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AVC at GDC '10, Day Three: Step into the Virtusphere A.V. Club

12.03.10

David Wolinsky  

Just in case there were any doubts about whether Nintendo bottlenecked the whole notion of innovation in its output at the creation of motion controls for the Wii and stopped immediately at launch after bungling the confused, staggered release dates for The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube and its latest system, Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto effectively confirmed the Wii’s stumbling pace this morning in a talk about that series’ newest iteration, Other M. Sakamoto is a guy who’s been with Nintendo since 1982—a year before the NES was released in Japan—which made the man’s obvious initial concerns about the Wii’s lack of computing power all the more eyebrow-arching. While graphics or processing power are rarely the focus in talking about any Wii game, it was fascinating how forthcoming Sakamoto was in talking about his early visions for the game, basically dumbing down the game at every turn before Team Ninja and a handful of other developers intriguingly got involved. In his English-translated speech, Sakamoto talked about wanting to make Metroid: Other M an on-rails action game—a move that surely would further piss off the faction of fans that balked when the series turned FPS, a.k.a. the first step in incrementally destroying the entire point of Metroid and unapologetically telegraphing that confusion to the entire world.

This might also just be the translator working on this speech, but the word “beautiful” seemingly popped up at least once a minute in describing this new game, especially to describe the acting, which is funny because most previews elsewhere on the Internet had been using another word for the acting: “melodramatic.” Regardless, if Nintendo insiders have obvious hesitations about the Wii, it’d be refreshing if they just fessed up and admitted that trying to

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