Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've written anything for PixlBit and, honestly, life has just been a bit too crazy to focus on much. So instead of jumping back into the writing fray, I thought it'd be fun to start doing some Twitch streaming. I did a short stream a couple months ago showing off Quickie World, a kaizo SMW romhack (for those following me on Twitter, you've probably seen my growing obsession with Kaizo). Since that went pretty well, I thought it'd be fun to actually announce this one and try to get a bigger crowd involved. Part of the motivation is the release of a really awesome looking Banjo-Kazooie mod called Banjo-Kazooie: The Jiggies of Time. I'm really looking forward to playing it and showing it off to the community.
It's no secret that Sony originally intended to produce a CD-ROM attachment called the Play Station for the Super Nintendo console. Somewhere along the line the deal went sour and what was originally intended for the CD-ROM drive became the Sony PlayStation.
You might not remember this, but at one point in time* it was possible to play Wii and DS games online – you know, over the internet! Well, that’s all over now, but to send the online services off in style, we were able to gather a few members of the PixlBit family and have an intense session playing Mario Kart Wii. This helped remind us how much fun Mario Kart can be online, and how much of a hassle the Wii Friend Code system was. We were able to capture some footage of the races from Chris’s perspective and provide them to you as a video relic of our evening and proof that the Wii was once online capable.
To help you cope with the encroaching demise of online Wii gaming, your PixlBit family is here to help you send the service off to its eternal existence before it all ends on May 20th. What better game to do this with than one of the few that had a significant online community: Mario Kart Wii. Join us on Thursday, May 15th starting at 9:00 p.m. EDT to play Mario Kart races until we puke blue shells. If all goes according to plan, we’ll also record the event so you can see how it played out from at least one other person’s perspective. To get in on the fun, just post your Mario Kart code in the comments and we’ll add it to a big list for everyone to tediously enter into their Wiis.
Link has jumped from one generation to the next while reinventing his style for saving princess Zelda with every iteration. Unfortunately, the most recent games have been much less groundbreaking than the golden age from the original through Ocarina of Time. Whereas the player had become accustomed to at least a few new mechanics and drastically different artistic styles between each installment, recently players have been fed mostly regurgitated ideas. Even so, the new technological capabilities of Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U should provide plenty of new places to take the franchise.
We’ve let the dust settle and even waited long enough for some of the controversial policies to get reversed since E3 wrapped up, but we’ve got plenty of opinions about this year’s show. Each of us came into it with slightly different expectations and varying levels of optimism and negativity. Some of us were pleasantly surprised and others were given the huge serving of “meh” we anticipated. Read through each of the PixlBit staff’s impressions of E3 2013 and see whose opinions most closely align with yours.
Nintendo has announced that they will be showing a 3DS focused edition of Nintendo Direct tomorrow morning at 10am EST (7am PST).
The Nintendo 64 emerged in 1996 as one of the most powerful consoles of its time, producing 3-D visuals that not even the Playstation or Sega Saturn could produce. At a time when franchises were attempting (and often failing) to make the jump to 3-D, along came Super Mario to save the day yet again.
Click through for the biggest stories of the week of November 19:
Up until yesterday, Nintendo and Amazon were in an unspoken and unannounced feud. For months, the online superstore has not stocked or sold Nintendo hardware directly, but today the cold war appears to have ended. Amazon is now offering the Nintendo 3DS XL, a previously unavailable item, directly from their warehouses.
Rumors of a November 18th Wii U launch date swirled today, when a NeoGAF forum thread was posted revealing a potential leak by Performance Designed Products (PDP). Apparently, at GameStop's annual Fall conference, the accessory-maker revealed it was launching various Wii U accessories on Sunday, November 18th, which lines up with Nintendo's previous holiday hardware release timelines. Similarly, another source has informed Kotaku of a PDP representative suggesting their "peripherals would be available just ahead of the Wii U's November 18 release date."
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 90s. In this era we saw many things; we saw the true start of the (in)famous 16-bit console wars, the slow decline of arcades, the invention of CD-ROM media and the start of a tradition with mainline Mario titles. Thought it was nice the NES had three great Mario games? You are not going to see that again for a very long time. Make that nineteen years to be exact. Take a good long look over this fourth Mario Mania entry, because the 2-D Mario platforming ship is sailing and it feels like a bittersweet moment.
Today Xenoblade Chronicles is available for purchase in the US thanks, in part, to Operation Rainfall. To mark the occasion, a few members of the PixlBit staff began a dialogue concerning the future of the movement and if it’s at all possible that Operation Rainfall could revive the west’s love for the Japanese RPG.
We previously reported a game breaking bug in Link's newest adventure, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. We can now report that a fix is available for download in the form of a Wii channel called the "Zelda Data Restoration Channel."
In response to developer and customer requests, Nintendo developed and will release what they have called the Circle Pad Pro peripheral. This attachment supplies the 3DS with a second analog stick as well as two additional shoulder buttons. Nintendo had already indicated that the peripheral will be made available in North America on February 7th and that they will also offer a bundle that will package together the device and Resident Evil: Revelations which debuts the same day and will support the second stick.
It took us a long time to finally get the Club Nintendo rewards program on this side of the globe, and some people would say that the American version of CN gets the short end of the stick. That changes today, as it seems that Club Nintendo U.S. has put up some actual games that you can redeem your coins for, as well as some other loot.
Last Friday, Nintendo of America announced that the Nintendo faithful and loyal supports of Operation Rainfall would be granted one of their longstanding wishes with the stateside release of heralded RPG Xenoblade Chronicles this upcoming April. The news came at a precarious time for Nintendo. With Skyward Sword having been released this past month, Nintendo’s upcoming release schedule was looking just a little more than barren.
In a recent interview President of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Amie said that he believed that “there certainly will be more games launched for the Wii.” Adding, “We believe there are still millions more systems to be sold.” While most gamers and journalist blew this comment off as pandering PR speak it seems that there was some truth to those words as we can now confirm that Nintendo will be bringing the long awaited Xenoblade Chronicles to North America this upcoming April.
Nintendo's November 3DS update should be right around the corner since there's only one day left in this month as of this writing, but there's been no announcement as to when exactly it will be released. Well, it should come as no surprise that Nintendo is going to miss the November window of release; however, the release date has now been locked down.
Different things usually happened with Nintendo in two completely different continents. While the NES arrived in 1986 in North America, Japan was already in its third year of Famicom glory. Nintendo’s then-released Famicom Disk System introduced the battery back-up save feature, eliminating the need for long over-drawn password saves. Games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda greatly benefited from this innovation. It was also this year that Nintendo saw fit to release a sequel to Super Mario Bros, appropriately titled Super Mario Bros. 2. This was a completely different Super Mario Bros. 2 than the one North Americans got in 1988. So what in the world happened?
I have a pet peeve that goes along the lines of this sentence: “It’s good, for its time.”
You don’t have to tell me that I am a year late. I already know that. Mario’s 25th Anniversary has already come and gone, and Nintendo’s other big franchise is celebrating its 25th this year: namely, the Legend of Zelda. Yet you already know that by now, so you are probably asking this question right now: “Matt, what the hell? Why are you doing a Mario retrospective when you could be writing about Zelda?”
After a year-long hiatus, WiiWare Demos are finally making a comeback. There are four planned titles ready for a launch this Monday: BIT.TRIP FATE, And Yet It Moves, ThruSpace and Jett Rocket. The service also appears to be back for good this time around as the e-mail Nintendo sent out this morning states that "additional demos will be added on Mondays and each will remain available on the Wii Shop Channel for a limited time". Great news for those curious about current titles.
This was just posted on the Nintendo of America Twitter page regarding PokePark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure, one of the first Wii Pokemon games that is not based on stadium battle:
This morning Nintendo of America announced that American players will have a special way to celebrate 25 years of the famous Italian mascot. On December 12, Super Mario All-Stars Limited Edition will be released in America for a limited time only.