General game developing news and updates.
Cuphead is Now Available on Steam!
Cuphead is a classic run and gun action game heavily focused on boss battles. Inspired by cartoons of the 1930s, the visuals and audio are painstakingly created with the same techniques of the era, i.e. traditional hand drawn cel animation, watercolor backgrounds, and original jazz recordings.
Dear Nintendo fans,
On January 30, 2019, we plan to close the Wii Shop Channel, which has been available on Wii systems since December 2006. We sincerely thank our loyal customers for their support.
You can still add Wii Points until March 26, 2018, and purchase content on the Wii Shop Channel until January 30, 2019. In the future, we will be closing all services related to the Wii Shop Channel, including redownloading purchased WiiWare, Virtual Console titles, and Wii Channel, as well as Wii System Transfer Tool, which transfers data from Wii to the Wii U system.
If you have Wii Points to spend, content you want to re-download, or content you’d like to transfer from a Wii system to a Wii U system, we recommend you do so while the services are still available.
If you have any questions, please see our Q&A.
Thank you for supporting the Wii Shop Channel and for being such great fans of Nintendo.
Sincerely,
Your Friends at Nintendo
The new Super Mario Run update is here, and there are LOTS of new things to discover. Plus, take advantage of the $4.99 USD limited time special pricing – check it out:
Remix 10
It takes one Rally Ticket to play through one set of 10 short, fast-paced courses. Daisy is lost somewhere along the way, so if you play enough courses you’ll be able to find her! There are also tons of 10-course sets to play—and you can even unlock decorations, buildings, and more.
World ★
Buy the game now and World ★ will become available once you complete certain challenges of the original courses. There are some new courses to explore, including a forest, a ship packed with coins, and a whole airship armada. Each course adds a whole new level of fun!
Princess Daisy
Beat short courses in Remix 10 mode to unlock Princess Daisy as a playable character. Using the new action “double jump”, you can enjoy the course with a different gameplay feel from previous characters.
EA SPORTS FIFA 18 for the Nintendo Switch console is the most immersive, social, and authentic soccer game ever created for Nintendo players. Play for fun or compete for glory, on the big screen TV or on the go!
Features:
Switch Kick-off: Exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, Switch Kick-off is a head-to-head mode that, for the first time, logs your stats and tracks your performance against your friends in a local leaderboard. This is a “couch co-op mode” unique to Nintendo Switch.
To learn more about the game, or to purchase the digital version, please click here.
Game Rated:
Get wicked and complete the ultimate YO-KAI WATCH™ experience. The strange but friendly troublemakers, Yo-kai, are back in a time-traveling adventure, and this time their mysterious world is packed with exclusive quests, Wicked Yo-kai to befriend, new areas to explore, and a revamped Blasters action co-op mode* featuring new bosses.
The YO-KAI WATCH™ 2: Psychic Specters game launches today, only on the Nintendo 3DS family of systems. It can be purchased in stores, in Nintendo eShop, and at Nintendo.com. For more information about the game, visit https://yo-kai.nintendo.com/yw2/.
Game Rated:
Fantasy Violence
Comic Mischief
The Strong Museum of Play announced today that its International Center for the History of Games (ICHEG) has accepted a donation of artifacts documenting work done by Nutting Associates, the first company to sell coin-operated video games.
This is a big deal for game industry history buffs, since in 1971 Nutting put out what’s basically the world’s first commercial arcade game: Computer Space, designed and pitched to Nutting by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
Famously, the pair went on to cofound Atari a year later. Nutting continued to make electronic games until it closed in 1977, and now game industry historian Alex Smith has donated photographs, marketing materials, circuit board schematics, and other artifacts documenting Nutting’s work making games.
The donated materials are expected to make appearances in future exhibits at The Strong, which is located in Rochester, New York and already counts a number of Nutting game machines among its collection.
Nine years after introducing the world to Mario (under the guise of “Jumpman”) in Donkey Kong, Nintendo created a companion for him: Super Mario World’s Yoshi. But where did Yoshi come from?
According to excerpts translated by Kotaku of a new Nintendo [Japanese] interview with devs who worked on Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island, Yoshi was inspired by an image of Mario riding a horse that Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto drew in the ’80s.
(The interview also included a screenshot [excerpted below] of a prototype Yoshi sprite, dated November of 1989, in which the iconic dinosaur looks more like a sad turtle.)
“When we were making [Super Mario Bros. 3], he drew a picture of Mario riding a horse and had put it up on wall next to where he sits. When I saw that, I thought, ‘I guess he wants Mario to ride something,'” Super Mario World director (and fellow Nintendo vet) Takashi Tezuka reportedly said. “So, when we were making Super Mario World, we had this ‘dinosaur land’ concept, and I had [Shigefumi] Hino draw reptile type art.”
However, it sounds like one of Hino’s first attempts came out looking more like a crocodile than everyone was comfortable with. Tezuka reportedly felt that was maybe a little too reptile-y, and sketched a cuter dinosaur-like creature that became the basis for the Yoshi that appeared in Super Mario World.
And of course, according to a company character guide published in ’93 and publicized by Console Wars author Blake Harris in 2014, Yoshi’s full name isn’t Yoshi: it’s T. Yoshisaur Munchakoopas.
Terrible Toybox’s pixellated paranormal point-and-click adventure game Thimbleweed Park, released earlier this year, unfolds like a comedic X-Files; as always, it begins with a dead body.
The game has the look at feel of a classic Lucasarts adventure, and it also has the pedigree: among its creators are Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who brought us classics like Maniac Mansion and Zack McKracken and the Monkey Island series. But Terrible Toybox also features indie devs like Jenn Sandercock. “Our team isn’t just Lucasfilm alumni, there’s people like me on the team who are relatively newer to the industry,” she says.
I talked to Sandercock about what made Thimbleweed stand out from the crowd in an indie field saturated by nostalgia.
What makes us different to many games that are “inspired by” or “in homage” to classic games is that our core team is made up of people who actually created those classic games. So they know all the things that they learnt previously and have had time to think about ways to fix any issues they perceived in the way they used to make games. Also, I’m sure having fans come up to them over the years saying things like: “I loved X, but that one puzzle was so frustrating” helps a lot.
“Many old games were frustrating because of design mistakes, not the actual core gameplay mechanics. We can make a new adventure game using the old mechanics in a way that doesn’t feel frustrating.”
What I and the others bring to the team is a fresh perspective. I grew up playing adventure games and loved them a lot (it’s why I got into the industry). Based on that experience there were a number of pet peeves that I wanted to “fix”. For example, in Thimbleweed Park at the edge of the screen the cursor changes to show an arrow if there’s another area you can explore at the side of the screen, whether that’s via side scrolling or going to a new room. And that’s because there was one game where I got stuck because I didn’t even realize there was another room I could explore.
Other little things that we’ve included are: dynamic lighting, fast walking, full voice acting, casual mode, a hint-line system, following your cursor around. None of those things seem very big when taken by themselves, but when you put it together it modernizes the game and makes it easy for people to jump in and play regardless of whether they are veteran point-and-click adventure gamers or new to the genre.
It can be slightly frustrating to me sometimes when Thimbleweed Park is dismissed as simply a throwback game that only hard-core point-and-click adventure gamers will love. First person shooters have tweaked their gameplay quite a lot over the years, but a lot of the core gameplay is pretty much the same. It feels frustrating that for adventure games people don’t separate out content or implementation issues from the core gameplay mechanics.
Many of the old games were frustrating, but in my opinion that wasn’t because of the actual core gameplay mechanics, it was because of game design mistakes. So if we use our knowledge from over the years, we can make a new adventure game using the old mechanics, but that doesn’t feel frustrating.
“Thimbleweed Park was somewhat an experiment to try and work out what it was that made those games charming, since we weren’t sure what component it was. We kept many of the same mechanics, and modernized where we thought it was necessary or improved the game. “
For us, Thimbleweed Park was somewhat an experiment to try and work out what it was that made those games charming since we weren’t sure what component it was.
So we kept many of the same mechanics, modernized where we thought it was necessary or improved the game. Of course, I’m a little biased, but I think we really did manage to capture a bit of the charm. I feel that we’ve made point-and-click adventure games accessible to people who’ve never played them before as well as people who never stopped playing them.
Developing a game is difficult, and it’s hard to find time to put in all the features we want. For example, I really wanted to put in some sort of hint system, since I don’t like walkthroughs that spoil the game. However, during development we ran out of time to work out how to integrate a hint system into the fiction of the game and not make it too jarring to players.
After release, Meghann O’Neill wrote an incremental hint system that reminded me of the old UHS (Universal Hint System) style hints. We liked it so much that I worked with Meghann to put it into the game as a phone number that you can call within the game, a hint line. In hindsight, it feels like an obvious way to implement hints, since the game is set in 1987 when adventure games did have hint lines where you could call and talk to a real person to find out what to do next. But during development, we just couldn’t have taken the time to work on this. So it feels great that now anyone who’s downloaded it can get this update for free. You couldn’t do that for games on physical disks back in the day.
“When we were designing puzzles, we always came at it from a story perspective first. By integrating the puzzle solving with the narrative, it means that players themselves progress the story.”
When we were designing puzzles, we always came at it from a story perspective first. We knew what we wanted to accomplish and then we’d work out how someone in the real world might solve that puzzle and try to see if that makes sense within our game world. By integrating the puzzle solving with the narrative, it means that players themselves progress the story. It’s kind of like the show, don’t tell method, but is “do, don’t tell” instead. Players feel a lot more ownership when they get to play a real part in the story themselves.
I feel that many contemporary adventure games have moved away from puzzle solving and have concentrated on the narrative/story part of the game. I was a little late to get around to “finishing” it, but I loved playing the Witness. Games like that and the Professor Layton series feel like their core puzzle solving mechanics are very separated from the underlying narrative that goes through the game. Although I love the puzzles, they’re what I solve to get a cutscene, rather than advancing the narrative by my puzzle solving. Other adventure games these days have very little in the way of traditional puzzles at all, such as Gone Home and Firewatch.
I think that this evolution of adventure games is great. It’s wonderful to see people taking the genre in different directions. However, I believe that rather than us deciding there is only one “good” way to do an adventure game, these different approaches are simply adding to the breadth of types of adventure games that are possible.
Until now, you’ve just been playing with power. But starting tomorrow, you’ll be playing with SUPER power. That’s because the retro-tastic Super Nintendo Entertainment System™: Super NES Classic Edition system is hitting stores at a suggested retail price of $79.99. The system comes with 21 pre-installed Super NES™ games, many of which are considered some of the greatest video games of all time. All-time classics like Super Mario World™, The Legend of Zelda™: A Link to the Past™, Super Metroid™, FINAL FANTASY III and Donkey Kong Country™ are on the same mini system as Star Fox™ 2, which has never been released before!
“Super NES Classic Edition is perfect for any Nintendo fan, retro gamer or anyone who just wants to play some really fun video games,” said Doug Bowser, Nintendo of America’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “And at a reasonable price, the system will be a great addition to any holiday shopping list.”
Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Super NES Classic Edition has the same look and feel of the original system – only smaller – and comes pre-installed with 21 games:
Given this stellar lineup, the most difficult aspect of the system will be deciding which one of these games to play first. Each and every one is a classic, and they cover so many different genres. Fans of fighting games, action-adventure games, platformers and massive RPGs all have something to get excited about. And with Star Fox 2, which has never been released outside of this collection, even the most die-hard and dedicated Nintendo fans will have something to play for the first time.
While playing all these retro games is nostalgic and fun, Super NES Classic Edition comes with some modern conveniences that enhance the overall game-play experience. By using the easy-to-use Rewind feature, you can replay challenging sections by rewinding about a minute or more based on the type of game and your last suspend point. (Up to four suspend points can be saved for each game.) To add a little visual flair, you can even wrap a cool border around your game with the new Frame feature. Some of the frames change color based on the game being played.
Included with Super NES Classic Edition are one HDMI cable, one USB charging cable with AC adapter and two wired Super NES Classic controllers, perfect for playing multiplayer games. Some of the games with multiplayer options include Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super Mario Kart, Contra III: The Alien Wars and Secret of Mana.
While Super NES Classic Edition is sure to be a hot commodity, Nintendo will ship more units of the system on launch day in the U.S. than were shipped of the NES Classic Edition™ system all last year, with subsequent shipments arriving in stores regularly. Nintendo also plans to ship the retro-inspired product into 2018.
For more information about Super Nintendo Entertainment System: Super NES Classic Edition, visit http://www.nintendo.com/super-nes-classic.
ESRB for Super NES Classic Edition:
Suggestive Themes
Violence
For the first time, My Nintendo users can now redeem Gold Points for some of the hottest indie games on Nintendo platforms. For a limited time, you can redeem points to download select Nintendo 3DS and Wii U titles from our talented independent developers. Users will receive a download code that is redeemed in Nintendo eShop. Get it with Gold Points!
BIT.TRIP Presents… Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien
(Wii U): 90 Gold Points
Runner2 is a rhythm-music, auto-running platformer. Players will run through fantastic environments, using brand new moves, to amazing new soundtracks as they run, jump, slide, kick, and soar toward the goal of tracking down the Nefarious Timbletot who has un-fused CommanderVideo’s reality. Runner2 features 5 exciting worlds, 125 tantalizing levels and 5 death defying BOSS battles! Play as 8 different characters and find secret areas to unlock new and zany costumes!
Zen Pinball 3D (Nintendo 3DS): 50 Gold Points
Zen Pinball 3D for Nintendo 3DS brings an incredible stereoscopic 3D experience to the acclaimed video game pinball series for the first time ever. Featuring four beautifully crafted, original tables, Zen Pinball 3D features the most advanced ball physics in a video pinball game to date, online leader boards ranking you against other players, in-game friend challenges, interactive 3D models, and more! Zen Pinball 3D for Nintendo 3DS is the definitive pinball experience on portable game consoles.
Super Little Acorns 3D Turbo (Wii U): 60 Gold Points
Time for some squirreling action! Prepare for some super squirreling action! Now with 50% new exclusive level content, ninja completion bonuses, super high speed turbo mode and a whole bunch of zany new squirrel outfits!Run, jump, swing and smash Mr Nibbles through 90 frantic levels of pixel perfect platforming. Mr Nibbles goes nuts for acorns and he’s on a mission to reclaim his stash from the pesky critters who stole them so he can feed his growing family.
Art of Balance (Wii U): 70 Gold Points
Grab your Wii U GamePad and build a balanced stack in this physics-based puzzler! Puzzle games must be addictive. This was our top priority during the development of the game. That’s why we designed 200 levels that not only challenge your skills but also your imagination. With its perfect touch controls ‘Art of Balance’ is easy to pick up and hard to put away. Play alone or invite friends to drop in at any time for co-op play. We even added split-screen and online multiplayer for extra fun. Seeking an even bigger challenge? Then try out the new endurance mode and improve your Online-Highscore.
