Before Satoru Iwata, it was Hiroshi Yamauchi that presided over Nintendo as president of the company, building it from a toy manufacturer into the console juggernaut we know today. Even after stepping down, Yamauchi retained some interest in Nintendo, holding roughly 10% of the company.
That 10% interest was enough for Forbes Magazine to declare him this year's richest man in Japan. You'll note Forbes doesn't come out and credit Yamauchi's newfound 7.8 billion net worth to the skyrocketing value of Nintendo's stock price (that this blog has covered exhaustively), but Yahoo! News was willing to do the math.
Shares of Kyoto-based Nintendo have more than tripled in the past two years, boosting the value of the company to around $79 billion, and the fortune of Yamauchi, who owns 10 percent.
Yamauchi also owns the Seattle Mariners, which I'm sure is why the Marines are the first (and possibly only) team to support the Nintendo Fan Connection.
The Nintendo Channel went live late last week, but extenuating circumstances prevented me from getting my Wii hooked up to check it out until today. (And if you're wondering where our WiiWare coverage is, Sardius managed to get two games covered just while I was writing this!)
What the Nintendo Channel does is... kind of interesting. Basically it lets you shop for new DS and Wii games, watch promo and info videos on a variety of upcoming products for Nintendo systems, and download Nintendo DS demos for roughly a dozen or so titles. In return for these services, the Nintendo Channel wants to gather usage data from you, so if you're not the type who likes to take off your tinfoil hat, you may want to take a pass on this one.
If you're interested in a breakdown of what's available and interesting in the various aspects of the Nintendo Channel, then look no further than... uh, behind the cut for more details.
Nintendo is an infamously tight-lipped company, developing and sometimes even launching products in total secrecy. When Nintendo reveals any of their secrets, it's often part of financial necessity, and this is especially true with the English translation of the Financial Q&A session that recently went up on the Investor Relations section of Nintendo.co.jp.
The questions are pretty far-ranging and hint at a lot of things, so I'll just start a rundown of the major points that seem reasonable to take from a close reading of the Report. Just click behind the cut to see the breakdown.
In short, it allows the developer to create graphic effects normally seen on other consoles with vertex and pixel shaders specifically, dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows, heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more.
The DS Pokemon games frighten me a little. People are still playing them. There are people who don't play anything else. Diamond and Pearl ups the total for obtainable monsters to 493, so full-completion fanatics are kind of stuck with the games until their Pokedexes are full or they break out the cheat codes.
Every Pokemon generation has its annoyingly unobtainable monsters you won't get outside of cheating or a special event, and Diamond and Pearl apparently decided to torment players with four. Darkrai is one of them, previously only obtainable by Japanese trades or glitches. If you want the chance to paste people in online matches with a totally legal North American version of Darkrai, then hit your local Toys R Us on the weekend of May 31, between noon and 4 PM for your chance to catch the elusive little bastard. If he's like the Japanese event version, he'll show up with a Cherish Ball, Enigma Berry, and two moves called Roar of Time and Spacial Rend he can't ordinarily learn. I honestly don't know what that means, but it sounds good!
Pokemon Diamond/Pearl
Almost every report about Nintendo's stock has been so uniformly rosy for the past month that covering it seemed pointless. KBC Securities Japan says that is about to change.
As reported by Bloomberg, KBC has cut its estimate for Nintendo stock prices by 30% and downgraded it from a "buy" to a "hold" stock. Additionally, KBC calls for an 8% drop in income at the end of this fiscal year, a 6% drop in DS shipments, and a 5% drop in Wii shipments.
This doesn't seem to make sense given GameStop's declaration that the Wii shortage stands little chance of ending before September of this year, but KBC cites a stronger yen as part of the reason for Nintendo's downgrade.
Profits from overseas sales of Wiis and DS are going to be worth less overall when they go home to Tokyo due to the exchange rate. Still, for Wii and DS shipments to slow, then the supply shortages would have to end sometime in 2008. Are we going to see it, or is this just another analyst prediction that isn't going to hold water?
So the latest Guide to Greener Electronics issued by Greenpeace is out, and has duly improved Nintendo's initial 0 score to a 0.3, since there is now reason to believe Nintendo is following some sort of Chemicals Management guidelines. Nintendo won't publicly state what they are, of course, and Greenpeace seems ready to begin tearing its own hair out over Nintendo's stubborn silence.
Nintendo remains the odd one out of the 18 companies in the Guide, without any public time lines to eliminate the worst toxic chemicals or a global recycling policy for the millions of products it sells every year. If Nintendo has better policies why not make them public like the other 17 companies in the Guide?
This is one of those stories that may not seem to impact you immediately, but it could have serious implications for the longevity of already-ailing arcade genres like shooters and fighters. Reuters reports that the popularity of the Wii is causing major problems for Japanese arcades and companies that get a significant part of their revenue from arcade titles, namely Namco Bandai and Sega Sammy.
Shares in Japanese toy and amusement arcade firm Namco Bandai Holdings (7832.T: Quote, Profile, Research) fell for a second day on Thursday after it issued a shock downward revision to its earnings outlook and said it would close 50 to 60 arcades, about one-fifth of the total.
"A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home," company spokesman Yuji Machida said.
Sega Sammy's already announced the loss of 100 arcades to the Wii. Given that Namco Bandai and both the Sega and Sammy arms of Sega Sammy are important producers of Wii software, it becomes increasingly hard to argue that the Wii is good for third parties.
Develop Magazine recently published a list of "Game Changers", people who were transforming the industry from inside out. Not only does this yield up an unusually interesting perspective on how the industry works, but it gives an interesting nod to Satoru Iwata for Nintendo's 2007 success with the Wii and DS.
Iwatas hand in Nintendos renaissance is significant. The DS and Wii have been phenomenal hits, but the initial surprise on their unveiling was all part of his careful plan to disrupt the norms of the games industry. It was a lesson he learnt during his days as a coder for Nintendo subsidiary HAL, where he and his colleagues would deliberately aim to make that which Miyamoto would not in order to keep their games fresh. This approach works: the devices he launched as president have reached out to new audiences and spurred an industry-wide thumbs up of the casual set, encouraging developers to make more physically demanding and lower cost experiences. His next target is getting more development talent supporting Nintendo: the imminent unveiling of download service WiiWare should help bridge the gaps between the casuals and the hardcore developers.
Earlier I reported word that Masaya Matsuura and Rodney Alan Greenblat were working on a new music game for the Wii. Now, thanks to a Majesco press release, we finally have some details!
Major Minor's Majestic March turns the Wii Remote into a special baton that the bandleader, Major Minor, uses to keep tempo, recruit new band members and pick up valuable items. While marching through eight whimsical locations that contain various hair-raising events, Major Minor strives to create the most impressive parade ever. Players can add up to 15 different instruments to their dynamic procession--including brass, woodwinds, and percussion-- to alter its composition and resulting performance. Players are scored on how well their band maintains its rhythm and manages obstacles that could otherwise throw the procession into disarray. The band keeps tempo to more than 25 popular marching band songs from around the world, composed into original medleys for each stage.
Wired's Game|Life also has a nice huge gallery of Greenblat's designs for the game up. It sounds promising!
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