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Cave Story Wii has finally been given a release date, at least in North America.

The game includes 5 game modes, including Easy Mode, Hard Mode, Boss Rush, and Sanctuary Time Attack.

Other features:

• Standard definition and Wii-exclusive progressive (480p) graphics
• New character designs by creator, Daisuke Amaya
• Completely redrawn background and interface, exclusive to Wii
• Remastered music as well as the original soundtrack
• Mix-and-match new/old artwork and music!
• Five new play modes (including Sanctuary Time Attack and Boss Rush)
• Three-save files, as demanded by fans
• Over 20 epic boss battles through Mimiga Island
• 15 levels to explore in the vast world
• 10 unique weapons to find and upgrade
• Classic Controller compatibility
• Three unique endings
• A few surprises fans

You can read the full press release here.

Also, here’s a brief interview I did with Pixel about Cave Story Wii last year. Various constraints forbade me from posting it until now. Enjoy!

Derek: Hi, Pixel, it’s nice to get to speak with you again!

Pixel: Thanks!

D: How is the Cave Story Wii project going?

P: I’ve played it a few times to check the game’s progress through development. It feels very good. I find the newly re-drawn artwork agreeable and I’m happy with the newly re-mixed music.

D: Last time I talked with you, you said you were hesitant to do games commercially, and to work in a group where your vision might be compromised. What made you decide to work with Nicalis on this project?

P: I, myself, have thought about making commercial games, but I haven’t had any good ideas about it. When Tyrone first contacted me I was a bit puzzled and didn’t really understand entirely. After our continued discussions I could feel Tyrone’s passion for Cave Story. It surpassed my own and I felt that I could leave it up to him.

D: When did you start working on the project, exactly?

P: When was it? I think maybe Spring or Summer of ‘08? Tyrone, when was it?

(Tyrone: That’s right.)

D: What was the process like, working with Nicalis? Do you talk every day? How did you get around the language barrier?

P: Tyrone’s wife is Japanese and I am grateful for her help in advancing my conversations with Tyrone this far. He’s currently studying Japanese; we’re not able to communicate entirely with each other with just us when he visits my home. My English studies have not gotten far…I’m sorry.

(T: Derek, he’s being very modest, his English has come a LONG way.)

D: Are you happy with the new features, like the high resolution graphics? How did you and Nicalis decide on these features?

P: I am satisfied with how Cave Story turned out on the Wii. It’s fun to think about games, but to actually implement them is many times more difficult. Now that it’s come together I feel rewarded thanks to the support of all the players.

D: Are you interested in doing more commercial game development now?

P: I haven’t thought about it yet. I can’t think in my head of what’s necessary.

D: I noticed that fans sent you a DS last year, and you must also have a Wii now. Are you trying out a lot of new games? Are there any that captivate you?

P: I don’t have a Wii yet, but I plan on getting one.

D: Cave Story has made a huge impact on the Western independent game scene. Do you play any indie games or have any thoughts about them?

P: I don’t know too much about indie games. You mean games created by an individual and such, right? I have looked around for free games, but lately, due to time constraints, I haven’t had time to play much.

D: What has the response to the Cave Story Wii project been like in Japan?

P: I received many congratulatory words. I’m happy because many people have expressed interest in a Japanese version for Wii.

D: Have you worked on anything else game-related in the meantime?

P: I’m working a little bit on an RPG, but I’m still barely on the basic systems.

D: Have you worked on anything else creative, like art and music?

P: Right now I’ve just been making the RPG. I’ve made a bit of pixel art and music for the RPG, but it’s all still temporary.

D: You were a student when you started Cave Story, and you were an office worker when you finished. Now that Cave Story Wii is almost out, is your life even more different?

P: It stopped once I got job. Lately, I’ve been coming home late so I’ve left the house duties and child support to my wife. Saturdays and Sundays are spent doing household chores. Anything creative is typically done on nights during the week.

D: How often do you play your own games? Do you have any new thoughts about Cave Story now?

P: I test my games until they’re complete, until I hate them. So, I end up not playing the games I create. But I’m looking forward to playing Cave Story on the Wii.

I still receive requests for a sequel to Cave Story even now. I don’t have any ideas for a sequel to Cave Story, but if I started making it, I believe I could come up with something. Cave Story was actually developed in that manner.

D: It’s popular to ask a random question at the end of the interview. Last time I asked you what your favorite food was, and you said lightly-salted onigiri (Japanese rice balls). This time I’ll ask you what your favorite movie is!

P: My favorite movie is The Game with Michael Douglas. I watched it twice and enjoyed it both times. Also, A Chinese Ghost Story (Joey Wong) – I saw it when I was a kid, but it was a very uncomfortable feeling. Also, a few more I can recall are Mr. Vampire 2, Aliens, and Pom Poko.

D: Once again, if you have anything else you’d like to say to your fans…

P: Thank you for your support.

I hope that you will some day will be able to play the RPG being created now. Although it’s still into the unforeseeable future… Continue reading

Nicalis has announced that the WiiWare version of Cave Story will be hitting the North America WiiWare store on March 22nd.

Some of the new features for this enhanced version include:

- New character designs and completely redrawn background and interface, exclusive to Wii
- Remastered music as well as the original soundtrack
- Mix-and-match new/old artwork and music!
- Five new play modes (including Sanctuary Time Attack and Boss Rush)
- Over 20 epic boss battles, 15 levels to explore and 10 unique weapons
- Three unique endings

No word on a release for the rest of the world, but hopefully it won't be long after that.

Official Cave Story site
Preview trailers from back in 2008

Game industry sleuth Supperannuation points out that UK artist Ross Dearsley, formerly a senior conceptual designer at Electronic Arts for nine years, has a fabulous collection of work posted on his personal site from EA's released and cancelled internal projects. You can see several of my favorites after the break.

Along with a look at character designs from the previously discussed current generation remake for Road Rash, Dearsley's site offers concept artwork for titles like Gunhead and Oliver Twist -- Dante's Inferno wasn't EA's first go at adapting a classic literary text into a video game!

Vincent Proce, Midway's former visual creative directory before he left the company last February to take a job at Vogster, shared several character designs from a Mortal Kombat pitch that dramatically revamped the look and histories of the franchise's fighters.

"The basis for the idea was a re-imagining of the Mortal Kombat franchise from the original premise but mixing modern muti-player and dismemberment game design with the original fighting mechanic," explained Proce. "The game idea isn't going to happen now that I no longer work there."

His pitch turned Kano into a "half Japanese, half U.S. military badass"; Sonya as the daughter of a Texas Ranger, armed with what looks like a glavin and Special forces training; Raiden as a god whose feet rarely touch the ground; and Scorpion as a wraith waring "the yellow blood of the demon that [resurrected him] to exact his revenge against his mortal enemy".

Though Proce designed and presented only four characters with the pitch, he says he would like to give the same treatment to the rest of Mortal Kombat's original characters if he ever finds the time.

[Via Super Punch]

[Our own Brandon Sheffield sat down with Nippon Ichi president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the SRPG-focused company's new PSP game, as well as its philosophy and operating practices.]

For over 15 years, Japanese developer and publisher Nippon Ichi Software has been releasing hardcore-targeted RPGs, particularly strategy RPGs like the successful Disgaea series.

Most recently, the team behind Disgaea has announced its newest game, Zettai Hero Kaizou Keikaku (which Siliconera translates as Absolute Hero Modding Project), a PSP dungeon-crawling action RPG that -- like many other Nippon Ichi games -- features plenty of randomly-generated content.

We talked with NIS president and COO Souhei Niikawa and Disgaea team development lead Masahiro Yamamoto to discuss the small company's attitude toward game development, its RPG success, and why throwing characters is such a big deal in its titles:

Your focus has been on RPGs, particularly Disgaea. Where will you focus going forward?

Souhei Niikawa: Well, RPGs remain a popular genre for the hardcore audience, so I think that RPGs will still be a central part of our strategy.

Disgaea is certainly an important title for Nippon Ichi. We'll continue to grow that game by doing what's best for that particular series. Placing our fortunes on nothing but Disgaea wouldn't be right at all. For example, we want to grow this new game in the same way that we've grown Disgaea. We want to make games that are different from Disgaea, of course, but sell just as well as that.

A lot of Nippon Ichi's character designs have "moe" and "loli" elements. Will that continue? Has for the market for that become smaller?

SN: We made games for the people who play them. If the audience's needs shift away from moe or loli, then we'd certainly go with a different design. We still think there's a demand for that, though, so it will probably continue. From the creator's perspective, we think it's very important to keep trying new things, and as a result, we naturally don't want to stick with any one thing for too long.

What made you adopt that style in the beginning? Did it start out with what the development team liked?

SN: Yes. Well, it's undeniable that a large part of our audience is what people would call game otaku, or hardcore game fans. So we want to make what they want, but at the same time, we're all pretty hardcore too. So, there's that. (laughs)

The first Disgaea really seemed to be designed around picking up and throwing characters. That influenced the rest of the dungeon design and combos in battle. Would you agree with that?

SN: Certainly. Well, not just with Disgaea, but it's been an important aspect of a lot of our games, including this one here. It's been that way from around that time.

It's sort of a Nippon Ichi trademark.

SN: Yeah. We're all about throwing people. (laughs) Using that as a vital tactical tool.

Where did the idea for that come from?

SN: The original task before us was to figure out how this game would be different from the rest. We needed some strong and unique gameplay aspect that would give this project some sort of individual hook. I think it's something that's worked, as you can see how the series has progressed from 1 to 3.

Masahiro Yamamoto: I don't really remember the individual process that led to the pick-up-and-throw idea, but we were coming up with all kinds of ideas to put in the game and make it unique.

The original Disgaea is full of original little ideas like that, but it's undeniable that the throwing system is the idea that stuck out the most in gamers' minds once it came out. It's the result of that kind of thought process.

Just thinking about it by itself, it's hard to conceptualize how it'd be fun. How did you decide that the feature was so important to have?

MY: Well, we're a very small company, and none of the teams behind our projects is particularly large. That structure allows individuals to test out assorted ideas pretty quickly as they come up with them, then show them around to see what the rest of the team thinks.

I don't think that teams the size of what you have for Final Fantasy would be able to try out such risky things within development. I think that's one of the merits of having a small company like ours; it's easier to try new challenges, and that's how a lot of features in our games are born.

You go through a lot of iterations.

MY: I think so, yeah.

How much content is too much for one game? With the item world, you could keep going forever. How do you know when to stop?

SN: I guess you could say it's when we feel like there's nothing left to add to the gameplay.

MY: Oh, we never really stop. (laughs) We put so much stuff into each project, and eventually we get to a point where we ask ourselves, "Do we really need all this?"

When a majority of staffers start answering, "I'm not sure" to that question, that's when we stop. (laughs) That's pretty much how it works.

We really think that having a lot to explore in our games is very important -- especially with the Disgaea series, where it's become kind of a hallmark. Of course, we definitely can't take that approach with all of our titles; instead, we find different ways of making the games engaging and fun to our audience.

I was wondering if you're concerned that if you give too much, there might not be any need to buy sequels.

MY: That's not really much of a worry to us. The way we see it, in fact, most of audience goes through our games pretty quickly, especially the really hardcore people who support the Disgaea series. It's really something, the amount of time they put into playing our stuff. I wouldn't call it a big worry.

Nippon Ichi is pretty much the only game company in Gifu Prefecture. Do you think your company has any regional flavor since you're isolated from other developers?

SN: Well, the Internet is everywhere, and we're a game company, after all, so it's certainly not an inconvenience or anything.

I would say [our flavor] is not in the location so much as our style of company. Since we're kind of out in the country and have small development teams, that helps to add individuality to our games.

In Tokyo, you have a lot of developers who have gone from company to company, quitting one job and picking up another one right off. I think the fact that we've not experienced that as much helps us keep consistent in the sorts of games we release.

Do your staffers come from all over Japan?

SN: Yes. We don't really headhunt from other companies or anything. Sometimes we hire new grads who apply to our company; sometimes we get people who have previous experience with other game companies.

Finally, when you start a new game, from what point do you begin -- an idea, a list of features? What is your jumping-off point?

MY: In the beginning, there's only an outline, a very general idea of what kind of game we want to make -- what kind of world we want, for example. Then things just expand off from there, and eventually we figure out what sort of genre would be best, like how this game turned out to be a dungeon RPG. That's how things begin.

Riffing off of Gary Clarke's "Movie Posters for Minimalists" set, illustrator InfiniteContinues creates his own series of images exploring how you can pick out familiar video game characters from a few basic forms.

"It’s a testament to the details of these character designs that they can be recognised when reduced to a few simple shapes and colours," explains InfiniteContinues, who currently works as an artist for SCE Europe.

I picked out five favorite pieces and pasted the below. You can see the rest of the artist's series on his Flickr set.

This opening animation for Brazilian show Bom Dia & Companhia doesn't just pay homage to popular scenes from films like Mission Impossible and Raiders of the Lost Ark (not sure why that guy is naked in the reenactment), it also bears more than a close resemblance to the character designs of a certain Media Molecule series (the studio's only series, in fact).

Even without any stitching/zippers and colored dull green, the characters are unmistakably Sackboys. Even the logo's presentation looks like something ripped from LittleBigPlanet!

[Via NeoGAF]