Nintendo DS Game News

Trademark law may state that the slogan “It only does everything” can only be used by Sony to describe the PlayStation 3, but when we live in a world where the Nintendo DS can be used to train fast-food workers, we think Nintendo should have a legitimate claim to the description.

According to Japanese trade paper Nikkei (via Andriasang), McDonalds will indeed soon be using the DS to train their part-time employees in Japan, using a proprietary program called “eSmart” that they’re developing themselves. This will mean installing around two DS handhelds in every McDonalds store in the country, which apparently totals 3,700 locations as of the end of February — meaning as many as 7,400 DS handhelds McDonalds is about to purchase.

The total cost for this initiative (excluding the cost of developing the eSmart program) is said to come out to around 200 million yen ($2.2 million). But McDonalds expects the DS training system to save money by cutting training time by half compared to traditional methods, partly because of how familiar employees will already be with using a DS.

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Trademark law may state that the slogan “It only does everything” can only be used by Sony to describe the PlayStation 3, but when we live in a world where the Nintendo DS can be used to train fast-food workers, we think Nintendo should have a legitimate claim to the description.

According to Japanese trade paper Nikkei (via Andriasang), McDonalds will indeed soon be using the DS to train their part-time employees in Japan, using a proprietary program called “eSmart” that they’re developing themselves. This will mean installing around two DS handhelds in every McDonalds store in the country, which apparently totals 3,700 locations as of the end of February — meaning as many as 7,400 DS handhelds McDonalds is about to purchase.

The total cost for this initiative (excluding the cost of developing the eSmart program) is said to come out to around 200 million yen ($2.2 million). But McDonalds expects the DS training system to save money by cutting training time by half compared to traditional methods, partly because of how familiar employees will already be with using a DS.

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Japanese developer CyberConnect2 released the first details today on Solarobo, a new robot action game and the first Nintendo DS title in the studio’s history. It’s set to be released in Japan from Namco Bandai Games; no US launch has been announced.

Released to commemorate the 15th anniversary of CyberConnect2’s founding, Solarobo boasts a gameplay and visual style very close to Tail Concerto (above), a 1998 PlayStation title that was the studio’s first game ever. “I’m not joking when I say that this game’s been in conception for 10 years and in development for three,” CC2 head Hiroshi Matsuyama told Famitsu magazine this week. “Crazy, isn’t it? Three years for a Nintendo DS game! I’m impressed Namco Bandai waited that long for us.”

The game is set in a world composed of floating islands, one where dog-like and cat-like humanoid species have banded together to create an advanced civilization. As shown in the fully-animated intro (created by anime studio Madhouse), you play Red Savarin, a dog bounty hunter who works with his sister Chocolat and DAHAK-AZI03, his cool personal robot, to take on jobs and catch his targets.

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There had been a few Nintendo DS successor rumors leading up to GDC this week, and now even more (unconfirmed!) details have emerged from various anonymous sources from the conference. Raymond Padilla reports (via Shacknews) that from the information he gathered at GDC, the DS2 will have a built-in accelerometer, power similar to a GameCube, and may even be out by the end of the year.

According to Padilla’s info, the DS2 will, naturally, also have two screens. But they’ll be larger, higher resolution, and the gap between the two screens will be much smaller compared to the DS, so they could be used as one large screen.

Padilla also reports that the “dev kit is similar in power to the GameCube,” although it’s not clear if that means the graphics can be expected to be at the GameCube level as well (which, let’s be honest, would mean DS2 visuals would even be pretty close to Wii visuals, too). This also means that developers will reportedly find the system easy to developer for, as the “people familiar with the dev kit made it sound like there wasn’t much of a learning curve on the new system.”

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Over in Japan this week, Namco Bandai Games took the veils off Masou Kishin: The Lord of Elemental, the latest game in their sprawling Super Robot Taisen series of anime-inspired robot sims. The game is due out for the Nintendo DS May 27 in Japan for the retail price of 6090 yen.

The Lord of Elemental is more than just another SRT Original Generation title — it’s the one that kicked off the whole series, sort of. Originally released in 1996 for the Super NES in Japan, the game marks the debut of hot-blooded robot pilot Masaki Ando and his elementally-powered craft Cybaster, popular enough that they starred in a 26-episode TV anime in 1999. Once a normal Japanese kid, Masaki gets his mecha career kick-started in this game when he’s summoned to La Gias, a world housed under the Earth’s crust, and asked to pilot one of the four elemental robots built by the kingdom of Languran to stave off a prophesied disaster.

“We’ve never dug into the backbone of Masaki and Cybaster, even though they both appear regularly in the SRTOG series,” producer Takanobu Terada told Famitsu magazine this week. “The Lord of Elemental answers the question of where those characters came from.”

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Scribblenauts was one of 2009’s breakout hits, so it’s no surprise to see a sequel already in the works — and it’s coming pretty soon, too. The latest issue of Nintendo Power reveals Scribblenauts 2 will be released on the DS this fall, just a year after the first game’s release.

According to GoNintendo’s notes from the issue, Scribblenauts 2 will have the sort of additions and improvements you’d expect for a game all about random vocabulary: It’ll have a whopping 10,000 new words, 120 “new and improved” levels, improved controls (one of the major complaints with the first game), a new hint system, a fleshed out level editor, and apparently it’ll focus heavily on adjectives. That last one could potentially open the gameplay possibilities quite a bit, considering adjectives could be used to modify the things you create. For example, maybe you aren’t just able to conjure a T-Rex, but a rotund T-Rex? Or — could you imagine — a delighted T-Rex?

Hopefully we’ll know more soon enough.

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It’s time once again to play everyone’s favorite news game: Boarderline-Irresponsible Patent Speculation! On this episode, we have Nintendo filing a patent for what appears to be a new cartridge design for the Nintendo DS…or, maybe a new cartridge design for the heavily rumored DS 2?

The patent was picked up on by Siliconera, and to be honest, there’s nothing in it that specifically proves it could be either of the above. While the included figure shows what certainly looks like a DS, the patent filing states that it’s for “illustration purposes only.” Still, Siliconera also points out this cartridge design — which would, if it’s actually meant for the DS, stick out quite a bit — has the same number of pins as a standard DS cartridge.

That’s all there really is to go on, though, so it’s impossible to say what the mystery behind this cartridge is. Will more be revealed at GDC next week? Or will we have to wait until E3 in June for answers? Or does Nintendo have no intentions of doing anything with this patent at all? Stay tuned!

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Kadokawa Games announced Metal Max 3 for the Nintendo DS in this week’s spate of Japanese gaming magazines. The RPG, part of a series we last saw in the US with Atlus’ Metal Saga in 2006, will hit Japanese store shelves sometime this summer; no American release has been announced.

Like Metal Saga, Metal Max 3 takes place in the near future after an unspecified disaster turns the world into a giant Mad Max pastiche. The hero, which Kadokawa calls “the strongest level-1 character in the history of video games,” has just been resurrected from the dead by mad scientist Dr. Minch. His first task: Finding his lost memories. His second: Surviving, presumably.

The game is under development by Crea-Tech, with design duties handled by series director Hiroshi Miyaoka, a JRPG veteran who cut his teeth working on the first three Dragon Quest games. Gameplay will be your typical turn-based JRPG fare, with your hero hiring mercenaries and customizing vehicles like tanks and (for the first time in the series) motorcycles in order to beat bad guys and track down bounties.

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At the Nintendo Media Summit today, a North American release date and price was revealed for the new supersized DS system, the DSi XL. Known as the DSi LL in Japan, the supposedly spectator-friendly handheld will launch a month from now, on March 28, for $189.99. Assuming there are no price drops between now and the end of next month, that will put it at a $20 premium over the smaller DSi (still retailing at $169.99) and $60 over the Game Boy Advance cartridge-supporting DS Lite ($129.99).

The most obvious difference between the DSi XL and the standard DSi is the increased size; the screen and stylus are both much larger. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata claimed back in October that the XL’s increasing viewing angle would create a “new play style where those who are surrounding the game player can also join in one way or the other to the game play.”

Expect to hear plenty more out of the media summit as the day rolls on

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So rumors are flying that Nintendo is already hard at work on the DS 2, and it might even be revealed at E3 in June. But can we add to those rumors that it might also feature built-in rumble functionality, too? Maybe! A patent filing by Nintendo has been dug up that describes how a “game apparatus” with an “LCD and a touch pad” would initiate a rumble feature depending on what’s happening in the game, which would then be felt by the player through the stylus (Broke My Controller, via Kotaku).

This filing is actually an addendum to a patent filed by Nintendo in 2005, and describes this rumble feature through the example of attacking a character in a game. “In a case that the enemy character exists at a depth of a game screen, little damage is applied to the enemy character, and a weak vibration is applied to the game apparatus,” the filing confusingly explains. “Conversely, in a case that the enemy character exists at a front of the game screen, much damage is applied to the character, and a strong vibration is applied to the game apparatus. In either case, the vibrations are transmitted to the fingers or hands of the player via the stick.” (Don’t even think about it.)

So in other words, strong attacks mean more rumble, weak attacks less. But could this actually be a new feature planned for the heavily-rumored-but-still-unannounced DS 2? Or, as can often be the case with patents, simply an idea or prototype Nintendo filed to have it protected but may never actually use?

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