Nickelback's Chad Kroeger wants you to stop playing Guitar Hero and would much prefer you pick up a real instrument, he recently told MTV. "It's tough to find other bands out there, because either they're making a record, or they just got done touring," he said. "So kids: Start rock bands. Set down the 'Guitar Hero,' learn how to play an actual guitar and start a band, because it's hard to find more bands to put a solid rock-and-roll package together, to get out there." You hear that, kids? If you don't play Guitar Hero, you can play real music with Nickelback! Personally, we'd rather play the game.
We'll admit the allure of Guitar Hero is probably greater than actually learning how to play guitar. Because the learning curve isn't as steep with the game, and with Guitar Hero including such a wide range of music (well, not all music) that is sure to please just about anybody, we can't say we're surprised that the kids would be looking to Activision's music game for their jollies.
A lot of things come to mind when looking at screens or video from MadWorld. Its visual style has been compared to Sin City and Running Man, to name a few. So, is this where creator Atsushi Inaba got his inspiration for the game?
"Of course we like Sin City very much and we have seen Running Man before but they are not the sources of our creation," said Inaba. "The concepts of MadWorld are 'visual impact' and 'over-the-top violence,' and these two themes run right through the game." Inaba also says it hasn't been easy for his team to accomplish the game's stylish look and feel, commenting that "all team members are constantly working very hard to capture the style we want the final game to have."
When asked why Platinum Games settled on the Wii, Inaba pointed to the "huge install base" and said his team is "really interested in the Wii platform" and "wanted to create a really cool and stylish game for that." Frankly, we're glad. Not just because we, uh, want to play this, but also because we're tired of the Wii getting the "it's only for kiddies" label. We're awfully tired of that, to tell you the truth.
Nintendo bossman Reggie Fils-Aime (who is earning a reputation for frankness) is the latest industry figure to question the Wii's third-party output, suggesting that third-parties don't yet understand the platform. He reckons people who purchase Wiis are interested in games that sell strongly on other systems, but that the quality is missing. "I will be able to say our licensees 'get it' when their very best content is on our platform," he told Forbes. "And with very few exceptions today, that's not the case."
With the odd exception, the Prince of Persia series has maintained an enviably high standard throughout its nineteen-year run. Sadly, it's not something we've seen enough of on the Wii, apart from a slightly idle Ubiport. We want more of his royal leapiness on Nintendo's machine, and now Ben Mattes, producer of the cel-shaded Prince of Persia on the HD consoles, has sparked hope in our fanboy hearts.
Although he admitted that a version of the latest game wasn't heading to Wii, Mattes told Destructoid that he admired how the Wii port of Rival Swords (which he produced) felt with the Wiimote and Nunchuk. "I hope that we will see another Prince of Persia game on the Wii," he said. "Because [...] I really liked the way the Prince's movement translated to the Wii controls. I think that it's really kind of a natural fit."
Another natural fit is Prince of Persia games and our money, so get cracking, Ubisoft.
Last month, Nintendo revealed that Club Nintendo, Japan and Europe's ace consumer rewards program, would launch in North America. Weeks of silence followed, but now Cammie Dunaway has started talking up the service. Here are five crucial facts she divulged to MTV Multiplayer:
Club Nintendo in North America is still on schedule to launch before the end of 2008.
It will be more like the Japanese program than the European, in that there will be more physical products than digital.
As is the case in Europe, you gain points (known as gold coins in North America) by purchasing a product and entering a code on the Club Nintendo site, and can reap further points by completing surveys on the product you bought. In Europe, it's worth mentioning that these are hardly time-consuming: just five or six questions with tickboxes.
Unlike in Europe, you can gain points for indicating an interest in purchasing before buying. Noice!
Some items from the Japanese service will make it to North America (Yay! And also: please include this).
If you'll excuse us, we're now going to randomly hit our keyboard in a fit of wild, unabated excitement. YAKJFDAIWOQBHKJGFEDRYUVBEIUQ
[Update: A clarification: the service will be coming to North America as a whole! Apologies for the geographical confusion!]
Want to see Club Nintendo's greatest gifts to Japan and Europe? OF COURSE YOU DO. So go here.
"Iwata Asks" articles are almost as old as the Wii itself, coinciding as they do with anynotablefirst-partyrelease, and the latest round of questioning stars four of the Animal Crossing: City Folk team: Aya Kyougoku (who forgot to wear her regulation beige Nintendo jacket for this), Ryuji Kobayashi, Isao Moro and Kou Nogami (not pictured here).
Most of the discussion focuses on fairly obscure minutiae. So Nogami discusses how WiiConnect24 allows for the exchange of village data without you knowing it, which means people can visit a friend's village while their Wii is off, as can NPCs from other villages, who may then spread rumors from their hometown. The team estimates the game's appeal becomes "two or three times" as great when played online, a statement we look forward to testing.
We're also told that City Folk will let players create "trails" on the landscape. Apparently, the ground in your village consists of a top layer of grass which slowly wears thin the more you walk on it. A little grass grows back at the end of each day, but if you walk over a certain area enough (say, from your house to Tom Nook's), a trail will begin to form. Kobayashi says that it takes about a fortnight before a faint path becomes visible, and Moro adds that a clear trail will have appeared after two months, but that grass grows back more speedily if surrounded by grass and trees. Nifty!
As part of its "Touch! Generations" range, Nintendo will hope Wii Music can rack up some dizzying sales figures. Sadly, the maligned music title hasn't made the best of starts in North America, falling a long way short of the launch window sales for other first-party titles, such as Wii Fit. Cammie Dunaway has revealed that the game did "somewhere [like] 65 or 66,000" in its first two weeks on sale, whereas the more expensive Wii Fit shifted 687,000 copies in its opening eleven days.
Nintendo isn't about to panic, however. Rather, Dunaway thinks it could have the same long-term appeal already displayed by Wii Fit, Wii Play, and Mario Kart Wii, all of which regularly show up in the monthly NPD charts. "We're predicting that it's going to be an evergreen title, she told MTV Multiplayer. "And if you look at titles like Brain Age, it's about the same as what Brain Age did during it's first few weeks and went on to sell 2.5 million copies. Wii Fit certainly had a larger launch than that. But I think that people are starting to understand Wii Music."
After thoroughly enjoying 2D Boy's World of Goo, we decided that just playing and loving the game was not enough. So, we shot some questions over to Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler from the indie start-up. Imagine our surprise when they actually answered them all! So, head past the break and read our interview with these talented lads.
So says Sega A&R man Darren Williams in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, who also described the console as "the kind of thing that families will play at Christmas, and probably won't play again throughout the remainder of the year."
Before we all fetch the pitchforks and start constructing crude Darren Williams effigies, perhaps it would do some good to calmly consider whether the man has a point. In this blogger's personal experience, a small number offamilies do only use the Wii sporadically, and Williams clearly isn't referring to Wii Fanboy staff or readers.
Whether these occasional players are such a bad thing is another debate entirely. One popular theory seems to be that newer gamers are less likely to invest in new Wii software, but we saw yesterday that the Wii's tie ratio is thoroughly healthy. What sayeth you?
Censors, be damned! That's more or less the attitude of House of the Dead: Overkill developer Headstrong Games, which has said it won't be compromising the amount of gore in Overkill.
"Sometimes we've gone 'ooh, we shouldn't really do that'," producer Neil McEwen tells CVG, "but then we've gone 'no, hell yes we should'." McEwen reasons that, as nobody is getting exploited, then buckets of claret are justifiable: he suggests the gore will be as "extreme as possible." He also plays the tongue-in-cheek card, though that didn't help MadWorld when the Daily Mailcame knocking. Even if censors have already ensured the game won't be released in Germany, we salute McEwen and Headstrong for this carefree attitude. If only other developers and publishers were as bold.
It's one of the game industry's strangest quirks: as any console ages, it becomes both more worthy (as it gains a wider library of games) and cheaper. But not the Wii, by the sounds of it. In case you still didn't know after two years of Nintendo hardware holding its price, Nintendo overlord Satoru Iwata doesn't like price drops. Cutting prices, argues Iwata, is the same as telling potential customers to wait and save some cash, something he "always thought was a mistake."
It's nothing to do with money, though, oh no. It's about treating consumers equally and fairly. Further on in the interview, Iwata explains that early adopters shouldn't feel like they've bought something at a loss. There's definitely a PS3 joke to be cracked here, but we ain't going there.
You know what? We were all kinds of ready to pick up All Star Cheer Squad. The day it released, we were waiting at the GameStop, with our money in hand, ready to pick up the title. In the end, we didn't, because, really, how were we to know if this was the ultimate cheerleading sim? Thankfully, a real cheerleader has stepped in and told us what to think!
Natalie, a cheerleader with the New York Jets Flight Crew, put the game through its paces, stomping on the Balance Board and using the Wiimote and Nunchuk to bust poses all over the place. Her final verdict? Well, she enjoyed it, but you're just going to have to watch the video past the break for the rest of her thoughts.
Seriously, though, somebody should tell her that Nintendo doesn't suggest wearing huge boots while using the Balance Board. Doesn't she know how expensive that thing is?
Gamasutra spoke with Hitoshi Hasegawa and Yosuke Hayashi of the post-Itagaki Team Ninja about the current and future state of the high-profile development team. So far, those plans don't include the Wii, but the new Team Ninja seems more open to experimenting with other consoles than before. The studio is looking to expand their audience, and "If that lends to one console," Hayashi said, "PS3, or if that's going to be the Wii -- that's just the direction we will go."
Hayashi had similarly vague statements last year, but they were more personal at that time than business-oriented. If Team Ninja decides it would not only be fun, but profitable to create a Wii game, that's more likely to justify the expense and development time.
Team Ninja may not be working on any Wii projects themselves, of course, but their company, Tecmo, is, and the expertise gained from that stuff may help Team Ninja. "We will continue to work in that path. We have a lot of Wii console fans within the company, so hopefully there's something that we can work on."
Producer Peter Dassenko, who's handling the upcoming Alien Crush Returns for Wiiware, spoke with theBBPS.com about the title and Hudson as a whole. As pumped as we are for Alien Crush Returns, it's not the only interesting thing about the interview. Dassenko pretty much confirms that we will see updates to other Hudson titles hit WiiWare, much like Star Soldier R and, of course, Alien Crush Returns.
"The special thing about Hudson is that we really do listen to what our fans want," Dassenko said. "We know there are a ton of fans out there demanding remakes or completely new versions of our more popular brands like Military Madness, Adventure Island, Bonk, and more," continuing on to say that he's "sure we'll see other series making the leap to current-gen soon enough." Sounds good to us!
MTV's Stephen Totilo has posted the third and final part of a lengthy interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. Though the bulk of the article was lent to discussion of Wii Music, the pair broached other subjects, including what Miyamoto perceives as a lack of innovation in titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy.
Though Twilight Princess was "not a bad game," Shiggy felt there was "something missing," and was also semi-criticial of the previously untouchable Galaxy, which he thought was "very new and [...] very unique," but "somewhat conservative in terms of how far we branched out with design." If we may mount the Wii Fanboy soapbox for a moment, we'd concur that Twilight Princess was far from being the best Zelda, but found Galaxy to be consistently creative and entertaining.
Elsewhere, Miyamoto referred to the "next Galaxy," which may or may not mean we'll be getting another Mario-in-space game (we wouldn't read too much into it), and that he loves Portal. Nintendo fanboys we might be, but we can probably all appreciate that last statement.
With the odd exception, the Prince of Persia series has maintained an enviably high standard throughout its nineteen-year run. Sadly, it's not something we've seen enough of on the Wii, apart from a slightly idle Ubiport. We want more of his royal leapiness on Nintendo's machine, and now Ben Mattes, producer of the cel-shaded Prince of Persia on the HD consoles, has sparked hope in our fanboy hearts.
So says Sega A&R man Darren Williams in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, who also described the console as "the kind of thing that families will play at Christmas, and probably won't play again throughout the remainder of the year."
It's one of the game industry's strangest quirks: as any console ages, it becomes both more worthy (as it gains a wider library of games) and cheaper. But not the Wii, by the sounds of it. In case you still didn't know after two years of Nintendo hardware holding its price, Nintendo overlord Satoru Iwata doesn't like price drops. Cutting prices, argues Iwata, is the same as telling potential customers to wait and save some cash, something he "always thought was a mistake."
You know what? We were all kinds of ready to pick up All Star Cheer Squad. The day it released, we were waiting at the GameStop, with our money in hand, ready to pick up the title. In the end, we didn't, because, really, how were we to know if this was the ultimate cheerleading sim? Thankfully, a real cheerleader has stepped in and told us what to think!
Gamasutra spoke with Hitoshi Hasegawa and Yosuke Hayashi of the post-Itagaki Team Ninja about the current and future state of the high-profile development team. So far, those plans don't include the Wii, but the new Team Ninja seems more open to experimenting with other consoles than before. The studio is looking to expand their audience, and "If that lends to one console," Hayashi said, "PS3, or if that's going to be the Wii -- that's just the direction we will go."
