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Platinum Games' Hideki Kamiya has a new video game out. It's not getting perfect scores or perfect reviews. Yeah, like he cares. Here's one of video game's most expressive game designers brushing off criticism as only he can. Read more...

Square Enix consistently protects its trademarks and copyrights. And still people consistently use them without permission. So it's perhaps not a surprise that an artist selling a Final Fantasy action figure series was shut down when Square's lawyers told his 3D printer to cease and, yes, desist.Read more...

0x10c (often pronounced "ten to the c") was for a time the next big thing from Mojang and Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of Minecraft. It was to be a sprawling sandbox space adventure, but Persson put the project on hold back in April, citing creative difficulties, and then this week said he'd shelved it altogether.Read more...

A portion of an NES interview with former Nintendo employee, Kyle Mercury...

NES: Was it difficult for employees to be critical of Nintendo’s policies even if the problems were quite clear? And did that negatively impact the decision making in promoting/marketing the GameCube effectively?

KM: It absolutely was. Again, Nintendo is a very proud company and they were facing a market shift unlike any in their history. The Marketing team had to walk a fine line of keeping the energy up, keeping people excited about the future, and implementing solutions that tried to resolve the really glaringly obvious problems of the present. Too far in either direction and you’re either seen as sadly naive or a cynical doomsayer. For me, this meant staying sincerely passionate about the brand (and I was), but being honest about the position we were in. I was fortunate to have that mix of philosophies, but a lot of people didn’t and that made for a very trying experience when it came to developing initiatives. A huge number of people refused to admit there was a problem and many of the cynics levied the blame against the consumer, rather than Nintendo’s own policies. Marketing was doing the best with what we had. We weren’t making the software, or the hardware, we were just bringing it to the people and doing what we could to keep an notoriously fickle and increasingly disenfranchised audience engaged in a time where amazing new options were everywhere.

NES: Recently, there’s been a lot of bad news about the Wii U. The console is even selling slightly less than the GameCube according to IGN. Right now, based on Wii U’s poor sales performance, it seems like casual gamers (or expanded audience) who made the Wii popular have abandoned Nintendo with the Wii U.

Since you worked with Nintendo during the GameCube era, what do you take from all of this? Do you see any similarities between the GameCube era and the Wii U era?

KM: There are certainly parallels. The Wii performed what was, at the time, a remarkable feat: It drastically lowered the barrier to entry to video games. Price, ease of use, novel and broadly appealing content, innovative technologies without the fear of complexity that usually comes from them, disregard for traditional demographics… It was a perfect recipe and something the video game industry sorely needed. The GameCube had elements of those things, but it’s not what the market was looking for in the time of the PS2. Nintendo’s mobile division (especially backed by the Pokémon money machine) saved the day and there was only gain to be had with the Wii.

The Wii U also has elements of that whole, but once again it’s not what the market is looking for. It has sacrificed the simplicity of the Wii, but hasn’t caught the sheer hardware or media power of Microsoft or Sony. Casual gamers have moved to phones and tablets which are unsurpassed in convenience of play and cost. Title offerings aren’t exactly bold and with more and more 3rd party developers, studios that defined the last generation of games, reducing or removing support for the Wii U and a sadly lacking indie development scene… what’s the value proposition? The Wii thrived because it changed gamers expectations. The GameCube and Wii U suffered because gamers expectations have changed.

The GameCube at least benefitted from 3rd party developers still looking to push boundaries and create a-typical experiences. Games that could take chances because we hadn’t quite reached the almost “AAA or Indie” only state we’re in now. The middle class of gaming has slowly been whittled away this past generation, though I would argue there is an exception to be made for the still Nintendo dominated handheld market.

so I've had it up to HERE with these weaboo anum *crag*s who feel the need to deride the Lion King all the time because it apparently ripped off of Kimba the White Lion

well, no shit, the Lion King ripped off Kimba, but that doesn't mean jack shit when The Lion King was an incredibly beautiful and brilliant milestone for the art of animation

everything in that film is wonderful and lovingly crafted by masters and stands as one of the greatest if not the greatest examples of the art even today

whereas Kimba's animation was primitive even by 1960s standards

i mean, look at that shit; we have two frames of animation passed off as "dialogue"

it's worse than post-Tom and Jerry Hanna-Barbera made-for-television shit like Yogi Bear, and that was already budget as hell

A pet sim/adventure game featuring talking dogs? PlayStation Vita Pets bounds through the forest next year to rescue the unfortunate handheld gaming device trapped in the well.Read more...