Konami have confirmed earlier reports by announcing that Metal Gear Solid: the Essential Collection is coming to the PS2 for $29.99. It will include the original Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation, the director\’s cut of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 in a commemorative package with artwork by renowned Metal Gear Solid artist Yoji Shinkawa.
Daxter on the PSP has now sold over 2 million copies worldwide since its release. Ready at Dawn comment that the bar has been set and they\’re about to raise it with God of War: Chains of Olympus as this is set to do even better.
Developer Gamecock has said that Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball will be the best looking title on Xbox Live Arcade. They believe the game may take off bigger than a lot of boxed games have done. Gamecock went on to say that that Live Arcade is better established than the PlayStation Network and that the market\’s not yet there for the PSN. However they say that Sony really wants the game for PSN and that they are platform agnostic.
According to a rumor in the March issue of EGM, Capcom has decided to leave the sequel of Dead Rising in the hands of a North American developer. The rumor suggests that the developer is based in Los Angeles.
Microsoft will be adding to its Originals collection with Ninja Gaiden: Black, BLACK and Sid Meier\’s Pirates. The games will be available for 1200 Microsoft points on 9/20/2005.
The ESRB has rated three possible candidates for Xbox Originals, they are :Dead or Alive 3, Metal Arms and Raze\’s Hell. The ESRB usually re-rates all titles added to Xbox Originals. They have also rated possible XBLA games Ultra Bust-a-Move and Guilty Gear X2 #Reload.
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures developer Funcom has revealed that it has censored some parts of the game in the US & Germany to make sure it does not get rated adults only. Gamers will not see the nipples of naked ladies in the US version. The German version of the game will have full gore and nudity but will not feature decapitation, dismemberment or excessively graphic fatalities. The rest of Europe however should get an uncensored version.
Speaking in their latest podcast, Bungie revealed that the groups next game will be something totally different from Halo. The director of community affairs chipped in by saying that what he\’s seen so far of the ultra secret game is pretty cool. But that was as far as the team would go…
The latest self-help game from Nintendo, Sight Training, has claimed the number one spot in the overall Australian game charts, according to data trackers GfK Australia. Sight Training was the country’s best-selling game for the week of January 21 to January 27, up from eighth spot the previous week.
Nintendo dominates this week’s charts, with eight out the overall top 10 being Nintendo first-party games. More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? and Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain? have taken the second and third places, respectively. The previous week’s chart topper, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, still remains in the chart, but fell four spots to number five. The PlayStation 3 version of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare sits in the sixth place, with the 360 version failing to make it into the top 10. Finishing off the week at number 10 is Nintendogs: Dalmatian and Friends.
All sales stats, including console-by-console breakdowns, can be found below:
Top 10 Full-Priced Games
1. Sight Training, Nintendo DS
2. More Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain?, Nintendo DS
3. Brain Training from Dr Kawashima: How Old Is Your Brain?, Nintendo DS
4. WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2008, PlayStation 2
5. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, Wii
6. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, PlayStation 3
7. Nintendogs: Labrador and Friends, Nintendo DS
8. The Simpsons Game, Nintendo DS
9. Nintendogs: Dachschund and Friends, Nintendo DS
10. Nintendogs: Dalmatian and Friends, Nintendo DS
Top 10 PS3 Games (over A$60)
1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
2. Assassin’s Creed
3. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock bundle
4. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
5. Need for Speed ProStreet
6. FIFA Soccer 08
7. Virtua Tennis 3
8. Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction
9. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
10. Medal of Honor: Airborne
Top 10 Xbox 360 Games (over A$50)
1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
2. Halo 3
3. Assassin’s Creed
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock bundle
5. Mass Effect
6. Need for Speed ProStreet
7. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
8. Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
9. FIFA Soccer 08
10. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Top 10 Wii Games (over A$50)
1. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games
2. Super Mario Galaxy
3. Ghost Squad
4. Mario Party 8
5. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock bundle
6. Pok
Only you can help Professor Layton solve the mystery of Baron Reinhold’s will.
Watch | Download
In the recent tradition of offbeat, narrative Nintendo DS adventure games like Hotel Dusk and Phoenix Wright, ubiquitous Japanese developer Level 5 has a charming new game heading to stores called Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It’s been out in Japan for a good year now, but the game’s formidable mix of devilish logic puzzles and a heavy reliance on written and spoken dialogue made importing Professor Layton a daunting prospect for anyone but fluent speakers of Japanese.
Well, good news: Layton is due out in North America next week, and from the looks of a preview build we got to play, it has gotten a top-notch localization. You’ll play the role of the affable Layton and his quick-witted assistant, Luke, who have traveled to the village of St. Mystere to solve the mystery of a puzzling last will and testament left by the late, eccentric Baron Reinhold. The will’s bequeathal hinges on a mysterious object called the golden apple, so everyone involved with the will in some fashion is scrambling to figure out just what the golden apple is, and where it might be located.
The game is rendered in lovely 2D art and has been rife with continental charm so far, from all the authentic British accents to the accordion-heavy soundtrack and prolific donning of top hats and other old-world accoutrements. The architecture and prevailing design of St. Mystere make it look just like a sleepy little European hamlet out of some old storybook or animated film. In short, Layton has a surprisingly cohesive aesthetic and presentation that are so evocative you’d hardly know the game was developed by a Japanese team.
Some of the puzzles here will have you seriously scratching your head.
If you had to categorize Layton, it would fit best in the adventure genre; you navigate from one static background to another by simply tapping on arrows pointing in available directions. But the gameplay is driven almost entirely by logic puzzles. As an old lady informs you when you enter town, St. Mystere’s “main export is…the puzzle!” Indeed, just about every resident you run into in the town will have some sort of puzzle for you to solve before you can progress, though usually the puzzles are unrelated to the storyline, from what we’ve seen so far.
Each puzzle has three hints associated with it that you can access if you’re stuck, but you’ll have a finite number of hint tokens for use in the game (with a handful more hidden throughout the town), so you’ll want to be extremely judicious about when you want to get a hint. The puzzles also pay out an arbitrary number of picarats, the game’s currency, and each time you fail to solve a puzzle correctly, the payout will be reduced. Picarats can apparently be traded in for some kind of benefit later on, though we haven’t gotten far enough to see their effect yet.
We only got to play through the early area of the game before Nintendo swooped down and repossessed our copy of Layton, but we got a good feel for what the puzzles will be like. One puzzle presented us with eight identical-looking weights, one of which was lighter than the others, and we had to determine which one was the light one. We had a scale to use to compare the weights, but we could use the scale only two times, so we couldn’t solve the puzzle by simple process of elimination. Another puzzle showed us four top hats with varying heights and brim widths and then challenged us to pick the one with a brim as wide as the hat was tall. This sort of optical illusion required a lot of eyeballing. We figure we’ll be seeing more puzzles of this type later in the game.
Nintendo says more puzzles will become available on the Internet on a weekly basis.
Another puzzle gave us a riverbank with three wolves and three chicks on one side, and a raft at the bank. We had to get all six animals across to the other side while observing the following rules: There couldn’t be more wolves than chicks on one side of the river (or the wolves would feast, natch); the raft could hold two animals at most; and at least one animal had to be on the raft for it to move. Yet another puzzle had a surprisingly subjective solution: We were shown a dog made out of matchsticks and then were asked to move only two of the matchsticks to make the dog appear as though it had been run over by a car. (Nobody said this puzzle-solving business was all laughs.)
Nintendo claims that the final version of Layton contains more than 130 puzzles, though it seems like some of those will be optional and not part of the main storyline. Furthermore–and rather surprisingly–the company will be making new puzzles available for download on a weekly basis, though we haven’t heard how many you’ll be able to fit on your Layton cartridge at once, nor whether you’ll have to pay for them. As mentioned, Professor Layton is set to hit shelves next week, so look for a full analysis soon.
-If Its Games
;)
TOKYO–When the NPD Group released its year-end game-sales figures earlier this month, a gaggle of analysts sifted through them, drawing differing conclusions and issuing varying prognostications. However, one thing everyone could agree on was that 2007 was Nintendo’s year. “Nintendo has certainly been the belle of the hardware ball this year, capturing the top two spots for hardware units sales for the year with the DS followed by the Wii,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.
Indeed, in the US, there was no contest in 2007 in terms of hardware sales, with the Nintendo DS selling 8.50 million units (17.65 million lifetime to date) and the Nintendo Wii selling 6.29 million units (7.38 million LTD). By comparison, 4.62 million Xbox 360s (9.15 million LTD), 3.82 million PlayStation Portables (10.47 million LTD), and 2.56 million (3.25 million LTD) PlayStation 3s were sold in the same time period.
While Nintendo’s 2007 success now seems like a foregone conclusion, it wasn’t always so. In 2005, Electronic Entertainment Expo attendees who’d been wowed by the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 unveilings left Nintendo’s press conference shaking their heads after being shown a nonfunctional mock-up of a tiny console code-named “Revolution.” When that device was renamed the “Wii” in 2006, doubt became incredulity–until Nintendo showed off the console’s motion-sensing remote at an E3 event that was more spiritual revival than press conference.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Wii immediately sold out in the hours after its November 2006 launch and has been a scarce commodity ever since. As a result, Nintendo’s stock has soared in Japan, where the DS’s series of brain-training games have become a national phenomenon for all ages. And both inside and outside Nintendo’s homeland, the strategy of targeting the “blue ocean” of nongamers with pick-up-and-play games like Wii Sports–while retaining hardcore fans with titles like Super Mario Galaxy–put the Kyoto-based company’s finances into overdrive. Until a shocking 10 percent slip of its share price on Monday, Nintendo had Japan’s second-highest market capitalization, just behind auto maker Toyota.
The man most commonly seen as the architect of Nintendo’s success is its president and CEO, Satoru Iwata. Born in 1959, he worked nearly two decades as a programmer at Nintendo developer HAL Laboratory, in part on the Kirby series, eventually becoming its president in the 1990s. In 2000, he became director of Nintendo’s software department before succeeding Hiroshi Yamauchi in 2002 as president of the company. He inherited the Nintendo GameCube, which spent years jostling with Microsoft’s Xbox for a second-place position, after the PlayStation 2, in the worldwide console wars.
Despite the protestations of the Mario faithful, conventional wisdom had Nintendo’s Wii occupying either second or even third place in the current three-way console battle against Sony’s more high-powered PS3 and Microsoft’s online-focused Xbox 360. With those doubts now firmly in the dustbin, If Its Games spoke with Iwata about his company’s past success and future strategy.
If Its Games: Now that the numbers are in, there’s no question that 2007 was a massive year for Nintendo. What were the year’s highlights for you?
Satoru Iwata: There were two major things for me in 2007. The earlier half of the year saw some mixed opinions about Nintendo, about how the Wii would do, about whether it would continue to sell or not. But thanks to those who supported us, things got off on a good start. So the first of two major things that happened in 2007 was to achieve this first step with the Wii establishing it as a major presence among game consoles.
The second was the great momentum of 2007’s holiday sales season. Although we saw market expansion with our Nintendo DS in Europe from 2006 and the US recorded historical sales in 2006, this was the first surge that we saw since the Japanese DS craze. In this sense, last year was the year that there was global acknowledgement of our long-touted mission of expanding the gaming population.
There was a large shift in Japan between the end of 2005 and the start of 2006 as the DS began to sell well. There was talk then that this was a phenomenon only possible in Japan and that things wouldn’t go so well in the West, where gamers look for a more realistic gaming experience.
But we felt that fun is universal, regardless of geography. People everywhere had accepted and enjoyed the titles we’d developed in the past with that philosophy in mind, such as Mario and Zelda, so we figured we had a chance. And sure enough, witnessing the overwhelming market expansion by DS and Wii in the latter half of last year confirmed that the expansion of the gaming population is happening in the US and Europe as well.
IIG: There were a lot of skeptics when the Wii first launched, even amongst Nintendo fans.
SI: Well, we were doing all sorts of things that were way outside of the accepted mold for the industry. It was a series of battles against people saying, “But that doesn’t make any sense!”
IIG: Were you confident you could pull it off?
SI: I would sound so cool if I could say, “Oh, I knew it all along,” but it is not necessarily so. [Laughs] It was more of a conviction that somebody needed to go there and push things in this new direction.
We knew that if games appealed to fewer people, the future was going to be bleak. And with video games being demonized by the public, it was hard to see how games could flourish in all that. So we knew we had to change it. We knew that to change that, we’d be playing to and reinforcing Nintendo’s strengths.
It’s not that the opinion of those with different perspectives weren’t convincing for us. With each suggestion, we thought through many things, but with each step along the way, we could feel the market changing bit by bit, and that is why we were able to keep going. Hearing stories about customers who seemed like they’d never touch a game scouring store shelves for a copy of Brain Age is what encouraged us.
Little reactions like that show up before the actual sales numbers start rolling in. Still, we didn’t know whether a major shift in those numbers would take months or years to achieve. I worked under the assumption that if five years went by and the world didn’t change, I could kiss my job good-bye. [Chuckles.]
IIG: What are your plans for expanding into new regions?
SI: I’m sad to say that last year, production couldn’t even keep up with Japan, US, and Europe’s demands. The scarcity of Wii units in the US and Europe is particularly serious. This is a result of not being able to build up stock at all over the summer due to the consistently active demand for the Wii throughout the year. If we had branched out into new markets under these circumstances, we wouldn’t have been able to meet demand. That’s why the expansion into new regions will take place this year.
IIG: Do you have any specific plans for timing and which regions you’ll be marketing to?
SI: We feel that it’s better for the sales regions, release dates, and other details to be announced directly in those local markets, so they’ll be unveiled locally one by one. One thing I will say, though, is that the year’s end is the busiest period for video game products, and the time when the most units are moved. Should the timing coincide, it will be difficult for production to meet the initial demands succeeding the launch, so it will hopefully happen earlier in the year.
IIG: You mentioned you were approaching the Chinese market at a corporate management policy briefing last October.
SI: I’m afraid that the statement I made there about China has not been correctly reported. I want to elaborate what I meant to say: At Nintendo we hope that the Wii, which has been accepted by people of all ages as a source of healthy fun, would also become available to Chinese families in the near future. In order that this can happen, Nintendo will work hard to ensure we increase production of the Wii, and definitely comply with the laws and regulations of the Chinese government.
IIG: The US shortage of the Wii is ongoing–and pretty severe. The DS continues to sell well and remains in ample supply. Why do you think these two products remain so popular?
SI: Well, I personally felt that our products were relatively solid in terms of their value. But I was bracing for more of an uphill battle in convincing our customers of it, and I was anticipating that we would need time to fight the battle.
Due to the portable nature of the DS, it’s easy to share the fun of a good game with a friend on the spot. With the Wii, however, the hurdle was much higher, you had to say “Hey, I’ve got this fun game, Wii Sports, want to come over and play?” [Chuckles]
That’s why, at our press conference to introduce Wii, I said that the DS’s popularity is no guarantee for the Wii. The reason is the difficulty of conveying the fun of the Wii to people. I felt that we’d never be able to leap that hurdle if we didn’t put 110 percent of our effort into spreading the word to the customers.
After a lot of discussion on that, we decided to bundle Wii Sports with the hardware in regions outside of Japan. I figured that some people might buy a Wii because they want to play Zelda, but we didn’t think that the majority of initial Wii purchasers would buy the console to play Wii Sports. But the people who bought the Wii–and I hesitate to put it this way–were stuck with Wii Sports whether they liked it or not. Our theory was that if people played it and found more enjoyment than they’d expected, that enjoyment would quickly spread to the people around them.
In retrospect, the US culture of the house party played a major role in spreading the value of Wii to a bigger circle faster than we ever predicted. All of my American friends keep telling me, “Man, the Wii is the ultimate party machine!” [Laughs] But none of that was intentional on our part. All we did was ask ourselves how to pack the most smiles and surprises into the product as we developed it. Fortunately, we hit a sweet spot. As a result, interest in the Wii has spread across the US surprisingly quickly. I think that explains why the DS took off faster in Japan, but the Wii has spread faster in America.
IIG: The gaming demographic has broadened considerably in a short period of time, but there are still a lot of traditional game fans looking for less casual gaming and more deep, immersive titles.
SI: Games that are easy to pick up and play have the possibility to appeal to new people and show them the fun and value of video games. They also have the benefit of allowing experienced gamers to play together with newcomers. That was really missing from the market before, and I think it needs to be there.
At the same time, Nintendo has teams working on meeting the needs of more hardcore gamers. The big complaint from them now may be that we’re not pouring all of our resources into that sector exclusively, but I feel that it’s Nintendo’s mission to make both kinds of games. Every experienced gamer today was a beginner at some point, who encountered an experience that made them fall in love with games.
I think it’s absolutely critical to keep that entryway open for new people. I think it’s really important to strike that balance between the two extremes. While it’s possible to create a game like Brain Age in an extremely short period of time with a great idea and the right people, a game like Zelda contains content that physically and inevitably demands more time to create.
I feel that the current imbalance between the time a person spends enjoying a game and the time it takes to create it is a real problem, and something that we as developers need to work on resolving.
IIG: What do you mean, specifically?
SI: No matter how fun a game is when you first pick it up and play it, people eventually get bored. Our task is to come out with the next big thing before that boredom sets in and to go beyond just releasing an extension of the current titles every three months.
Not only that–coming out with the next Mario or Zelda game means coming up with a ton of innovative ideas. Otherwise people will say, “Yeah, this used to be fun.” Keeping up an existing franchise alone requires much creativity, but in addition you have to come up with something fresh and new that people have never seen before. That’s where ideas like Wii Fit came from.
We’re constantly working on a variety of ideas for new, different games, but it’s only after the specifics have been nailed down and they’re ready to be announced that we can talk about them. So while I can tell you all about a project that we can have out within two months’ time, games that still need six months or a year’s work really have to be kept under wraps.
I will say, though, that one of the lifestyle proposals we’d like to put into effect in the first half of this year is an experiment aimed at getting people to use their DS’s in public spaces as part of a larger effort to make the DS a more helpful tool for people in their everyday lives. It’s a portable, single-architecture platform that can receive anything given a Wi-Fi hot spot with over 20 million units in use in Japan and about the same amount in the US and Europe.
I really think the idea of making it a gaming machine that’s also useful in your daily life is a good one, and possible. We’ll be keeping an eye on the experiment’s results while hopefully increasing the number of places you can use your DS in progressive steps.
IIG: Wii Fit has done exceptionally well in Japan since it was first released, selling over 1 million units.
SI: Games that require expensive accessories, by conventional game industry wisdom, seem to be an obvious example for products that are least likely to succeed. But the fact that Wii Fit sold over a million copies in a little over a month is proof that we decided to make a million units before we sold a single one. [Laughter.] That’s the only way we could make it happen.
IIG: Betting you could sell over a million units of a high-end peripheral-based game outright was pretty ambitious.
SI: I think that if we hadn’t seen the same favorable results from our previous experiments in breaking conventional industry wisdom, everyone else at Nintendo would have stopped me from trying this even if they had to put me in a headlock. [Laughs.] But it’s our job to keep moving on to the next new thing. If we stopped surprising people with what we did, Nintendo’s worth would be worth a lot less than it is now.
Touting the slogan of expanding the gaming population is our way of declaring to our internal development staff, other software makers, distributors, the media, and ultimately to the customer our intent, which is that we as a company are standing on ground that will crumble away underneath us the minute we stop moving forward, and that this knowledge is driving us to keep working.
If we just stand there, our customers will get bored and leave. Our survival depends upon our ability to create a situation where new people are entering, and established gamers aren’t leaving.
IIG: With WiiWare set to launch this year, what are your thoughts on packaged games versus downloaded software?
Well, the current state of affairs is that the Virtual Console saw over 10 million downloads by the end of last December. That’s the total number of titles people paid to download. I think that selling over 10 million classic games in that price range stands as proof that there are great possibilities with the download model. Since that’s the case, I feel that WiiWare is one answer to a lot of the problems that I perceived even back when I was still a developer myself.
However, I don’t think that packaged, retail games will be replaced by downloads over the next three- to five-year cycle. Packaged games have a number of advantages, from the guarantee of a certain amount of sales volume to the firmly established buying habits and infrastructure that I think should be preserved in the future.
But packaged games aren’t a complete solution anymore. The cost of materials and distribution margins mean that there isn’t much price flexibility, and there’s always a risk with inventory. Plus the majority of a product’s life span ends within a very short period after its release in the current market, such that titles can no longer compete for shelf space a month after their release.
When making games, though, you come up with a lot of fun ideas that could sell for ¥500 (about $4.70). Well, if there were a forum for releasing that ¥500 single idea into the market now, maybe the idea would grow into something that could be used as a full packaged game in the future. That’s off in the future.
For me, the biggest reason for wanting to do WiiWare is to create an opportunity for new products to materialize by providing a forum where those products can be sold without having to compete in terms of size or name recognition, or be bound by inflexible prices or inventory risk.
I hope that WiiWare can act as a platform for that kind of an experience, but there are always people who suspect that WiiWare is all about cutting out the distributors. [Chuckles] I try to explain that that’s really not the case every opportunity I get.
IIG: While the Wii has been an unqualified success for Nintendo in terms of software and hardware, it still hasn’t seen any third-party software hits on the same scale as Super Mario Galaxy, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, or even Wii Play. Do you think third-party developers and publishers are struggling with the Wii’s innovative nature?
SI: Every time someone points out to me that only Nintendo games are selling on the Wii, I remind them that the same thing was said for the DS. [Chuckles]
As the first party, our primary goal is to make software that people want to play so much that they purchase the hardware, so we were putting all of our efforts into that before the hardware was even released. It’s natural, then, that our title lineup still feels a bit more robust. We had to start off at full steam to establish the platform as something with enough of a market to make it worthwhile for other developers to come into.
Last year saw the ratio of DS software flip to the degree that even we were thinking, “Wow, Nintendo is kind of the second banana here.” It took almost two years for the DS to get to that point, and the Wii has only been out for a year. From here on, we’ll see more titles by third-party software makers that they’ve invested all their energy in, so I believe that with time, this problem will resolve itself. We’re also actively working to support these software makers to ensure that this problem will be resolved. It’s undeniably in the customers’ best interest for other creators with their own aesthetics to come in and make things that have us writhing around saying “Why didn’t we think of that?”
I’ll also mention that according to last December’s top 100 games data from the NPD Group, Wii titles are outselling Xbox 360 titles, and only five of the 20 Wii titles on the list were created by Nintendo, with the remaining 15 from third-party developers. But even with those numbers there, that isn’t the impression you get. It feels like it takes a bit of time for popular perception to catch up to the actual sales figures.
IIG: The library of Wii titles has many casual games and expansions of existing franchises like Mario and Zelda. Is there something you feel is missing from the current lineup?
SI: Although it can’t be helped since it has only been a year since its release, I think there isn’t enough depth overall within the lineup. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is just around the corner, waiting to show everyone that claims of Nintendo not caring about hardcore gamers are indeed misunderstandings, but I feel like we need to go even further.
We at Nintendo keep a close watch on how many people per household use each console, and in Wii’s case, that number is 3.5. DS and Wii are the first platforms to ever cross the three-person mark in the history of our investigating that statistic.
That average takes people living on their own into account as well, meaning that in families of four, it would not be odd that all four members are customers. But there’s no guarantee that all four of them enjoy the same games, which means that they may enjoy a greater number of software titles over the course of a year. This is a situation that promotes a healthy cycle between the creator and the consumer.
So I’d like to increase the overall depth. Not just in one specific genre, but all across the board. If there’s anyone out there thinking, “Nintendo probably wouldn’t be open to a title like this,” I assure you, you’re mistaken. We love fun games of all kinds. [Laughs]
IIG: Taking a step back from games for a second, a lot of companies are working hard on building up massively multiplayer games or virtual worlds like Second Life. The Wii infrastructure is set up now, the Mii avatars have taken hold, and you’ve got experience in making virtual worlds from Animal Crossing. Do you have any plans for creating an avatar-based service like, say, Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation Home for the Playstation 3?
SI: The first question I would ask is whether the service is fun if you’re 5 or 95, if you’re tech-savvy and if you’re computer illiterate. If that’s not a hurdle we can get past, it’s not something Nintendo is going to pursue.
Take the Miis, for example. Sure, we could go crazy with the interface until it was so customizable that you could make an avatar that looked like anyone you could imagine. But it’s because the interface is the way that it is now that the average person can pick it up and create a family member’s portrait and feel a personal connection to games unlike anything available in the past. Mii is the answer we came up with after a long process of questioning just how low we could keep that entrance threshold.
In that respect, the virtual-world services out there now still aren’t at a place where we’d like to join in–and certainly not to the point that we’d want to jump into competition with everybody else. We’d rather focus on doing things that nobody else would do.
Our job is to constantly look into what people find fun and interesting. I mean, nobody else wants to develop a video game where you get on the scale and see how much you weigh. [Laughs] That’s how we’re able to keep offering people surprises and entertainment, so even if we were to make a virtual-world-like product, we’d be sure to make it something that nobody would call it a product similar to another company’s offering.
IIG: In closing, what sort of year would you like to make 2008?
SI: One where I can still be smiling come 2009. I sure hope I won’t be crying!
The Dynasty/Samurai Warriors franchise is about as polarizing as you get. Either you love the series’ completely mindless hacking and slashing, or you hate it, not least of all because every entry is essentially the exact same game. This time, Koei decided to mix things up a bit by applying its tried-and-true formula of button-mashing, beat-’em-up action to the first-person on-rails shooter genre. Unfortunately, Samurai Warriors: Katana is as boring as it is uninspired, and includes some of the worst motion controls available on the Wii. Even diehard fans of the series will find it difficult to enjoy; this is a Samurai Warriors game in name only.
Like the other games in the series, Katana takes place in the Sengoku era of Japan’s tumultuous history. Against the backdrop of several powerful factions warring to unite the entire nation, you will battle with or against the forces of legendary figures such as Nobunaga Oda, Yukimura Sanada, and Ieyasu Tokugawa. In a bizarre twist that is one of the most disappointing parts of the game, you don’t actually get to play as one of these historical giants, but rather must assume the guise of a nameless warrior in their armies. In the rare opportunities that you get to see yourself, you’re depicted as one of the random soldiers that you spend the entire game beating up by the hundreds.
As disappointing as this sounds, that is not The Shredder.
Each of the less-than-historically canonical stories have overall themes that range from becoming a master ninja to collecting the most attractive women in Japan and then deciding which is the most beautiful (by beating up the ones who are not, of course). The individual missions you participate in include tasks such as breaking into a heavily fortified enemy stronghold by climbing a poorly placed staircase along the outside, or stopping enemy cavalry with your scoped, semiautomatic musket. As you can probably tell, Katana doesn’t exactly take itself seriously. In many ways, the bizarre sense of humor that it exhibits–such as the always entertaining way in which bosses rag-doll backward in slow motion upon defeat–works in its favor, but it ultimately proves to be nothing more than a brief aside that tries to take your mind off of the insipid combat system and terrible controls.
As a first-person on-rails action game, combat in Katana is as cut and dry as can be. A targeting reticle appears onscreen wherever your Wii Remote is pointed, and whichever weapon you currently have equipped is poorly mapped to its position. Each of the four types of melee weapons you can use work fundamentally the same, in that you target the enemies you want to kill and mash the A button. However, the weapons do differ in the type and degree of gratuitous controller waggling required to use their charged and Musou attacks; by the time you complete the game, you will have thrust your controller at the screen more times than you would care to admit in polite conversation. Ranged weapons are more varied, in that each operates completely differently, but they suffer from the same motion-control issues as the melee weapons. At best, you’ll simply point and hit the B trigger, and at worst, you’ll fight to swing your controller horizontally at just the right speed while trying to prevent it from interpreting your motion as a vertical toss.
The most egregious use of motion controls is not in the way that you must engage in combat, but rather in the ridiculous minigames you’re forced to participate in during missions. When riding a horse, you’ll have to turn your Wii Remote on its side and tilt it left or right to steer while flailing the Nunchuk to gain speed. When dodging spear soldiers and spiked balls on an excruciatingly slow march uphill, you’ll have to turn both controllers from side to side. Furthermore, in what is quickly shaping up to be a video-game-related crime against humanity, whenever you need to get anywhere fast you’ll run by alternately swinging your controllers forward.
Throughout the game, your normal combat strategy amounts to knowing or guessing when to block. Boss battles are slightly more involving, but in the end amount to nothing more than a matter of memorizing attack patterns through painful trial and error. As if they recognized that these encounters were completely one-dimensional, developers Omega Force mixed things up a bit in select battles by introducing new abilities, such as the power to slow down time to reveal weak spots that wouldn’t otherwise be seen. Unfortunately, normal boss fights seem watered-down and frankly incomplete after experiencing some of these skills, and it’s unclear why they weren’t implemented for the rest of the game, given that it would have gone a long way toward improving the otherwise-stale gameplay.
At the end of each mission, your performance is rated and you’re awarded gold, which you can use to purchase role-playing-game-style ability upgrades and helpful disposable items, or to add special powers to your weapons. To earn even more money, you can redo story missions or participate in optional trials that assign you a rapid series of tasks. If you want a break from solo play, Katana offers local multiplayer support. Oddly enough, the multiplayer doesn’t include co-op, and instead forces you to compete in a number of different split-screen modes.
For the entire length of Katana, you will battle wave after wave of entirely dispensable soldiers, samurai, and ninja with artificial intelligence so brain-dead that you’ll begin to question exactly how it was that their real-life counterparts ever managed to accomplish anything. Despite the number of enemies onscreen at any given time, they will for the most part politely take turns trading blows with their friends, and in the few chances they get to surround you on the missions that are not on rails, they won’t so much as raise a hand against you if you’re not looking directly at them.
If you enjoy waggling your controller around randomly, this game is for you.
Katana certainly isn’t the prettiest game on the block. Enemies are as generic-looking as ever, and after killing a hundred or so identical swordsmen, you begin to wonder where the cloning facilities are. Every castle, dungeon, and village looks similarly mass-produced, and exploring any of these drab locations induces an overt sense of d
Japanese PlayStation 3s will soon be going silver–and the metallic colour doesn’t come as a major surprise following similar variants for the slimline PlayStation 2, original PS2, and PlayStation Portable. It also follows two other colours available for the PS3 in Japan, clear black and ceramic white–the latter of which was first introduced to Japan last year and also hinted to be making its way stateside.
The new silver console will also be accompanied by a matching DualShock 3 controller. The system will go on sale for ¥39,800 ($374,
The Entertainment Software Rating Board continues to break news of unannounced games, as this week the board updated its ratings database with assessments for new installments of Capcom’s PC and Xbox 360 action game Lost Planet and Vivendi Games’ Xbox Live Arcade cooperative shooter Assault Heroes.
Lost Planet Colonies had previously been trademarked by Capcom and rated by the ESRB’s German counterpart on the Xbox 360, but now it appears the game is headed for the PC as well. A PlayStation 3 edition of the original game is expected to launch in the US later this month, but the ESRB listing made no mention of a PS3 edition of Colonies. Lost Planet Colonies received a rating of T for Teen.
The ESRB also issued a T for Teen rating for Assault Heroes 2 from Vivendi Games. A sequel to the 2006 Xbox Live Arcade game wouldn’t be terribly surprising; Vivendi was so impressed with the original game’s Chilean developer Wanako Studios that it purchased the outfit in February of 2007. At the time Vivendi said the group was working on 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures for Live Arcade, as well as a number of unannounced projects for its Sierra Online imprint. Since then, Wanako has produced Arkadian Warriors for Live Arcade.
Veteran video game designer David Jaffe has been locked down as a keynote speaker for this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Jaffe’s presentation, entitled “From Grunt to God to Startup: Career Lessons From the Edge of Game Development,” is aimed at those who wish to make a career in the video game industry.
During the presentation, Jaffe will discuss his journey, which has seen him develop the Twisted Metal and God of War franchises and the recent formation of his own independent studio, Eat, Sleep, Play. Currently, his studio is developing the upcoming Twisted Metal: Head On - Extra Twisted Edition for PlayStation 2 as part of a three-game deal with Sony.
The address will be part of the Game Career Seminar, which runs February 21 and 22 during GDC, held this year at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Other speakers at GDC 2008 include Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux, Microsoft Corporate VP John Schappert, Electronic Arts’ Sims studio head Rod Humble, and Blizzard Entertainment VP of game design Rob Pardo.