Shenmue Dojo

The creator of some of Nintendo's most iconic characters and beloved games pulls back the curtain on his top-secret Wii U projects, and explains his rationale for radically reinventing the control scheme for his new Wii U-bound Star Fox.

How long have you been working on the new Star Fox game?

We originally began working with Star Fox back on Wii, and we had a small group of people experimenting with it for many years, maybe about six years, but we didn’t find an idea that really brought that together for the Wii. So instead we moved experimentation to the Wii U using some of the same assets. It’s been maybe 6 to 10 months that we’ve been experimenting with it.

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.