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Project H.A.M.M.E.R. (Wii)

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Just read this over at GoNintendo. Apparently NGamer have found out that the game is still in development! Heres the link...

 

http://gonintendo.com/?p=43378

 

sounds like a planed leak. so it would shift the focus of the n sites off the E3 real leaks (not that there are any up to now that i am known of)

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Saying that Zack and Wiki not selling is due to Wii's fault is very erm... wrong, lacks reality to it; the reality that it is a niche title that would be hard to sell anywhere.

It was because Capcom never advertise ANYTHING (appart from a couple of games).

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It was because Capcom never advertise ANYTHING (appart from a couple of games).

 

 

I've seen quite a few Z&W adverts actually. It was on alot when Nintendo sponsored comedy shows on ch4.

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I've seen quite a few Z&W adverts actually. It was on alot when Nintendo sponsored comedy shows on ch4.

Yeah, that's Nintendo advertising just Nintendo generally though; there's never been a proper Z&W ad.

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Ya read about that earlier. The game never looked that great from the outset.

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Super bump for this very interesting vid:

 

What a mess. :shakehead

 

Absolutely disgusting practice by the higher ups. Saying things like " You wouldn't understand because your not Japanese " is unacceptable. No wonder the western studios fell apart once Iwata came along.

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Aren't the same people in charge back then, still in control now? They are and some of what was said in that video comes as no surprise to me.

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Really sad to hear about the demise of another once great western Nintendo 2nd party. :nono:

 

These studios were great during the N64 and early Gamecube days. What has changed between then and now?

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Absolutely disgusting practice by the higher ups. Saying things like " You wouldn't understand because your not Japanese " is unacceptable. No wonder the western studios fell apart once Iwata came along.

 

See that's the part that doesn't make sense to me. It's not like Nintendo haven't maintained good relations with plenty of other internal and external western studios; so how convenient is it that this one studio that was plagued with problems throughout this project (one in which they had a large budget and more or less complete creative freedom to boot!) blames the Japanese NST managers...

 

Not to claim that they're faultless here, but I get the feeling that this is a matter of us only hearing one side of the story here. This was the first time that NST ever tried making a game that didn't rigidly stick to a pre-established formula founded by another series (even Metroid Prime Hunters, which deviated heavily from the single player focus that the series was known for, was very heavily based on Quake); so the design staff were all rookies in a certain sense because this was the first time they actually broke out to do their own thing.

 

And from the sounds of things, design was the one big problem with this game... If the simple act of killing enemies with the hammer was all it had going for it, then it sounds like a refocus on environmental destruction/interaction was actually the right approach to take. If anything though, it really should've been cancelled much sooner, rather than keep pouring money into a project that was going nowhere fast.

 

Game concept design has never really been NST's strongpoint with their games generally, but rather they've mostly been good at taking someone else's work and building off of that. All of their other games have followed in that way, even from the beginning (their first project was re-skinning the unreleased Panel de Pon 64 into Pokemon Puzzle League) and generally the main characteristic features of their games came down as suggestions from various NCL staff (I know that Miyamoto himself suggested the Turbo system for Wave Race Blue Storm and I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that the Avalanche mechanic of 1080 Avalanche was also another NCL suggestion as well).

Edited by Dcubed

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To be fair, it's not the higher ups at Nintendo who are the point of contention. From what I understood, it's the Japanese people they put in charge of NST.

 

We are also only hearing one side of the argument here. There's bound to be more to it.

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To be fair, it's not the higher ups at Nintendo who are the point of contention. From what I understood, it's the Japanese people they put in charge of NST.

 

We are also only hearing one side of the argument here. There's bound to be more to it.

 

Don't quote me in future. I'm not interested in your dribble.

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I think you mean drivel, dribble is what babies or basketball players do.

 

Serebii's post was perfectly fine, just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean you have a right to tell him to stop quoting you.

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Don't quote me in future. I'm not interested in your dribble.

 

That was uncalled for. It's a valid point he made.

There's more to this story than this video.

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That was uncalled for. It's a valid point he made.

There's more to this story than this video.

 

Oh there's more to it alright. And I'm not talking about this post. I don't want any of his quotes clogging up my notifications. I've a fair idea what he's doing behind the scenes. Probably reported that post as well for writing the word dribble.

 

And my post was quoted but he removed it.

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See that's the part that doesn't make sense to me. It's not like Nintendo haven't maintained good relations with plenty of other internal and external western studios; so how convenient is it that this one studio that was plagued with problems throughout this project (one in which they had a large budget and more or less complete creative freedom to boot!) blames the Japanese NST managers...

 

It's something I have zero trouble in believing actually happened.

 

Nintendo has displayed a certain arrogance in the past and at times I often think they look down on western studios due to their different attitudes and approaches to making games. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to see that this is actually how it when down.

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Oh there's more to it alright. And I'm not talking about this post. I don't want any of his quotes clogging up my notifications. I've a fair idea what he's doing behind the scenes. Probably reported that post as well for writing the word dribble.

 

And my post was quoted but he removed it.

 

The PM him asking him not to quote you, because as it is your request is clogging up the thread. I'm the third reply about your post. Or use the lets talk about this place thread, and politely make the request there.

 

Maybe I should've taken my own advice, but iunno, rolling with the hypocrit angle here.

 

 

Edit: just saw the snide post in the aforementioned thread. I can understand why you're annoyed, I apologize somewhat, but standby that this isn't the place for it.

Edited by Nolan

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It absolutely breaks my heart to see Wave Race: Blue Storm and 1080 Avalanche in that video. I never cared much for Project H.A.M.M.E.R. as I never thought it sounded like a particularly fun idea but this whole ordeal does perhaps go some way to explaining why we haven't had a new Wave Race or 1080 Snowboarding in over a decade :sad:

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It's something I have zero trouble in believing actually happened.

 

Nintendo has displayed a certain arrogance in the past and at times I often think they look down on western studios due to their different attitudes and approaches to making games. It wouldn't surprise me one bit to see that this is actually how it when down.

 

Next Level Games? Retro Studios? Monster Games? Headstrong Games? The various outside studios that they've worked with over the years? They've all turned out fine and have always been positive about the suggestions and support that have been offered (and it's not like they haven't had their share of struggles over the years either - NLG chose to dedicate themselves to working with Nintendo exclusively after their bad experiences of working with other western publishers after all.).

 

This one seems like such an extreme outlier in terms of experience that I really doubt that it's really an accurate account of what happened. It was a troubled project that span on its wheels for 5 years, by a studio who had never designed their own game from scratch before; it's actually pretty amazing that they actually let them keep at it for so long before finally pulling the plug!

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Next Level Games? Retro Studios? Monster Games? Headstrong Games? The various outside studios that they've worked with over the years? They've all turned out fine and have always been positive about the suggestions and support that have been offered (and it's not like they haven't had their share of struggles over the years either - NLG chose to dedicate themselves to working with Nintendo exclusively after their bad experiences of working with other western publishers after all.).

 

This one seems like such an extreme outlier in terms of experience that I really doubt that it's really an accurate account of what happened. It was a troubled project that span on its wheels for 5 years, by a studio who had never designed their own game from scratch before; it's actually pretty amazing that they actually let them keep at it for so long before finally pulling the plug!

 

Believe what you want, dude. Until Nintendo come out and dispute the claim, I for one have no problems thinking it went down like this.

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Believe what you want, dude. Until Nintendo come out and dispute the claim, I for one have no problems thinking it went down like this.

I just think you're looking at it too big. From what the video says, it wasn't the overall Nintendo higher ups the NST developers were clashing with, it was the specific staff that were put in charge of NST.

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Next Level Games? Retro Studios? Monster Games? Headstrong Games? The various outside studios that they've worked with over the years?

 

Next Level Games seems to be in a spot of trouble now, at least with the fans. How much creative freedom do they have with Metroid Prime Federation Force? Are Nintendo just forcing them to shove the Metroid franchise on a completely unrelated game?

 

Monster Games have been relegated to porting Wii games this gen. Can't imagine that does much for studio moral. Such a waste.

 

I had to look up Headstrong Games to figure out who they were. They're working on 3 multiformat projects according to their site, nothing Nintendo related.

 

Retro is the only studio that seems relatively safe, but after what happened with Rareware and NST I don't feel very confident Nintendo really values any of these studios that highly. ::shrug:

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Next Level Games seems to be in a spot of trouble now, at least with the fans. How much creative freedom do they have with Metroid Prime Federation Force? Are Nintendo just forcing them to shove the Metroid franchise on a completely unrelated game?

 

We can answer that. No. This is an idea that Tanabe has been wanting to do with the Metroid franchise for 10 years and now he, with Next Level Games, are doing it.

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There's something about Monster Games that I LOVE. Excite Truck and Pilot Wings are two of my favourite games on Wii and 3DS. I will never forgive Nintendo for how awful they have treated that development studio. Could they really not get anyone else to port their stuff? Ugh.

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Next Level Games seems to be in a spot of trouble now, at least with the fans. How much creative freedom do they have with Metroid Prime Federation Force? Are Nintendo just forcing them to shove the Metroid franchise on a completely unrelated game?

 

Monster Games have been relegated to porting Wii games this gen. Can't imagine that does much for studio moral. Such a waste.

 

I had to look up Headstrong Games to figure out who they were. They're working on 3 multiformat projects according to their site, nothing Nintendo related.

 

Retro is the only studio that seems relatively safe, but after what happened with Rareware and NST I don't feel very confident Nintendo really values any of these studios that highly. ::shrug:

 

Well, Next Level Games actually were working on a Metroid related game for 3DS, prior to putting it on hold when they were asked to make Luigi's Mansion 2, so it is actually a series that they wanted to work on anyway...

 

Headstrong Games are the guys who made the Batallian Wars games and the Art Academy series (the former being a new IP loosely based on Advance Wars and the latter being a brand new IP of their own that they've continued to iterate on for the last 5 years).

 

With Monster Games, you have to account for the fact that they're a relatively small studio of about 20-30 odd people. That's not enough to make really large scale projects anymore, so that's why they've been working on smaller scale projects this generation (as well as helping out Retro in making Tropical Freeze). With Pilotwings Resort, it was easy enough for them to make because they had a lot of pre-existing assets and code that they could take from Wii Sports Resort, but something larger than that is a big ask for a small studio like theirs.

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