14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo has some big, big franchises going for it which have been powering its success over the years, like Zelda and Super Mario. The thing is that the driving force behind most, if not all of them, is a single man, Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary videogame designer who has already received several life time awards from the industry.
He has recently talked to Stephen Totilo, from the MTV Multiplayer gaming blog, and the most important disclosure made during the interview is that Miyamoto is not very content with how Zelda and Mario were handled the last year. He said that “What I've been saying to our development teams recently is that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was not a bad game, by any means. But, still, it felt like there was something missing. And while, personally, I feel like Super Mario Galaxy was able to do some things that were very unique, at the same time, from another perspective, certain elements of it do feel somewhat conservative”. In other words, the massive innovation that Nintendo relied on, in both the hardware and software fields, was just not there.
He hopes that the new games in both franchises will be a nice surprise for all the fans, as the teams are really pushing the envelope of what has been done. The point is to come up with a unique idea and use it to build a great game. Miyamoto mentioned releases like Portal, Mirror's Edge and Spore as games which managed to create interesting experiences with unique ideas at their core.
But before a new Zelda or Mario, Miyamoto talked a bit about the revival of Punch-Out! saying that “It's a game that people have been wanting for a very long time and we've had a number of people who have wanted to make a Punch-Out! game. I'm working on that game as a producer. It will feel very classic. But at the same time, with the 3D polygons and the polygonal rendering of the characters, I think is going to make for some very nice cut-scenes and a little bit deeper story”.