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Back when I was covering E3, I criticized Nintendo for not promoting Wario Land: Shake It! more aggressively. It wasn't at the press conference and wasn't on the floor. Looks like Nintendo also feels like they made missteps there, as Vice President of Sales and Marketing Cammie Dunaway admits in an interview with gaming stat site VGChartz

VGC: What is your message to people who weren't happy with Nintendo's E3 conference?

CD: I would say the message is we were disappointed with our performance at E3. There were titles like Wario which we think will be really fun titles that we should have show cased [sic]. We were excited that Mr. Miyamoto made the commitment that Pikmin is coming. It would have been nice if we could have said that on stage. But, we think it was a good recognition for us that we care for our core fans, and not just the new people who are now discovering Nintendo.

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Lots of other good stuff in the interview, especially if you're interested in the developing Latin American games market.

Something I didn't notice about the DS Elebits title when I played it at E3 - since I hadn't played the original - is that it has little in common with its Wii parent, at least in terms of game mechanics. Siliconera's eyes were sharper and had an interview with the Elebits Project Manager at Konami, Gregg Nolan, to ask about why. They also managed to extract some info about a potential Wii sequel...

Wait you said Elebits is probably going to come out for the Wii? Do you mean there is going to be Elebits: Adventures of Kai & Zero on the Wii or is there going to be a brand new Elebits game?

... There are a lot of press and fans that enjoyed the first game on the Wii and my question to my producer and the game designers was is the DS story the new direction for the franchise? Mukaitouge-san who is the producer of the first one basically said that the DS experience will be the next direction for the next DS experience. The first Wii game will be the story and the starting point for the next Wii game.

This entire Gamasutra interview with Hironobu Takeshita is great, but this is worth noting by itself:

You talked about how people were trying to graphically exceed the capabilities of the Famicom, but what about the temptation to exceed some other capabilities, such as flicker, slowdown, sprite limits, and stuff like that? Was it really hard to get people to stay within the confines of what they could have done, if this had come out after Mega Man 6 in 1993?

HT: Yeah, there were some things, like you couldn't have more than three enemies on the screen at once, so we had to make sure that that's how it stayed in our game. In the part with the dragon with the flame, [there should be] flickering, and whatnot.

In the options of this game, you can adjust that, unlike the old games. We purposely put some of those old-school bugs into this game, so it does recreate that feel.

That's right: this game will contain apparently user-controllable bugs and flickering options. Better than authentic.

Today's just barely a quicker news day than Friday, but probably because I've got an entire weekend's worth of goodies to go through. Anyway, some of the bigger Nintendo newsbites are coming from a Wall Street Journal interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. Probably the most interesting thing he establishes there is that Wii MotionPlus will be available by itself, and hopefully will be cheap:

WSJ: Will Wii owners be forced to buy a Wii Motion Plus for each controller they own to play newer games?

Mr. Iwata: There will be games that will be enhanced by the Wii Motion Plus as well as games that can only be played with it. Users will need four if they have four controllers, but we're going to try to offer it for as little as possible. We haven't announced the price yet, but the cost of making the Wii Motion Plus is not that much, so I think we can make it very affordable.

DS owners have been a bit put out with Square-Enix lately. Not because they aren't releasing good DS games, but the highly anticipated Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy Dissidia are both exclusive to the stinking PSP. Why not the more popular DS?

Pocket Gamer, unlike most grousing forum dwellers, had the courage to take the DS question to Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core producers Hideki Imaizumi and Yoshinori Kitase. Their response is highly unexpected.

How much the product sells really depends on the game itself, who it's targeted to and all sorts of different factors. It's not really always about the hardware. Especially in terms of this game where the demographic was higher teens to young adults as opposed to small children. The PSP seemed closer to that demographic than DS in general. So we feel we really made the right choice.

We'll make a DS game called Brain Age: Final Fantasy for DS [laughs].

Er, wait, Square-Enix is still approaching the DS as a system for little kids and old ladies? How... 2006.

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So, the second game in the Professor Layton series is generally called Professor Layton and the Devil's Box in Japan. There's no way this name will stand for US release, because think of the children!. So what's the game going to be called over here? Well, a GameTap interview cinches it.

GameTap: Were there lessons you've learned along the path of creating Professor Layton and the Curious Village? And how did you apply them to the second title?

Hino-san: I learned that it's better to integrate the puzzles in the story.

In the first title, I was concerned that the puzzles which unrelated to the story abruptly appeared along with gameplay. So, for Pandora's Box [the second Layton title], we designed most of the puzzles to go along with the storyline. On top of that, for the puzzles related to the core part, the graphics were particularly created to match Professor Laytons world.

Hm. Professor Layton and Pandora's Box? Not a bad choice, actually.

There's a new Iwata Asks interview up, this one with Shigeru Miyamoto talking about Wii Fit and the production of the Wii Balance Board. Where Iwata's interview with Sakurai was... let's say, lucid and precise, the interview with Miyamoto is utter insanity. There are many digressions about Miyamoto's inspiration for the game, and how he treats his design teams. It kind of has to be read to be believed... here's a snippet to get you started.

Miyamoto: I used to play pachinko many years ago, but that stopped when I started swimming. Simply swimming without thinking about anything except how demanding it was had a similar effect to the stress relief I got from pachinko, which enabled me to escape the cycle of worries I had. Another thing I managed after quitting pachinko, was to stop smoking which also lead to better fitness. To be completely honest though, I don't really like being thought of as such a serious person. I mean, I didn't drink in the first place, and on top of that, I managed to quit smoking and get actively involved in doing sports, so I must seem like some kind of a role model! (laughs)

The game I'm really dying to play right now is Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for DS, which hits March 4th. Here's a Siliconera interview with the English language producer, Keith Dwyer to help you get psyched up, too... and explain the NA version's terrible, terrible boxart.

Speaking of tweaks the box art gives Shiren a different feel. ... He looks like a fierce warrior on the US box. Why the change?

Sometimes packaging needs to be revisited to communicate new features the game has, or to be appropriate for different market segments. With Shiren, we had a few things to consider; we had to create art that resonated with gamers in the US, but it also had to convey the new edge of this revamped version. ... It's a tough journey, and we wanted to portray that.

I appreciate good intentions, but to me you primarily portrayed "We hired a guy who can't draw very well."

Suda51 was in strangely restrained form for his latest interview with Edge, by which I mean no elaborate toilet-related metaphors. Still, he said some interesting things about the different versions of No More Heroes and the role of blood in action gaming.

In the action part of the game, the moment when Travis finishes his adversaries is quite bloody in the American version. Was that always OK with Nintendo?

Indeed it was. But its an important point that the game is different in different territories. The Japanese and European versions have no blood and you simply kill those enemies. The US version is the closest to my initial vision of the game. The issue of having blood spilt is an interesting one. Todays technology makes a very realistic visual experience possible, so does that mean blood has to be sprayed all around? Im not sure. There is, in terms of videogames, almost a natural absence of blood: you kill an enemy and thats all.

To round off an interviewful day, here's an excellent GameSpot talk with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. It's not so much that the questions are good, but that Iwata is unusually frank and willing to allow insight into why Nintendo does what it does. Probably the most interesting answer of the piece is Iwata's discussion of the success of the Wii in the US, so I'll tease you with that. The entire piece is really worth reading, though.

In retrospect, the US culture of the house party played a major role in spreading the value of Wii to a bigger circle faster than we ever predicted. All of my American friends keep telling me, "Man, the Wii is the ultimate party machine!" [Laughs] But none of that was intentional on our part. All we did was ask ourselves how to pack the most smiles and surprises into the product as we developed it. Fortunately, we hit a sweet spot. As a result, interest in the Wii has spread across the US surprisingly quickly. I think that explains why the DS took off faster in Japan, but the Wii has spread faster in America.