New Iwata Asks reveals new details on Wii Sports Club

The new and improved high definition Wii Sports Club is just a week away now and there’s a new Iwata Asks feature to celebrate. The interview features Satoru Iwata of course and three members of Nintendo’s Software & Planning Department — Kozo Makino, Ryonosuke Suzuki and Takayuki Shimamura.

There were a couple of juicy nuggets of information revealed, the first is that Nintendo isn’t the primary developer for these titles. While the original were made in-house at Nintendo these HD-ports have been handled by an external studio. It’s a name you’ve heard of before though, Namco Bandai Studios are responsible for the port.

[quote]Kozo Makino: We asked Namco Bandai Studios to develop it, so I first participated as a coordinator. But in the end, I got into just about anything. I mainly worked on the network aspect of the game, but at times I made suggestions on how some features should turn out to be.

Ryonosuke Suzuki: At first, I was a coordinator too, serving as contact for Namco Bandai Studio and dealing with overseas subsidiaries in localizing the overseas versions, but eventually, like Makino-san, I was doing anything I could.[/quote]

However Namco Bandai didn’t do everything however, members from both Nintendo’s Network Development & Operations Department–the Software Planning & Development Department ‘chipped in’.

We also have Namco Bandai to thank for getting the game online. While something like Bowling is quite simple – Tennis is somewhat more complex.

[quote]Makino: In a typical online game, the information of the button presses are sent to your opponent, and the inputs are synchronized between the players. But for this game you have to send complex information from the gyro sensor and accelerometer of the Wii Remote Plus controllers, in addition to information from the buttons, which was a brand new challenge.

Satoru Iwata: And in Tennis, there may be four people on the court at once.

Makino: Yes. At first, we were uneasy about whether we could really do it, but we tossed around all kinds of ideas with Namco Bandai Studio.
[/quote]

Wii Sports Club isn’t going to be a normal on the shelf game, but instead will be made available 24 hours at a time or you can buy a game separately and keep it forever. Each game too will also have a free trial, but Iwata has said this will be extended that when there’s a new game released the trials will reset and you’ll be able to try all of the games again for 24 hours.

Details of the Golf game were also revealed. Remember that demo back at E3 2011 where they had the GamePad on the floor showing the lie of the ball? Well that’s made it into Wii Sports Club Golf.

The game will also download to your Wii U overnight if you have more than 1.3gb of space left on the console. With this and the 24 hour trial you’ll be able to see this new icon on your home screen and just jump into a game.

There’s a lot more in this Iwata Asks so you should check out the rest of it! There’s some videos of Iwata and his team playing the game online as well.