Nintendo t-shirt design contest will be judged by Shigeru Miyamoto

In case you didn’t own enough gaming tees, Uniqlo has opening its annual tee design competition, this time centered around Nintendo. The UTGP’17 comes with a healthy $10,000 prize pot and the contest is open to global entries. (Yes, even from you.) Notably, the collaboration has ensured Nintendo’s legendary Shigeru Miyamoto will be act as a “special judge” for the competition. The winning (and runner-up) designs typically go on to be sold in Uniqlo stores, which adds an incentive worth even more than that prize pot. (Or not. Real talk; it is 10,000 bucks.)

Source: Uniqlo

Nintendo didn’t show the NX at E3 over copycat concerns

Away from the media’s prying eyes, Nintendo’s investor meeting allowed some people to ask some surprisingly frank questions — and glean a few more insights into where the company is going — whether that’s smartphones, new consoles, VR, theme parks, movies… or all the above. If you were surprised that Nintendo wasn’t showing its incoming NX console (currently pegged to launch in March 2017) at E3, the world’s biggest gameshow, earlier this month, there was at least a reason. According to Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, the company didn’t because it feared copycats if it revealed the console so far in advance of the launch.

宮本：通常はNXをE3で展示するべきだが、出さなかった。発売前に情報を出すと真似される心配がある。今年はゼルダだけを展示した。短時間では楽しめないソフトなので30分遊べるようにした。ゲーム雑誌からE3でNo.1の評価を受けた。

— あれっくす/6月29日 任天堂株主総会 (@NStyles) June 29, 2016

(Miyamoto had also said in a recent interview with AP that when it came to the new console, “there’s an idea that we’re working on. That’s why we can’t share anything at this point, and I don’t want to comment on the other companies. If it was just a matter of following advancements in technology, things would be coming out a lot quicker.”)

The legendary games director also got to take another look at VR at this year’s E3, but it “wasn’t what I expected.” The main challenge for Nintendo, apparently, is to ensure it’s comfortable to play for extended periods. According to (translated) tweets from the meeting: “We have the core technology…. We want to release something that can be played for long periods, carries value, and is affordable. We want parents to feel at ease.”

The company also highlighted a shift during its slide presentation. The recorded voice of Nintendo president Kimishima narrated: “Up until now, the goal was to expand the gaming population irregardless of age, gender, or experience. Now, we’re focusing on increasing exposure to Nintendo’s [characters and game titles].”

Then the investors got to the real-talk: “The Wii U is essentially being retired and the 3DS is past its peak; aren’t your business forecasts unrealistic?” President Kimishima responded by highlighting that sales of the portable have now passed 58 million, and that the company believed it could certainly make a profit by selling games to this install base. “We believe Pokemon will do so.” He also believes that its smart device titles (with Fire Emblem and Animal Crossing both on their way), will help the company make a profit.

Source: NStyles (Twitter), Cheesemeister3k (Twitter, translations)

The best way to play ‘Splatoon’ is with a hacked water gun

Researchers and makers over at Kougaku Navi in Japan have been working hard on a playable Splatoon gun since March, and the latest model really looks the part. It combines a Wii U GamePad, controls transplanted inside a Splatoon-themed water pistol and Sony’s head-mounted display to give you at least a little bit of movement freedom. It’s not perfect, but if you really want to play the game with a gun, it possibly the closest we’ll get.

#スプラトゥーン の新しいインタフェース作った pic.twitter.com/rqedtePWAY

— kougaku (@kougaku) June 20, 2016

While it may look like a fantastical VR version of the Nintendo’s hit shooter, it doesn’t go quite that far. However, that’s not to say it’s not brilliant on its own merit: Let’s break it down. The GamePad is the lynchpin here: it’s strapped to the player’s back to deliver vibrations to your very soul body as well as gyroscopic movement of your view to the HMD. Why is it on the back? It’s the best way of approximating where you’re aiming the gun. (Especially if you’re holding it two-handed — like a good ghostbuster.)

The gun contains controls to move forward, backwards and to shoot of course. It’s wirelessly connected to the pad, one of several major upgrades that came in after their second creation. It looks surprisingly playable for a very low-fi solution. Now I want to play. Can I play it? Guess I’ll dust off my Japanese dictionary and shoot the researchers an email. Take a more detailed (Google-translated) tour of the development process right here.

Via: Buzzfeed Japan

Source: Kougaku Navi

A one-button wearable defeats the purpose of Pokémon Go

Whenever you ask Pokémon players what they enjoy about playing the games, it usually involves the actual Pokémon in some way. Some enjoy training up their creatures to create the ultimate battle team; others really get into the breeding aspects of the game. In some titles you can even enter your Pokémon in beauty pageants where you dress them up in gaudy accessories. And of course, there’s the thrill of finding as many species as possible in order to achieve the ultimate goal: a complete Pokédex containing every single known Pokémon. These characters lie at the heart of most of Pokémon gameplay.

Which is what makes the new wearable, the Pokémon Go Plus, somewhat puzzling. It’s an optional add-on for the new mobile AR game Pokémon Go that reduces the action of capturing a Pokémon to a series of blinking lights. The device lights up and vibrates when a Pokémon is nearby. You push the button to attempt a capture, and the device will respond with a blue light to indicate success, or a red light for failure.

The idea is that by making it so that Pokémon trainers can participate in the game without having to pull out their phones, they’ll stay focused on the real world. If they’re on their way somewhere they can keep walking, and if they’re in the middle of a conversation they can keep on talking. However, Pokémon can be a bit of an obsession, and it’s unlikely that someone’s going to push the button and not going to want to pull out their phone. That’s because a lot of the joy of the game lies in the thrill of “What did you get?” ​

The button is also meant to save time, as Pokémon capture can be a bit of tricky business and often requires a bit of consideration: Which Poké Ball do you use? Would an item help? That thought process has been replaced by a strategy of “spray and pray,” which means that when you eventually pull out your phone you’ll probably still spend a bit of time pruning your roster of creatures. There are also bound to be occasional disappointments. What happens when the player encounters a rare Pokémon? Does the Go Plus automatically pick the best capture strategy? Or will players open up the app to find out their Go Plus tried to capture a Mew with a standard Poké Ball and failed? (Pro tip: You’re gonna want a Master Ball for that.)

There’s nothing wrong with trying to extend the Pokémon experience into the real world with some extra hardware. This isn’t the first time that a Pokémon game has flirted with add-ons, nor is the Go Plus the first device to encourage Pokémon trainers to be more active: The Pokémon Pikachu was a digital pet that also served as a pedometer, rewarding the user for walking by unlocking more in-game activities. Its successor, the Pokémon Pikachu 2 GS, could transfer data with Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal, essentially trading steps taken for in-game items. Years later the PokéWalker was bundled (for free) with copies of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, and served up a lot of the same functions. All of these pedometers are nice add-ons to the Pokémon experience, but they’re also gaming devices that can be actually used on their own. Your interaction with the Go Plus is limited to pushing a button and hoping it turns blue.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be a big deal if the Pokémon Go Plus were cheap and disposable; something you could try once and then forget about. But Nintendo doesn’t do cheap and disposable — though the game will be free at launch and doesn’t require the Go Plus to work, the device is sold separately for $35. That’s more than many people will ever spend on a mobile game. Heck, it’s about what you’d spend on the average 3DS game, Pokémon titles included. Casual users are likely to opt out, even though they’re the ones most likely to benefit from a wearable that makes it easier to get further in Pokémon Go without having to sink hours of effort into it.

You’d have to really like Pokémon to drop that much cash on such thing, never mind wear it openly. And there are plenty of people who will do just that. Hardcore trainers are always looking for new ways to improve their Pokémon experience, and may not mind the extra work the whole “throw a Poké Ball at everything” approach entails in terms of team management. But it’s also not what drew players to the franchise in the first place. If you really like Pokémon, wouldn’t you want more than just a blinking light?

Follow all the news from E3 2016 here!

Nintendo’s E3 ‘Zelda’ booth is almost as good as the game itself

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is easily one of the best games we’ve gotten to try at E3 this year. And in true Nintendo fashion, the company’s booth is nearly as impressive as the game itself. The company pulled out all the stops this year, building a huge Hyrule environment in its booth for attendees to stroll through. You could take photos with a wonderfully detailed Link statue, cover in fear from various goblins and stroll through the Temple of Time. There was even real grass all around the booth to help simulate the wonderfully alive world that you get to explore in the game.

Words don’t quite do it justice, though — check out this gallery of one of Nintendo’s most lavish E3 booths yet.

​The ‘Pokémon Go’ wearable costs $35

Next month, Nintendo is going to fulfill the childhood dreams of thousands of people who grew up in the 1990s: It’s releasing Pokémon Go, an app that lets you catch pocket monsters in the real world using your smartphone. That alone is pretty exciting for fans, but if you’ve been following the game you also know that the app is getting a companion wearable that lets you play it without looking at your phone. Today at E3, Nintendo gave us a price for the wearable: $34.99.

For an accessory to a smartphone game that’s a pretty steep price, matching the cost of a new 3DS title. For die hard players, however, the Pokémon Go Plus wearable might be worth it: it’s the only way to play the game without pulling out your smartphone. Using it sounds pretty easy — if the wearable is blinking blue, there’s a Pokémon near you. Players can press the button to try to catch it. A rainbow light pattern means success, while a blinking red light denotes failure. Simple. Effective. Casual. Still kind of expensive.

On the other hand, there’s no other way to casually catch Pokémon during your morning jog. Nintendo didn’t give a hard release date for the app itself, but said the wearable will be out at the end of July. If you’ve been waiting for this one, you won’t have to wait much longer.

​Nintendo’s ‘Ever Oasis’ is a dungeon crawler in the desert

Okay, Nintendo may have said it was only bringing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokémon Sun and Moon to E3, but we all knew something else would show up during the show. Well, here it is — Ever Oasis, a brand-new action RPG for the Nintendo 3DS.

At glance, Ever Oasis looks kind of like a cross between Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy — tasking players with assembling parties of adventurers, exploring dungeons, solving puzzles and building up a town in the heat of a desert oasis. Believe it or not, that odd combination of game elements actually makes sense: Grezzo, the studio behind Over Oasis, is also the company Nintendo used to port Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask to the 3DS. And its director? Koichi Ishii, a man famous for working on Final Fantasy and the Seiken Densetsu (Legend of Mana) games.

Nintendo hasn’t given us a release date for the new game, but if town-management team-based dungeon crawling sounds like your bag, keep tabs on this one.

​’Mario Party: Star Rush’ doesn’t make you wait your turn

The mini-game mayhem of Mario Party can be a lot of fun, but the franchise has always suffered from its board game origins: when it’s not your turn, there’s nothing to do but wait. With Mario Party: Star Rush, that changes — Nintendo’s next entry in the series does away with individual player turns in favor of a more hectic group “scramble” turn. In other words, Mario Party is getting a fast-paced upgrade, and that’s a good thing.

Nintendo kind of snuck the announcement of the new 3DS game in under the rug, hiding it at the end of a press release for the new Zelda game — but the game looks like a fresh take on a old idea. The group mini-games are still the main focus, but the game board no longer has set paths. Instead, characters can move across at tiled landscape at will, and every player moves simultaneously. This opens the game up to more robust strategies, like choosing to start the ‘boss fight’ minigame right away.

If you’re not a Toad fan however, there is a trade-off: Star Rush’s main mode is called Toad Scramble, and everybody plays as the anthropomorphic mushroom man. The other Mario characters still play a major role as recruitable Ally characters, but aren’t technically playable themselves. I guess that settles the argument of who gets to be Luigi.

Mario Party: Star Rush will be available on 3DS on November 4th.

‘Breath of the Wind’ is the boldest ‘Zelda’ game in years

Nintendo wasn’t lying, or even exaggerating. There really has never been a Legend of Zelda game quite like Breath of the Wind, and the series should be all the better for it. I’ve extensively played (if not quite finished) every major Zelda game, but that familiarity with the series rarely came in handy throughout the 45-minute demo I played at E3 today. I was confused and disoriented, not quite familiar with how I should be interacting with my surroundings — much like Link himself after being awakened in a shrine with no clear direction on where to go.

That’s not a bad thing — in fact, it’s just what the series needed. Ocarina of Time set up a play style that the subsequent Zelda games have rarely deviated from. New moves were added, controls were tightened, but it all felt like iterations on the same model. In Breath of the Wind, that’s largely out the window. Yes, you can still lock onto enemies, parry attacks with your shield, dodge and slash with your sword, but there’s a wide variety of different weapons at your disposal now. You can pick up a broken tree branch and use it to attack for starters, beat down a few goblins, steal their clubs, grab a wood-cutting ax and more.

It’s easy to swap between weapons, which is good, because there’s a new durability system at play here. Every weapon you have can get damaged and eventually break if you’re not careful. And if your goblin club is nearly broken, you can just chuck it at an enemy to do double damage before it finally falls apart.

The world of Hyrule is even more significantly changed than combat. As Nintendo has mentioned already, Breath of the Wind is a massive open-world that you can explore in any way you want. Whatever you see, you can go to — enemies or some environmental challenges might stop you along the way, but you can try. I only got to see a portion of the Great Plateau in the 20 minutes of I had to explore the area, and Nintendo says that’s only one percent of the game’s total area.

Beyond just size is what you can do in Hyrule. First off, you can jump whenever you want, only the second time you’ve been able to do so in a Zelda game. (1989’s Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link was the first.) You can also climb trees and cliffs and basically interact with the environment in a host of ways — once you get your hands on that axe, you can start felling trees, for example.

And once that tree is down, you can chop it up and collect wood; once you take down an enemy, you can harvest its weapons or armor to make a shield. The amount of stuff you can collect in the environment is vast and varied, and it’ll all come in handy. In particular, you’re going to want to keep your eyes peeled for various food items, because you won’t find hearts in bushes anymore. You’ll instead need to collect food from around the world and save it for when you need a heart boost — you can even combine ingredients and cook it to get a bigger boost.

This is all to say that there’s tons to do in Breath of the Wind before you even dig into the game’s story. But fortunately, for those who want to get into the meat of the plot, it isn’t long before Link starts getting nudged down his path. The game may not hold your hand in terms of teaching you mechanics, but it doesn’t take long to get into the story if that’s how you want to play it. Following the direction of a voice in his head, Link soon raises a variety of shrine all around the world of Hyrule to start exploring. At a high level, it looks like these shrines will be the game’s version of dungeons, but you can play them in any order you want.

You’ll meet an old man on the plateau (who looks suspiciously like the King of Hyrule in The Wind Waker), and he tells you that you’ll need his little paragliding tool to get off the plateau without falling to your death. He then asks you to head into the shire that’s accessible on the plateau to get some treasure you can barter for that paraglider. So that first encounter is a bit scripted, and unfortunately I didn’t actually get to play the Shrine and see what comes next, but a Nintendo representative assured me that you don’t need to follow the game in any prescribed path.

Ultimately, there’s enough familiar here to make the game feel like a classic entry into the Zelda series — not 15 minutes into the game, there was the first glance of the malevolent spirit of Ganon encircling Hyrule Castle. But the massive, interactive, living world coupled with the mysterious introduction to the story (Link is resurrected after 100 years!) makes for a game that feels significantly different than any Zelda that preceded it.

What’s perhaps most impressive is that Nintendo pulled this off not by putting Hyrule mostly underwater or by moving things into the clouds, as it did in The Wind Waker and Skyward Sword, respectively. The classic overworld is still here — it’s just more expansive, varied and interactive than ever before. If Nintendo can keep this feeling alive throughout the entirety of the game, the company will have managed to pull off the biggest reinvention of the series since the release of Ocarina of Time nearly 20 years ago.