Hayashida: Super Mario 3D Land is a gateway game
Super Mario 3D Land has a curious structure: it's very easy throughout the first eight worlds, and then it surprises the player with a "special" set of eight additional worlds, which test players with insane time limits, ever-pursuing "Shadow Marios" and every other trick EAD Tokyo could think of. ...
NPD's top 25 includes at least eight 3DS games
No 3DS games sold enough in the US to place in the top ten last month, according to NPD data. But 3DS sales were happening just under the surface, with many 3DS games making it into the (undisclosed) top 25 games of February. The NPD told Joystiq that "some examples" of the 3DS titles that made the ...
Long Mario is long: early Super Mario 3D Land concepts that didn't make it
Super Mario 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida opened his GDC talk with some concepts that didn't make it into the final game. They were ... wacky. The ideas included a "Huge Mario," who is so huge that you can only see the bottom half of his body on the screen, and a long Mario: "He has long arms ...
Nintendo 3DS sales hit 4.5 million units in first year, outperforms original DS
Nintendo announced this morning that its 3DS handheld will have sold 4.5 million units in the States when it celebrates its first birthday on March 27, 2011. Initial sales were slow for the glasses-free 3D device, but picked up the pace following last year's price cut. The company predicted late ...
Super Mario 3D Land, Resident Evil Revelations talks at GDC
Super Mario 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida will present a postmortem talk at GDC entitled "Thinking in 3D: The Development of Super Mario 3D Land." Attendees will be required to cross a pit of moving blocks while being chased by evil purple versions of themselves in order to attend. Or, what ...
Skyrim takes top honors at NY Video Game Critics Circle Awards
You'd have to be a fus-ro-dummy to think that Skyrim would be through with receiving accolades. At last night's New York Video Game Critics Circle Awards, the Bethesda Game Studios-developed RPG took home yet one more, earning the "Big Apple Award for Best Game" as decided by a cabal of NY-based ...
Iwata throws around the idea of paid Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart DLC
Nintendo head honcho Satoru Iwata hinted at the possibility of paid DLC for two of its 3DS titles, Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7, at a recent investor meeting. Speaking in terms of hardware and software lifespans, Iwata suggested (hypothetically) Nintendo could benefit from the addition of ...
Super Mario 3D Land breaks 5 million sold, Skyward Sword at 3.4 million
Nintendo elaborated on the "strong sales" for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Super Mario 3D Land today, in its list of million-selling titles for the last nine months. The Wii adventure sold 3.42 million units worldwide, of which 3.04 million took place outside of Japan. That makes it the ...
Monster Hunter Tri-G tops 1 million sold in Japan
You'd think that Japan would be fresh out of monsters at this point, considering that they've been ruthlessly hunting them without rest since 2004, but that's not the case. In fact, it seems the monster birth rate is so high over there, that over a million blademasters and gunners have been ...
Platinum's Kamiya hoping to announce his own game in 2012, Fumito Ueda loves Portal 2, and more
Since Bayonetta's late 2009/early 2010 debut, director Hideki Kamiya has gone relatively quiet. And while he remains that way for now, it seems we may see some movement from him this year, as he told 4Gamer in its big "looking back on 2011" Japanese developer feature (via Andriasang) that he ...
