throw off slow Yoshis and the best level designers in the business put their new toys to work in the most imaginative ways. Anyone could have used a new sprite scaler to make giant bosses, but Miyamoto’s team used it to dream up a screen-filling Bashful Burt you’d have to de-pant to beat, a frog you’d fight from the inside out, a struggle for space against two Shy Guys and a potted ghost, an armoured monster who could only be beaten by having the ground removed from beneath his clanking feet and a raven who was ejected from his patchwork moon home with a prod up the bum from a wooden stake.
Back in 1995 those too-rude-for-vicar jokes were a trademark of naughty-minded Japanese developers and games like Legend Of The Mystical Ninja, Parodius and Yoshi’s Island had a keen sense of humour that’s been all but lost in today’s world. The sheer weirdness of Japanese games from the early 1990s is impossible in a globalised gaming universe in which titles cost $50 million to make. Needless to say, no creative director is ticking the box beside the kanji for “poke raven in bottom on moon to win” on a pitch document in the 21st century.
When Nintendo fans talk of the early nineties as a golden era it’s exactly because of moments like these. This was technology put to the most creative uses, not only to render screen-filling monsters, but also to give you something unique to do once they’d swollen to mammoth size. Behind it all is a sophisticated physics model that powers everything from that flutter-jump to the eggs Yoshi fires like cannonballs. Those algorithms provide the magic behind some of the best boss fights of all time, as ping-ponging eggs punch holes in wibbly-wobbly ghosts and Yoshi’s frantic flutter saves you from deadly falls at the very last second.
As a result, Yoshi’s Island is perfectly unique. The box says “Super Mario World 2”, but it is no more a direct Mario World sequel than Super Mario 3D World was a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy. The first four Mario games showed a natural evolution of sorts, but for Super Mario World 2 Shigeru Miyamoto started from scratch and kicked off a kind of lunatic design that persists to this day.
Nintendo always starts from scratch with Mario, not just from game to game, but from level to level. In 1995 you’d Touch Fuzzy and Get Dizzy on one level and morph into a car, or ride a giant Koopa on another. In 2013 you’d be a giant Mario one minute and a cat the next, or racing down rapids, or carrying a friend to the flagpole. There’s always something new to try.
Even today players are finding new things to discover in Yoshi’s Island. Some of it’s useful for speedrunning, like Yoshi’s perfect flutter, which can be chained to flutter entire levels without losing altitude or the ‘gatehack’ that opens pinball bumpers from the wrong side. Others are just pure, show-off silliness, such as Yoshi’s tricky backwards run, or the glitch that launches the lizard into space during one boss fight, or the many ways to juggle eggs.
Yoshi’s Island is an inexhaustible bounty of ideas and innovation and is one of several games that Nintendo banked upon to carry it through its darkest days. From August to December in 1995 this game, Donkey Kong Country 2, Doom, Mortal Kombat 3, Final Fight 3 and Killer Instinct made Nintendo’s case, while Wipeout, Ridge Racer and Battle Arena Toshinden represented Sony, but after 20 years Yoshi’s Island stands alone: still good, still funny and still a technical masterwork.
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]]>The post How Nintendos most famous castle changed Mario forever appeared first on Game News.
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What a contrast with all those locked doors inside. Super Mario 64 didn’t feature the first platform game hub level but certainly codified the form, since other aspects of its design meant the between-levels part of the game had to shoulder much more responsibility than before. A map screen is great when you’ve got the best part of 100 levels to lay out, but Super Mario 64 only had 15. They were bigger than anything players had ever seen, designed for repeat visits and full of diversions, but the game needed a different means of tying the courses together.
From a functional perspective, then, Princess Peach’s royal abode is pure padding – it takes Super Mario 64’s 15 stages and sprinkles them over four subdivided floors. Despite the gating it does so nonlinearly, a subtle clue that things had changed from the days when Mario’s adventures were nothing but an epic journey towards the right of the screen. This was a space to be explored, with multiple entrances, exits and rooms you were meant to return to. Still, it’s a relatively compact, tidy and efficient environment compared with the bloated hubs it would inspire: you could fit Peach’s Castle many times over into Donkey Kong 64’s DK Island or Banjo-Tooie’s sprawling Isle O’ Hags.
There was a weird, voyeuristic novelty in walking around the nearly abandoned dwelling. We’d visited the Mushroom Kingdom plenty of times, after all, but never been invited to potter about the royal residence before. So it was a surprise to discover Princess Peach was an avid art collector. Given Mario’s three-dimensional transition, there’s something wonderfully symbolic about jumping into 2D paintings that then reveal themselves to be 3D worlds; it’s easy to miss the simple trick they pull off. The painting gimmick doubles up as an economical piece of level design: Mario 64 doesn’t need to integrate its environments into its hub zone or provide plausible transitions between the hub and the courses – it just hangs them, like exhibits, on the wall. They’re still logically placed, though: the entrance to the watery Jolly Roger Bay awaits beside schools of fish in the coolly lit aquarium; Super Mario 64’s final courses – the vertiginous Tick Tock Clock and sky-high Rainbow Ride – await in the castle’s summits.
The strangest thing of all about Peach’s Castle, however, is that it feels like a real place, an actual home to contrast with all the themed gauntlets hidden inside it. Peach’s fondness for landscape paintings has an obvious design-related purpose, but there’s no denying that by modelling and filling her castle with such curios Nintendo had made the Mushroom Kingdom more grounded than ever before. The brightly coloured, prehistoric charms of Super Mario World’s Dinosaur Island had been reined in favour of a blander, fairytale aesthetic and a castle that, frankly, would slot neatly into Disneyland.
Meanwhile, the layout of the castle was oddly plausible – the courses might be stuffed with enemies and tricky platforming gauntlets, but Peach’s home was made up of nothing but long corridors and echoing rooms (there’s a Boo-infested courtyard, but this is the otherworldly exception to the rule). Even a puzzle in which Mario must ground-pound two pillars to drain the moat outside was unusual – it loosely paralleled finding alternate course exits in Super Mario World to unlock new levels of the map, but its focus on the castle’s mechanical workings was more akin to a Zelda temple than anything we’d seen in a Mario game.
A common criticism of Super Mario Sunshine is that the GameCube title’s preoccupation with turning Isle Delfino into a consistent, unified place held back its level design – a misstep that it took Galaxy’s abstract droplets of play to correct. If that’s true, then perhaps the first inklings of the impulse to make 3D spaces believable and consistent can be spotted here. As the Galaxy games managed to increasingly capture the purity of 2D Mario in 3D space, they whittled away at the hub until it was once again a map screen.
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But they lost something in doing so. Before Peach’s Castle, games like Mario were all about the rush to the level exit, the leap to the flag. But 3D worlds dangled the possibility of more immersive spaces: places we could pause, dawdle in and explore. Peach’s Castle was one of the first. It showed us a Mario who existed beyond the end of the level, a Mario without any immediate task. A Mario free to spend afternoons outside, somersaulting from tree to tree.
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]]>The post Why double Mario forced Nintendo to change Super Mario 3D World appeared first on Game News.
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The mandate presented to Nintendo’s elite development team was clear. Its aim, according to Miyamoto, was “to make a 3D home console Super Mario game that people who like the New Super Mario games can also enjoy”. In other words, to forge a stronger link between Mario’s two-dimensional obstacle courses and his more expansive 3D adventures. And not only in design terms, you suspect, but also to bridge the sales gap between the two.
Plans were set in motion after Super Mario Galaxy 2 was completed. “We decided we should make an entirely new title, rather than another in the Galaxy series,” co-director Koichi Hayashida says. “Up until that point, we had only been working on games for the home console, so you might expect that we’d go on to develop a game for Wii U. In fact, we got really interested in creating a 3D Mario game that could be played with the 3D effect of 3DS. That’s why we chose to develop for the handheld system instead. Saying that, though, at that same point we also planned on making a version for Wii U. So, in that sense, you could say the game was in development for over three years.”
Hayashida admits that Nintendo may have had to reconsider its approach had Super Mario 3D Land been a failure. But the critical and commercial success of Mario’s 3DS debut encouraged the company to stay its course. With the help of Nintendo subsidiary 1-Up Studio (formerly known as Brownie Brown, which worked on the likes of Mother 3 and Heroes Of Mana), the largest development team in EAD Tokyo’s history began work on its Wii U spiritual sequel. And with the core concept established at a very early stage, there was plenty of time for experimentation.
Indeed, the finished product bears the hallmarks of an eclectic approach to game design, one actively encouraged by the policies of co-director and team leader Kenta Motokura. Over 100 staff members were asked to come up with ideas, from throwaway gimmicks to entire level concepts, which were then displayed across dozens of Post-it notes stuck to the studio’s walls. So perhaps it’s little wonder 3D World sometimes feels generous to a fault, introducing ideas before throwing them away minutes later. “We discussed and discarded a huge number of ideas during development,” Motokura says. “Sometimes you just can’t tell if an idea is good or bad by looking at it on the drawing board; when this happens, we try it out in-game. If we don’t find the idea fun, it won’t make it into the final product. There was a lot of back and forth on the course designs due to this.”
That sense of restlessness is pronounced in 3D World with its myriad asides, which range from the rapid-fire thrill of the Mystery Houses to the puzzle-led Adventures Of Captain Toad levels, the latter having been particularly warmly received. “We thought they were a lot of fun, so we’re really glad everyone likes them too,” says Hayashida. “If enough fans express such enthusiasm, we’d consider doing something with this feature in future.” It’s tempting to suggest that the rise in popularity of the quick-fix gaming offered by smartphones may have been an inspiration, but it’s a comparison that Motokura is quick to dismiss. “They weren’t inspired by smartphone games. The idea was to design a game that would become even more fun as you play through it, and this influenced the pace of the game, effectively increasing the rhythm. We felt that a short challenge with quick results would be a good motivation for players to advance onto the next course.”
Producer Yoshiaki Koizumi chips in: “We do feel a need to keep delivering games that will surpass our audience’s expectations. As creators, we try to fill our games with as many unique elements as possible. Moving into the future, we want to continue to deliver even more surprises as fast as we can so that it never feels like there aren’t enough.”
“We scrambled to readjust the game so that the double cherry feature would make it into the final product.”
Despite having such a vast pool of ideas to draw from, one of 3D World’s very best notions came about by happy accident. The Double Cherry power-up was conceived when one of the level designers accidentally added an extra character model into one of the courses. “We ended up with a single player being able to control two versions of Mario at the same time!” Motokura recalls. “We all tried it and it was really amusing, so we scrambled to readjust the game so that this feature would make it into the final product. If the game had locked up with two identical characters on the level, I don’t think we would have the double Mario feature we have now!”
While the Double Cherry was a latecomer, the Super Bell that allows Mario and company to adopt feline form was introduced nearer the start of development, becoming the signature feature of a game overloaded with playful touches. As with many of the best Nintendo designs, it was simply the most elegant solution to an existing problem, or in this case two: the director’s desire to allow Mario to climb walls, and to provide a way to help novices clear high obstacles. “We wanted Mario to make use of not only the ground but other surfaces, which is what led us to this idea,” Motokura says. “At roughly the same time, we were looking at ideas for more exciting ways for players to run around the courses. One of the things we investigated was having characters scamper around on [all fours]. For both movement styles, the test characters were either a normal-looking Mario or a version with a slight difference in colour. In finally putting all this together into a new Mario ability, we felt that a cat ticked all the boxes… For the final design, we strove to make it as cat-like as possible, while keeping it clearly distinct from [3D Land’s] Tanooki Mario.”
Cat Mario also represented another answer to an ancient problem – that of combat within the context of a 3D platform game. Leaping onto enemies’ heads in two dimensions might not be a issue for most players, but that doesn’t hold true for 3D. It’s a balance that Nintendo has wrestled with for some time, as Hayashida explains: “[This] is why you had the punch in Super Mario 64 and the 360-degree spin attack in Super Mario Galaxy. Since Super Mario 3D Land, though, with the 3D effect, jumping on enemies has become a lot easier, but we still decided to add in the claw attack to give Cat Mario an advantage. Then, of course, there’s Rosalina, the unlockable character for this game, who can perform a spin attack without needing a transformation. I think, when playing as her, you’re really able to feel the difference in playstyles.”
Yet if the five playable characters offer a range of abilities – Toad’s running speed makes him ideal for time attacks, while Peach’s floaty jump acts as a built-in difficulty modulator – the stages were seemingly designed with only one skillset in mind. “If a course is fun to play as Mario, then generally speaking it will also be fun to play using the other characters as well,” Hayashida says.
But the plumber handles differently from his other home console incarnations, the absence of a triple jump being a notable omission. Its exclusion stemmed from a desire to hark back to the simplicity of older Mario games. “Back when we were discussing the character abilities for Super Mario 3D Land,” Motokura says, “we thought about what was the simplest bit of fun that could be had using Mario’s regular abilities. We decided it was jumping across a series of platforms without falling – think back to the doughnut blocks and rotating platform courses in previous games. This decision helped us make comparatively intricate courses for Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World. In contrast, in a game like Super Mario 64, I think the fun needs to be on a slightly larger scale, hence why the triple jump worked so well there. It’s not that one ability is better than the other, it’s just that we use ones that best fit the design of the game.”
Losing 3DS’s stereoscopic effect and its aid to depth perception proved challenging, though, despite Hayashida’s admissions that it was also the root of the biggest hurdles during development of the 3DS title. “With Super Mario 3D Land, we developed the game with the premise of having the 3D effect, but we also had to make sure the game was still fun to play when this effect was turned off; that made things much more difficult. Through a lot of tweaking, I think we managed to make a game that’s also fun to play even without using the 3D feature. We took the lessons we learned here and used them in making Super Mario 3D World.”
Further complicating matters, Nintendo’s team wanted to accommodate four players simultaneously for 3D World. “We had to make sure none of the players would feel left out, even if all four players are moving in different directions,” Hayashida says. “We combined multiple types of camera movements that would adjust to the layout or a given feature in the courses. It was a lot of work setting all this up!”
Miyamoto’s presence was felt at a macro level, but even so he directed the 3D Land and World team to tackle problems it might rather have skipped. “We used the Goal Pole in Super Mario 3D Land, but it was quite a challenge for us,” Hayashida says. “We tentatively asked Mr Miyamoto if we could change this, but he was pretty sure that the Goal Pole is a staple of Mario games. It’s definitely a clear marker, and is easily visible even from afar.”
Its blend of old and new earned Super Mario 3D World universal acclaim, even if it was criticised for being a poor showcase of its host console’s features. “We always try to keep our 3D Mario games both highly intuitive and readily accessible,” Motokura says. “We designed this game so that the players could really sink into it and clear all the courses without having to read lots of text or deal with difficult controls, whether playing by themselves or with others. However, if we were to make another game then we might need to make even more use of the GamePad.”
“For Super Mario 3D Land, we strove to integrate the best elements of 2D Mario games into a 3D Mario game,” Koizumi says. “In a sense, you can also say that we created Super Mario 3D World by rethinking traditional Mario game ideas. In addition to doing this, we went all out inserting elements [that allow] players to further enjoy the sprawling environments. There’s still a lot more room for discovery and invention, and we’ll continue to propose new and exciting game mechanics going into the future.”
Whether that will involve Toad, Luigi and company remains to be seen, but it may have to. After all, now we’ve had a home console 3D Mario with fourplayer co-op, it could be hard to justify a singleplayer-only outing. But will the team’s adventures continue on 3DS or Wii U? “That’s still a secret!” Koizumi laughs. “I can tell you, though, that we’ve already started approaching our next challenge.”
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Shigeru Miyamoto has been making games at Nintendo for more than 30 years. In that time, he has directly overseen dozens of titles, from the landmark Super Mario Bros. to his latest pet project, Pikmin 3. But all those projects don’t come without some missed opportunities.
“I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever made a bad game, per se, but a game I think we could have done more with was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” he told Kotaku.
The sidescrolling/RPG hybrid is a black sheep among the beloved Zelda series. Miyamoto says it never quite took on that vital life of its own.
“When we’re designing games, we have our plan for what we’re going to design but in our process it evolves and grows from there,” Miyamoto said. “In Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, unfortunately all we ended up creating was what we had originally planned on paper.”
He said hardware limitations were partly to blame: for example, a grating several-second pause when the game transitioned from the overworld to side scrolling segments nixed opportunities to blend the two.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is available on 3DS eShop if you want to see for yourself.
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]]>Both Future Shop (opens in new tab) and Best Buy Canada (opens in new tab) are listing Yoshi’s Land as a real, bona fide thing you’ll soon be able to buy and stick in a Wii U. Well we say ‘soon’. Both retailers are listing an estimated release date of New Year’s Eve 2013. Though that’s probably very much a placeholder date, actually translating to ‘some time in 2013’.
As for the game’s description? Future Shop are listing the game as thus:
‘Join everyone’s favourite dinosaur in his first big starring role on Nintendo Wii U – Yoshi’s Land. Utilise the power of the Wii U Touchscreen GamePad to enjoy dual-screen fun in this epic adventure with stunning HD graphics and connectivity with the MiiVerse’
Hmmm. ‘everyone’s favourite dinosaur’. Jurassic Park T-Rex is going to be sad. No official word from Nintendo on this one yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as there is any.
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Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of the Wii U, has admitted to employing 14-year-old students in making the consoles. Various reportage compiled by Eurogamer confirms the students, as part of an internship program, were illegally put to work to cover a production shortfall in advance of the console’s November 18 launch.
“Our investigation has shown that the interns in question, who ranged in age from 14 to 16, had worked in that campus for approximately three weeks,” Foxconn told Reuters. “This is not only a violation of China’s labor law [which sets the working age at 16], it is also a violation of Foxconn policy and immediate steps have been taken to return the interns in question to their educational institutions.”
Reports from watchdog group China Labor Watch indicated Chinese technical students were forced by their schools to either take the internships or risk losing credit. Once there, they were treated as any other workers, taking on long night shifts and overtime. Foxconn also manufactures the iPhone and several other popular consumer electronics, and has appeared repeatedly in the news for alleged labor violations.
Nintendo responded to IGN’s request for comment on the child labor issue.
“Nintendo is in communication with Foxconn and is investigating the matter. We take our responsibilities as a global company very seriously and are committed to an ethical policy on sourcing, manufacture and labor,” Nintendo said. “If we were to find that any of our production partners did not meet our guidelines, we would require them to modify their practices according to Nintendo’s policy.”
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