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Friday, March 20, 2015

Miyamoto: Still Clueless on F-Zero; Still Should Retire

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I had to watch obnoxious Smosh people to make this article.

I feel absolutely justified that, for our Best KoopaTV Article of 2014 award, we gave it to Are We Too Harsh On Miyamoto?. Why? Because right after we sent a message out signaling that an anti-Miyamoto article is more important to KoopaTV than, say, an anti-feminist article or something, Miyamoto and Bill Trinen go out to talk with those Smosh dudes while playing Mario Kart 8 about various topics, including the F-Zero series.


The relevant part for this article (I'll get to sort-of-interesting stuff at the very end) starts at 5:24. The Smosh dude asks if Captain Falcon, Samus, and Mr. Saturn (what a strange list) will get more games in the future.

Miyamoto answers that since other companies are making traditional, realistic racing games (see E3 2013 where it was nothing but cars), what Nintendo wants to do is counter that with a "gamey" (arcade?) racing experience. Miyamoto then follows up by saying, "maybe if we create a new type of controller interface, and we find a controller interface that's particularly suited for F-Zero, then maybe we'll do something again with it in the future."

...What? Then they made a segue to Star Fox on Wii U which will be a disaster for another article.

We know the Internet has a passion for the F-Zero franchise, which is why our most popular article is "Miyamoto Always Arrives Late" which was commentary about how Miyamoto understood that people want an F-Zero game, but he has no ideas for it and doesn't know what "direction" to take it in. Of course, if you read that article, KoopaTV offers plenty of direction, mostly to take advantage of the vast lore and character assets the F-Zero series has. Miyamoto would never agree to that, of course, because he is fundamentally anti-character.

Miyamoto looking devious in a Smosh interview
"Hm, how can I ruin treasured Nintendo franchises this year?"
If you don't want to take our obvious suggestions, then another direction you can take is "forward". Where is forward? Not the kind of "forward" that MSNBC promotes, but the real sense of progress that the F-Zero series has never experienced before. People would be very happy with things like a track creator, like HD graphics, like online play. It's the high-skill high-thrill action that you currently cannot get on a Nintendo console without going back two generations. It's not my kind of thing, but for whatever size base F-Zero is, that's what they want. Hell, that's what those Nintendo Redirect lunatics were clamouring for.

Miyamoto's problem (well, one of them) is that he believes he needs to re-invent the steering wheel for F-Zero, a standard that obviously does not need to apply with New Super Mario Bros.. Why does Shigeru Miyamoto apply this special standard to F-Zero that does not apply with the Super Mario Bros. series? How can Nintendo put a man with such obvious hypocrisy in charge of anything? A new control interface? What's wrong with the GamePad or the GameCube controller or anything else? You yourself, Mr. Miyamoto, said the GameCube controller would be the standard controller. And guess what? For F-Zero, along with many other great games, it's an amazing controller. It's better for some genres more than others, but for a racing game? Yeah, it's great.

When Miyamoto wanted the Wiimote to be the new standard-bearer, people bemoaned that. Why? Because it was frequently more imprecise than button presses. There is a reason why you should use the Wiimote on its side to play Punch-Out!! Wii instead of the Wiimote + Nunchuk or... even worse, the Wii Balance Board.

Shigeru Miyamoto making an Illuminati symbol
"Hm, how can I make people think I'm making an Illuminati reference?"
F-Zero should be moving at a clip where you cannot afford anything less precise than your standard buttons and control stick. That Nintendo Land minigame wasn't anything like the speed of F-Zero GX, and I can't help but feel like that was an attempt to see what "new" thing they can do with the franchise.

By the way, at 11:00 in the Smosh interview, Miyamoto briefly mentions the Splatoon team and how they are basically working too hard and adding too many features, and how he wants to apply subtractive design to the process. There are times where subtractive design philosophy (removing things to make it better) is quite desirable, but you can't trust Miyamoto with it. With Miyamoto, put enough things on the table and he might UPEND THE ENTIRE THING! "Does Splatoon really need a story? Or characters? Or music?" Miyamoto might rhetorically ask.

Splatoon is being developed by a bunch of young Nintendo dudes. The last thing they need is for their creative spirits to be eliminated by Miyamoto's tyranny and terrible design philosophies.


Ludwig believes that you can see better design philosophies than Miyamoto's with KoopaTV's own games, such as Trayvon Tyson's Punch-Out!! and the recently released Defend Anita Sarkeesian! Play them for free by clicking their respective hyperlinks!


None of the F-Zero discussion matters if it's due for a mobile release with Nintendo's new mobile strategy.
Miyamoto doesn't know what to do with F-Zero so he'll just put its aspects in Mario Kart 8 retroactively.
The same logic of cluelessness on a series is why Advance Wars isn't getting anything.

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