Tag Archives: Nintendo

Unreleased Wii U games will be demoed at Best Buy during E3

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A tiny Sonic standing atop a plane in Sonic: The Lost World.

Nintendo has announced a handful of games set for launch on the Wii U through the spring and summer. Releases include the exclusive Sonic: The Lost World, a new version of Super Luigi U, and Mario and Sonic: Winter Games. Some of these unreleased games will be available for play at Best Buy during E3 prior to release.

Super Luigi U, which will be available as DLC for New Super Mario Bros. U, will include the character Nabbit from the original game as a multiplayer character that cannot take damage from enemies but is also incapable of getting power-ups. The game will be released as DLC for $19.99 or as a standalone version for $29.99 on July 26 in Europe and August 25 in North America.

Nintendo provided few details regarding Sonic: The Lost World except that it will come to both the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, with more details to come during E3 in June. The game represents a partnership between Nintendo and Sega, two formerly feuding companies. As for the Olympics-oriented Mario and Sonic, playable events will include skiing, snowboarding, skating, and bobsledding.

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Nintendo kicks “Let’s Play” videos off YouTube then slaps ads on them

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Alibaba

Once it became simple to record, upload, and share digital video over the Internet, gamers quickly became interested in recording themselves playing games—especially with humorous or profane commentary. The phenomenon of creating and sharing so-called “Let’s Play” videos took off around 2006 and today has its own channel on YouTube. Practitioners of this self-recording art sometimes refer to themselves as LPers for short.

Now, it looks like Let’s Play videos are one more piece of content that’s being caught up in YouTube’s Content ID system. It’s an automated copyright-enforcement system that’s been glitchy from the start and often criticized for taking down legitimate content. Remixes of cultural icons have been taken down with no good explanation, as well as NASA content that should be in the public domain. Political satire didn’t stand a chance either. Until October, there wasn’t even a meaningful appeal system for owners of wrongly removed videos.

It looks like LPers are the latest victims. A prolific LPer named Zack Scott took to Facebook yesterday to complain that several LPers had experienced takedowns of the videos including Nintendo games. A company fan like himself wasn’t the right target for automated takedowns, Scott complained, and he said he’d stop playing Nintendo games until the situation was straightened out. “It jeopardizes my channel’s copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers,” he wrote.

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DICE: Battlefield 4 engine won’t run on the Wii U

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Too hot for the Wii U.

The release of the Wii U has done surprisingly little to quiet the debate over whether the system is actually powerful enough to stand up to the likes of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, much less the new Sony and Microsoft systems coming later in the year. Recent comments from DICE Technical Director for Frostbite Johan Andersson lends some weight to the argument that Nintendo’s new system isn’t powerful enough to stand up to the next generation.

After mentioning on Twitter that the newly announced Star Wars games from DICE and Visceral will be running on DICE’s powerful Frostbite 3 engine, Andersson responded to a reader concern that this will mean the games will not be available for the Wii U.

“[Frostbite 3] has never been running on WiiU,” Andersson tweeted. “We did some tests with not too promising results with [Frostbite 2] & chose not to go down that path.”

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Nintendo Offers Smartphone App Porting Tool, But Should Be Porting Its Content To Phones Instead

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AWKWARD-MARIO

Nintendo is trying to get people to buy the new Wii U, but it just isn’t working, according to recent sales numbers. Now, the Japanese gaming giant is hoping that helping developers port their smartphone content to the home gaming console with conversion software will help entice buyers, according to the Japan Times.

Smartphone apps on a home console isn’t a novel idea: Sony began encouraging devs to bring their mobile phone hits to the PlayStation network a while ago, and continues to add mobile-first titles to the ranks of the Vita’s portable library. But there’s nothing really indicating that’s making a major difference in terms of attracting customers. After all, why would people seek out those titles on consoles, portable or otherwise, when they’ve already got myriad devices to play them on natively, including the iPhone, Android smartphones and the iPad?

Nintendo looking for ports of smartphone titles is a quick and dirty way to build out a larger software library, and for developers, a way to at least explore a new delivery vector to reach customers they may not already be reaching. But it will probably be a limited audience, made more so by the fact that anyone who’s already a fan of the title on mobile would probably be disinclined to pay for it all over again.

Porting is also a strategy that hasn’t really seemed to have been successful for anyone so far. BlackBerry has encouraged developers to port their Android apps over to BB10 using its own super-simple tool, which by all accounts takes only a few minutes to do its magic. But even still, it’s finding it hard to get developers on board, and that’s going from one mobile platform to another. Incentivizing conversions for mobile devs to bring their titles to a home console will likely be tricker still.

It’s been brought up before, but it bears repeating: Nintendo would probably stand to gain a lot more by reversing the situation, and porting its own blockbuster titles to other platforms, the way that Sony has flirted with doing, and the way that other publishers like Square Enix and Capcom have fully embraced. Admittedly, neither of those are hardware makers like Nintendo, but arguably that makes things more imperative for the Mario creator, which is having a really rough go of its hardware efforts, with lots of money sunk into a brand new console just at the beginning of what has been a 10-year release cycle in the past.

I wouldn’t mind having something like Dots on my Wii U, if I had or cared about one, but it’s not going to convince me to go buy that console. On the other hand, I’d love Super Mario World on the iPhone (a legit version, not via emulator) and would pay dearly for the pleasure. You’ve got the funnel all wrong, Nintendo, and it isn’t going to bring the people back.

Eternal Darkness creator seeking crowdfunding for spiritual sequel

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It’s been almost 11 years since Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem became the first M-rated game published by Nintendo, but to this day fans talk reverently about the GameCube cult classic’s rich mythos and mind-bending “insanity effects.” Now, Eternal Darkness director Dennis Dyack is trying to bring that magic back with plans to attract crowdfunding for a spiritual successor called Shadow of the Eternals.

Pretty much everything we know about the game at this point is contained in a teaser trailer posted by IGN, ahead of a formal crowdfunding effort set to start Monday. The short video highlights a gothic castle, robed figures, flesh-eating, green-eyed monsters, and fire… lots of fire. There’s also a cryptic reference to the “Ordinem De Non Visis,” or Order of the Unseen.

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We rooted Wii U encryption and file system, says hacker group

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The hacking group responsible for one of the first major modchips for the original Wii claims to have successfully reverse-engineered the pieces necessary to run copies of Wii U games from external USB hard drives.

“Yes, it’s real,” the Wiikey group posted in an update on its website. “We have now completely reversed the Wii U drive authentification, disk encryption, file system, and everything else needed for this next generation K3y. Stay tuned for updates!”

The group describes the Wiike U, as it’s being called, as “the first and only optical drive emulator” for the system, running a “powerful embedded Linux system” that is compatible with all regions and models of the Wii U. As described, the device appears to only play copies of official Wii U and Wii games, and not homebrew or hacked titles.

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And then there were two? Nintendo skipping E3 press conference this year

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There will be no on-stage antics like this from Nintendo at this year’s E3.
Ben Kuchera

For the first time since the annual industry conference started in 1995, Nintendo will not be holding a major press conference around the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year, instead “working to establish a new presentation style for E3.”

Nintendo announced the surprising change in its promotional plans via an investor presentation by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata overnight. Rather than holding a major E3 press event to appeal to different audiences around the world, Iwata says Nintendo is “planning to host a few smaller events that are specifically focused on our software lineup for the U.S. market” for this year’s show, one for American distributors and another for the Western press. Iwata also cryptically mentioned that Nintendo is “continuing to investigate ways to deliver information about our games directly to our home audience around the time of E3,” suggesting that it might be planning some sort of video presentation directly to consumers via the web (or the Wii U) during the show.

While Nintendo will still be showing off new Wii U and 3DS titles on the E3 show floor, the move represents a significant change in marketing tactics for the major console maker. It’s as if Apple decided to announce the next major revision to iOS not with a worldwide developer-focused keynote address, but by simply setting up a booth at Mobile World Congress and inviting the press and select developers to try it out during a cocktail hour.

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Report: Wii U, Vita continue poor US sales performance in March

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Leaked numbers from NPD’s latest report on US game hardware sales suggest consumers aren’t scrambling for new systems from Sony and Nintendo. Numbers obtained and confirmed by sources in a position to know on gaming forum NeoGAF suggest the Wii U sold only 67,000 units in the US during the five weeks running from March 3 through April 6.

The leaked numbers continue a disappointing 2013 for Nintendo’s newest system, which sold an estimated 50,000 US units in January and roughly 64,000 in February. This is after the system sold a decent 890,000 units during the 2012 holiday launch season last November and December.

For comparison, the Wii U is so far selling about 28 percent slower than the GameCube did in the five months after launching in November 2001, and about 50 percent slower than the Nintendo 64 and the original Wii did in their first five months. The Wii U is only about 10 percent behind the cumulative US sales numbers put up by the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 five months into their life cycles, however.

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