If it wasn’t already official enough, it’s now 100% confirmed – Bowser is Nintendo of America’s president and there’s no turning back. If you caught Nintendo’s E3 2019 Direct presentation, you most-definitely saw Doug Bowser – Reggie’s replacement – appear in his first Direct as the head of the American subsidiary.

If you did miss it, you can probably guess what went down. Instead of the human Bowser, Mario’s arch-enemy actually appeared alongside Nintendo’s Yoshiaki Koizumi. It was quite hilarious, as predictable as it might have been. Not long after this, the real Bowser eventually walked out and owned the spotlight while informing the other one about the mix-up. Here’s a recap:

It’s hard to believe, but it seems like Doug has already won over the majority of Nintendo’s fans and it’s all because his surname is Bowser. Honestly, this is all it took for people to trust the guy who’s been troubling Mario for more than 30 years? Maybe every company should appoint a president who has a surname of relevance.

Regardless of this, we think Doug did a fantastic job in his first presentation as Nintendo of America’s president. It’s also got us wondering how Nintendo will keep this joke alive. Maybe Baby Bowser will appear in a future Direct? We guess we’ll find out!

What did you think of this joke? Do you feel safe with Bowser in control of the American sector? Tell us below.

There was a lot to learn about each of Nintendo’s upcoming Switch titles on the first day of Nintendo Treehouse Live at E3 2019. When the localisation team sat down alongside Super Mario Maker 2 producer Takashi Tezuka, viewers were able to learn a little bit more about what to expect from the building game arriving in a few weeks time.

If you missed the live stream, or don’t already know about this particular morsel of info regarding the follow-up to the Wii U original, read on. In the game’s story mode, there’s a ‘Part’ icon in the bottom left side of the screen. During a preview of a night level, we got to see how exactly it functions.

If you’re struggling with a course, the game will notice this and Luigi’s course parts will become accessible, allowing you to select from a small assortment of helpful items such as stars, mushrooms and even blocks to modify the course.

In a translation, Tezuka explained how the Luigi assist mode allowed everyone to play through levels, regardless of their experience:

“I wanted to make sure that there was something for people who might have trouble with these stages, so that they would also be able to make their way through it – so include some way to help people that might not be as advanced as other players.

Tezuka further explained how it is a game about making after all, and it’s a very “light-hearted” addition:

“This is a game about making, so I thought it would fun if there was a way to include a little bit of course making, even when you’re playing a course, like this, so we included this Luigi assist mode.

“I wanted people to just have a light-hearted casual way to be able to add some making elements to courses while they were playing them…That means you don’t have to persevere”

Are you glad to hear Super Mario Maker 2 is more accessible? Are you looking forward to this game’s release? Tell us down in the comments.

In January 2019, we launched our journalism grant partnership with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Our first recipients are already midway through their data journalism training and now I’m thrilled to introduce the recipients of the second phase of our program.   

Kelechukwu Iruoma and Ruth Olorounbi comprise a team investigating the toxic effects of oil spillage in Ogoniland, Nigeria, which has led to poisoned farmlands and compromised reproductive health. An estimated 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled since 1958: This makes an annual average 240,000 barrels of crude in the Niger delta, destroying the local livelihood and the very population’s survival. An award-winning investigative freelance journalist, Iruoma covers environment, education, agriculture and health in Nigeria. He is a reporting fellow of ICFJ and International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), and has been trained by the organizations as Premium Times Center for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and Global Rights Nigeria. 

His reporting partner Olurounbi is the business editor at Per Second News, a U.S.-based organization. The Wole Soyinka Female Leadership and ICIR fellow has covered development and human right issues, business, and agriculture for more than 10 years. When she’s not writing, the award-winning journalist mentors young girls in her local community.  

The second project is one man’s cultural retrospective on a country’s re-emergence to a superpower and tourist destination. Philip Cunningham’s story will take him across the globe, about 7,000 miles from his New York base to Beijing. A seasoned broadcast reporter, producer and documentary filmmaker who started as a Chinese history researcher and tour guide in China, he has worked with outlets like PBS, ABC, NBC, BBC, NHK and CCTV and has witnessed key events like the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the 1999 anti-U.S. demonstrations, and the 2008 Olympics. His goal is to create an immersive travel odyssey of Beijing across time and space that’s at once personal and political, cultural and historical. In addition to plumbing his photo and video archive, a past Nieman Fellow and Fulbright scholar, Cunningham plans to revisit key locations — some of which have changed beyond recognition. Since his first visit in 1983, not only has China changed radically, but so has journalism and the toolkits for a documentarian. A student’s retelling of one of his own stories inspired Cunningham to explore how the latest technologies might enrich the age-old art of storytelling.  

Two very different stories, both told and amplified through immersive storytelling.  

Supporting these three journalists has been part of our larger effort to help newsrooms and journalists deliver impactful stories and empower them through technology to find, create, and share information in unprecedented ways. We operate on the industry and individual level: be it hosting workshops at NICAR in southern California and the upcoming GEN Summit in Athens, working directly with newsrooms like the AP or Recode or assisting individuals like our ICFJ grant recipients, our goal is help journalism in what is our shared values: the pursuit of truth so that people and communities can make the best decisions in their daily lives to guide their future sustainability. 

We look forward to sharing stories on what the ICFJ grantees are learning and how they are affecting change in these communities. Please visit ICFJ to see and support all the tremendous projects it is undertaking–and while you’re at it, wish the center a happy 35th anniversary. 

Tags: data journalism, grantee, ICFJ, storytelling

In January 2019, we launched our journalism grant partnership with the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Our first recipients are already midway through their data journalism training and now I’m thrilled to introduce the recipients of the second phase of our program.   

Kelechukwu Iruoma and Ruth Olorounbi comprise a team investigating the toxic effects of oil spillage in Ogoniland, Nigeria, which has led to poisoned farmlands and compromised reproductive health. An estimated 13 million barrels of oil have been spilled since 1958: This makes an annual average 240,000 barrels of crude in the Niger delta, destroying the local livelihood and the very population’s survival. An award-winning investigative freelance journalist, Iruoma covers environment, education, agriculture and health in Nigeria. He is a reporting fellow of ICFJ and International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), and has been trained by the organizations as Premium Times Center for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Wole Soyinka Center for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) and Global Rights Nigeria. 

His reporting partner Olurounbi is the business editor at Per Second News, a U.S.-based organization. The Wole Soyinka Female Leadership and ICIR fellow has covered development and human right issues, business, and agriculture for more than 10 years. When she’s not writing, the award-winning journalist mentors young girls in her local community.  

The second project is one man’s cultural retrospective on a country’s re-emergence to a superpower and tourist destination. Philip Cunningham’s story will take him across the globe, about 7,000 miles from his New York base to Beijing. A seasoned broadcast reporter, producer and documentary filmmaker who started as a Chinese history researcher and tour guide in China, he has worked with outlets like PBS, ABC, NBC, BBC, NHK and CCTV and has witnessed key events like the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the 1999 anti-U.S. demonstrations, and the 2008 Olympics. His goal is to create an immersive travel odyssey of Beijing across time and space that’s at once personal and political, cultural and historical. In addition to plumbing his photo and video archive, a past Nieman Fellow and Fulbright scholar, Cunningham plans to revisit key locations — some of which have changed beyond recognition. Since his first visit in 1983, not only has China changed radically, but so has journalism and the toolkits for a documentarian. A student’s retelling of one of his own stories inspired Cunningham to explore how the latest technologies might enrich the age-old art of storytelling.  

Two very different stories, both told and amplified through immersive storytelling.  

Supporting these three journalists has been part of our larger effort to help newsrooms and journalists deliver impactful stories and empower them through technology to find, create, and share information in unprecedented ways. We operate on the industry and individual level: be it hosting workshops at NICAR in southern California and the upcoming GEN Summit in Athens, working directly with newsrooms like the AP or Recode or assisting individuals like our ICFJ grant recipients, our goal is help journalism in what is our shared values: the pursuit of truth so that people and communities can make the best decisions in their daily lives to guide their future sustainability. 

We look forward to sharing stories on what the ICFJ grantees are learning and how they are affecting change in these communities. Please visit ICFJ to see and support all the tremendous projects it is undertaking–and while you’re at it, wish the center a happy 35th anniversary. 

Tags: data journalism, grantee, ICFJ, storytelling

If you tuned into Nintendo’s Treehouse Live Broadcast following the big E3 2019 Direct presentation, you likely saw the same segment we did highlighting upcoming September release, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

While there was a lot revealed about this Switch title in the half-hour demo, one of the more interesting titbits of information was regarding the return of the Color Dungeon from the DX version of Link’s Awakening and also the introduction of the Chamber Dungeon.

To cut to the chase, the Color Dungeon is back! Even if it doesn’t have quite the same impact as it did back in 1998, it’s there. What’s reassuring, as the Nintendo Treehouse crew explained, is the fact all of the DX content is represented in this newer version of Link’s Awakening. If you’re not familiar with the original Color Dungeon, it required players to solve color-puzzles and made special use of the Game Boy Color at the time.

Interestingly, the Switch release will also include the new Chamber Dungeon. This dungeon is a building that actually replaces the original Camera Shop that was located in Tal Tal Heights (first featured in Link’s Awakening DX). You could take photos throughout Koholint Island and then return to this shop to print them out or view on the Game Boy Printer accessory.

Instead of this, the building has now been replaced by the Chamber Dungeon, run by Dampé, who you might remember as the graveyard keeper from the 1998 Nintendo 64 release, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It’s also worth noting Dampé was not featured in the original Link’s Awakening games. The Chamber Dungeon itself will allow you to create challenging custom dungeons. For more insight, view the video below:

What are your thoughts about the color dungeon returning and the new chamber dungeon feature? Tell us down in the comments.

Feud has one of the most irreverent app store descriptions that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Not only does it make for a refreshing change from the usual shameless hyperbole but it also provides some potentially life-saving health and safety advice concerning the perils of open manholes. The game itself is a two-player strategy game in which each player takes it in turns to move their pieces around a chequered board with the aim of capturing their opponent’s king. As you may have already guessed, Feud shares many of its sensibilities with the granddaddy of all abstract board games. It follows in the quirky footsteps of the slurred-sounding Chesh and the really rather good Really Bad Chess, by messing with the established rules of Chess to create a fresh new challenge.

A few quick calculations reveal that the board in Feud has only sixteen spaces and that there are a total of sixteen pieces. As a result, the pieces are packed tighter than Tokyoites on a commuter train. This means that the only way to move around the board is to swap places with orthogonally adjacent pieces. The crammed board is viewed from overhead in either a portrait or landscape orientation. Before the game commences, each player will place their king on one of the four spaces in the back row. This will determine the starting positions of all of their other pieces. Each turn a player must first switch the positions of one of their pieces with an adjacent one and they then have the option to carry out a single action. You do not have to take an action but if you fail to take an action for three consecutive turns then you automatically lose the game. The space constraints may mean that there are fewer movement possibilities than in Chess, but these special actions go some way to making up for this.

The King is the most important piece; he doesn’t have a special action and if he dies you lose the game. Wizards can teleport, which allows them to swap places with any other friendly piece, not just adjacent ones. Archers can make a ranged attack in a straight line, either horizontally or vertically. Shields cannot be moved by the opposing player and their positioning will block an archer’s line of sight. Knights get an extra attack and medics can heal up to four adjacent friendly pieces for one health point each. Kings and shields begin the game with four health points, whilst all other pieces have three points. When a piece attacks an enemy it will inflict a single point of damage. Reduce an opposing piece to zero health points and it will be removed from the board.

The combatants are a rather insecure bunch, feeling the need to be adjacent to other friendly pieces in order to function. An isolated piece is therefore useless, and if at any time all of your remaining pieces are isolated, you will lose the game. It may sound simple enough – until you start playing that is. The chain of repercussions that accompany each and every move will soon have you turning mental somersaults. Things get even more fraught as players begin to lose pieces and the board opens up. Now, the problem of leaving your pieces isolated becomes ever more pressing. In a face-to-face match, Feud can really put you in a state of analysis paralysis, which will often leave your opponent twiddling their thumbs and wishing that the developers had included a timer in order to speed things up.

Let us take a look at the aesthetics, and I should make it clear that I am not talking about the apparent dashing good looks of Feud’s developers. I love how the cute buttoned-eyed characters stop blinking when they become isolated. The top-down view means that the pieces are easy to distinguish and the interface is both clean and smooth. However, not being particularly good at thinking ahead, I do miss the opportunity to take back a mistaken or disastrous move. Although games do not take long, I would still have appreciated the option to save a game that is in progress. As it is, returning to the main menu will cancel your current game.

Feud definitely falls into the easy to learn, difficult to master category. The tutorial is nicely presented and will have you ready to play in no time at all. There is a hint system that will recommend a move when you are hopelessly stuck but it would have been nice to have an advanced tutorial to take you through an actual game and explain the thinking behind some of the moves. As it stands, I found myself initially feeling a bit clueless as to what approach to take and how to formulate a strategy. I did quickly discover though that the starting player usually snatches the impetus, giving them a distinct advantage.

There is a hot seat mode, which allows you to take part in a face-to-face battle, or you can challenge an AI opponent.  The AI has two difficulty levels and three different play styles. An aggressive opponent will throw everything into recklessly pursuing your king, a defensive AI focuses on protecting their own king, whilst a sneaky challenger will try their best to isolate all of your pieces. The easy AI isn’t up to much, but the hard one gave me a decent challenge. I have always been a bit rubbish at these types of games and so a more capable player may have a different story to tell.

There is always the option to find an online opponent and you can play cross-platform against iOS, Android, PC, Mac and Linux users. Currently, online games are limited to asynchronous games with a 24-hour turn deadline. This does mean that games can drag on and the option for a quicker turnaround would be much appreciated. There isn’t a ranking system either, which can lead to some one-sided games that are not much fun for either player. Aside from a few negatives, Feud is a clever and compelling abstract game and better still it is entirely free to play. So you have nothing to lose by giving it a try.

Kestrel Moon just made a change to the licensing of the runtimes powering their Creature 2D animation software.  These runtimes enable you to fully utilize animations authored in Creature in your game engine of choice.  Runtimes exist for the follow game engines and platforms:

The terms of licensing for the runtimes are now as follows:

The Creature Runtimes operate under 2 License types depending on whether you own a Licensed copy of Creature or not.

• People who own a licensed copy of Creature: You use the standard Creature License included with the runtime code. TLDR: You are free to publish/modify/sell your product with the Creature runtimes without needing to state you are using the runtimes/put the copyright notice in your code/app. If you already have been using the Creature runtimes as a licensed owner of Creature, nothing changes ?

• Everyone else: The runtimes are released under the very permissive Apache License ?

Both Licenses allow for private use and do not require any disclosure of your source code.

The previous licensing required developers to have a license to work with a runtime, making integrating Creature runtimes into various game engines and technology impossible if you didn’t already own a license.  This change should make it easier for example for a game programmer to work with the runtimes using art generated by an artist, not requiring an additional license in this scenario.

If you are interested in learning more about Creature, be sure to check out our hands-on video available here and embedded below.

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