During a recent interview with Gamasutra, Nintendo's Denise Kaigler spoke about a slew of subjects sensitive to the Nintendo loyal. Core gaming, third-party support, and the new DSi were just a few of the subjects Kaigler touched on. In regards to the core, Kaigler says that developing games for that audience is important for "everybody, the industry, certainly for Nintendo, but most of all, for consumers." She points to Zelda: Spirit Tracks as a game for that audience.Moving on to third-party support, we're starting to see more and more third parties recognize Nintendo's platforms. Kaigler says that being able to offer that 150 million user base between the two systems is very enticing to those developers. But, she notes that Nintendo wants to impart its own success on the platform and show these developers how it has achieved success (see: characters with floating, circular hands in everything), which might tie into those poor sales figures for the recent original, mature games MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill.Finally, no interview with a Nintendo exec can skip the company's latest handheld, the Nintendo DSi. Some folks (especially commenters on Joystiq) have felt the handheld doesn't improve enough over the DS Lite, especially for the price it's demanding. Kaigler, however, argues that the new handheld has plenty to offer, pointing out the DSi's popularity on Amazon and at GameStop through pre-order figures, as well as the one feature that we think too many people are overlooking: DSiWare.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Boy: Mr. Owl, how many hardware revisions does it take to get to the perfect Nintendo DS?Mr. Owl: Let's find out ... one ... ah-two ... three. Three!
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Continue reading Now Playing: April 5 - 11, 2009

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Canada's ELAN Awards, a ceremony celebrating achievements in animation and video games, has announced that it will add another trophy to Shigeru Miyamoto's collection. The Nintendo producer, "considered by his peers to be the greatest video game designer in the world," will be inducted into the organization's "Video Game Hall of Fame." One notable peer: last year's award winner, Microsoft's Don Mattrick.Voting for the honorary award, along with the ceremony's other honorary awards in the fields of animation and visual effects, was held online, hosted by IGN. The awards will be handed out on April 25 in Vancouver at an event hosted by Tom "Spongebob Squarepants" Kenny.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Q Games president Dylan Cuthbert tells G4 he's done with the StarFox franchise for now. Cuthbert lead development of the original SNES game as its unreleased sequel, and his company created StarFox Command for DS. It won't likely be involved in any eventual Wii installment in the franchise.Cuthbert says he might be up for another StarFox "maybe in another 10 years," saying that a Wii version would "be a big project, like 100 people on the staff. It's just not something we really want to do. I'm sure someone will make it. Maybe [Nintendo] will go back to Namco." Remember StarFox: Assault? We try not to.In a slight jab at Shigeru Miyamoto, Cuthbert told G4 that the legendary designer probably won't listen to "core" gamers' wants for a new StarFox, saying, "Miyamoto doesn't really care about that. He wants to make what he wants to make, so he just goes ahead and gets it done." Was that a snap we just heard?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments