Culture
Team Ninja’s Itagaki on choosing DS over PSP
Sure, he wears sunglasses at night, but Team Ninja’s executive producer Tomonobu Itagaki’s got game, man. He’s also highly opinionated and confident and dresses like a Japanese Michael Jackson, which can put some people off, but any man that can turn the DS on its ear (literally) and deliver a touch-based Ninja Gaiden game is worth listening to for a spell or two. This interview ...
Nintendo Spotting: Accessorizing edition
Oh, how jealously obsessed I am this morning of the fairer sex. What, with the controlling of the hearts and minds of men, and all the swishin’ and hair tossing, how could you not be, right? And then there’s this. An accessory that has me turning positively Hulk smash green with envy because I’ll never get to enjoy them — save a mid-90’s revival of the left-ear-only p...
Wii owners are irrelevant to ‘enthusiast sites’
Via the NeoGAF forums, courtesy of HylianTom, we have news today that 1up.com is taking a calculated risk and will not be focusing on Nintendo or those people who own its systems. You can judge the grammatically challenged exchange (not because of Tom, as you’ll see) for yourself after the jump.
The downfall of the Adventure Game?
A new article over at the Escapist got me a tad excitable today because it features one my favorite genres: the adventure game. More specifically, it deals with how, over the years since text-based adventures were the norm, the adventure game has become, in a word, cluttered. The Escapist’s Atul Varma: Adventure games, at their core, are about solving puzzles. The fun lies in figuring out ho...
Culture comes to the Wii
OK, so calling it culture may be a bit over the top. And if there’s anything I’m not these days, it’s over the top. … Anyway, Viva Pinata and Samba de Amigo (sans maracas) are headed to the Wii. Game|Life: Apparently Microsoft isn’t satisfied with putting their first-party, Rare-developed franchise Viva Pinata on the Nintendo DS: they’d just like to concede the ...
Does Japan unfairly shun American games?
While on the topic of Japanese games, Game Trailers tries to answer the following question in round table fashion: Does Japan unfairly shun American games? In the video clip, analyst Michael Pachter asserts that no Western game has sold more than a million copies in Japan, whereas several Japanese games have done precisely that here in the US. Assuming his facts are right, he’s got a point. ...
Major Japanese contributions to video games
I wrote an article for GamePro last week in which I documented the major Japanese contributions to video games since the birth of the medium. Here’s a relevant snippet for Infendo Nation: 1889 – Nintendo is formed in late September by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda cards which are used for several popular Japanese games. Over the years the company will transform into on...
Nintendo Spotting: Wii car finishes 2nd edition
Some cool pics of NASCAR’s new Wii car, driven by Greg Biffle, can be found over at bits, bytes, pixels and sprites. And it means absoltuely nothing in the grand scheme of things, but… Luckily I had the Nintendo Wii car to cheer on! (There was also a Halo 3 car but it spent the 1st half of the race at the tail end and the 2nd half in the garage). What made the race work out so well is ...
It’s time to retire game rankings
I doubt they realize what they’ve done. The couldn’t possibly, unless it was some kind of grand satire experiment where they themselves were trying to epitomize — using a mirror — what was wrong with their medium. A certain web site today gave Halo 3 (which I am 100% positive will be amazing for a Halo game) a perfect score. They weren’t the first, and certainly won&#...
How would you remake Kid Icarus?
I don’t know if it’s due to a lazy Friday afternoon, or because people were discussing Retro Studios next big move earlier today in David’s post on Infendo or what, but today I started thinking about how a developer would go about remaking Kid Icarus. At first, for some crazy reason, I imagined a FPS, but that quickly died out. It wouldn’t make any sense, as I would want to...
Movie Review – The King Of Kong
Infendo Newsletter editor, Chris, reviews the recent documentary The King Of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters I live in a fairly unknown town in the Midwest. When a movie, such as The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, gets such a limited release, it would probably not be showing anywhere near my town. So surprised I was to find that for one weekend only, a theater nearby would be showing this movie....
Future to publish Nintendo Power starting Oct.
As expected, Nintendo announced a new publisher for Nintendo Power today, Future US, the same company that operates Next-Gen.biz, Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, PSM: Independent PlayStation Magazine, and Official Nintendo Magazine UK. No word if all the editors are getting canned, but the first new issue under Future’s direction goes on sale next month. The result largely ends up as a sec...