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Nintendo halting console and software distribution in Brazil
Nintendo will end its distribution of hardware and software in Brazil due to high import tariffs. The company opted not to create a local manufacturing operation to avoid the import fees in the emerging market. "Starting in January 2015, Gaming do Brasil, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Juegos de Video Latinoamérica, GmbH, will no longer distribute Nintendo products in Brazil," Nintendo stated to Game Informer. "Despite the changes in Brazil, Juegos de Video Latinoamérica will continue to be Nintendo's distributor for Latin America and they remain committed to the brand and the region." To get a sense of the sticker shock these tariffs have, when Sony's $400 PlayStation 4 launched in Brazil it was approximately $1,800. Sony explained at the time the mark-up was caused by various import fees and taxes. "Brazil is an important market for Nintendo and home to many passionate fans, but unfortunately, challenges in the local business environment have made our current distribution model in the country unsustainable," said Nintendo. "We will continue to monitor the evolution of the business environment and evaluate how best to serve our Brazilian fans in the future."
GDCA 2015 finalists led by Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
The finalists for the 2015 Game Developers Choice Awards were revealed today, led by Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which received five nominations. Monolith's third-person action game was nominated for Game of the Year, Innovation, Best Design, Best Narrative and Best Technology awards at the ceremony (on top of also being Joystiq's favorite game of 2014). The other nominees for the 15th annual GDCA's Game of the Year award are Bayonetta 2, Alien: Isolation, Destiny and Hearthstone. Blizzard's collectible card game received three nominations in total, the other two for Best Design and Best Handheld/Mobile Game. Destiny also received two other nominations for Best Audio and Best Technology. The ceremony for this year's Game Developer's Choice Awards will be held during the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, March 4 at 9:30 p.m. ET (6:30 p.m. PT) at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center. Head past the break to see the full list of nominees.
Super Joystiq Podcast Live: Best of 2014 [Update: Watch the replay!]
Starting at 3:30PM EST right here and on Twitch, it's JOYSTIQ DOME! Ten games enter! Ten games get robustly examined while 13 editors jaw at one another before examining the year 2014 in detail! Yes, it's the Super Joystiq Podcast Live! Thrill as Ludwig Kietzmann tries to defend Watch Dogs. Swoon as Susan Arendt and Anthony John Agnello defend Lightning Returns with the fury of a thousand burning suns. Chortle as Alexander Sliwinski tries to resist playing Hearthstone. Jess Conditt talks Walking Dead, Danny Cowan digs Shovel Knight, Earnest Cavalli loves Sunset Overdrive, Sam Prell digs into Dragon Age: Inquisition, Richard Mitchell bets on Bayonetta, Xav de Matos feels Far Cry 4, Sinan Kubba delights in Dark Souls 2, Mike Suszek survives Desert Golfing, and Thomas Schulenberg gives Super Smash Bros. for Wii U a what for all over again. And that's just how it starts. Tune in right here and on Twitch.tv/Joystiq at 3:30PM EST for a live, all staff round table discussion on the best games of 2014, our personal favorites, and a look back on the gaming year that was. [Images: WBIE]
New Nintendo eShop releases: Chariot, Mega Man Battle Network 2
Considering we're knee-deep in new year lull, there's enough to dig into in this week's eShop update. If you're after something new, you've got the couch-bound co-op of puzzle-platformer Chariot - check out our review on PS4. If you're after something older, you can't go far wrong with Mega Man Battle Network 2. The Game Boy Advance RPG joins the first MMBN on Wii U Virtual Console, and there are four more Battle Networks to go. It may be a new year, but we're keeping it old-school in our eShop posts. As always, the full list of new releases is below the break, while all the sales stuff is just a chariot's ride away.
Joystiq Streams: Who watches the Watch Dogs Wii U? You do!
We've been threatening to do it for almost two months. Everyone said we were just making empty threats. "Oh, Joystiq is all talk," they said, "what with their boasts about streaming odd ports of big budget duds on a peculiar Nintendo console! Why would they ever stream Watch Dogs on Wii U? Who would even watch such a thing?" Joystiq would watch such a thing. Come! Join us as we discover just how Ubisoft's hacker action game stacks up on the old GamePad. We'll be streaming Watch Dogs for Wii U starting at 4:00PM EST on Joystiq.com/Twitch. Our own Xav de Matos (@Xav) will be the canary in the proverbial coal mine. Mike Suszek (@mikesuszek) will provide much needed moral support and hang out in the chat. Joystiq.com/Twitch broadcasts every Tuesday and Thursday at 4:00PM EST. Sometimes we get squirrelly and stream stuff out of the blue, so if you want to catch us at those times make sure to follow us on Twitch. [Images: Ubisoft, Nintendo]
Best of the Rest: Ludwig's picks of 2014
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. Jazzpunk Jazzpunk is likely to be misunderstood, or impossible to understand, by design. You could say explanation comes as an insult to its eccentricity. The gist of it is that you're a spy completing missions in a surreal, robot-dominated world, the kind you might dream up after dozing off in the middle of a late-night Leslie Nielsen movie marathon. And while the convoluted wordplay wouldn't feel out of place in a Zucker spoof - in Japan, for example, you're asked if you prefer kimonos or kistereos – the barbs of reality are what really make Jazzpunk stick. Take its odd vision of dystopia, which is regularly mocked through one-off minigames (like a first-person shooter dubbed ... Wedding Quake). Here, you can put on a special visor that lets you see and blast nonsensical Wi-Fi passwords as they dance in the air around you. I mean, that's weird, but ... think about it. The concept is kind of weird to begin with, right here on Earth. Taken as a form of escapism, then, Jazzpunk is silly without taking you too far from the truth.
IGF 2015 finalists: The Talos Principle, 80 Days, Invisible Inc.
Finalists for the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 17th annual Independent Games Festival awards are Klei Entertainment's Invisible Inc., Croteam's The Talos Principle, Inkle Studios' 80 Days, Patrick Smith's Metamorphabet, 11 Bit Studio's This War of Mine and Team Outer Wilds' Outer Wilds. These games make appearances across other categories – Exellence in Visual Art, Narrative, Design, Audio and the Nuovo Award for unconventional game development – as well. Other games up for awards from the IGF are Lumino City, Else Heart.Break(), Pry, Three Fourths Home, Framed, Killer Queen, Shovel Knight, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, The Sailor's Dream, Desert Golfing, Elegy for a Dead World, Bounden and more, listed in full on the IGF website. The IGF jury nominated more than 30 games from a judging pool of almost 650. The IGF awards are held during GDC, alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards, on Wednesday, March 4 in San Francisco. Congrats to all the finalists! [Image: Klei Entertainment, Invisible Inc.]
Star Fox Wii U playable at E3, features GamePad cockpit view
Star Fox for Wii U should be playable at this year's E3, according to what Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto told Smosh. A good sign that the game will make its intended launch later this year. Miyamoto also detailed that the game will utilize the GamePad's touchscreen as the ship's cockpit view, while the television will display the Arwing in third-person. "One of the things that we're doing is, often times in games you have the cinema scenes where it's a movie that's playing and you have to just sit back and watch. There's no gameplay," said Miyamoto. "But because we have the GamePad with the second screen, what we can do is have these cinematic sequences in the game where you're still able to look around and play." During a pre-recorded segement for The Game Awards, Miyamoto said Star Fox for Wii U would be out before the next Legend of Zelda, also expected to be available this year. [Image: Nintendo]
AbleGamers names the top AAA, indie games of 2014
The AbleGamers Foundation, an organization that advocates on behalf of the gaming disability community, has picked Bayonetta 2 as the most accessible mainstream game of 2014, while Always Sometimes Monsters and This War of Mine are the organization's first-ever winners in the new independent game category. Bayonetta 2 receives the AbleGamers' Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year award because it is a "near-perfect example of game accessibility" that allows players to choose from a multitude of control options, AbleGamers says in a press release. "Bayonetta 2 stands out among other accessible mainstream games by paying careful attention to user-friendly game experience," the release reads. "The inclusion of a one-button combat mode creates an experience other character-action titles should implement. As a proof of concept, this game demonstrates that accessibility can be implemented into a mainstream AAA game without harming any of the gameplay. Popular titles such as Shadow of Mordor could easily implement one-button mode for those who need such accessibility while leaving complicated controls for those who prefer those methods, and still award players with a top-notch game that is accessible to everyone." We also thought Bayonetta 2 was an outstanding game of 2014. AbleGamers says it could not choose between Vagabond Dog's Always Sometimes Monsters – a game that we also adored – and 11 Bit's This War of Mine when selecting the inaugural AbleGamers Accessible Mainstream Indie Game of the Year.
Best of the Rest: Thomas' picks of 2014
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved I love listening to music alone. When no one's looking, I'm free to tap out drum beats, put on emotional lip-synchs and flail in synch with a song's swelling heights. Playing Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved is a lot like those solo jam sessions in the way it grants a free pass to completely lose myself in a song's components. Sure, I look ridiculous, but I have to! Matching notes with halfhearted swipes and restrained punches just leads to broken combos, as if the Kinect is the all-knowing gaze of an instructor ready to belittle a cold, tired performance. Substituting instruments and creating remixes adds a welcome element of experimentation to Fantasia, but it's the core focus of moving with music that brings me back each week. It's increasingly difficult to ignore life's noise while playing a game as I grow older, but Fantasia's peak moments tune out every distraction, leaving me with an uninhibited excuse to enjoy twisted, endearing remixes of songs that I love.
Best of the Rest: Sam's picks of 2014
WildStar I grew up during what I'd consider "the golden age" of MMO games. I was there for the launch of World of Warcraft, as well as earlier titles like EverQuest and Ultima Online. The genre has a very special place in my heart, and WildStar felt like the last, major, "true" MMO (as opposed to games like Bungie's Destiny that possess MMO-like features) release that we would see in a long time, possibly ever again. A last hurrah, if you will. And what a hurrah it is. We don't really "review" MMOs here, but through a series of postcards, I chronicled my time with a game that is in no uncertain language a fantastic piece of craftsmanship. The visuals are bright and colorful, with a Pixar-esque personality evident throughout. The gameplay is fresh and fast, requiring constant focus instead of hotkey rotation memorization. And of course, the housing. Oh, how I could spend hours simply customizing my plot of land with various wallpapers, decor, even mini-quest objectives. WildStar is a thoughtfully-constructed game with a wealth of content. True that it relied a bit too much on large-scale endgame raids and the promised monthly updates fizzled shortly after launch, but I don't regret a moment spent on Planet Nexus.
Metareview: GOTY Edition
Over the weekend the Joystiq hive mind concluded its annual hive dance and deemed Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor the top dawg of 2014. Monolith's action-RPG may have hacked and slashed its way to the top of our list, but a glance at The Rest of the Internet makes one thing clear: When it comes to 2014's GOTY awards, there isn't One Game to rule them all. With that in mind, we've taken the Metareview format we use to collate other outlets' reviews and given it a GOTY paint job. As ever, it's just a sampling of all the publications out there and plenty of places have yet to dole out their awards. Nonetheless, here's a wee look at the best games of 2014 according to everyone else.
UK Charts: Captain Toad reports for duty in 16th
JAN 5 2015 JOYSTIQ THE INTERNET TREASURE TRACKER REPORTING SAFE AND WELL STOP WE SECURED CAPTURE OF SIXTEENTH REGIMENT THOUGH WE HAVE BEEN ON UK MAINLAND FOR SOME TIME ALREADY STOP MUST GO THAT IS MY BUS STOP CAPTAIN ARCHIE MONTGOMERY TOAD
Rumor: Duck Hunt amiibo data on Super Smash Bros. disc
Just because an amiibo figure for the dog-and-duck duo from Duck Hunt hasn't yet been officially announced doesn't mean one isn't coming. That's what a video from YouTube user "Mema Haxx" posted earlier this week would suggest, anyway. As short as it is mysterious, the video shows a player of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U heading to the amiibo options menu and pulling up "Duck Hunt Duo," which is how the characters are labeled in the European version of the game. There's no description for the video, so it's hard to tell just what we're seeing. One explanation is that Haxx triggered code within the game that made it think it had just interacted with an NFC chip inside of a Duck Hunt amiibo. Another is that it's totally fake. Without an official announcement of a Duck Hunt amiibo from Nintendo, there's no way to be 100 percent sure. While we wait for such a reveal, why not speculate on what wondrous defects people will find on a Duck Hunt amiibo (and subsequently try to sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars)? [Image: Nintendo]
Joystiq Top 10 of 2014: Bayonetta 2
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. Bayonetta 2 is exactly the game I needed in 2014. While major developers and publishers seem to cram more and more into every project – giant maps, hundreds of objectives, skill trees, systems, sub-systems, meta games, companion apps – Bayonetta 2 on the Wii U is an eye-opening, high-heeled kick to the teeth. It drops you headfirst into its bizarre world, where the bombastic war machinery of Heaven and Hell collide, your only real task being the gleeful destruction of it all. The titular witch, Bayonetta, is as perfectly posh as ever and just as deadly, with a healthy supply of imaginative weaponry to dispose of holy angels and vile demons alike.
Diddy Kong amiibo has no mouth, and he must scream
The craze for defective amiibo reached a fever pitch last month, when bids for a legless Princess Peach amiibo exceeded $25,000. Prior to that absurdly-pricey posting, bids on a Samus amiibo with two arm cannons closed at $2,500. Now however, the dust is settling, and defective amiibo no longer seem to fetch quadruple-digit or higher prices. Case in point: this jawless Diddy Kong amiibo, which closed out bidding at $471.99 Canadian (approx. $403.03 USD) earlier this week. Diddy's high price now seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as a cursory glance through defective amiibo on eBay reveals far more inactive listings than active ones. (It also reveals a very liberal interpretation of the word "defect," as many of the so-called "defective" toys have simply come loose inside their packaging). Of course, just because an item's auction has closed doesn't mean that a bidder will be true to their word - a deal's not done until money has exchanged hands. Still, this is fun reminder that one man's trash is another man's treasure. [Image: Nintendo/bam_fan101]
New Nintendo eShop releases: Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire
To complement the recent launch of Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the latest Nintendo eShop update is headlined by Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire. For those unfamiliar, Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire is, as its name suggests, a pinball adaptation of Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, the same games that provided the basis for the recent Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire remakes. In Pokemon Pinball players are still working toward catching all the Pokemon available, but the core series' lengthy adventures are replaced by complex table layouts and bouncing silver balls. Pokemon Pinball Ruby and Sapphire is now available from the Wii U eShop for $8. The other half of this update is the GameBoy Color platformer Bionic Commando: Elite Forces. It's not the best in the series, but it's also not the worst, and it is notable for relatively novel gameplay and what the developer's were able to do with the aging handheld hardware. Bionic Commando: Elite Forces is priced at $6. Capping off the update are a list of sales. Joystiq favorite Shovel Knight is 33 percent off on both Wii U and 3DS until January 8, Unepic is 30 percent off on Wii U until January 29 and the 3DS eShop is hosting 50 percent discounts on both Dress to Play: Cute Witches! and Dress to Play: Magic Bubbles! until February 1. [Image: Nintendo]
Joystiq Top 10 of 2014: Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. It's been a long time coming, but the Wii U finally came into its own this year, thanks in no small part to Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. The game sold nearly half a million units stateside during its weekend launch, earning the title of fastest-selling Wii U game in the United States. We'd call that a surprise, but here's the thing about Smash Bros.: everyone – young, old, casual, hardcore, and every label inbetween – wants to get in on the action. That's what makes the series special, and Smash Bros. for Wii U proved that Nintendo and developer Sora Ltd haven't lost sight of that universal appeal.
Joystiq Discussion: How do you tackle your gaming back log?
January is when the sheer scale of it hits you, when you stare into the inky abyss of your Steam library and wonder: when the hell am I going to play all of these games? Every time the sale starts, the back log grows. Five measly bucks for a copy of Tomb Raider: The Definitive Edition! Who cares that I'm smack dab in the middle of three different RPGs? I can't let that pass me by! So the backlog swells, piling more and more games onto the proverbial, sometimes actual, stack. Recently I took stock of my own considerable back log, counting up all the vintage cartridges, discs, recent releases that went on sale, and downloads I'd amassed but never actually fired up to play. Turned out there were 27 games that I'd simply never turned on. In January, I'm trying to tackle them one at a time. Pokemon Y and Silent Hill: Book of Memories are first up! Once I've knocked them down, I'll move on to two more. It's not a perfect system, though. There are plenty of ways to tackle the back log. Do you take it slow? Do you not even bother and just let the back log grow? Or do you manage to keep up, finishing everything as you go. Take the poll, discuss below. How do you tackle your gaming back log? [Images: Nintendo]
Best of the Rest: Sinan's picks of 2014
ATTENTION: The year 2014 has concluded its temporal self-destruct sequence. If you are among the escapees, please join us in salvaging and preserving the best games from the irradiated chrono-debris. Dark Souls 2 I've been known to perch on treetops with many a RPG, but even by my standards this was a makeout-heavy year. Four of my five picks are of the role-playing variety, and I've put more than 250 hours into that quartet alone. 2014 was a super-solid time for the genre, and that's evidenced by the sheer range of RPGs in my Best of the Rest. The only place to start this round-up is Drangleic. It was always going to take something truly special for Dark Souls 2 to stay out of its predecessor's shadow, at least for me. We are, after all, talking about following on from my game of the last decade. That proves a challenge too far for From's sequel, despite the many tweaks and additions it brings to the table. Crucially, Dark Souls 2 diminishes that sinking-into-quicksand helplessness, that sense of being lost, in every sense of the word. It is still there, but just that significant bit less so. Yet Dark Souls 2 remains an all-encompassing adventure like few others this year. It draws from both Dark and Demon's Souls to juxtapose a deep, foreboding world against an elegant simplicity of swords, shields, dungeons and big bad monsters. There are more pretenders to the throne now, but Dark Souls 2 still stands out as an idiosyncratic, unpredictable experience. For all my criticisms I plowed at least 100 hours into the world of Drangleic, and I'll be back on the plow when Dark Souls 2 hits PS4 and Xbox One in April.
