In a talk before hundreds of game developers today at the Game Developers Conference, Sakamoto talked about his career making Metroid games for Nintendo since 1986. The Metroid games, which star the heroine Samus with a signature “arm cannon,” are known for their serious dramatic style and shooting action. But Sakamoto said he also loves to make people laugh with the goofy WarioWare games. That diversity of games has helped Sakamoto stay creative over the decades.

The room was crowded, of course, because Sakamoto’s games have been great commercial successes, selling millions upon millions of games on both handheld and home console platforms over the years. His latest Metroid Other M game ships in May, while WarioWare D.I.Y. ships on the Nintendo DSi on March 28. Both are expected to be high-profile Nintendo titles. The Metroid title in particular is crucial for Nintendo to hang on to its hardcore fans; and its emotional storyline with a female protaginist also offers the hope of a much broader audience than usual.

Sakamoto aid found his serious stylistic inspration in the horror films of Dario Argento, creator of the Italian films Suspiria and Deep Red. Argento was great at controlling the mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast. He used music and sound effects to create the emotions of fear in the audience. He invoked fear through mastery of foreshadowing and increased the felling of tension by contrasting both storylines and scenes.

Sakamoto said he shared these same techniques in the creation of the scary scenes in Metroid Other M. He was also inspired by films of Luc Besson (Leon: The Professional), John Woo (A Better Tomorrow), and Brian De Palma (Carrie). He particularly liked the last scene of Carrie. At the same time, he loves making audiences laugh. Even in comedy, he still uses mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast. He likes to steer a conversation to set up great one liners.

Sakamoto picks up creative thoughts anywhere he can and then stores them away until he needs them. Then he integrates them into games as the ideas become fully baked. Some of his ideas led to the creation of Nintendo’s iconic Mii characters, which were fully developed by Nintendo’s design chief, Shigeru Miyamoto. Sakamoto said he was proud of the goofy game, Tomodachi Collection, a DS game that launched in Japan in June, 2009. In that game, the story is driven by the player, who can create more of their own story elements. While designing that game, he said to one team member, “You have to take off your underwear!” The idea was that guy needed to loosen up.

With Metroid Other M, he wrote a story that takes place between the time of the games Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion in the early 1990s. He brought in a male character to co-star with Samus, creating tension between main characters. Then he found a partner, Team Ninja, an outside game developer, to work on the game itself. The goal was to make the ultimate Metroid game. When planning, Sakamoto wanted to be able to control the game using only the Wii remote. That meant the character would have to move along a pre-determined path. Then Team Ninja wanted to add use of the Nunchuk attachment, and then introduced the idea of controlling character movement in a 3-D space using just the control pad on the Wii remote. So the control scheme includes both 3-D and 2-D movement styles.

Two movie production companies, Taiyo Kiakaku and D-Rockets, to create the movie-like video scenes that take place in between the game play. For those scenes, the team used comic book storyboards to plan video sequences.

Companies: nintendo

People: Yoshi Sakamoto

webOS users that are looking for a podcast app may want to check out the recently graduated drPodder. The app comes as recently graduated because while it has been around for a little while, up until now it was limited to the homebrew community. As far as what the app will do, like most capable podcast apps today, it will allow you to download and listen or stream both audio and video podcasts. You can also choose to have your subscription list update manually or on schedule. Anyway, the App Catalog version is currently available and selling for $0.99.

Read [drPodder] Via [PreCentral]

Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

GamesBeat 2010 kicked off to a packed house on March 10.

GamesBeat 2010 was a roaring success! Here’s another look at the goings-on in the conference on Wednesday, March 10 at GDC 2010.

[10 photos; photos by JP Manninen]

VentureBeat's Matt Marshall set the theme of Disruption 2.0 in his welcome speech.

Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, delivered his keynote to a riveted audience.

Tim Chang, Norwest Venture Partners speaks up as John Salter, The Raine Group, listens.

Paul Lee of Vanedge Capital and Chris Petrovic of GameStop Digital Ventures change ideas on investment opportunities.

Paul Lee, Vanedge Capital.

Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat leads a session on disruptive game platforms.

Gareth Davis, Facebook, Peter Relan, Crowdstar and Jack Buser, PlayStation share a laugh onstage.

Gareth Davis listens intently to Jack Buser in Dean Takahashi's panel discussion.

Alex St. John, CEO Hi5, challenges Facebook on the panel.

Tags: 2010, gamesbeat, GDC

Forrester claims the new platform will make engagement with readers easier through a more interactive approach to blogging. Using new tools like polling and “most recent posts” as well as search, RSS and Twitter feed integration, the platform aggregates all forms of content from analysts and their teams to one location. The new set up definitely makes it easier to get around and find relevant analysts and topics.

My favorite is the “recommend this post” tool that gives readers more than just the usual sharing tools, such as retweets, Facebook and Digg. It’s a way for readers who have found a post helpful or insightful to let others know they should read the same. Mark Mulligan’s Blog, one of many that posted this announcement, currently has two recommendations from previous readers.

Other research firms leverage similar blog platforms for their analysts. Gartner, a similar technology business research firm, has its Gartner Blog Network, which aggregates various analyst’s posts into one place. Though it doesn’t have the navigational ease or outside integration like Twitter that the Forrester new platform includes.

Companies: Forrester Research

What’s it going to take to dethrone World of Warcraft? One of two things, I’d say: one, an asteroid smashing directly into the planet, with Blizzard at the exact location of impact, or two, Blizzard releasing World of Warcraft 2. The asteroid is more likely at this point. So you can imagine the time and money EA is putting into The Old Republic, the only MMO with a chance in hell of taking away even a fraction of WoW’s subscribers.

At some fancy financial-type meeting in New York, EA said that BioWare’s The Old Republic is the “largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company.” Considering the amount of money that Ea throws at its games these days, yeah, you can assume the company has high hopes for the game. I do.

The game is currently scheduled for release spring, 2011. I don’t know a damn thing about Star Wars, but I’ll at least give the game a shot. It’s gonna take the jaws of life to pry me away from WoW full-time, though. I wish I could put that in a resumé.