In a rare move, it appears Nintendo has cherry-picked a game directly from the E3 wishlist of fanboys ’round the globe. In an interview with TIME, Nintendo’s head development honcho Shigeru Miyamoto revealed there’s an all new Star Fox title coming to Wii U, along with two other titles; Project Giant Robot, and Project Guard.
While the latter two are still in an experimental phase, all three are designed specifically with the Wii U’s GamePad in mind. Miyamoto went into a surprising amount of detail concerning the game — check out the excerpt below.
In one of the games, which Miyamoto called Project Giant Robot, players control sky-scraping automatons, angling the Wii U GamePad in front of a TV screen while shifting their torsos left and right or up and down to maneuver the robot’s upper-body while thumbing the controller’s joysticks to punch or grab — almost like a full-body game of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. The GamePad shows you what the robot sees, while the TV screen offers a zoomed-back view, letting onlookers — as well as you — admire your tromping, pummeling handiwork.
In another, titled Project Guard, the GamePad became a quick-jump map of a fortress manned by numbered, laser-firing security cameras. As robots encroach on different entry points, you have to tap the GamePad to leap from camera to camera, blasting enemies that trundle or come at you sprinting — even some that sneak under your radar. All the while, onlookers can shout out the numbers that correspond to robot-threatened camera feeds, turning your defense operations into a frenetic, heart-racing, tap-and-fire scramble.
And the third project? A game Nintendo fans have been waiting for a very long time to see: Star Fox is back, only reimagined on the Wii U using Miyamoto’s new GamePad-based controls — controls that’ll ask of players things they’ve never had to do before in a video game. Whether they’ll come willing or balk remains to be seen, but Miyamoto is convinced he’s on to a control scheme that’s not only novel, but with practice, indispensable.
In his new version of Star Fox — still fundamentally a spaceship-based shooter — players now use the GamePad’s motion controls to aim and fire the Arwing’s weapons, simultaneously controlling the nimble craft itself by thumbing the joysticks to accelerate or turn and pull off signature moves like barrel rolls, loops and the tactically essential Immelman turn. And you can still morph your Arwing into a land tank, rocketing down to the surface of a planet, then rattling around the battlefield and laying waste to the landscape.
But Miyamoto and his team have added a new vehicle mode, one that’s designed to exemplify the new motion control scheme: It lets up to two players pilot a helicopter-like craft, one player controlling the helicopter itself, the other controlling a tiny robot you can drop from a tether to roll around a limited area, either snatching up booty or blasting enemies. Leave the robot hanging as you fly around the battlefield and it becomes a kind of dangling, swingable cannon. Project Giant Robot and Project Guard are still considered experimental at this point, and Star Fox is at least a year away, but I had a chance to sit down with Mr. Miyamoto after trying all three. Here’s what he told me.
It’s not entirely clear if the new game will resemble older games in the series, like Star Fox 64, or fall closer in line with GameCube’s Star Fox Assault. Either way, controls that use the GamePad in a unique way are great news for Wii U fans. We’ll likely find out much more at this morning’s Digital Event, so stay tuned.
