Category: Nintendo

A new challenge approaches.

Everyone’s favourite game developer-turned-YouTuber Masahiro Sakurai is back with another entry in his Creating Games series, and his latest video once again sees Kirby’s Dream Land take centre stage.

This time, Sakurai uses the classic Game Boy title to discuss the level of difficulty in video games and how it needs to be balanced so that the reward matches the risk. Kirby’s Dream Land gives you extra lives, the ability to fly and a good attack range among other things which in turn reduces the game’s ‘essence’ but increases its broad appeal — anyone can have a crack at a Kirby game, and that’s the point.

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“Getting Nintendo would be a career moment”.

An internal email from Xbox’s Phil Spencer in 2020 has revealed that the company was (and potentially still is) considering Nintendo as a potential acquisition.

Revealed as part of a deluge of leaked, unredacted documents from the FTC Vs. Microsoft case in the United States, the email goes into surprising detail regarding Spencer’s thoughts on the acquisition, going so far as to say that “getting Nintendo would be a career moment” and that it would be “a good move for both companies”.

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The Kombat Pack hasn’t even been released yet.

After some leaks prior to release, there are now reports of a new DLC character datamine for Mortal Kombat 1.

As detailed by IGN, dataminers have unearthed lines of dialogue that could be for either “cut content or “upcoming, unannounced” DLC characters. Here’s the rundown from dataminer ‘thethiny’, detailing the findings so far:

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An “exclusive” pin set is up for grabs.

Later this year in November, Nintendo is releasing an updated version of Square’s classic RPG Super Mario RPG.

If you’re on the hunt for pre-order bonuses and happen to be located in North America, games retailer GameStop has now officially revealed what it will be offering in both the US and Canada.

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Video games, uh, find a way.

Limited Run Games has revealed that two more titles are being added to the Jurassic Park: Classic Games Collection — Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition.

Previously, the collection included the NES, Game Boy, and SNES versions (where applicable) of Jurassic Park, and Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues. Now, the publisher and retro game preservationist has announced that the two highly popular Sega Genesis titles will also be included.

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A divine force.

Saying that the original PlayStation was a treasure trove of RPGs is a bit of an understatement. But even with that statement, Star Ocean: The Second Story remains a standout to many RPG fans. Its blend of sci-fi and classic fantasy, action combat, and crunchy synth tunes hit a particular chord back in the late ‘90s. This was the West’s first exposure to the Star Ocean series – and for many, the series has never reached those highs from 1998.

But Star Ocean is a series that started way back on the Super Famicom. Despite its Nintendo origins, Star Ocean has often remained adrift from Nintendo platforms. 2001’s Blue Sphere – a Game Boy Color spin-off and sequel to The Second Story – and Star Ocean: First Departure R, a remaster of a PSP title, remain the only two other games in the series to release on a Nintendo console.

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Wish upon a Star(field).

In an attempt to ensure that Microsoft’s Xbox is easily differentiated from the Switch, the company once attempted to make a shift in terminology when it comes to what constitutes a “console” — because that couldn’t possibly lead to confusion, right?

In a 2019 email from Xbox’s head of marketing, Aaron Greenberg (and shared to Twitter by Kotaku‘s @ethangach), we can see that there was a time in which Microsoft was keen to present the Nintendo Switch not as a “console”, but rather as a “portable gaming device”. This all spawned from Ori and the Blind Forest leaving its Xbox exclusivity and making its way over to the Nintendo console, with Microsoft, obviously, looking for a way to spin it so that its system could still appear favourable.

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Surreal Madrid.

Games have, over their history, often sought to become interactive movies or cartoons. There is the general decades-long race towards realism in Triple-A games running on higher and higher-specced hardware, the labour-intensive, hand-drawn aesthetic of many indie games like Cuphead or Hoa and, of course, that art form traditionally maligned but subject of a recent renaissance: full-motion video.

The challenge has always been that the more a game resembles a movie or cartoon, the less it resembles a game. The more cutscenes, the less interaction; the more bespoke animation, the less resource available to expand the game. Madrid-based indie developer Gammera Nest’s The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo has decided which way that particular cookie is going to crumble: it takes a hit to its point-and-click-adventure gameplay, but makes almost no compromise on presenting a superbly animated and fantastically surreal cartoon.

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“The whole mission is to share the work”.

Have you ever seen an original Contra up close? What about an original Mario Kart?

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Crying’s not for me.

In the most positive sense, it’s amazing what gets approved for release on the Switch. Raindrop Sprinters is an indie title that could well be a mobile phone game in everything except its aesthetic, which accurately resembles an early ’80s arcade title.

You play a cat represented by a bobbing paw, tasked only with crossing a screen from one side to the other, on repeat, 40 times to finish the Standard game. During each brief transit, raindrops fall from a corrugated overhead roof, dripping randomly, with enough gaps to allow you to make your crossing unscathed. With one life only, it’s simplistic, but there’s a core scoring game here that’s both utterly compelling and unapologetically brutal.

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