Nintendo has once again astounded the gaming community with a wealth of high quality news straight from their monthly Nintendo Direct segment. Here is a summary of everything you need to know:
Mario and Luigi: Dream Team – It will be released on Aug 11, 2013 in North America and continues the Mario and Luigi brotherly love single player but yet co-op gameplay. And NES Mario 2-style, it will all just be a dream.
Mario Golf: World Tour – The next Mario Golf title will feature online community features similar to Mario Kart 7. Nintendo supporting online play!? Yeah, who knew!
New Zelda! – The biggest news of all, A Link to the Past 2 has been announced and video footage was shown. The world rejoiced.
Mario Party 3DS – That’s right. The board game series will be debuting on 3DS sometime in 2013 and will feature 7 game boards and AR card support. Maybe they will also include the e-Reader Mario Party game that no one played but do not get your hopes up.
Professor Layton – The Azran Legacy will be coming to 3DS and features more than 500 new puzzles.
Wii U Gets Firmer – An upcoming Wii U firmware update will introduce some new features like being able to transfer data between two USB drives and Nintendo promises to make load times a little faster while giving the option to shut off the auto-power off shut down feature.
A new Yoshi’s Island – There have only been 2 true Yoshi platforming titles, Yoshi’s Island on SNES and Yoshi’s Story on N64. So it has been a while since we were able to eat fruit to poop out projectile eggs. This is big and exciting news.
Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D – Did you play this game on Wii? Or more importantly, did you finish the Wii version? Thing is, DKR is a very difficult game, requiring pixel perfect high reflexive jumps to be successful. But for the complainers that said the game was too hard, an easy mode is going to be included in the 3DS port.
Pikmin 3 – Finally got a solid release date of August 4, 2013.
Level-5 Continues to Support the eShop – Another batch of three games are headed to the eShop: Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale, West: Starship Damrey and Bugs vs Tanks and Attack of the Friday Monsters. Like Level-5’s initial 3 eShop games, these are going to be unique experiences.
Bravely Default – This Japanese-only JRPG will finally be making debut stateside later this year. Thanks SquareEnix!
Earthbound VC – After years of complaints and online petitions, Nintendo will finally release Earthbound, aka Mother 2, to the Virtual Console sometime later this year.