Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto plays ‘Project Giant Robot’, an upcoming Wii U game. Nintendo
LOS ANGELES — Nintendo has a lot of games to talk about this year at E3. An open-world Legend of Zelda. A new Star Fox. A make-your-own-Mario.
And you’ll probably enjoy playing them… eventually. Just not this Christmas, and maybe not for a while. Much of the coolest stuff that Nintendo showed during its E3 livestream Tuesday was slated for the year 2015, if indeed it even had a date. And Nintendo’s propensity for long delays leaves us unwilling to place any big bets on some of those games making those dates. (Really, when has a Zelda ever made it out without a huge delay?)
Nintendo seems to be placing the vast majority of its 2014 holiday hopes and dreams on Super Smash Bros., its all-star mascot fighting game for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. A handful of other games round out its year. With little to no third party support, it means Nintendo has to double down on its own bets.
As it did at last year’s E3 show, Nintendo made its announcements not at a live press conference but with a pre-recorded video that it debuted on Tuesday morning. The “digital event” kicked off with an animated sequence clearly done in the style of Robot Chicken, with a clay version of Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime taking a miniature stage.
Clay Reggie did not get a few sentences into his presentation before being heckled by an audience member, who was revealed to be a bearded, disheveled, jaded member of the gaming press. “What are you going to announce, Reggie? More Mario games? Where’s Mother 3?” (A sensible response, since Nintendo should really release that cult hit Japan-only RPG in America.)
“We’re not announcing a new Mario game today,” responded clay Reggie. This was a bold statement considering that Nintendo was minutes away from announcing a Yoshi game, a Toad game and a Mario game.
With Wii U sales slumping (but possibly picking up following the release last week of heavy hitter franchise Mario Kart), Nintendo needs to show some signs of life this holiday season. Besides Hyrule Warriors, the action-oriented spin-off of The Legend of Zelda that will be available on September 26, those signs of life will come from Super Smash Bros. or they will come from nowhere.
Here are the new things that Nintendo announced on Tuesday, as seen by WIRED at a preview event on Sunday:
Miyamoto plays Star Fox on Wii U. Nintendo
Miyamoto’s New Star Fox
Remember when Nintendo’s game design guru Shigeru Miyamoto said he was stepping back from his role as the leader of the Mario and Zelda teams to focus on smaller game projects? This was on full display at E3 this year, when he gathered an exclusive group of press to show off some experimental game concepts that were still early in development. All of these were meant to be games that could only be possible by using the Wii U GamePad controller’s touchscreen and your TV screen in concert.
“Project Robot” was a mini-game in which two lumbering giant robots fought each other. It’s meant to be intentionally clunky, like Miyamoto’s own Surgeon Simulator. You hold the right trigger to move forward, use the left and right analog sticks to swing your arms and move the GamePad around to orient your robot’s torso. It’s funny because of all the real-time unpredictable physics happening. Was it fun yet? Not as much.
The next demo was called “Project Guard.” You have 12 security cameras all stationed in a building around an object you’re guarding. You can put the cameras anywhere you like. Robots start swarming in from every entrance, and you have to constantly check the cameras on the TV screen to find them, then switch to that camera using the touch screen, then shoot them down. This was much more fun — again, it feels overwhelming because of the sheer complexity of it, but that’s the challenge.
But the big reveal was Star Fox, a new entry in the outer-space shooter series that began on the Super Nintendo. You control your ship as usual, but on the GamePad screen you can see the view out of the cockpit, and use the motion controls of the GamePad to sight down your reticle and pinpoint your aim at individual enemies.
It still feels a little rough, and it should. Miyamoto said that it was still very early in development, and in fact he ordinarily would not show a game at all that was so early. But his aim for this year’s E3, he said, was to show that Nintendo was in fact working on game ideas that use the GamePad. (One wonders why it took this long.)
In a group Q&A following the demo, Miyamoto said that because they want to finish Star Fox as quickly as possible, Nintendo is currently in discussions with outside developers to take on the project, which to this point has been prototyped entirely within Nintendo. (Again, a rare glimpse behind the curtain.)
Nintendo
Amiibo, Nintendo’s Skylanders
Get used to saying “Amiibo” (it’s pronounced like “amigo” with a B). That’s the brand name of Nintendo’s line of Skylanders-style interactive figurines, which it will roll out this holiday season. The first game they’ll work with is — you guessed it — Super Smash Bros. Buy a Mario figurine and place it on your GamePad controller, and you can play as Mario in Smash Bros..
Well, of course, you could also play as Mario without placing that figurine on the controller. But this Mario is different from the standard Mario that appears in the fighting game’s roster. He’s your Mario — you can level him up and make him stronger by playing more matches, then customize his move sets. This data is then saved to the figure, so you can bring your custom Mario to a friend’s house. These characters, says Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai, can become quite powerful relative to the game’s standard-issue fighters.
Amiibo figures, Nintendo says, will have similar functionality with other games. It’s going to retroactively patch Amiibo support into Mario Kart 8, it said. They’ll also work with newly-announced games like Mario Party 10 and…
Nintendo
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
If you loved the puzzle levels in Super Mario 3D World in which you played as the hapless Captain Toad, get ready for what looks like a whole game composed of them. This is likely to require you to use the Wii U GamePad controller and its touch screen, to manipulate the levels by touch as Captain Toad ambles around them. This will be available this holiday season.
Splatoon
Nintendo closed its Direct with an extended presentation of this game. Atypically of Nintendo but very typically of the rest of the videogame industry, Splatoon is an online multiplayer shooter. Of course, this has a non-violent spin on it: Everybody’s shooting globs of paint. Also, everyone is an octopus. Or maybe a squid. Either way, once you cover the floor with globs of your color of paint, you can stealthily swim in the paint without being detected.
I played a demo of this game following our preview of the Nintendo Direct. The game mode we played, which will be available on the E3 show floor, challenged two teams of four players each to paint as much of the arena’s floor as possible with their color of paint. Whoever coated the most of the level in their technicolor squid goo at the end of five minutes were the winners.
Developed at Nintendo’s main studio in Kyoto by a team of younger designers, Splatoon is scheduled to be released in 2015.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse
This was probably the closest thing to a big surprise Nintendo had in store. Kirby: Canvas Curse was memorable for being one of the first Nintendo games to truly show the appeal of touchscreen gameplay on the Nintendo DS. So a Wii U sequel fits perfectly. Instead of controlling Kirby directly, players draw lines on the screen that he rolls along. This, too, won’t be out until 2015.
Mario Maker
Leaked a few days ago by someone who took a furtive photograph of Nintendo’s booth in progress on the E3 show floor, Mario Maker is exactly what it sounds like: a Wii U game that lets you construct your own 2-D Super Mario Bros. levels. (It took this long?) You can build your level, then play it back using either classic 8-bit or high-definition New Super Mario styled graphics. Release date… sometime in 2015.
And… those were the only brand-new, not previously announced games that Nintendo showed off during its Digital Event. For the most part, Nintendo used its time at E3 to update players on games that it had already announced, some quite a while ago.
Xenoblade Chronicles sequel
Whether you call it “X” or “Monolith Soft’s New Game,” this upcoming RPG is a highly anticipated Wii U release for the Nintendo core fans. The new story trailer shown during the direct confirmed that the game is a direct follow-up to Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii, but gave little other concrete information besides the fact that it won’t be available in the U.S. until 2015.
Hyrule Warriors
Besides what we learned last week when the official Japanese website for this teamup between Tecmo Koei’s Team Ninja and Nintendo launched, the E3 videos for this action Legend of Zelda spin-off revealed that Princess Zelda herself and Midna from Twilight Princess will be playable characters. Hey, add in Impa and that means that so far, three out of the game’s four playable characters are women.
Nintendo
The Legend of Zelda Wii U
Here’s what you came to see. Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma showed off some representative footage of what the Wii U’s first original entry in the Legend of Zelda series will look like. As he has hinted before, this Zelda will be more of an open-world adventure. Instead of being constrained to entering and exiting small areas that are stitched together to give the impression of a large connected world, this edition of the game should really all take place on one big, open map.
It should feel like a modern-day version of the first game in the series, he said, in which players could explore anywhere they wanted at any time. “The puzzle solving begins the moment the player starts thinking about where they want to go, how they will get there and what they will do when they arrive,” he said in the video.
Nintendo says this game will be out in 2015. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Sure, it might happen, but has Nintendo ever announced a big Zelda game and then actually released it without a big, painful delay in the middle of the development cycle? And they’re trying new things with this one, too, which only increases the chances they’ll hit a snag somewhere. Although the video segment was certainly fun to watch, it’s clear that it’s a scripted, faked-up moment, not actual gameplay.
Yoshi’s Woolly World
Announced as Yarn Yoshi about a year and a half ago, this side-scrolling platform game starring Mario’s dinosaur friend has gone dark until now. The big announcement is that it’ll have a two-player simultaneous mode. Coming in 2015. More likely to show up than Zelda.
Bayonetta 2
Announced nearly two years ago, this Mature-rated action game by Platinum Games looks like it’s finally happening in October. As a bonus, it’ll now include the first Bayonetta too, with optional Princess Peach, Samus Aran and Link outfits for the main character.
…Mother 3?
Look, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but would Nintendo really reopen the old Mother 3 wound for no reason? Additionally, later in the video that same heckling journalist (who I really think is the most sympathetic character in the show) asks, “Where’s Star Fox?”
Well, it turns out Star Fox was right at the end of that video. So… where’s Mother 3?
So if you’ve been following along, that means Nintendo’s 2014 Wii U lineup is Smash Bros., Bayonetta 2, Hyrule Warriors and Captain Toad. Solid, not spectacular. We know creative stuff is on the way, but it’s going to be late. How late is too late for Wii U?
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