The first time you boot up Nintendo Land, three things happen: a floating screen with arms says hi; you see a version of yourself, too thin and bearded, in lieu of a muscled scowling super-soldier; and your view of the game world sways and shakes, contingent upon the movement of your own hands. All combine to form a stirring, possibly overwhelming, introduction to the Wii U, Nintendo’s first HD console and their next salvo in the war to amuse the already overstimulated masses.In brief: Nintendo Land is designed as a virtual theme park, with amusements based on twelve revered Nintendo franchises. Each attraction houses its own unique game, a stylized and stripped-down take on a classic, with new and unique goals. And so Mario Chase is not a platformer but a simple game of tag; Donkey Kong Cart Crash is not a race to the top but a slow, pain-staking roll to the bottom, those familiar girders drawn in chalk and beset with obstacles. And in each of these, you play as your Mii character dressed in colorful Nintendo garb.To many, the game will act as liaison to this new box in their living room. Early adopters forget how confusing a new device can be to the common consumer. We buyers of gadgets and readers of tech-porn dismiss the obtuseness of the simplest inputs: How many still cringe when a parent double-clicks a hyperlink?
The path to understanding is only more treacherous when it comes to gaming. For the past eight years, Nintendo has chopped at the dense foliage of buttons and sticks built up over decades with their twin-machetes of touch-screens (DS) and motion control (Wii). This new console combines each in an attempt to serve those playing for years, while allowing safe passage for those curious but uninformed.
Far too often the gaming landscape reeks of an eighth-grade dance hall: the Haves over here, the Have-Nots over there. The Wii U presents a middle-ground, a place where long-time players and the newly-anointed can commingle and drink from the same punchbowl. Nintendo Land is their letter of invitation.Apple’s App Store and Facebook’s social games have introduced many to the power of games, but the gulf between this broader audience and those who’ve played for decades is still deep and wide. Early reports on the Wii U exemplify this: Reporters about for running apps from the Wii U home screen; my mom bought an iPhone last year and still barely knows what an app is.
2019-1-25 Monita is a playable character in Anysmash. She advises you through the minigames in the game Nintendo Land, as your host. Monita is a robot who is the player's host in the game Nintendo Land. Nintendo Land features several minigames from the most. Nintendo Land is a launch title for the Wii U, which was first released in North America on November 18, 2012, Europe and Oceania on November 30, 2012, and Japan on December 8, 2012. The game's setting is based on a virtual theme park, containing twelve minigames (referred to as attractions by Monita, the game's host) built around various Nintendo franchises, including four based on Mario and its subseries.
That’s why Nintendo Land’s Monita is so important.With the Wii U, Nintendo realized their GamePad, a controller with an imbedded 6.2” touchscreen, would prove to be much less accessible than the simplicity of the Wii’s Remote. Nintendo Land requires a guide into this new playable territory. Monita is your digital Sherpa.
Hers is the first voice to welcome you. She teaches you how to move forward.
Also, she is a screen.(And though she is a screen, which to my knowledge does not possess sexual organs or an endocrine system, I know she’s a “she,” because her name is Monita.)That Monita is a personified screen, as opposed to just another avatar telling you what to do, feels odd at first, but soon the choice makes sense. What Monita brings is two-fold: 1) she’s disarming, odd, an attention-getter; and 2) she puts a face to this new device we now hold in our hands.To Point #2: Imagine you don’t own a tablet or smart device.
This big screen in your hands has not yet become an extension of your mind; you are no multi-touch prestidigitator. The flat empty space can be intimidating. How do we manipulate it? Writers understand the fear of a blank page.
So, too, might a handheld screen intimidate the new user. Enter Monita. Now the very thing you fear is leading you around, helping you learn the basics.
We’re comforted; we move along. Perhaps this argument sounds facile, presumptuous.
But on some subconscious level known only to our brainstem, maybe it makes sense. Wii Fit, a $99 bathroom scale with mini-games, sold over 20 million copies.
A talking bathroom scale.To Point #1: Pixar has known for a decade (and Disney long before then) that sticking a pair of eyes on most anything results in an automatic and irresistible cuteness. (See: of the otherwise mediocre Cars movies.) Of course, the temptation can go. (See: Kinect’s experiment, an unfun destroyer of joy; the Paper Clip from Microsoft Office.) Nintendo Land is already full of known franchises and technicolor throwbacks. But newcomers might not know who Captain Falcon is or understand how the heroine of Metroid is actually named Samus and that she’s a lady, not to mention a bounty-hunting bringer of death. Monita is a clean slate, a slightly sarcastic non-entity, a character-less character in a world full of them. Gamers and non-gamers, uncles and nieces, techheads and luddites: We’re all on the same page. More than that, we’re all in the same game, in a way never before seen on a home console.Nintendo Land is an engaging, nuanced, surprising example of a company riffing on its own history.
There is unique opportunity that comes with such rich lineage. A pixelated Link makes sense; he once looked just this way. An 8-bit Master Chief is a fan project, a “What If?” scenario not a part of our shared history. But instead of simply mining their greatest hits, Nintendo subverts them, rearranging past mechanics and inserting the very people that first played these games decades ago: You. Pardon the PoMo, but Land is a very meta-game: a game about games; a game flipped inside out, the inverse of how we normally interact with the game-space and its denizens.Step one in this interactive origami is how we view the world. Players have seen games from a first-person perspective since 1974’s Maze Wars. But the screen in front of us was always fixed in place.
Any camera-control was mere digital nudging, or the slow drag of a right-stick wiggle. As your Mii stands in the main hub of Nintendo Land, you stand in your living room. Rotate your physical body and look at the GamePad screen; your perspective moves with you. Face the opposite direction of your TV and the Pad—your eyes—look behind you. Bring the Pad to the sky and see cardboard clouds revolving on wires. There’s an immediacy of movement, almost to a fault, as the TV view wiggles in syncopation to your own shakiness. Yesterday I drank too much coffee; my running through a virtual theme park was viewed through a rickety, tremulous lens.
But it felt like my running, not someone I controlled. This is Step Two. Players of Nintendo are now Nintendo characters.
Barthes would have a field day.For thirty years, we have sat in our homes and taken control of these characters, inhabiting them in their own unique worlds. Now, Nintendo is dressing its customers in the fanciful skin of its game characters, unleashing players into this real-world setting (a theme park) meant to evoke imagined realms (a cross-stitched Hyrule; a toy-block Mushroom Kingdom).
Land switches the conventional relationship between player and character; instead of controlling a puppet we pretend to embody, we are the puppet, dressed in its clothes and borrowing its props—an arm cannon, a flashlight, a sword—as we step into a faked “real” version of the “real” fake world.We have always felt in control of these animated toys. But now the toys are ourselves. Down the rabbit hole we go.The Wii U midnight launch in New York City exemplified this shift. The event included a special appearance by Nintendo characters brought to life: A parade of Miis.
That is, giant mascot versions of our in-game avatars. Real-life versions of fake real people. Players of Nintendo are now Nintendo characters. Would have a field day.Miiverse, the new system’s answer to social-networking, takes us one layer further. Online worlds have been populated with real-world counterparts for years. But NPCs are mostly pre-generated, fabricated by the designers, imbued with life by artists and writers. Here, your Nintendo Land plaza swarms with other Miis, each connected to a player down the street or across the globe, each spouting a typed or drawn message: a greeting, a hint, a drawing of a raging Pikachu or a docile Yoshi.
You interact with these mannequins superficially in the game-world; but tap a button and you can continue the conversation through a series of handwritten comments. Now even the townspeople are created by its inhabitants. The game itself, sweet and addictive, is but a jar of honey; underneath, a hive buzzes. We roam there together, absorbing the collective wisdom of our excitable peers.Nintendo has been building this new reality for the past three decades. We’ve been visitors without even knowing it was there. The company survives on the passion of its fans, an enthusiasm seeded so early that we barely question its existence. Playing Nintendo Land, we glimpse behind the curtain of their glorious machine and see ourselves, manipulated and rosy-cheeked, running after something that won’t turn around.
I’d be upset—that dread awareness that comes with such invasion—if it all wasn’t so much fun.
For the article about the park-themed game as a whole, see.Pikmin Adventure: Tame the Wilderness (Pikmin Adventure: ピクミンアドベンチャー ) is an attraction featured in the title. It is the Pikmin-themed mini-game of the 12 Nintendo franchise-based attractions playable in Nintendo Land.Pikmin Adventure is fast-paced, action filled attraction, as opposed to the real time strategy-styled puzzle solving nature of the main games in the franchise. The goal is to complete each level, by crossing the finish line. Pikmin Adventure also includes a multiplayer co-op and a multiplayer versus mode. Contents.Gameplay Pikmin Adventure is played with one to five players. One player controls their Mii dressed in 's, and uses the Wii U GamePad, while up to four others use the Wii Remote to play as Miis dressed as assorted, larger. There will always be one Olimar player and one Pikmin player, even if an AI player has to take the place of a human one.The players are tasked with navigating through each level, defeating enemies and blockades on the way, until they reach the end, where the awaits.
The attraction has a blocky and metallic theme to it, especially the enemies, in which most of them are are mechanized versions of Pikmin.The Olimar player has a group of smaller Pikmin they control, and are differentiated from the playable Pikmin by their smaller size and resemblance to chess pieces. Although they have different colors, these do not make a difference, with the exception of Blue Pikmin, that do not flail when underwater. In addition, the player controlling Olimar has the option of using their to call every Pikmin to their side (including those controlled by other players) by using the icon on the lower left of the touch screen or by pressing /. The captain player can throw Pikmin by tapping at a spot on the GamePad, while the Pikmin players move around and attack freely. All human-controlled characters have a shared meter, represented by hearts on the.As they make their way through the area, players will encounter enemies. Most of the time, all enemies in a section must be defeated before the next one is unlocked.
Other times, players must destroy a specific block or perform some other task before the path is cleared. Most levels have large enemies – bosses – near the end. These must be defeated before the level can be completed.All players can move around freely, attack and pick up rocks and bombs.
The captain player can issue small Pikmin to attack blocks or enemies, while the Pikmin players can strike with their heads. Throughout the levels, blobs of can appear from various sources. Collecting three blobs increases that player's level, which increases the attack power. With nectar, the relevant Pikmin on the player's side can from leaves to buds to flowers, though this is merely aesthetic. For the captain player, an increase in maturity means an increase in army number, and for the Pikmin player, more nectar means higher defense; when hit, Pikmin players will lose levels, and if they're hit when on the bottommost level, they will die. Whenever a player dies, the game freezes for a second, showing the defeated player, and when it resumes normal speed, that player will be sent flying upwards at an angle. A heart is depleted from the meter and, provided there are still any left, the player will briefly join the game again after a couple of seconds.
AI-controlled players will not freeze the game or count down the number of hearts when killed.One of the main mechanics of the game is the captain player's. When used, all Pikmin, player-controlled or not, will be grouped with the captain. The player Pikmin will stack on top of the captain's head and can be in this fashion. If a player Pikmin doesn't want to be grouped, they can shake the Wii Remote after the whistle. Some spring-loaded pads, which require all players to be stacked in order to be activated, propel everyone onto other rooms.Walls block the players' path sometimes, but these can be broken down. Some of these blocks are replaced with, which give out a bit of or a heart when broken.
In addition, larger variants of these blocks are on the ground in certain spots, and trigger certain events to happen when broken, such as spawning a bridge. Some Question Blocks appear spontaneously from certain spots on the ground, and when broken, reveal several pools of nectar and sometimes hearts.There are three powerups that captains and Pikmin can obtain. These change the way Pikmin are thrown and damage enemies with. If hurt, the captain or Pikmin player will lose their powerup instead of being knocked out. Certain levels also play out similar to, in which there is a time limit, and players must continuously kill enemies and overcome obstacles to gain more time, to keep the timer from reaching 0.
Players that fail repeatedly on the same level will find a large Question Block at the start of the level on their next try. Breaking this releases a giant blob of nectar that instantly levels up all players to level 50, or adds a minute to the clock in timed runs.After completing the normal expeditions, advanced missions are unlocked, with an increased difficulty level. These missions also give the Olimar player a new gameplay mechanic: by pressing / or a button on the GamePad's screen, all Pikmin in the captain's party are changed to, or the usual mixed group. These colors now make a difference due to the fact that enemy weak points in these missions are color-coded, and only Pikmin of the same color can harm them. In addition, Blue Pikmin are still immune to navigating through water.
Mastery rankings also exist for all levels in the attraction; to obtain them, players must complete the stage within a certain time limit, and not take any damage.Versus mode In the competitive mode, the Olimar player battles against the Pikmin players with the goal being to get more pieces of candy than the other team. Candy appears from defeated enemies and from attacks inflicted on members of the opposing team. Main article:.Some of the common creatures in the appear, such as, but there are also enemies never seen before in the actual series. The most common is a race of spherical insects, called 'Beebs'. Cannon-like enemies called are also featured; they either fire bombs or spiked balls.
Appear, but blow out air and charge.In order to attack an enemy, players must aim at their purple, spherical weak points. There is a robotic UFO piloted by the villainous Dark Monita that appears in some rooms, and drops enemies inside capsules. The most common enemies chomp Pikmin or the captain, although there is a variety that can grab their prey, throw them up in the air, swallow them, and encapsulate them inside blocks shaped like feces. Players who are trapped will constantly shout 'Help!' Via a speech bubble near them, and they can be freed from these prisons if other characters or Pikmin attack them, at which point they'll say 'Thank you!'
Via another speech bubble. The same happens if a player is trapped inside a bubble that had been shot at them.In the extra levels, some enemies are imbued with elemental properties:,.
These do not affect Pikmin like the hazards of the main Pikmin games but instead indicate which type of Pikmin will deal damage.The following enemies exist:. Bulborb: comes in three colors: red, yellow, and green. Red Bulborbs charge after players in a straight line, while Yellow Bulborbs hop back and forth to dodge attacks and can also spit projectiles like water or spiked balls. Green Bulborbs attack like the Red Bulborbs, but have the added ability of following the player while charging. All of these Bulborbs can eat players and trap them inside of a Bulborb dropping.
If the GamePad player is stuck in one of these, any Pikmin in their group will automatically latch on and attack it. Bilious Bulborb: similar to the in appearance, the Bilious Bulborb has three weak points; one on its back and two on its sides. It attacks by spitting projectiles at players. Beeb: an enemy that walks around and has a simple tackle attack.
Bombardier Beeb: a Beeb variant that will explode shortly after spotting a player. The larger the Bombardier Beeb, the bigger the blast radius. It can be defeated before detonating, which yields nectar or coins.
Telescoping Pumphog: a type of Blowhog that is anchored to the ground. It mainly acts as a cannon that fires bombs or spiked balls. White Pumphogs lack weak points and are invincible.
This enemy is typically stationary, but a rare variant can burrow through the ground as means of travel.Bosses Bosses use the. King Beeb: a large Beeb that rolls around to trample players. Bulblord: a large Bulborb with a hexagon-shaped body. It charges, rolls, and bites. A stamp can be obtained by breaking its eyes.
Large-Mouth Wollywog: a large. It uses its tongue to attack. Emperor Pinchipede: a large centipede with pincers.
Its main attack is to try and bite the players. Greater Bladed Beeb: an insect which bears blades on its hands. It tries to cut players. Grand Bulblord: a green Bulblord. Translucent Wollywog: a ghost-like Large-Mouth Wollywog. Greater Studded Beeb: a spike-ball handed Greater-Bladed Beeb.
Monochromatic Pinchipede: a white Pinchipede.Plants and fungi. See:Plants and fungi in this attraction are purely decoration, and have a robotic look to them. Each one has a statue of it on the Nintendo Land plaza.Power-ups There are three different power-ups that can be found throughout the attraction. These help do more damage to enemies and blocks, and change the way Pikmin are tossed and/or attack with. These power-ups also act as a shield, by preventing the character from taking damage, but being lost in the process.Hammer Seed Hammer Seeds are the first power-up to be found in the attraction. When collected, Pikmin will grow sledge hammer heads on their stems. When the Olimar player throws Hammer Seed Pikmin, they will drop down on enemies much like do in.
They also have a chance to stun the enemies. Pikmin players with this power-up have increased damage, as well as the ability to stun randomly, and when is held down and released, they will charge forward, consecutively swinging their hammer down on enemies.Monita's notes. “ This item sprouts a hammer from a Pikmin's head. It doesn't look particularly heavy, but take a swing at the enemy and you'll see that it gets the job done. ”Whip Seed Whip Seeds are the second power-up found in the attraction.
Whip seeds will grow springs on the Pikmin's stems, which can be extended to attack in a longer range and do more damage. If the Olimar player gets the Whip Seed, their Pikmin home in on the targeted area like fireworks when thrown. They can also be thrown farther than normal and follow moving enemies, similar to the. When a Pikmin player gets the Whip Seed, their attack range is increased enormously, and can attack from farther away to avoid taking damage.Monita's notes. “ This item extends a Pikmin's stalk so it can be used as a whip, allowing long-range attacks. If Olimar picks it up, his Pikmin will explode with colour when he throws them! ”Knuckle Seed Knuckle Seeds are the last of the power-ups in the attraction.
Knuckle Seeds turn the Pikmin's stems into fists, and make the player stand in a fighting stance when standing still. The Knuckle Seed makes Olimar's Pikmin act like bullets when thrown, and do great great impact damage, much like from. When the Pikmin players get this power-up, they do massive damage with combos, and when is held and released, Pikmin will perform a -like attack.Monita's notes. The Knuckle Seed power-up as seen in the Nintendo Land Plaza.Controls One player will play as Olimar on the GamePad.
They can move their character with /, use the touch screen to throw Pikmin by tapping on the target, and use / as the whistle. In the extra levels, / is used to change the type of Pikmin between blue, yellow, red, and mixed. Buttons for these last two functions also exist on the GamePad's screen. By quickly flicking the stylus from the captain's position to a direction, the Olimar player will perform a dodging somersault in that same direction. In addition, the player can also tap a bomb or rock while near it to pick it up, and hold a press on a location on the GamePad to make the leader walk in that direction.The Wii Remote players use to move around, to attack and pick up rocks or bombs, and to jump.
Can be held to execute a strong attack, with the effects depending on the current power-up, if any.