Microsoft’s Community Games, the Xbox Live project, has entered closed beta. With XNA, users are able to create games and rate the work of others the winners of which will be posted on XBL. Only those who have paid for premium membership ($99 and year, $49 for 4 months) will be able to take part in the closed beta.

At GDC recently, Microsoft revealed some XNA games as demos on Live, and yesterday David Edery talked about the Community Games initiative in some detail with GamesIndustry.biz, and hinted that he thinks that XNA will “leapfrog WiiWare and PSN in downloadable space”.

Afterwards, Edery, in a rare bit of macho enthusiasm, ripped his shirt off, flexed his muscles and called Shigeru Miyamoto a wimp, SCEE President David Reeves a nancy-boy and challenged both to a cage-match in the middle of Madison Square Gardens.

Via: GamesIndustry.biz

Shigeru Miyamoto thinks the most unique products have always come out of America. That’s surprising, coming from the man behind a game like Pikmin. But he was adamant in saying it, when speaking about the launch of WiiWare and the future of indie developers.

“I think America has always been better at creating unique products,” he said. Nintendo is looking to have a platform where indie games can succeed by opening itself to even the smallest of developers.

“Here in the United States, you have these independent developers who have managed to get the skills and the training and the development, and also have managed to get access to the technology and the hardware needed to develop it,” he said. “They’re able to let their own personality and their own kind of unique interests really flourish in the games that they’re creating.”

Reggie Fils-Aime explained that there’s no oversight by Nintendo, and all they do is insure the game isn’t buggy and has an ESRB rating. It’s an interesting approach, but not all that different from the “Nintendo Seal,” which is devoid of any sort of quality assurance.

via Game|Life

Nintendo recently posted the latest “Iwata Says” segment, which has Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, sitting down for a chat with Shigeru Miyamoto. The conversation starts with Iwata asking Miyamoto questions about how they came to develop Link’s Crossbow Training and accompanying Zapper, but then things start to take a turn for the weird. Miyamoto casually begins revealing some of the radical ideas that were proposed for various Legend of Zelda titles. How radical? Well, he once envisioned having Ocarina of Time play from a first-person perspective — his fascination with the FPS style eventually spawned Link’s Crossbow Training. Also, he concieved of “a sort of Terminator style story about a time warp from the future” to explain how Link might have a gun. Finally, the original prototype for the Wii Zapper? It was literally made from rubber bands and wires. Obviously (and thankfully), none of these ideas ever came to fruition. However the images in my head of Arnold Schwarzenegger decked out in Link’s green costuem isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Via Wii.com

Shigeru Miyamoto, the mind behind everyones favorite plumber and Wii Fit is already looking towards the next step.

Wii Fit is an unprecedented success despite pessimistic predictions. Wii Fit is a harsh and demanding personal trainer. It keeps track of your weight and BMI, asking you to explain yourself if you show an increase. It compares you against your family members and criticizes you when you fall behind. Despite this people are buying the game in droves. Amazingly enough, there has been no reported rise in collateral damage from Wii Fit players destroying stuff out of frustration.

“We thought they might, but the evidence from Japan is that they get cross with themselves — not the machine. They don’t blame the game.”

Miyamoto is naturally pleased at the success of Wii Fit and is already moving towards taking the punishment to the next level. Wii Fit will be evolving to include web based game play, to allow players to compete with people outside their household.

Lest people embrace Wii Fit with too much enthusiasm, Miyamoto does offer a word of caution and encouragement for players to emulate the Wii balance board in their real lives:

“Spending too long, staying in and playing any video game is not good,” said Miyamoto. “I always tell my children to get out on a sunny day and I, myself, went jogging in Central Park yesterday. But I do my stretching on Wii Fit. They work together.”

via TimesOnline

I can almost guarantee that, if a year ago I went around asking people what they thought the name of a Nintendo fitness game might be, a majority of the answers would include Mario’s name. And why not? His name has graced(?) so many different titles that the expression “I’ve lost track” doesn’t quite encapsulate it all.

So why is the classic mascot’s face nowhere to be seen? Shigeru Miyamoto explained it as a matter of wanting to make the game feel like something for anyone, regardless of age. “We wanted to create [Wii Fit] so that people of all ages could look at it and feel it was for them. I think [including Mario] might have limited its ability.”

What you will find in Wii Fit, though, is the Balance Board as a type of character, but that wasn’t something Nintendo set out to do.

“Actually, when we created that character and were creating Wii Fit, our ultimate goal wasn’t to create a new character for Wii Fit. I do like the idea of trying to introduce new characters periodically. But really, with Wii Fit, what we were trying to do is if you look at fitness DVDs or other sports training type products, they have a very predefined atmosphere to them. They’re very health and sports-oriented. Our feeling was that, if we are going to create Wii Fit and have Nintendo put this out and sell this as a Nintendo product, it needs to feel like a Nintendo product. And creating an interface and trying to design how the gameplay work, we felt it needs to feel fun and fresh and maybe feel a bit silly too. That’s ultimately how the Balance Board came to be [as a character] in Wii Fit,” Miyamoto explained.

In fact, Miyamoto also said that the intention for Wii Fit wasn’t to design a new peripheral, but the very nature of the game required one. “Once we made that decision to create the Balance Board our goal was to make it the least intrusive peripheral that we could. And what we found was that, through that process and the process of implementing the different functions of the balance board, we felt we created something that was truly a new and unique interface. And with that interface we had something that was a strong selling point as well.”

You can read the full interview at MTV Multiplayer.

Every year Time magazine lists the top 100 most influential people in the world, and this year Shigeru Miyamoto is one of the finalists. While I was pleased to see him listed when I opened my copy yesterday, I was not surprised. The creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda,Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Fit, etc is definitely one of the most influential people in my book, and if you would like to see him listed go here and vote for him now.

So far, Rain (Korean pop star), Stephen Colbert, Stephenie Meyer, Jon Stewart, and Roger Federer are the top five.

Get on over there and vote for Miyamoto, you know you want to!

Mario Kart is set to launch in the US later this month, so it was a natural fit for the latest Iwata Asks feature on Nintendo.com. This entry detailed the history of the series all the way up to Mario Kart Wii, including the development of the Wii Wheel. Kenichiro Ashida revealed that there were roughly 30 prototypes of the wheel before we get the present day Wiiel, which it seems to just be begging to be called.

Ashida said, “With regard to weight, we thought carefully about how many grams would best suit gameplay. When considering durability, we wanted to make something strong using thick materials, but increasing the weight by even 30 grams would have been considered too heavy for some people. We eventually designed it to be as light as possible so people could use it for a long time without getting tired too quickly.”

Miyamoto explained that a wheel is such a natural way of interacting, it was a perfect fit. “A steering wheel is so easy to understand. Almost everyone has the experience of using some kind of steering wheel, from riding toy cars with pedals as children, to driving real go karts at a theme park. Everyone knows how to turn the wheel right in order to go right. Besides, I kind of wanted to make a product that would come in a big box for a change!”

I’m surprised it actually took Nintendo this long to create a wheel. It seems more like they simply wanted to wait for Mario Kart to launch it, since third parties have been putting out cheap plastic circles and calling them wheels for quite some time now. It’s not like Mario Kart was the only driving game that could have used it; even the Wii launch game Excite Truck was using the same maneuvers as a wheel, only with nothing more than the Wiimote.

Silicon Knights president Dennis Dyack took time to elaborate on some of his comments at DICE giving his take on what good games need. Ever a proponent of solid narrative for video games, Dyack believes that a story should be judged by the same criteria as other forms of media. He also decries series that add on additional stories grouping them together as a trilogy, although they were never truly meant to be together from the start. The whole script for the upcoming Too Human trilogy has been worked on in advance.

Like Miyamoto, Dyack believes that a great game that is delayed will be forgiven, where a bad game that makes the release date will not. He intends to release Too Human when it’s ready and not before.

Read the complete interview on Gamsutra.

In the third installment of the “Iwata Asks” series of interviews on the Wii fit, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata invited producer Tadashi Sugiyama and chief director Hiroshi Matsunaga from the Entertainment Analysis & Development Division to talk about the game.

The trio talk about how Wii Fit evolved from the idea of a nutritional tracker for the DS and a bathroom scale for your Wii. In the second part of the interview, the hardware team talked about developing the concept of balance from Sumo wrestlers that use two scales to weigh themselves. In this third installment the software team had the same inspiration from the a Seitai Therapy method using two scales for maintaining good posture.

The funniest part of the interview is the talk about the player’s choice of personal trainers.

Matsunaga: Early versions only had a female trainer! (laughs)

Miyamoto: That’s what happens when you have a bunch of men working to make a fitness game! (laughs)

Read the entire interview on Wii.com.

The latest Iwata Asks interview features Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, talking with Shigeru Miyamoto, Senior Managing Director of Nintendo, about Wii Fit. A transcript of the talk along with a few related graphics are available on Wii.com.

Wii Fit was released in Japan December 1, 2007 and Europe is due for release June 1, 2008. A nebulous Q2 2008 release date is still the word for the North American release.

via Press Release