Present at this year’s roundtable were Nintendo highly-respected heavyweights Shigeru Miyamoto, Eiji Aonuma, and Yoshiaki Koizumi.
-
Miyamoto:
First of all, this year, one of the most important topics is what are we going to be doing with Wii and DS?
Of course, today we did announce Wii U, but today we are going to focus more on 3DS.
The Nintendo E-Shop opened yesterday for 3DS and there are 10 3-D trailers available for download.
Hopefully the franticness of the show will die down by tomorrow or tomorrow evening and you will have a chance to download them for yourself. We want you to do so so that you get the best idea of what those games will look like on that system.
We are going to start with the Legend of Zelda: OoT 3-D.
(Discussing improved frame rate, visuals, etc.)
Miyamoto actually played it again for himself for the first time in a while recently, and it was really quite refreshing. He was actually surprised by how much he’d forgotten.
There were some pretty good lines in the game and he remembers playing and thinking, “Wow, that was a pretty good line” and then looking back and thinking, “Oh yeah, I wrote that.” (Laughs) And at the same time I was telling the staff how terrible some of those other lines were, but it’s too late to go back and correct that (laughs again).
Talking about creating hint movies; they don’t want to just give the answers to the puzzles away, but they want people to try and figure them out for themselves. So instead they’ve focused in on very short snippets of video so that the people who haven’t solved the puzzle see just enough to figure it out on their own the rest of the way and still have that satisfaction of figuring it out.
We have also designed it so that those movies only become available after you have clearly tried to solve the puzzle multiple times and have failed.
Also, as I mentioned this morning, we have included the mirrored Master Quest mode, so even if you’ve played this game before many times, we think there is a lot of content there. So we hope you’ll give it another time.
And considering that it launched 13 years ago, there are a lot of kids who never even got to experience that.
The next title coming for 3DS after that is Star Fox 64 3-D.
(Shows a 2-D version of a 3-D trailer for Star Fox).
People often refer to Star Fox as a sort of space shooting or dogfighting game, but really when I play it, what I find is really fun about it is actually the way you fly around objects and how it is in space that you’re flying.
The big challenge that I have always had with games like this in the past, is that the audience kind of divides into two groups. One group, when you tilt up, they expect the ship to fly up. And the other group expects the ship to fly down when you tilt up, like actually flying a plane.
(Miyamoto takes a quick poll of the roundtable audience to see who prefers which. When the minority is shown to be the latter group, he says that it’s because they are the ones who grew up on SEGA games. Laughter ensues.)
Miyamoto wishes there was some sort of industry standard for this sort of thing to make life easier on everyone.
The circle pad is great. When you slide it up, it feels like the ship should really go up–it’s not like a D-pad. When playing OoT 3D, when he slid up, he expected aiming to go up. So then he went into his sort of troubled mode where he tried to solve the problem. Of course, they have the gyroscope built in, so they tried to use that to solve the problem. When you tile, it moves the slingshot. And he thought: this is my chance to bring the world together (laughter). So both games have gyro controls as well.
I think using the circle pad for lateral (side to side) motion in Star Fox prevents the 3-D effect from being broken. So I think that’s the best solution there.
Miyamoto now mentions the display of your friends’ faces in Star Fox multiplayer.
Super Mario 3-D is mentioned, but Mr. Koizumi will discuss that later.
Also, we are going ot be releasing Kid Icarus this year as well, and we’re fortunate to have Mr. Sakurai sitting in over here for us (applause).
If you want to ask him a question about Kid Icarus, that’s okay, but don’t ask him about Smash Bros. (laughs).
Of course we will also be releasing Mario Kart this year for 3DS, and I don’t know if you have played it yet, but it is running at 60 fps.
And we’ve also added a sort of glider wing to each of the karts, and it turns out that it’s a lot of fun to glide through the air with your karts. So I wanted to call it Super Mario Kite (laughter).
And actually we are working on this game in collaboration with Retro Studios. It’s thanks to Retro Studios then that all of you can play Mario Kite later this year.
So I think that’s it for this year.
But there is one other tihng I wanted to touch on that is related to the gyro controls. On the programming side, obviously, we are providing some assistance to make sure that the 3-D visuals stay in focus as much as possible, but I have also found that there are times where people want to play in 2-D. And that is a perfectly acceptable way to play the games, and so that is why the depth slider is there.
But there are some sections of some games where you might find it easier to play in 3-D.
Of course, with the lineup we have this year, there will be plenty of content for you all to play on 3DS. But there is some great built-in stuff also that I hope you are using .How many of you are using the Street Pass? (Everyone raises their hand.)
So you maybe have gotten my Mii. I think someone is busy clearing out my queue so that you can all get my Mii.
-
-
[continue to Part 2…]