Wario Land: The Shake Dimension? Good. Wario: Master of Disguise? Not so good. Wario Land DS? A possibility, apparently. The lovely folks at Cubed3 are running an interview with Nintendo’s Takahiro Harada and Nobuo Matsumiya about their contribution to the tubby funster’s waggle-tastic Wii adventure, and reacted enthusiastically to the suggestion of a Wario Land game for the DS.

“Wario Land DS - oh I just want to develop it! Maybe, if many of your readers’ opinions are gathered and sent to us, it might be an idea that will be realised in the not too distant future. Everyone, do you want to play Wario Land DS?”

There’s only one reasonable answer to that, of course, and that’s “hell, yes”. So if you’re keen, then register your vote here.

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It’s not often that huge games publishers hold their hands up and admit their mistakes, but in an interview with VGChartz, Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway has done just that, suggesting that Nintendo was “disappointed with [its] performance at E3″.

After the conference, there was much internet grumbling about Nintendo abandoning its core fanbase, a criticism which Dunaway acknowledges, expressing regret that more wasn’t done to appease the hardcore. “There were titles like Wario which we think will be really fun titles that we should have showcased” Dunaway admits. “We were excited that Mr. Miyamoto made the commitment that Pikmin is coming. It would have been nice if we could have said that on stage.” 

While Dunaway didn’t win herself too many fans with her enthusiastically patronising performance at E3, these comments should garner a bit of respect in the eyes of most reasonable Nintendoites. Elsewhere, she claims that before working for Nintendo, her family had “a Wii, 3 or 4 DSs, a PSP, an Xbox, [and] a PS2.”

Rival consoles in the house? I’m not sure The Reggienator would stand for that. The full interview can be found here. Check it out.

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Xbox 360 RPG Mass Effect is a terrific game, melding action with stat-building and wrapping it all up inside a compelling sci-fi story with a helping of moral dilemmas to chew on. Though I’m not sure how it’d be done, apparently Bioware - or its handheld division at least - is considering remaking the game for DS.

Speaking to Eurogamer.de, Bioware’s Miles Holmes, currently at work on Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, suggested that the company was interested in “anything that reinforces [our] franchises”.

“I tell you which one I would want. I want the Mass Effect one,” Holmes added. It’s rare that a developer speaks so boldly about anything like this without there being something potentially in the pipeline, so fingers crossed we could see this superb space opera on our dual screens before too long.

 ”Having a DS version would be an awesome way to keep interest alive and keep [the franchise] going,” Holmes explained.

Excitement +4.

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There’s an interesting interview with Shigeru Miyamoto on the Telegraph’s videogames page, where he attempts to further assuage the fears of Nintendo’s core fans by re-emphasising the fact that the Mario, Zelda and Pikmin teams are all working on games, and that he has no plans to abandon traditional videogames.

“Making these ‘traditional’ games is what I am best at,” he explains. “Because games of that nature take upwards of two or three years to make, we always have to keep the teams working on those projects going. At any given time, the team could be five to ten people, or it could be 50-plus. People are always switching in and out of those teams.”

While Nintendo continues to forge a new fanbase, Miyamoto adds that motion controls aren’t necessarily the best choice for some titles. “What the Wii remote and motion control allows us to do is things we couldn’t have done before. But of course there are also things that are accomplished better with buttons.”

Well said, that man.

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And about time too - it’s a pity it’s seemingly taken for it to be a ‘mainstream’ issue before Nintendo has acknowledged it in any meaningful way and suggested a storage solution might not be too far away.

In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, Reggie claimed “We have a consumer base who loves virtual console. We have a userbase who really is enjoying WiiWare content. So for us really our challenge really is how do we satisfy all these consumers who are loving all of the product we make available on a download basis? As we continue to have things…like ‘Mario Kart’ that has its own channel when you’re playing from an Internet perspective, we’re just making this challenge tougher and tougher. So in our view this is becoming much more of a mainstream problem, which is why we have a sense of urgency to solve it.”

So when it was an issue for the ‘geeks and otaku’ apparently it wasn’t on Nintendo’s agenda. You cut us, Nintendo. You cut us deep.

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We all know that when Miyamoto hints at something, there’s usually some substance to it. So are we to take his latest comment as confirmation that Punch Out!! will be arriving on Wii at some point in the near future (as was heavily rumoured before E3)?

In an interview with IGN, Miyamoto waxes lyrical about Wii MotionPlus - pictured above - claiming that “there’s a lot of possibility in terms of something, like a very accurate version of Punch-Out!! that goes beyond what Wii Sports Boxing can do, or even other ideas…”

Surely if that’s going to work, you’d need to use two controllers with MotionPlus, otherwise you’d have a left hand like Danny Williams, and a right like Muhammad Ali. But still: Punch-Out!! on Wii? Yes please, Nintendo. 
 

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There’s a great interview with Shigeru Miyamoto on MSNBC discussing the Wii’s success, his thoughts on Wii Music, and - perhaps most pertinently - the fallout from the E3 conference.

“Our view of how we use E3 has changed” he explains. “For a very long time, E3 was an event where — and certainly Nintendo included — catered specifically to the core gamer. Now we look at more … an opportunity for us to introduce new concepts and new types of play that we intend to bring to the broader audience, particularly because of the media that gathers at E3 now.”

Entirely understandable in a way, but that’s still discounting the significant percentage of specialist press who attend these events. While I get the need to focus more on the casual games, that shouldn’t be at the expense of all first-party core titles. Still: it should certainly temper expectations for next year - if, indeed, Nintendo decides to bother in 2009. Yet he offered hope to those disappointed by Nintendo’s showing.

“So while attending an E3 event like this, they might be given the impression that Nintendo is no longer focusing on the games that appeal to the core gamer, in fact we’re still working on many of those titles, but it’s just not the type of event where we’ll be showcasing that anymore.”

You’ve probably heard already, but just to add for the sake of completeness: Miyamoto also confirmed that Nintendo is working on a Pikmin game. Which, of course, is brilliant news. Let’s just hope we get some more information on that before too long. The Tokyo Games Show in September would probably be favourite, but this is Nintendo we’re talking about.

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According to this interview on IGN: errrr, maybe.

As Lucasarts’ Ken Fox puts it, “we’ve tried to make the lightsaber control as intuitive and fun as possible. It’s not a lightsaber simulator, but when you swing your Wii remote left to right; your character does the same.”

Which is sort of good and bad news. I’d like to see something where it’s really one-to-one lightsaber control, but I appreciate that could be very difficult to program, and also awkward for players to control. As long as it offers a decent rough approximation of your commands, then it could be ace. And that art style should suit Wii down to the ground.

Better than The Force Unleashed? Time will tell, but I’m slightly more hopeful about this one. A DS game, Clone Wars: Jedi Alliance is on the way, using stylus controls for lightsaber swipes. If this works in any way like the terrific Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, then it has just as much potential for brilliance as the Wii version.

Fingers crossed, folks. 

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Nintendo of Europe’s Laurent Fischer (you know, he just loves us geeks and otaku) has been talking a bit about WiiWare, and revealed that Frontier’s superb LostWinds is the service’s most downloaded title in Europe. Well deserved, I say.

“We’re not communicating on precise figures” said Fischer, “but LostWinds has the highest download level in Europe. And then you have the other titles which come close by, like TV Show King and of course Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles.”

While I’d personally have My Life As A King just about scraping into the top slot, if any other game deserved to be right up there, it’s LostWinds, whose only real negative is its brevity.

Fischer also spoke about the storage solution issue, claiming that “we know there is an issue in this, so it’s something that we’re working on.” He declined to comment further, merely suggesting that “this area is fully handled by the development team in Japan. It’s very linked to the overall strategy; that’s something they’re working on.”

Overall strategy? Marketing-speak for “I’ve no idea what it is”, or is there something interesting in store? Allowing the Wii to load game data from SD cards would be a fairly logical step, but this comment may hint at something else entirely. Watch this space.

Gamesindustry.biz

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Blimey. It’s always when you’re expecting least that you’re surprised the most, and so it is with the fascinating latest in the Iwata Asks series, up now on Wii.com.

(For those unfamiliar with the series, each one is simply a lengthy conversation between Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata and the developers of the first-party title being discussed. They’re always a great read because Miyamoto is nearly always involved, and he and Iwata evidently share a similar sense of humour - there’s always about ten moments where the translation just says “(laughs)”. It helps perpetuate the feeling that Nintendo is a likeable and caring company - this sort of thing gives a charming, human face to a multi-billion-selling corporation.)

The latest focuses on Link’s Crossbow Training, which may seem like an unusual choice until you realise it’s only just been released in Japan, selling 92,000 copies in its first week. The nature of the discussion is about building bridges between those who enjoy simple controls and the normally complex FPS genre - and thus the game, which combines elements of both, was born. It’s well worth a look, not least because Miyamoto suggests he strongly considered a first-person perspective for Ocarina Of Time (!) and that his initial proposal for the game was not to use link but to have “a sort of Terminator style story about a time warp from the future”. And he loves the genre, even though he’s not very good at it. Wow.

Seriously, give it ten minutes of your time. The line about ‘the third in the big box series’ in particular made me chuckle.

Iwata Asks (Wii.com)

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