Nintendo reported today that the game sold more than 1.2 million total units across Japan, Europe and the Americas during its first weekend on the market.
Excluding Mario Kart 8, Mario Kart Advance remains the weakest entry in the series at 5.91 million units. There is work to be done.
Mario Kart 8 has boosted weekly Wii U console sales by 666% in the UK.
Laura Naviaux, Sony Online Entertainment’s senior VP of global sales and marketing:
SOE has prided itself on being a major catalyst of women’s involvement in our industry. As our company continues to evolve and diversify our portfolio, we’ve found it imperative to refine our approach with game art and development, seeking out varied perspectives from the current and future leading voices in the industry. The market for compelling and original online game experiences is rapidly evolving and as a publisher it is our responsibility to listen and celebrate the spectrum of play styles among our global community, and deliver innovation in art, design and technology.
Congrats to scholarship winner Erin Loelius.
Andrew Webster delivers Temple Run and Temple Run 2 joint analytics:
Alongside the milestone, Imangi also revealed a number of details about its audience, which helps to illustrate the changing landscape of mobile games. 60 percent of all players are female, for instance, and the game is most popular in China, which accounts for 36 percent of all downloads. The next largest market is the US at 21 percent.<
Changing landscape indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci6lMQNLKZU
A trailer has one job: To sell you on the game. Its sole purpose is to move you closer to making a purchasing decision. It may ditch the game’s actual visuals for pre-rendered or even live-action footage, or live-action with so many special effects that it may as well be CG. It’s not there to give an accurate representation about the game, it’s there to get you to buy something. That’s it.
That’s what a trailer does from the point of view of the publisher, but as a player I want to learn something about the game. I don’t particularly care if the trailer uses in-game footage or not, a live-action trailer can just as easily tell us something about the tone and setting of the game using other means. Some of the Halo trailers, for instance, did a great job of setting up the scale of upcoming games and the sense of loss without showing much of the battles themselves. The “Believe” ad was a great trailer, as it told me something about the game. It got me interested because it made me feel something.
Unlike those on Twitter (referenced in the main article), I found the Wiz Khalifa track a breath of fresh air from the dub-step action epics and juxtaposed warm-and-fuzzy shooter reels. I also enjoyed watching a simple (mostly) side-shot mano-a-mano CG(?) fight in lieu of an over the top action sequence packed with cameo after cameo.
However, where the teaser is refreshing under the lens of style, it lacks the substance necessary to elicit excitement for this game. Grumpy Kuchera wins again.
Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris programmer, writing for the The Guardian:
Next I put together the procedures for manipulating the pieces: pick a tile, flip it, rotate it. But the playfield filled up in 20 seconds flat. Also, once you’d filled a line, it was kind of dead, so why keep it on the screen? So I made each full line disappear, which was key. I was a pretty good programmer and it took me about three weeks to get something controllable on screen. I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn’t stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn’t, either. It was so abstract – that was its great quality. It appealed to everybody.
