Every holiday season, the technology
world sets shoppers up with an abundant offering of games, gadgets and devices that are perfect for giving.
Although the plethora of options can sometimes be overwhelming for the novice tech shopper, (a challenge
Lifestyler tried to help readers cheat with in our Winter edition’s Bytes Gift
Guide),
there is almost no going wrong with the wonderful world of Nintendo. At a holiday gift preview for the gaming giant this past November, we got
the opportunity to talk to Nintendo of Canada’s spokesperson, Matt Ryan, about the games that are sure to be
added to any Nintendo users holiday wish
list.
Which game do you
think is going to be the most anticipated this holiday season?
That is a very
hard question to answer. From a Nintendo 3DS perspective I think Mario Kart 7 is going to make it into a lot
of gamers’ Nintendo 3DSs this holiday season. Mario Kart has been around for a really long time; it’s a fan
favourite, but I challenge anybody to enter a room where people are playing Mario Kart and not play whether
it’s on a Wii or Nintendo 3DS. It’s very “pick up and play,” you do not need to be a hardcore gamer to play
Mario Kart, especially Mario Kart 7.
What are some of
the new exciting features in Mario Kart 7?
In Mario Kart 7
there’s actually a lot of familiarity, so there are courses that you will have seen before and there’s
characters that you will have seen before and some of the elements of the karts you will have seen before,
but what’s new is that you can customize your karts in different ways, down to the tires. So if you’re in a
really muddy course you may want to put on the mud tires that are bigger to give you better traction, or be
Donkey Kong who’s got a little bit extra girth to him and is going to ride a bit better in the
mud.
There will be some new
characters that will be unlockable and no, I can’t share who those are because those are a secret and I, as a
rule, won’t spoil anything, but the two main new features are that you get to go underwater and you can fly
through the air. Now, in previous Mario Kart games you could go underwater but that would actually not be a
good thing because you would sink and then your car would have to be taken out of the water with a fishing
rod and you would lose your spot in the course. Well in this version of the game when you get submerged
underwater, a propeller pops out of the back of the kart and allows you to navigate through the environment,
and there’s great physics with that because you can actually feel a little bit of undertow or a little bit of
liquid around you as if you were actually driving a kart underwater. The other new feature is that when you
soar through the air, a glider will pop out the back of the kart and allow you to steer through the air and
glide.
The Nintendo 3DS
also has a new feature called Street Pass, can you tell me more about that?
Street Passing is
when two Nintendo 3DS owners pass each other once they’ve enabled the Street Pass functionality and then it
will actually swap information from their Nintendo 3DS systems to each other and it does it seamlessly and
you don’t have to touch any buttons or anything like that. What’s cool for Mario Kart 7 is that you swap
what’s called Ghost Data, so Ghost Data is when you go and you race a course, you create a ghost of your
character. You share that ghost with other Nintendo 3DS owners and then they can race against your time and
try to beat it so it’s pretty awesome and a cool functionality that you only get with the Nintendo
3DS.
How does the 3D
technology included in both the 3DS system and the accompanying games like Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D
Land, enhance game play for users?
Nintendo 3DS
offers something that you can’t get anywhere else on a gaming device, which is 3D without the need for
special glasses. That technology is being worked on by the industry and we know that televisions are going in
that direction too, but we’ve been able to pull it off on a gaming device first because of the size of the
system. The fact that you have a 3D depth slider on the side that allows you to control the intensity of the
3D and the fact that it’s a portable handheld gaming system which you can move around to kind of make it look
the way you want it to look, and the reality is that every gamer is different, some people prefer the 3D
depth slider to be on all the time, some players just want to play in 2D all the time, and that’s OK,
although some games like Super Mario 3D land are going to come out where you can play the majority of the
game in 2D but those can be elements where you really want to leverage that 3D to get an extra dimension
because it does add a new perspective to the environments that you’re in.
Both Mario Kart 7
and Super Mario 3D Land are titles that have already done well in pre-order sales. Why do you think the Mario
franchise continues to garner such a positive response?
Super Mario 3D
Land is a different way to play the Mario franchise. There’s been tons of iterations of the franchise… and
what makes these games so popular is that — Mario, he’s fun, he’s silly, he’s got a clumsy, kind of
ridiculous brother who’s taller than him but very clumsy and very shy. The Bowser character, the Yoshi who’s
very cute and likes to gobble things up — these characters themselves stand on their own and are very strong.
You can only get these games on Nintendo systems and the development teams that work on them especially the
big Mario games like Super Mario Brothers for Wii or Mario Kart or Super Mario Galaxy put a lot of time and
effort into those… the franchise has been around for so long, since I was a kid… but Nintendo has done a
great job just keeping those characters and their integrity at the highest level of quality. The short answer
is that the games are super fun. You can’t not have fun when you’re playing a Mario game, so that’s also part
of the formula for success.
Out of all the new
titles, which do you enjoy the most?
The Legend of
Zelda: Skyward Sword is going to take up a lot of my time when that launches. I mean there’s tens of hours of
gameplay in there; it’s super fun, it’s a great challenge, the graphics are awesome and now you can finally
hold the sword in your hand that’s holding the Wii remote and every movement you make with your hand is going
to get picked up on screen with your sword and that just feels awesome. So, out of everything we have
available this holiday, even this year, my most anticipated one is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward
Sword.
And just for fun,
who do you play as in Mario Kart?
I usually choose
Mario the first few times I play it. I will choose Donkey Kong, he is slow, but I choose him because he
cracks me up because he does funny things, so those are the two I go to the most. One of my favourite
characters was an unlockable one, and that was Bones, but usually… once you unlock a new character they
become your favourite for awhile, so Bones was a favourite but he’s harder to get
to.
» Nintendo.ca •
Photo Courtesy: Nintendo (Cohn
& Wolfe)
