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According to Satoru Iwata at today's GDC keynote, Shigeru MIyamoto is known to pull random Nintendo developers into side rooms to try games other members of Nintendo is working on. Miyamoto forbids the kidnapped developer to be given any tips. Miyamoto has never been arrested for this, Iwata joked. "Where the kidnapped developer is happy, the team has succeeded." (ONE MORE CRAZY IMAGE OF THIS BELOW) Read more...

One thing I know that "Gears of War 2" lead creator, Cliff Bleszinski, and I have in common is that we both grew up playing Nintendo games.

He's got the famously documented "Super Mario Bros." high score printed in the first issue of Nintendo Power.

I've got an NES in the closet of my childhood bedroom with some SNES instruction manuals I saved for some reason.

And so I think Bleszinski and I are both attuned to what Nintendo's lead designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, and the many creators who worked under him, put into the company's best games. There's a certain style of gameplay, a certain feel. It has nothing to do with colorful graphics our springy sound effects. There's a certain way a Miyamoto game progresses. Not many other games have it. But some do, like "Portal," for example.

Of all the non-Nintendo games I've played this year so far, the only one that has that feel is "Gears of War 2." Bloody chainsaw battles aside, this game feels like something Miyamoto touched.

Here's why. Read more...

Should game developers and designers have their names on the boxes of the games they make?

We posed this question recently to EA CEO John Riccitiello, who explained why Steven Spielberg's name should be on a game box and why Will Wright's shouldn't.

We've read discussions from gamers arguing for and against the idea. Those against say there's too many people to name, that manuals and the end credits are enough and that's it not fair to single certain people out. Those for having names on boxes, including one David Jaffe, say that games should give credit like movies do because the creative and technical folks behind the project really make the game, and the name recognition allows game makers to have the credibility and leverage while making their way through this booming industry.

You can expand the "Boom Blox" images above to test our first example.

Now let's see what what the boxes of "Super Mario Galaxy," "God of War," "Halo 3" and "Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution" would look like if their creators were given credit... Read more...

Just minutes after the end of Nintendo's press conference, Stephen had a chance to speak with lead designer Shigeru Miyamoto. We'll have more from Miyamoto next week, but the answer to our last question just had to be shared.

We asked if Miyamoto could talk about Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's promise that Nintendo's internal "Mario" and "Zelda" teams are hard at work at new projects. When will we hear more about then?

"What I can say is that typically games like that take anywhere from two to three years to finish those up," said Miyamoto. "We do have the teams together and the teams are all working. The other thing that I can say is that in the past we haven't really had much opportunity to release two Mario titles or two Zelda titles on a single hardware system. Our plan is to try to do that with Wii. With that in mind, the teams are working hard at this point."

Exciting! Sounds like we have more "Mario" and "Zelda" to look forward to in the future (as if there was any doubt). And with that, we're off to the Sony press conference!

Last week I interviewed Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto about "Wii Fit." The interview will be used for an upcoming MTV News piece on the game.

But we can't fit everything on air and I wanted to give Nintendo fans and all Wii owners access to the full conversation before the game comes out on May 19.

Miyamoto talked to me about everything "Wii Fit" -- the Balance Board, the challenge of making an exercise game in a world of un-fit people, the connections between this game and things like "Brain Age," "Donkey Kong" and the Power Pad...

He even addressed how this game relates to "Smash Bros." designer Masahiro Sakurai's recent comment that it's become hard to make new character-based games.

And he took, head-on, the challenge from hardcore gamers who say "Wii Fit" is a bad thing.

An excerpt about Super Mario's connection to this game, or lack thereof:

MTV News: Would it have been going too far to put Mario in it and make it "Mario Fit"? Would that have ruined the feel you were trying to evoke with the game?

Miyamoto: We wanted to create it so that people of all ages could look at it and feel it was for them. I think doing that might have limited its ability.

Part One of this interview appears at MTV News.com. Part Two appears below. You can read them in either order.

Enjoy.

Read more...

I spent an hour yesterday hanging out with Nintendo's star game maker Shigeru Miyamoto for an interview about "Wii Fit" we'll be airing on MTV in the coming weeks (and that you'll get to read about at MTVNews.com).

We talked a great deal about "Wii Fit," and he gave me and the MTV News crew a fantastic demo of the game.

I had brushed up for the interview by reading everything from the NeoGAF forums to Miyamoto's "Wii Fit" interviews with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Those Iwata chats are so good because, as Miyamoto told me, the two men have lunch three times a week -- and Satoru Iwata remembers things.

I hope to have more to share from the interview early next week. For now, here's a treat for anyone out there caught up with terms like "non-games."

Me: Do you consider "Wii Fit" a video game?

Miyamoto: Well, yes, in my mind, I would say it is a video game.

I wasn't going to argue with him...

(Look below for one more picture from the interview, also including Nintendo's Bill Trinen translating on the mic)

Read more...

Following up last weeks Virtual Console release of the heralded "Super Mario Bros. 3," and on the cusp of the release of the next greatest thing in Mario's world, "Super Mario Galaxy," it's time for the ultimate breakdown of the top 10 greatest Mario games of all time.

Right off the bat, I sense that many of you may have some issues with the order of my choices [Editor's note: please send all hate mail to Jason], but you need to understand that I am an 8-bit, side-scroller traditionalist. "Super Mario Bros." changed my life, and because of that, I believe that Mario should never have left his 2-D world.

Also, I just want to be clear on the ground rules of my list:

1. These are "Mario Bros." games in the most traditional sense of the word. No spin-offs, no sports games; platformers and arcade games only.
2. Miyamoto-san is not a required component, and you will see where some of his greatest games fall.

Read more...

Over at MTV News I wrote up an interview with Dylan Cuthbert, the sharp developer of one of my favorite DS games last year ("Star Fox Command"), the best GBA game I've ever played that wasn't released in the U.S. ("Digidrive"), and a fun new racing game called "PixelJunk Racers" that's worth downloading for the PS3.

Hey, at least try the demo.

The column covers Cuthbert's ideas about the wild new "PixelJunk" series, but I kept getting distracted during the interview. I kept asking him about his past. Sorry, but I was fascinated.

See, Cuthbert has an amazing resume that includes, of all things, having his company, Q Games, develop the background silk ribbon graphic on the PS3 and made a lot of tech demos that helped launch the PS2 and PSP. Even cooler is the fact that he's one of the only -- maybe the only? -- westerner to work for Sony and Nintendo in Japan.

The man worked in a 40-man office with Miyamoto back in the SNES days and helped teach the great gamemaker English. He also shared this, excerpted from my column:

What was it like being seated at the far end of the EAD Nintendo office, seated near the bathroom where the rest of the team liked to smoke and test out their English? "They had very strong personalities. All very interesting." How interesting? "They were not the sort to go drinking every night, that kind of flamboyant. They were more very fun and outgoing ... a lot of that comes out in the game. If you've played 'Zelda,' the various postman characters tend to be based on people at Nintendo." What about Tingle, the most eccentric of the "Zelda" universe characters? "That's not someone I know. Someone told me he is based on a person at Nintendo. Where else are they going to get these crazy ideas?"

There's more of that in the column.

So you work for EA. You're proud of the games you make, but you also know that, quite frankly, you're no Shigeru Miyamoto.

At EA's E3 2007 hotel suite, you're showing "NBA Live" for the Wii, which doesn't have the best graphics of any version of the game.

But it does support EA Family Play, an optional stripped-down control scheme that lets the player control a game of basketball with just a few Wii remote gestures. It's a fun idea that an MTV News guy will later tell you he likes.

It's all going well. But then you get a surprise visitor!

It's Miyamoto himself, strolling into the EA booth at E3 2007 wearing a striking white blazer. And there's scruff-chinned Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo's head of all things "Zelda" these days at his side ... and a couple of other Nintendo development guys that any MTV News reporter nearby doesn't know the name of.

You explain that, in the EA Family Play mode, the computer controls character movement. Perhaps you say that that idea was inspired by the tennis game in "Wii Sports." Maybe you don't. But you do tell Miyamoto, through his translator, to keep that remote level.

You tell him to lift it up when he's ready for the guy with the ball to shoot. (Did you mention he could pass the ball to the next best player by tapping the A button?) He shoots.

He finishes shooting. Can you see his reflection in the TV screen? Does he approve?

He does! He's smiling. Even Reggie Fils-Aime is! (Reggie will soon be defeated by Miyamoto 8-5 in an "NBA Live" face-off.)

And then he goes to play "Skate.," which isn't even set to come out on the Wii. Maybe he wants a version of it on the Wii that would support the "Wii Fit" Balance Board.