This past Thursday, Nintendo held it’s first Nintendo direct since the passing of former president Satoru Iwata. Though his absence was felt, there are a lot of new and exciting developments that came from the big N. If you don’t wanna watch teh full video, you can check out some of the high points after the jump.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Nintendo, The Pokémon Company and Niantic (Ingress) are working together to bring Pokemon GO to Android and IOS devices in 2016. Like Niantic’s mobile MMORPG Ingress, the game will make use of real world maps to allow players to find, battle, and capture Pokemon in the real world. The game will work in conjunction with a wristwatch peripheral named the Pokemon Go Plus which alerts players of events happening within the game so that players won’t have to spend as much time staring at their screens. Pokemon company president Tsunekazu Ishihara, Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata all had their input on the game. While this isn’t the first time Pokemon has hit mobile devices (The Pokemon Trading Card Game has been available on iOS devices since 2012), this is teh first full fleged Pokemon game developed with input from Nintendo. If this goes well, it’ll be interesting to see how this influences Nintendo’s mobile strategy going forward.

The gaming world lost one of it’s great innovators this past weekend. Satoru Iwata passed away due to complications from Bile Duct cancer. Following his graduation from Tokyo University, Iwata worked with frequent Nintendo developer HAL Laboratories, where he developed games such as Kirby, Balloon Fight, and Mother (a.k.a Earthbound). In the early 90s, he became president of the company, helping turn its fortunes around, and contributed to Pokemon Gold/Silver, the start of another classic Nintendo franchise. In 2002, he became the fourth president of Nintendo, and the first not to be related by either blood or marriage to the Yamauchi family. Taking over Nintendo, Satoru began an initiative to make gaming more appealing to all different audiences. To that end, Satoru was the catalyst behind the development of the Nintendo DS and Wii, along with their successors the Wii U and 3DS, all of whom provided Nintendo fans with unique styles of gaming that were unseen on either of their competitors’ consoles. He also improved communications with fans as well, creating the Nintendo Direct conferences, a series of online presentations aimed at introducing new software and hardware to the public outside of regular channels. In 2013, Iwata took over as head of Nintendo of America. Under his direction, the company nixed large E3 presentations in favor of the smaller Nintendo Directs, such as last month’s puppet show. Earlier this year, Iwata cut a deal with mobile developer DeNA to bring its properties to the mobile market.

Ever since it entered the console gaming market in the early 80s, Nintendo has been an innovator in the industry. It was thanks to the efforts of great men like Shigeru Miyamoto, The late Gunpei Yokoi, Reggie Fils-aime, and Takashi Tezuka that the company continues to be innovative. Satoru Iwata is another one of these innovators, and he helped pushed the company above and beyond what it was. The impact of his loss will no doubt be felt throughout the gaming industry.

Google has unveiled their best April Fools joke yet. With the new job role of Pokemon Master, they have updated Google Maps to be one giant game of Pokemon. You can explore real world maps and find Pokemon to catch. There are 150 Pokemon available in all. As you catch them you can see them in your Pokedex, which can be found by going to the search box. An option will appear to either let you go to the Pokedex or the Pokemon Center. This intrepid explorer has found a Pokemon Center in San Francisco, Tokyo and Sydney so far. Have you found others? Let us know in the comments. I’m up to 75 Pokemon so far with hopes to get all 150 by the end of the day. Keep us updated on your progress!

Movies based on video games are a lot like video games based on movies. They’re trying to cash in on an existing franchise and are usually almost completely devoid of any quality. But there are exceptions! Every once in a while there are games like Golden Eye which buck the trend. There is even the occasional movie based on a video game which isn’t completely horrible. I have a strange fascination with movies based on games, both the bad and the good.

Part of enjoying a video game movie is managing your expectations. I don’t think it’s fair to ignore that a movie is bad but there’s no sense in getting your panties in a bunch when a director you don’t like becomes attached to a film based on your favourite game. This list of the top of the top will demonstrate that even at their best video game movies are not ever treated with a ton of respect. If Uwe Boll or Stephen Sommers aren’t doing your video game movie, the alternative isn’t that Christopher Nolan does it, it’s that no one, or someone worse, does it. With that in mind, enjoy my top 5 favourite video game movies.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Pokémon Black and White 2 are out this week… but who cares about that? Pokémon Black and Blue is free to play! This game is made by the infamous PETA and is a commentary on the dog fighting like world that is the world of Pokémon.

PETA gets a lot of flack for their sensationalist shenanigans but this time I think they’re pretty much right on the money. The game insinuates that Pokémon are basically owned as slaves who are inhumanely forced to fight each other against their wishes. Ash Ketchum is basically the Michael Vick of Pokémon. In this version you don’t play as a trainer but as Pikachu and other Pokémon who are liberating Pokémon from their evil trainers. This game is obviously made by people who are big fans of Pokémon with all of the great references in it from Mudkips to the parallels between PETA and Team Plasma. Check out the game that’s embedded below.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

It costs more than a 3DS XL and just as much as a Wii, contains (at least a few) games available more cheaply on either the eShop or Wii Virtual Console, and comes with a dock that looks like the AES, but doesn’t actually play Neo Geo carts. And yet we still want one. Or two.

Sean and Vinnk wonder what the heck is wrong with them that they’d blow their hard-earned cash on such a frivolous item. Is it because it’s sexy and iPhone-like? Is it because of nostalgia? Is it because they’re stodgy old-timers who are fed up with a constant parade of uninspiring new games? …nah, but it’s fun to wonder!

Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV:
http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/59

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Vinnk tells us about all the Pokemon he knows, although… it’s not really that many.

Find our more about 1337band after the jump!

[Read the rest of this entry…]