Tag: Nintendo
Talking Point How Does Microsoft's Purchase Of Activision Blizzard Impact Nintendo?
The latest extraordinary power move by MS
Microsoft caused a stir last year when it confirmed that its intended purchase of Zenimax had gone through, known better as the Bethesda deal. For over $7 billion Microsoft picked up Bethesda and a range of talented studios, with lots of discussion at the time over the impact of franchises like Fallout,...
News Nintendo Minute's Kit And Krysta Say Goodbye In Their "Final Episode"
Update: Krysta is leaving Nintendo
Update [Sat 15th Jan, 2022 00:45 GMT]: In an update via social media, Krysta has announced she has decided to move on from Nintendo. Here's her full statement: "After over 14 years, I've decided to leave Nintendo. To be able to work at my dream job for so long and be part of some of the most memorable moments in...
News Nintendo Warns Fans About Fake Websites Impersonating The Company, Says It'll Take Action
Nintendo asks consumers to be careful
Nintendo has published a statement warning consumers of fake web pages designed to look like the company's online store, highlighting the dangers of submitting your details to such sites. The statement (Japanese) talks about a specific case recently discovered by the company; the fake website in question uses...
News Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 'Second Wind' Mod Videos Targeted By Nintendo
"Nintendo attacked my channel and took down 40 videos"
It appears Nintendo is at it again, this time targeting YouTube videos focused on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 'Second Wind' expansion mod. YouTube channel Waikuteru has been on the receiving end - with fears there'll be nothing left if it continues. Waikuteru is now asking fans of...
Random Mario And Bowser Are Being Used To Promote The PS5 In China
The real PlayStation icons...
When you think about Sony's PlayStation brand, what mascots come to mind? Some obvious ones would be Ratchet & Clank, Kratos, or perhaps even Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn - but why not Mario and Bowser? While you wouldn't normally associate the most famous video game character in the world with the PlayStation...
Random Metroid Prime Hunters Composer Reflects On The Stressful Times At Nintendo
"It was stressful to work on such high-profile games"
Lawrence Schwedler spent over 13 years at Nintendo Software Technology as an audio director, composing music for games like Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS, Wave Race: Blue Storm on the GameCube, Pokémon Puzzle League on N64 and even the Chibi Robo series. While it was "great and happy" most of...
Reminder The Luigi's Mansion LEGO Sets Are Now Available
"Grab your Poltergust and get ready"
Update [Tue 4th Jan, 2022 04:30 GMT]: The three Luigi's Mansion LEGO sets are now available. Here's your reminder: Original article [Sun 31st Oct, 2021 12:05 GMT]: Surprise! Nintendo and LEGO will be expanding their Super Mario series with the announcement of three brand new sets based on the Luigi's Mansion...
Feature 10 Overlooked GameCube Gems You Must Play
Small(ish) library, BIG surprises!
The North American 20th anniversary of Nintendo's cube-y console is upon us and we’ve come to realise that two entire decades is long enough for people to either forget the GameCube’s charming boxy shape or even grow to adulthood without ever handling Nintendo’s handled hardware. "0 years is also plenty of...
Feature Masayuki Uemura, The Nintendo Engineer Who Helped Define The Modern Games Console
A look back over the career of the NES and SNES' lead architect
The sad news broke today that Masayuki Uemura, the lead architect on the NES and Super NES consoles, died on 6th December at the age of 78. Uemura was an instrumental figure in the formation of Nintendo as the video game company we know and love today — his hardware design credits...
Feature Nintendo Hotliner Life 1990–93: Manning The Phones During The Console Wars
The curious tale of a Nintendo UK Hotliner
“Video Game Enthusiasts Wanted!” teased the advert in the Portsmouth Evening News. Other than a phone number, this mysterious call to arms offered no further information. But as a gaming obsessed 18-year-old looking for a job after finishing a BTEC in Computer Studies, I was mesmerised by the...
Feature The Man Making Brand New NES Games In 2021
Alastair Low explains 8-bit love and how he's making games more dyslexia-friendly
Alastair Low hadn’t even been born when the NES was originally released in the UK. But he spent much of his childhood joyously playing on Nintendo’s 8-bit wonder machine after picking one up for a pittance at a car boot sale in the mid-1990s. “I remember getting...
Feature Best WarioWare Microgames Ever
Our Top 25, but what's at number WAAAAH-n?
With the latest in Nintendo’s utterly bonkers WarioWare series – WarioWare: Get It Together! — recently hitting shelves, we thought it seemed like a ripe old time to have a look back across the entire series and pick out the 25 very best Microgames of the whole thousand-odd we’ve seen so far...
Random Get Nostalgic For The Wii Days With Nintendo's E3 2006 Conference, Upscaled
Excite Truck ftw
While the last couple of E3s haven't been quite what we're used to for obvious reasons, it's the memories of glorious summers past which keep our enthusiasm for the event alive. Earlier this year we took a look at a handful of Nintendo's most iconic E3 moments, but researching for that article and rewatching Nintendo's conferences...
News Nintendo's Boss Shuntaro Furukawa Warns Of Switch Supply Issues In 2022
"we will not be able to produce as many"
Last week, we heard from Intel's boss how global chip shortages were likely to continue all the way through to 2023, and now we've got another update, this time from Nintendo's president Shuntaro Furukawa. According to Furukawa, year-end sales of the Switch have been quite strong (especially for the OLED...
Random Shigeru Miyamoto Hijacks Nintendo's Twitter Account
To thank fans for voting Nintendo in Japan's TV poll
Nintendo fans on Twitter got quite the surprise yesterday when a tweet by the official company account sent out a message from the creator of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto. Yes, in a short tweet - Miyamoto took control of the company's Twitter account (don't worry, we're sure he had permission) to...
Talking Point Remember When People Thought Switch Would Fail?
Nintendo is DOOMED
2016 is a long, long, loooong time ago now, but I'll try to take you back to October 20th, 2016, the day the Nintendo Switch was announced. The US Presidential Election was looming, Brexit was still a massive question mark, and Disney's Moana, Disney's Rogue One, Disney's Captain America: Civil War, and Disney's Finding Dory were...
News Japan's Top 100 Console Games Of All Time Revealed, According To A Nationwide TV Network Poll
50,000 players voted
The Japanese television network TV Asahi ran a special broadcast yesterday where 50,000 players around the nation voted for their favorite console (and handheld) video games in a poll. The votes were there compiled into a "Top 100" list and Nintendo took out the top position - with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild...
News Nintendo's eShop Experienced Outages Over Christmas (Again)
Did you get an error message?
If you've had any issues over the past few days accessing the Nintendo eShop, creating Nintendo accounts, using certain subscription services, downloading or playing games online - you weren't alone. In the lead-up to the holiday period, Nintendo (kind of) warned everyone they might experience some issues, and sure...
Feature A Look Back At Nintendo's Long History Of Art, Music And Game Making Software
Over 35 years of programmin', paintin' and makin'
Between the Super Mario Maker games, Miitopia, and now the soon to be released Game Builder Garage, the last decade has seen Nintendo embrace the creativity of its players to produce fun content for all to experience. It’s amazing to see the creativity of the communities that form around these...
Feature From Famicom Disk System To Switch - The Evolution Of Nintendo's Miis
Love Mii do
Ah, the Mii. We remember when we first made our own Miis back in 2006. Back then the most character customisation we had experienced was probably with The Sims, so making Miis of our friends, family and favourite video game characters was a fun pastime. It's a real shame, then, that Nintendo stepped away from their Miis, presumably in an...
Quiz Nintendo Winter Wonderlands - Can You Name All These Festive Levels?
Name that game!
Note: We're republishing this festive quiz from last year. If you partook previously... well, you should get top marks, then, shouldn't you! If you're relaxing over the holidays and fancy putting your gaming grey matter to the test, feel free to check out our selection of brain-teasing quizzes on The Legend Of Zelda, Mario
Feature Takaya Imamura - The Man Who Named Majora's Mask And Created Nintendo's Coolest Characters
And Slippy Toad
On 20th January 2021, Nintendo artist, designer, producer and director Takaya Imamura posted his first ever tweet announcing that he was leaving the company after 32 years. Imamura isn't retiring — he's only 54 — but his departure signals the end of an impressive Nintendo career spanning the 16-bit era to Switch. While mascots...
Soapbox Retro Nintendo Games Cost Too Much, But Nostalgia Is Expensive
Second-hand Nintendo games are notoriously pricey, but why?
The year is 1999. I'm in a GAME, in Loughborough town centre. The grey carpet is sticky, the awful fluorescent lights are so dim I can barely see, and everything sort of smells like stale sweat. I'm standing in the N64 section with my brother, both of us clutching a small fortune in pocket...
Feature Clammy Consoles, Humid Horrors, And Retro Regrets
Don't try this at home
A few years ago a clever, witty, and shockingly beautiful Nintendo Life writer had to spend a few boring days trawling numerous websites searching for a brand new and eye-wateringly expensive wafer-thin HDTV with which to replace their ageing and sadly then only semi-functional slightly less wafer-thin HDTV. This new triumph...
Video We Have An EarthBound Conspiracy Theory
Fuzzy pickles, fuzzy pickles, fuzzy pickles
It's an old chestnut now. Way back in 2006 it was disappointing — if not surprising — that Mother 3 wasn't brought to the West, but after Lucas came to Super Smash Bros. in 2015 it seemed like a foregone conclusion that we'd see the third part of the EarthBound trilogy officially localised at some...
News Global Chip Shortages And Supply Issues To Continue Into 2023, Says Intel Boss
"exploding demand has persisted"
We've already heard how supply and production issues in the tech industry won't be improving anytime soon, and now Intel chief Pat Gelsinger has issued yet another reminder that the shortage of semiconductors will likely continue into 2023. "The overall semiconductor shortage is quite significant and the...
And so Kinect was born
Xbox's new six-part documentary series celebrating the 20 year history of Microsoft's console gaming division has a lot of company secrets and industry insights and one highlight from a Nintendo perspective is a brief segment about motion gaming in Chapter 5. In the holiday 2006, Nintendo launched its new motion-controlled...
News Rabbids Coding App Partners With Digital Schoolhouse For Free Learning Project
Resources also utilise games like Super Mario Maker 2
Rabbids Coding is a free app launched back in 2019 by Ubisoft, which can be downloaded for free on PC or mobile. In essence a puzzle game, it offers a learning experience to budding young programmers as you construct commands to the Rabbids to get them through a number of stages. It's now been...
Soapbox Nintendo's Game Awards No-Show Proves It Simply Doesn't Need Anyone Else
More Direct-to-you than ever before
Last week was The Game Awards 2021, an event organised and hosted by Geoff Keighley that's supposedly designed to bring together the entire industry for a general celebration of video games — and some awards, too (after all, it's there in the name). Opinions will vary, of course, but perhaps for Nintendo fans...
News Nintendo Is Investing In Office Space In Japan To House More Game Development
Nintendo HQ 2: HQ Reloaded
Once upon a time, Nintendo was a little playing card company, located in a regular-sized office building in Kyoto, Japan. They're a bit bigger now, and you may have seen their boring-but-iconic Kyoto headquarters before: It's a big white cube covered in windows. But it looks like there's about to be a second big cube...
News Nintendo Has Added Paper Mario 64 To Switch Online's Expansion Pack
See how the original Paper Mario adventure unfolds
Update [Fri 10th Dec, 2021 08:00 GMT]: Paper Mario has now been added to NSO's N64 Expansion Pack service. Enjoy! Original article [Fri 3rd Dec, 2021 01:30 GMT]: Nintendo will be adding a N64 classic to its Switch Online Expansion Pack service next week on 10th December. It's the original Paper...
News Nintendo's Switch OLED Dock Can Now Be Purchased Separately
Buy one today!
Back when the Nintendo Switch OLED model was announced, Nintendo revealed the dock would be made available for purchase as a standalone item. It's compatible with the standard Nintendo Switch, but it does not include an HDMI cable, AC adapter or packaging. One other catch is it's not being made available at retail stores and is only...
News Nintendo Switch Online Hit By Amazon Web Service Outages
"We apologize for the inconvenience"
Update [Wed 8th Dec, 2021 05:30 GMT]: According to Nintendo's customer support account on Twitter and network maintenance webpage, these issues have now been resolved: "The failure related to the Nintendo Switch network service in general, which occurred around 0:35 on December 8, has been recovered. We...
Random Nintendo Has Already Let One Celebrity Play Pokémon Legends: Arceus
Watching a family member play counts, right?
In the lead-up to the holiday season, Nintendo has been getting celebrities to promote the Switch and its extensive library of games in brief commercials. So far, there have been actors like Neil Patrick Harris and Jessica Alba playing games like
Video The GameCube Is Over 20 Years Old, And Blimey Do We Have Memories Of It
It's not even a cube
2021 marks the GameCube's 20th anniversary, which means it's already been hitting pubs in the UK for two years by now, but being the old group of sods on the video team that we are, we remember it when it was merely a proverbial babe in Nintendo's proverbial (thankfully) arms. At 20 Nintendo's cuboid console hasn't even been...
Feature The Best (And Worst) Of Nintendo At The Game Awards - Zelda, Smash, And More Zelda
Two Nintendo franchises are top of the Keighley tree
Nintendo often marches to the beat of its own DK bongos, hoarding its own first-party announcements for sporadic Nintendo Direct presentations – bar one exception, that is: Geoff Keighley’s yearly awards bash, The Game Awards. Over the years we’ve seen some surprising announcements and...
Guide Handmade Nintendo Christmas Gifts And Crafts - Festive Gaming Stocking Fillers
A crafted world, indeed
Making an early start on your Christmas shopping this year, are you? That's probably a good idea given one thing and another. Fortunately, there are plenty of Nintendo-related gifts for your loved ones that are only a click away this holiday season. From ugly gamer Christmas sweaters (the sweaters are ugly, not the gamers, of...
Guide Nintendo Christmas Gift Ideas - Art Prints And Posters
Brighten up your wall with these charming Nintendo posters
What gifts are you getting for your loved ones this Christmas? With so many gamer gifts and trinkets to choose from, it's a tricky question, for sure. If you're looking for something classy that's not going to clutter the place, perhaps one of these lovely Nintendo art prints or posters...
Guide Christmas Jumpers And Ugly Sweaters For Gamers - Pokémon, Mario, Sonic, And More
Garish gaming garments to keep you warm this Xmas
You hear that? That jingle bell-tinged drone is the sound of festive inevitability! In amongst the socks and the boxes of deodorant you'll be gifted this holiday season, there's a high probability there'll be an ugly festive jumper in there somewhere. Yes, even though granny's turned the thermostat...
Random This Accidental "Cursed" Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Mod Turns Everything Into A Nightmare
BOTW's Hyrule has a Dark World, too
We've all had that moment where we're messing around with a game's files, and we accidentally turn the world into a strange, wrong-coloured nightmare, where all the trees are screaming and the sky is as black as a void, right? No? Ah, you're missing out. Postposterous — whose video about Link's sunburn we...
News Nintendo Switch System Update 13.2.0 Is Now Live, Here Are The Full Patch Notes
Super stable
After some rather exciting firmware updates like Bluetooth Audio support, dock updates, and the release of the 'Expansion Pack' tier for the NSO, Version 13.2.0 focuses on stability improvements and enhancing the overall user experience. Here are the full patch notes, courtesy of Nintendo's official support page: Ver. 13.2.0...
News Updated Nintendo Policies Push For Increased Transparency And Diversity
Also expands procedures for dismissal of Directors
Recent weeks and months have brought a lot of attention to allegations of misconduct at Activision Blizzard, with a leaked email from Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser reacting and explaining that "every company in the industry must create an environment where everyone is respected and...
Video Boundary Break Takes Another Look At The "Out Of Bounds Secrets" In Wii Sports
Travel back to 2006
If you played the Wii back in the day, at some point you likely tried out the included launch title Wii Sports. It was a mix of sports that demonstrated the capabilities of the system's Wii Remote and motion controls at the time. If you've ever wondered what's beyond the boundaries of the game, then you might want to take a look...
News Nintendo Of America Employee Says Goodbye After More Than A Decade
"I will remain a Nintendo fan and gamer forever"
Last month, a report from Kotaku revealed Nintendo had shut down its branches located in California and Toronto. At the time, it was also confirmed Nintendo of America's SVP of Sales and Marketing, Nick Chavez, would be moving on. Chavez has now taken to social media to thank Nintendo for his time at...
Random Xbox's 20th Anniversary 'Metaverse' Acknowledges The Time It Tried To Acquire Nintendo
And the rest is history
Update: Our friends at Eurogamer have gone an extra step and transcribed part of the letter from within Xbox's virtual museum. The letter was sent by Xbox's Rick Thompson to NoA's business boss Jacqualee Story and attempts to set up a meeting with Nintendo's boss Hiroshi Yamauchi and hardware chief Genyo Takeda. "Dear...
Poll What's The Best Spider-Man Game On Nintendo Systems?
With great power comes great crashy bang bang
The internet has been a-tinglin' our spidey senses recently with rumours about the upcoming movie Spider-Man: No Way Home flying around social media. Will Maguire and Garfield return for this one? And, perhaps more importantly, will the film be a good one — like the last one with Doc Ock — or will it...
Random Reggie Fils-Aimé Admits He Bought Xbox Over GameCube As He Hosts 20th Anniversary Panel
"I actually didn't buy a GameCube until I was already part of Nintendo"
Reggie Fils-Aimé has done all sorts of things since he retired from his role as Nintendo of America's president in 2019, and his latest temporary gig is well worth watching if you love learning about the history of the video game industry. The man who made a name for himself...
"They run counter to my values as well as Nintendo’s beliefs"
Update: Nintendo has now officially confirmed this in a PR response to Fanbyte: “We can confirm the content of Doug Bowser’s internal email to Nintendo of America staff is accurate. We have nothing further to share on this topic.” Nintendo of America's president Doug Bowser...
Video The Varied And Fascinating Sources Of Inspiration For Metroid
A hugely revealing look by "Critical Kate" Willært
With Metroid Dread arriving to much acclaim in October, and by Nintendo's own description bringing an end to the original saga of the series, plenty of eager fans have been poring over the lore and detail of the franchise. A recent video by "Critical Kate" Willært (above) gives a fascinating and...
Feature A Link To The Past's Dark World Changed Zelda Forever
"Everyone who wanders into this land is changed to a shape that reflects his true nature"
To celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, we ran a series of features looking at a specific aspect — a theme, character, mechanic, location, memory or something else entirely — from each of the mainline Zelda games. Today, on the 30th...
