Nintendo Interview | Grasshopper Talks Wii Heroes, Contact DS & the Future

In a recent interview with UK site Computer & Video Games, the team sat down with the brains behind Contact for the Nintendo DS, Grasshopper Manufacturer.

Some of the highlights of the interview reveal that the main director of the game is Akira Ueda, who previously worked as director on Shining Soul I and II, plus Suda-san mentions how he was in charge of all the graphics and visuals for Super Mario RPG, and talks about how he rates Ueda as "one of the best graphic designers in the world".

It turns out that Contact was actually a Game Boy Advance project, but the Nintendo DS was in development at the time the game was being worked on and the pull of the Wi-Fi Connection helped with the decision to transfer to the new platform. Now the game can let you "group up to eight players in the same game to eight players in the same game and play together with your friends. When you are connected to the wi-fi there are new characters that might appear and new events that will happen. The more that you connect to the internet the more characters and events you will have to play with."

Suda-san also points out that if Ueda was not the main director he would have liked to do something crazier, akin to killer7, but is still really enjoying his work on Contact. He then went on to dicuss the Nintendo Wii:

Suda51: Regarding the Wii, I think it's really good hardware and I think that from now [on] there will be a lot of new ideas from different creators, I think in Japan you should have a lot of announcements for new games on Wii. I think all of the Wii games from Nintendo are really good and they use the console's features really well, but from now on the other developers could just copy the ideas in Nintendo's titles. But if the third parties can make use of the Wii better than Nintendo, the Wii will definitely be a success.

CVG: You're already developing a game for the Wii...

Suda51: We have a project on the Wii which is called Heroes. It's a partnership between Grasshopper and Marvellous again. So far, just the title of the game has been announced.

CVG: Can you give us any hint about what to expect from Heroes?

Suda51: I can't say too much at the moment, but people who really enjoyed Killer 7 should enjoy Heroes too.

So it appears that Nintendo is about to get another mature title to add to its line-up, which already includes Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Project H.A.M.M.E.R and a new Resident Evil project.

There is also mention of Grasshopper's scary-looking game for the PlayStation 3, Kurayami, but unfortunately publishers have kept their distance from it so far. Could time lead to this eventually being brought to the Nintendo Wii instead? You never know...

To conclude, Goichi Suda re-iterates a point he has discussed with others previously, that Akira Ueda has now left Grasshopper to form his own company called Audio. As previously reported on Cubed3, Audio, Inc. is due to work on a sequel to Contact, despite low Japanese sales of the title.

Stick with C3 for further updates!