Miyamoto Talks New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Posted by Ashish on 11.25.2009
The master talks his latest game...
Shigeru Miyamoto spoke with Famitsu Magazine recently about New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Here are the highlights:
Why did Nintendo decide to have two Toad characters accompany Mario and Luigi in multiplayer?: "Mario and Luigi are the same as always, of course, and suggestions for the other two characters included Wario and Waluigi, Toad, and Princess Peach," Miyamoto said. "The thing is that with Wario he'd need to have a fart attack, Peach would have to be able to fly with her skirt, and so on. With this game we wanted every character to play the same way."
The game pauses for just a moment in multiplayer whenever anyone on your team loses a life: "We had a lot of debate about that," Miyamoto recalled. "There were points in the project where there was no delay at all, but that wound up encouraging players to concentrate on themselves instead of the team. If there's that little stutter, that makes everyone say to each other 'Oh, nice, you screwed up!', and that's what I wanted to see."
When you do die in multiplayer, you're resurrected inside a bubble that someone else has to pop for you: "From a technical perspective, you need to be able to respawn in a safe place," said Miyamoto. "Only the player himself is in the best position to say whether a particular location is safe or not. That's why we give you that bubble and let you control your return time to some extent. Of course, you need someone else to pop the bubble for you, so part of the fun of multiplayer is to be mean and keep him encased in there."
Why no Wi-fi support, then?: "The biggest reason is that it's more fun to play with real-life people and communicate with them directly rather than over a network," Miyamoto responded. "Net play also places a lot of limits on what we can do, and instead of working around those limits throughout the project, we decided to concentrate on the group play experience."
