Since we Americans aren’t cocky enough, Shiggy has gone and complimented the ability of American developers to bring new ideas to life.

“I think America has always been better at creating unique products… In Japan, the technology required to create video games tends to be concentrated in the bigger corporations… Here in the United States, you have these independent developers who have managed to get the skills and the training and the development, and also have managed to get access to the technology and the hardware needed to develop it. They’re able to let their own personality and their own kind of unique interests really flourish in the games that they’re creating.”

Gotta love the good ol’ U.S. of A., the land of opportunity.

Wired

The famed creator of many of Nintendo’s biggest franchises recently commented on the idea of a first person Zelda. During the development of Ocarina of Time, Miyamoto himself suggested the use of first person to further envelope the player as well as give the CPU a little break from rendering the character model the entire time.

Interesting to hear this from the big guy himself. Could this perhaps be what he meant when he said Twilight Princess was the last Zelda game of its kind?

Iwata Asks
via Joystiq

Nobuo Uematsu, best known for his music in the Final Fantasy series, recently spoke in an interview of his praise for Nintendo’s own music man, Koji Kondo. No surprise there, of course, but its how Uematsu expressed his love for the Super Mario Bros. theme that’s worth your read.

Nobuo Uematsu: “I think that the Super Mario song should be the national anthem for Japan. [Hums the death refrain] So when someone wins a gold medal at the Olympics, a Japanese athlete, the flag should go up with the theme song. Shoop!”

James Mielke: “Japan would become a lot more popular.”

Uematsu: “Yeah, yeah. The world would have a different image of Japan if we use that.”

Mielke: “I’m sure Kondo-san would really like to hear that quote.”

Kyoko Yamashita: “That’s a good idea.” [Laughs]

If Japan gets the Super Mario Bros. theme, the US should get “The Imperial March.” Anyone second that?

1UP.com
via GoNintendo

While many of us know Mario as an innocent Italian plumber, many YouTube clips have proved that others wish he could wield an automatic rifle like Tony Montana from Scarface. One individual that has expressed interest in an “adult-themed” Mario, is none other than Suda 51. When he was asked if he would consider creating a game for a younger audience he replied:

“I want to make a Super Mario game for adults. Maybe Mario could wear an Italian suit and have a machine gun. But Nintendo probably wouldn’t like that idea.”

While the chances of Nintendo allowing anybody to tamper with Mario’s image are pretty darn slim, one can’t help but wonder what a Mario game would be like if he had the ability to snipe King Bowser from outside the castle instead of throwing him by the tail. Then again, Bowser would probably be packing heat as well.

CVG

The other Brawl update for today is just a notice that the latest in the “Iwata Asks” series of interviews is one with Super Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai. Iwata Asks usually targets Nintendo employees, but Mr. Iwata saw fit to interview Sakurai, since he is a former HAL Laboratories employee after all.

It’s an incomplete interview at this point, but it does detail a lot of things we know, specifically the story of how the project got started at E3 2005. Since then, apparently about 100 people worked on the game full-time, with about 700 people involved in total. 700? Holy crap.

Wii.com
via Smash Bros. DOJO!!

Gearbox was probably in the waaaay back corner of everyone’s minds when we all found out that Sonic Team wasn’t helming development of Samba de Amigo for the Wii. Luckily, they weren’t just handed the project, and it seems they even requested the project.

“We’re huge Samba fans. Huge Dreamcast fans. We totally told SEGA they had to let us do it. People want a Samba Wii game.”

Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft was able to sit down with Randy Pitchford (who wears the sombrero over at Gearbox), and while no real game information was brought to the table, some insight into the game’s creation was mentioned. Specifically, how the game will control. The Nunchuk isn’t as precise with orientation and position as the Wii Remote, so what about using two Wii Remotes per player?

“It’s possible. You just need a lot of smart people who can do a lot of math.”

Kotaku

Clint Hocking, Ubisoft’s creative director, recently took part in an industry panel discussion at the 2007 Montreal Independent Games Summit. When discussing how the Wii has seemingly changed video games forever, Hocking had this to say:

“I just hope it becomes that. They talk about marijuana as the gateway drug, I hope the Wii is the gateway console. I hope someone’s grandmother gets bored of playing Wii Tennis and moves to Zelda, by herself, even if she struggles with it and you have to help her, I hope she appreciates what’s amazing about it.”

You know when you say something, and it technically makes sense in your head, but it comes out wrong to others? This is one of those times.

GoNintendo

Super Mario Galaxy director/designer Yoshiaki Koizumi has been getting quite the spotlight since Mario’s latest adventure. In an interview with Wired, Koizumi talks about how he’s one of the main people trying to put more storyline into Nintendo games while EAD doesn’t really care either way.

YK: You’re right, EAD doesn’t tend to focus on the big story in most of their games. But I was the one coming up with scenarios, just on my own, ever since the time of Link’s Awakening. But even at that time, I felt like I came up with this entire scenario and a backstory for Link, but nobody really seemed to care. They were always saying, let’s not try to push the story forward too much.

So I would sort of try to find sneaky ways to get it in without them noticing too much. For example, I always liked the idea of you coming upon another character and hearing little bits of conversation that slowly begin to reveal different parts of the story. And that was the way that I tried to work on Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. A lot of the EAD games that do seem to have a lot of story, a lot of that came from my influence. But those are aspects of the games that Miyamoto wasn’t nearly as fond of and occasionally didn’t like.

The rest of the interview talks about how Koizumi first experienced the Super Mario series, working with Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Sunshine’s place in the series, sales of Galaxy, and what’s next.

Wired News