From the official press release:

All Wii U Deluxe Set owners who purchase digital content for Wii U, including downloadable games in the Nintendo eShop for Wii U and download codes sold at select retail stores, will earn points with a value equivalent to approximately 10 percent of the Nintendo eShop list price of each purchase. For example, a game priced at $59.99, such as New Super Mario Bros. U, would earn 599 points. For every 500 points they earn, participants will receive a code worth $5 in credit to be used in the Nintendo eShop for either Wii U or Nintendo 3DS.

This essentially amounts to a 10% discount on eShop purchases. Not bad, Nintendo. Note that rewards can be claimed on the eShop for the Wii U and the 3DS. Does this point to Nintendo finally adopting unified accounts across all services, or will we claim 3DS content through the usual convoluted and confusing method we’ve come to know and love from Nintendo?

The wording on the press release suggests we’ll have a unified account:

Consumers who purchase the Wii U Deluxe Set can use the Deluxe Digital Promotion with a Nintendo Network Account.

This is Nintendo though, so we won’t know for sure until the system launches.

Regarding the rumor of fully voiced characters in Ace Attorney 5, Capcom’s Dread Hellston tweets:

Saw some posts saying AA5 will have full voice acting – not the case. Just those iconic key phrases! Maybe a mistranslated interview?

False alarm.

Destructoid has a nice round-up of current Halloween related video game content and events.

The stores will carry E-rated video games, accessories and toys ranging from a 2-foot-tall talking plush Star Wars Chewbacca to a Skylanders backpacks.

Finally.

Love the new design.

Surprise surprise? Kim-Mai Cutler at Tech Crunch:

Zynga confirmed that it started laying off U.S.-based employees ahead of what is expected to be a weak third-quarter earnings report. In all, 5 percent of the company’s full-time workforce is being let go. As of the second quarter, the company had 3,200 employees so the final tally is probably close to 160 employees.

I don’t know about anyone else, but seeing that Zynga logo stamped on top of a game has meant “don’t bother” to me for a long time. Good luck to the newly unemployed.

Jason Schreier brings us this latest bit of stupidity from Kotaku regarding the newly announced iPad:

So if you dished out $500, $600, or $700 this year expecting to be able to show off the hottest new piece of hardware for at least a whole year…

…then you’re a fucking idiot.

Andrew Groen for Wired shines a light on the video game industry’s revolving door of talent, and gets this quote from Tim Schafer:

“One of the most frustrating things about the games industry is that teams of people come together to make a game, and maybe they struggle and make mistakes along the way, but by the end of the game they’ve learned a lot — and this is usually when they are disbanded,” says Schafer, president of San Francisco developer Double Fine Productions.

“Instead of being allowed to apply all those lessons to a better, more efficiently produced second game, they are scattered to the winds and all that wisdom is lost,” he said in an e-mail to Wired.

Siliconera reporting on an article from the Japanese “Nintendo Dream Magazine”:

The first reason for this was that, due to the 3DS’ surround sound capabilities, bringing over the DS sounds as they are would have been extremely difficult due to tuning problems.

Another concern was that the staff wanted the game sequences to work with the anime scenes, which are also fully voiced.

Old Gameboy and NES games sound pretty good on my 3DS, so I’m not sure what tuning problems are being referred to here.

Call me old fashioned, but giving voice to characters is not always a good thing. And in the case of the Ace Attorney series, it may actually be a bad thing. The use of short voice clips like the occasional “OBJECTION!!!” or “HOLD IT!!!” have become staples of the 11 year old series and are usually followed by awkward silence or triumphant music as the player reads the on-screen text. Throwing some voice acting into the mix will surely take away from that signature Ace Attorney sensation players have come to love.

[UPDATE]

Capcom’s Dread Hellston tweets:

Saw some posts saying AA5 will have full voice acting – not the case. Just those iconic key phrases! Maybe a mistranslated interview?

False alarm.

Gnome at Indie Arcade

The original Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was quite the disaster and though it did sell a few million copies many would argue it was the beginning of Atari’s end. And rightly so.

Dennis Debro’s brand new and properly indie Pac-Man 4k, on the other hand, hopes to make things right by cramming a way more faithful post of the original pill-chomper arcade game to the very same and now very retro machine.

What if you could go into the past, live out lives of other people? What if you could put right what once went wrong? Dennis Debro did, now he’s hoping each time that his next leap… will be the leap home.

It falls victim to some of the same traps Deus Ex did – guards who don’t act logically when they find a body, stumbling across alternate ingress routes on your way out of a building, and a massive propensity amongst the world’s population for leaving weapons and potions and books lying around. But the world is very interesting (when was the last time you played a stealth/melee first person game set in a plague-ridden steampunk city?) and the gameplay is excellent.

This commercial does a pretty good job of showcasing what the Wii U does, and really drives home the point that it is a BRAND NEW CONSOLE with a BRAND NEW CONTROLLER, but I could personally do without the “pew pews”. I expect hope the US commercials will be a little more subdued.

Develop’s Craig Chapple regarding Haunts: The Manse Macabre‘s dire situation:

Taking to the game’s Kickstarter page to reveal the bad news, creator Rick Dakan said the principal cause for the “dire condition” of the project was that there were no longer any programmers working on it.

The game’s lead programmer has moved on to work back at Google, as had previously been planned, and no longer had enough spare time to make progress on the title.

The second programmer on the project also quit the game entirely to take another job, with Dakan claiming the developer no longer wanted to work on the title in his spare time.

Here’s hoping they find new developers quickly. Maybe they should consider backing the What’s in a Game? Kickstarter so they can get beta access to Gameifesto.

Every time I think Nintendo finally “gets it”, they go and do something like this.

Hooray! Internships are popping up in China with the same (if not worse) poor working conditions as America! How nice of Nintendo to help children around the world advance their careers in such an inspiring way.

Game Rant’s Ben Kendrick:

According to a segment aired during the “Voice of China” program on China National Radio, Foxconn utilized children ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen in their Wii U production. The children were brought into the company through High School-level internship programs where they could receive credit toward their diplomas for work in the factories. However, many of the interns have reported that they were strong-armed into working lengthy overnight hours and/or physically demanding labor – threatened with the loss of their internship (as well as school expulsion) if they didn’t comply.