The player-voted Steam Awards have reached their conclusion, and the results are about as weird as the nominees. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the weirdest game possible won in several categories, such as Red Dead Redemption 2 for the Labor Of Love award and Starfield for “Most Innovative Gameplay”.
In a recent interview with The Guardian, Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto revealed he’s not quite ready to call it a career at Nintendo just yet.
“More so than retiring, I’m thinking about the day I fall over,” Miyamoto told The Guardian. “In this day and age you have to think about things in a five-year timespan, so I do think about who I can pass things on to, in case something does happen.”
“I’m really thankful that there is so much energy around things that I have worked on,'” he continued. “These are things that have already gone out into the world … they’ve been cultivated by others, other people have been raising them, helping them grow, so in that sense I don’t feel too much ownership over them any more.”
This has been a common refrain from Miyamoto, who previously said he wasn’t ready to retire when we interviewed him on the occasion of Super Nintendo World opening in the U.S.
Although Miyamoto has been an integral figure at Nintendo since joining the company 45 years ago and creating mega-popular game series like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Donkey Kong, he’s recently stepped back from his involvement in video game development. Instead, Miyamoto has set his sights on expanding Nintendo into different mediums like the Super Nintendo World theme park at Universal Studios or adapting its intellectual properties onto the silver screen with films like the Super Mario Bros. Movie and the upcoming Legend of Zelda live-action film.
“I don’t think of myself as a game designer. I’m about finding unique opportunities for Nintendo. The way things work here is that, more so than having a plan and following it, we come across certain things and from there, we try to find our own new path. The movies, the amusement parks, I’m excited to see what kind of organic things result from those,” Miyamoto said.
“I’m still very new to [the movie] industry and I’m still learning, but I’m trying to read a lot of scripts these days and learn about how they are developed, to see how we can create uniquely Nintendo films.”
Toward the end of the interview, Miyamoto jokingly said when he does retire from Nintendo, he hopes his illustrious resume won’t be forgotten.
“There is a scene in Iron Man where the president goes to his own company and the guard man doesn’t let him in, and he points at the portrait and says: ‘That’s me!’” Miyamoto said. “But I really hope that the teams I work with, at least, remember me as the creator of these things!”
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
More Mario? Surely not!?
Welcome to the future.
You, dear reader, are reading these words in the far-off, distant, sci-fi future year that is 2024. While the hoverboards, flying vehicles, and inside-out trousers have all apparently been delayed in this branch of the timeline due to some spacetime-related cock up, at least Skynet is coming along nicely, eh?
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Guild Wars publisher NCSoft’s long-rumoured Horizon: Zero Dawn spin-off is a full-blown MMORPG codenamed Project Skyline, will run on Unreal Engine 5, and is coming to PC and mobile with a PS5 release still TBC, according to a brace of job listings and CVs fished from the post-apocalyptic robo-wilds of yonder internet. Also according to the said listings, it won’t be out for a while.
Tim Cain wrote what is perhaps gaming’s most famous and influential monologue: the introduction to Fallout. “War never changes,” he says. “People loved it. I’m like, ‘I must be a writer.’” Yet much more recently, when Cain sat down to write his memoirs, nobody really liked what came out on the page. “I was really, really bad at it,” he says. “I had half a dozen people read it, and they all pretty much said that the stories were good, but my writing wasn’t.”
Cain’s writing strengths, as fellow Fallout originator Leonard Boyarsky has suggested, lie in shortform. Which was bad news for anyone who wanted to read the definitive account of his four decades at the heart of Interplay, Troika and Obsidian, three of the most important RPG studios of all time. Thankfully, though, it turns out Cain is a natural raconteur. The same anecdotes that appeared flat and toneless in his memoirs go down a storm on YouTube. There, for the past seven months, Cain has been delivering his stories straight to camera, as if at a dinner party with 73,500 other people. “When I started the channel, I would effectively just look at something in the book and be like, ‘I’ll tell that story today,’” he says. “Now I spend as much time answering questions and doing videos based on things people ask about.”
Star Wars Outlaws, the highly anticipated open world game from Ubisoft, will be released in late 2024.
Though Ubisoft and Star Wars owner Disney had previously remained tight lipped about the release date, a Disney Parks blog post quietly announced the release window, which was previously only confirmed to be sometime in 2024.
“Star Wars Outlaws, the open world Star Wars game, is set to release late this year,” the post said. “The game lets you explore distinct planets across the galaxy, both iconic and new. You can risk it all as Kay Vess, an emerging scoundrel seeking freedom and the means to start a new life, along with her companion Nix. If you’re willing to take the risk, the galaxy is full of opportunity.”
Star Wars Outlaws was revealed at the 2023 Xbox Games Showcase with a gameplay presentation coming soon after, and fans quickly grew obsessed with the cute axolotl-like Nix.
The game is set between Star Wars: Episode 5 – The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars: Episode 6 – Return of the Jedi, something developer Massive Entertainment said was due to the criminal underworld thriving at this time.
The developer also confirmed Star Wars Outlaws takes a more “handcrafted” and “manageable” approach to the open-world formula, with one planet being roughly the same size as two or three regions in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
We all know what we want, though.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of EarthBound (known in Japan as Mother 2) and, according to the official X (formerly Twitter) page, plans are in place to celebrate the hefty milestone (thanks, My Nintendo News).
What these plans are, exactly, is up in the air at the moment, but we’re not expecting anything earth-shattering. After all, Earthbound itself is already playable on Switch via the Nintendo Switch Online service, and we’re way beyond anticipating any official Western release of its sequel, Mother 3.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
Happy new year, PlayStation Stars members! We’ve got a fresh array of challenges, campaigns, and collectibles to kickstart your 2024 gaming journey. Let’s dive straight into what’s new this month.
PlayStation & You: Access controller
Available January 2
Available only to active Access controller owners. Create new ways to play with this highly customizable controller kit for PS5 consoles, designed to help those with disabilities play games more comfortably, for longer. To unlock your Access Controller Digital Collectible, play any game on your PS4 or PS5 console.
Campaign Name: Your PlayStation Monthly Games Await | Reward: 50 PlayStation Stars Points
Available January 2
New month, new PlayStation Plus monthly games. Try any one of this month’s games for 50 points.
Campaign Name: Vintage Lineage | Digital Collectible: Retro Lunch Box, First Edition
Available December January 4
Take it back to the days of pixel art gaming. Play any of one of the games listed below to unlock a retro lunch box Digital Collectible.
Campaign Name: Wind Down with PlayStation | Digital Collectible: New Year, New Nest
Available January 17
Relax and unwind with some cozy game time. Start any of the games listed below to snag your snow globe Digital Collectible.
Campaign Name: Brain Games | Digital Collectible: Synaptic Feedback
Available December January 18
Sharpen your mind with these beautiful puzzle games. Each one offers a unique blend of brain-bending puzzles and eye-catching artwork to put your problem-solving skills to the test.
Play any one of these titles to unlock the Synaptic Feedback Digital Collectible.
Stay tuned to PlayStation App for all the latest updates throughout the month. Not a PlayStation Stars member yet? Learn more about PlayStation Stars and join for free here.
Listen, I know we’ve spent the better part of the holidays harping on about all our favourite games of 2023 (and many more besides as part of our bonus Selection Boxes), but here’s another one for you that I mainlined in a single day over Christmas and absolutely loved. It’s Makoto Wakaido’s Case Files Trilogy Deluxe – a collection of not three, but four detective stories in which you go about solving grizzly murders across different towns and villages in Japan. In short: if you like the investigation bits of Ace Attorney and need something to whet your appetite before the Apollo Justice Trilogy comes out on January 25th, this will be 100% up your street. It’s currently just over a fiver in the Steam Winter Sale, and there’s a free demo you can try as well for good measure.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every week, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, let’s return kick off the new year with a jumbo-sized edition with even more games from across our Christmas holiday. Expect unexpectedly laid-back stressful horror, slow-motion stunting gunfights, a watercolour world, spaceships, mecha, and far too many legs. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!
