The Lego Mario & Yoshi set is an homage to 1990’s Super Mario World.
The Lego Group
From the front, it looks like a fairly straightforward re-creation of the game’s 16-bit sprites.
The Lego Group
Behind the facade are complex mechanics that move Yoshi’s feet and arms and bob his body up and down, to make him look like he’s walking. A separate dial opens his mouth and extends his tongue.
The latest addition is an homage to 1990’s Super Mario World, Mario’s debut outing on the then-new 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. At first, the 1,215-piece set just looks like a caped Mario sitting on top of Yoshi. But a look at the back reveals more complex mechanics, including a hand crank that makes Yoshi’s feet and arms move and a dial that opens his mouth and extends his tongue.
Most of the Mario sets have included some kind of interactive moving part, even if it’s as simple as the movable mouth on the Lego Piranha Plant. Yoshi’s mechanical crank most strongly resembles the NES set, though, which included a CRT-style TV set with a crank that made the contents of the screen scroll so that Mario could “walk.”
The Mario & Yoshi set is available to preorder from Lego’s online store for $129.99. It begins shipping on October 1.
Lego has also branched out into other video game-themed sets. In 2022, the company began selling a replica Atari 2600, complete with faux-wood paneling. More recently, Lego has collaborated with Epic Games on several Fortnite-themed sets, including the Battle Bus.
Nintendo’s Joy-Con Charging Stand (Two-Way) seems useful, but it’s coming out at a strange time in the console’s lifecycle.
Nintendo
The stand can charge the Switch Online NES controllers, something that Nintendo’s charging grip can’t do because the handles get in the way.
Nintendo
The charging stand can be removed from the stand part to maximize flexibility.
Nintendo
Nintendo’s Switch launched in March 2017, and all available information indicates that the company is on track to announce a successor early next year. It’s that timing that makes the launch of Nintendo’s latest Switch accessory so odd: The company has announced a first-party charging cradle for Joy-Con controllers, which up until now have been charged by slotting them into the console itself, via Nintendo’s sold-separately Joy-Con charging grip, or with third-party charging accessories.
The Nintendo of Europe account on X, formerly Twitter, announced that the charging accessory—formally called the “Joy-Con Charging Stand (Two-Way)”—will be released on October 17. It will work with both Joy-Cons and the Switch Online wireless NES controllers, and the charging cradle can be separated from its stand (where it looks a lot like the Joy-Con charging grip but without the grip part).
Power is provided via a USB-C port on top of the stand, which can either be connected to one of the Switch dock’s USB ports or to a separate USB-C charger. Other Switch controllers, including the Pro Controller and the SNES and N64 replica controllers, are charged via USB-C directly.
The Verge reports that the accessory has only been announced for Europe and Japan so far, though it will presumably also come to North America at some point. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, either.
Switch 2 is around the corner
Why would Nintendo release a new first-party charging accessory for your old console just months before it’s slated to announce its next-generation console? Rumors about the design of the Switch 2 could hold some hints.
Accessory makers and others with firsthand knowledge of the Switch 2 have suggested that the new console will come with redesigned Joy-Cons with additional buttons and a magnetic attachment mechanism. This would likely make it impossible to attach current-generation Joy-Cons, which physically interlock with the Switch and its various accessories.
But reporting also suggests that the Switch 2 will retain backward compatibility with digital and physical Switch games, which could justify retaining some kind of backward compatibility with existing controllers. This new Joy-Con charging cradle could provide current Switch owners a way to continue charging Joy-Cons and NES controllers even if they can no longer be attached to and charged by the console itself.
But that’s just speculation at this point. It could just as easily be the case that Nintendo has to keep the Switch going for one more holiday season, and it’s eager to sell every accessory it can alongside the shrinking but still significant number of consoles it will sell between now and the time the Switch 2 is released. Nintendo recently announced new games in the Legend of Zelda and Mario & Luigi series, which will give past and future Switch buyers a reason to keep their Joy-Cons charged in the first place.
Nintendo has taken pains to make old controllers compatible with new consoles before. Most Nintendo Wii consoles came with built-in GameCube controller ports, which enabled backward compatibility with GameCube games and also allowed GameCube controllers to be used with compatible Wii games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Wii remotes also continued to function with the Wii U.
One thing we don’t know about the Switch 2’s backward compatibility is whether it will provide any kind of graphical enhancements for Switch games. Several titles released in recent years, including newer Pokémon titles, have suffered from performance issues. Nintendo had reportedly planned to release a more powerful “Switch Pro” at some point in 2021 or 2022, but the update was apparently scrapped in favor of the more modestly updated OLED Switch.
Enlarge / Get ready to repeat this ~25-second slice of Mario over and over… and over… and over.
If you’ve ever seen a record-breaking video game speedrun or watched a Games Done Quick marathon, you may have entertained fantasies that you, too, could put up some decent times on your favorite old games. Sure, it would probably take a bit of practice, but what these speedrunners are doing doesn’t look that difficult, does it? How hard can it be to press a few buttons with good timing for a few minutes?
After spending a few weeks with Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, I no longer think that way. The game’s bite-size chunks of classic Nintendo games highlight the level of precision needed for even a few minutes of speedrunning perfection, not to mention the tedium of practicing the same in-game motions dozens of times to build up the needed muscle memory. In the process, I gained a newfound respect for the skill displayed by the best speedrunners and found a fresh way to experience some classic NES games that I felt I knew backward and forward.
Gotta go fast
While Nintendo World Championships draws its name from a series of competitions dating back to 1990, it draws its inspiration much more directly from the more recent rise of the online speedrunning community. Thus, the game’s main single-player mode is named “Speedrun,” tasking players with putting up the fastest times in 150 mini-challenges spread across 13 different Nintendo-developed NES titles.
Enlarge/ Really? Get the Morph Ball? That’s all you want me to do here?
Nintendo
The earliest of these many unlockable challenges seem almost insultingly easy on their face—collecting the first Super Mushroom in Super Mario Bros. or collecting the sword in The Legend of Zelda, for instance. When you first dive in, you may be more than a little bemused to find yourself showered with in-game rewards for spending just a few seconds completing such basic tasks.
But then you look at how much time that challenge took you—which is thrown up in huge numbers on the screen—alongside an even bigger letter grade. The “A” you got for collecting that Mushroom might seem pretty good, at first, but you know you could do better if you didn’t miss the item box with your first few jumps. So you quickly restart the challenge (and breathe deep through a helpful three-second countdown) and trim off half a second on your second attempt, earning an “A+” for your efforts.
If you are a certain type of player, you might say, “Alright, that’s good enough,” rather than repeating this cycle yet again (if so, I’d argue this game is not for you). But if you’re a different type of gamer, the mere knowledge that you could achieve an S rank with some combination of strategy and execution will propel you through entire minutes of repeated attempts, looking to optimize the perfect few seconds of button presses.
The fact that Nintendo doesn’t reveal the specific timing cutoffs for the different letter grades is equal parts frustrating and subtly encouraging, here. There were plenty of challenges where I felt I played as optimally as I could only to be greeted with a mere “A++” rank next to my new best time. The S rank’s mere existence often inspired me to redouble my efforts and look for new ways to trim even more time off my personal best.
Enlarge/ Analogue is launching another limited-edition version of its Pocket console, this time with an anodized aluminum body and buttons.
Analogue
Analogue has released multiple variations of the Analogue Pocket, its Game Boy-style handheld console that can play old cartridges and game ROMs using its FPGA chip. But until now, all of those designs have been riffs on the regular Pocket’s black (or white) plastic shell.
The company’s latest Pocket iteration might appeal more to people who prefer the solidity and durability of anodized aluminum to the cheap practicality of plastic. On July 15, the company will release a limited run of all-aluminum Analogue Pocket consoles in four different colors: white, gray, black, and a Game Boy Advance-esque indigo. The company says that “every single piece” of these consoles is “entirely CNC’d from aluminum,” including not just the frame but also all of the buttons.
The new material will cost you, though: Each aluminum Pocket sells for $500, over twice as much as the $220 price of a regular plastic Pocket.
The aluminum versions of the Pocket will run the exact same software as the standard plastic ones and will be compatible with all the same cartridges and accessories. Analogue’s site doesn’t compare the weight of the aluminum and plastic Pocket consoles, though intuitively we’d expect the metal one to be heavier. The aluminum consoles begin shipping on July 17.
Enlarge/ An exploded version of the new Pocket; even the buttons are aluminum.
Analogue
When the Pocket first launched in late 2021, ongoing supply chain disruptions and high demand led to monthslong wait times for the initial models. Things have gotten slightly better since then—you can’t simply open Analogue’s store on any given day and just buy one, but the basic black and white plastic models restock with some regularity. Analogue has also released multiple special edition runs of the handheld, including one made of glow-in-the-dark plastic and a colorful series of models that recall Nintendo’s mid-’90s “Play It Loud!” hardware refresh for the original Game Boy.
As much as we liked the Pocket in our original review, the hardware has gotten much more capable thanks to a series of post-launch firmware updates. In the summer of 2022, Analogue added OpenFPGA support to the pocket, allowing its FPGA chip to emulate consoles like the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, and others aside from the portable systems that the Pocket was designed to emulate. Updates toward the end of 2023 allowed those third-party emulation cores to use their own display filters, replicating the look of classic CRT TVs and other displays.
The updates have also fixed multiple bugs in the system. The latest update is version 2.2, released back in March, which primarily adds support for the Analogue Pocket Adapter Set that allows other kinds of vintage game cartridges to plug in to the Pocket’s cartridge slot.
It has now been almost exactly seven years since Nintendo first announced Metroid Prime 4 and over five years since the company said it was restarting work on the game with series mainstay Retro Studios. Now, Nintendo has finally shared the first glimpse of gameplay for the renamed Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which is now planned for a 2025 release.
“After a very long time, we are finally able to share more information about this title,” Nintendo executive Shinya Takahashi said during today’s livestreamed Nintendo Direct presentation, showing a remarkable talent for understatement. Takahashi went on to also ask that fans “please wait a little bit longer” for additional information before the game’s planned release next year.
That “additional information” should include whether the highly anticipated game will launch for the Switch—as was promised in 2017—or for Nintendo’s next console, which the company recently teased via a pre-announcement announcement. Nintendo kept its promise that “there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor” during today’s Nintendo Direct presentation, but a major first-party franchise game launching in 2025 definitely seems well-positioned to serve as a showcase for new hardware that Nintendo seems to be planning for around the same time frame.
Metroid Prime 4 also seems like a prime candidate to be the kind of “bridge game” that Nintendo sometimes launches across an aging console and its replacement hardware simultaneously. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild served as such a bridge game during the transition from the Wii U to the Switch in 2017, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess did so during the GameCube to Wii transition in 2006.
In 2019, Takahashi admitted that “the current development status of [Metroid Prime 4] is very challenged,” leading to the “difficult decision” to “essentially restart development” with a new internal structure under Retro Studios. “It will be a long road until the next time we will be able to update you on the development progress,” Takahashi said at the time, presaging the five-year wait for today’s trailer.
The world of 20X9
A familiar head emerges from a familiar ship.
Samus has mastered the cool three-point landing by now.
If you look in the background, you’ll notice Samus is getting some help from one of those Space Pirates (yes, that’s their official name).
No one will notice me if I transform into a tiny sphere!
Come meet my pets. Don’t worry, they don’t bite.
This cruise excursion was definitely worth the extra money.
The two-minute teaser footage for Metroid Prime 4 Nintendo released today features series protagonist Samus landing on a “Galactic Federation Research Facility” in the suitably cheesy, sci-fi-ish “Cosmic Year 20X9” (hey, maybe she’ll run into Stinkoman). Background details in the trailer point to Samus intruding on some sort of alien civil war, with familiar-looking Space Pirates firing on each other amid a barrage of anti-aircraft lasers.
The brief glimpse of gameplay we got features plenty of elements that will be familiar to anyone who has played the first three Metroid Prime games, including scanning objects for additional information, transforming into a morph ball to traverse narrow tunnels, and locking on to foes to easily circle them while firing away. The action-heavy portion concludes with the entrance of a mysterious figure in a strange, light-stripped mask breaking through an outer wall flanked by two seemingly docile metroids.
As the trailer concludes, we get a sweeping shot of a more tranquil, open area full of flowing waterfalls and giant trees, suggesting more of the exploration-heavy and combat-light puzzle-platforming sections the series is known for.
Gamers of a certain age may remember Nintendo’s Game & Watch line, which predated the cartridge-based Game Boy by offering simple, single-serving LCD games that can fetch a pretty penny at auction today. But even most ancient gamers probably don’t remember Mego’s “Time Out” line, which took the internal of Nintendo’s early Game & Watch titles and rebranded them for an American audience that hadn’t yet heard of the Japanese game maker.
Now, the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has helped preserve the original film of an early Mego Time Out commercial, marking the recovered, digitized video as “what we believe is the first commercial for a Nintendo product in the United States.” The 30-second TV spot—which is now available in a high-quality digital transfer for the first time—provides a fascinating glimpse into how marketers positioned some of Nintendo’s earliest games to a public that still needed to be sold on the very idea of portable gaming.
Imagine an “electronic sport”
Enlarge/ A 1980 Mego catalog sells Nintendo’s Game & Watch games under the toy company’s “Time Out” branding.
Founded in the 1950s, Mego made a name for itself in the 1970s with licensed movie action figures and early robotic toys like the 2-XL (a childhood favorite of your humble author). In 1980, though, Mego branched out to partner with a brand-new, pre-Donkey Kong Nintendo of America to release rebranded versions of four early Game & Watch titles: Ball (which became Mego’s “Toss-Up”), Vermin (“Exterminator”), Fire (“Fireman Fireman”), and Flagman (“Flag Man”).
While Mego would go out of business by 1983 (long before a 2018 brand revival), in 1980, the company had the pleasure and responsibility of introducing America to Nintendo games for the first time, even if they were being sold under the Mego name. And while home systems like the Atari VCS and Intellivision were already popular with the American public at the time, Mego had to sell the then-new idea of simple black-and-white games you could play away from the living room TV (Milton Bradley Microvision notwithstanding).
The 1980 Mego spot that introduced Nintendo games to the US, now preserved in high-resolution.
That’s where a TV spot from Durona Productions came in. If you were watching TV in the early ’80s, you might have heard an announcer doing a bad Howard Cosell impression selling the Time Out line as “the new electronic sport,” suitable as a pastime for athletes who have been injured jogging or playing tennis or basketball.
The ad also had to introduce even extremely basic gaming functions like “an easy game and a hard game,” high score tracking, and the ability to “tell time” (as Douglas Adams noted, humans were “so amazingly primitive that they still [thought] digital watches [were] a pretty neat idea”). And the ad made a point of highlighting that the game is “so slim you can play it anywhere,” complete with a close-up of the unit fitting in the back pocket of a rollerskater’s tight shorts.
Preserved for all time
This early Nintendo ad wasn’t exactly “lost media” before now; you could find fuzzy, video-taped versions online, including variations that talk up the pocket-sized games as sports “where size and strength won’t help.” But the Video Game History Foundation has now digitized and archived a much higher quality version of the ad, courtesy of an original film reel discovered in an online auction by game collector (and former game journalist) Chris Kohler. Kohler acquired the rare 16 mm film and provided it to VGHF, which in turn reached out to film restoration experts at Movette Film Transfer to help color-correct the faded, 40-plus-year-old print and encode it in full 2K resolution for the first time.
This important historical preservation work is as good an excuse as any to remember a time when toy companies were still figuring out how to convince the public that Nintendo’s newfangled portable games were something that could fit into their everyday life. As VGHF’s Phil Salvador writes, “it feels laser-targeted to the on-the-go yuppie generation of the ’80s with disposable income to spend on electronic toys. There’s shades of how Nintendo would focus on young, trendy, mobile demographics in their more recent marketing campaigns… but we’ve never seen an ad where someone plays Switch in the hospital.”
In recent years, we’ve reported on multiple efforts to reverse-engineer Nintendo 64 games into fully decompiled, human-readable C code that can then become the basis for full-fledged PC ports. While the results can be impressive, the decompilation process can take years of painstaking manual effort, meaning only the most popular N64 games are likely to get the requisite attention from reverse engineers.
Now, a newly released tool promises to vastly reduce the amount of human effort needed to get basic PC ports of most (if not all) N64 games. The N64 Recompiled project uses a process known as static recompilation to automate huge swaths of the labor-intensive process of drawing C code out of N64 binaries.
While human coding work is still needed to smooth out the edges, project lead Mr-Wiseguy told Ars that his recompilation tool is “the difference between weeks of work and years of work” when it comes to making a PC version of a classic N64 title. And parallel work on a powerful N64 graphic renderer means PC-enabled upgrades like smoother frame rates, resolution upscaling, and widescreen aspect ratios can be added with little effort.
Inspiration hits
Mr-Wiseguy told Ars he got his start in the N64 coding space working on various mod projects around 2020. In 2022, he started contributing to the then-new RT64 renderer project, which grew out of work on a ray-traced Super Mario 64 port into a more generalized effort to clean up the notoriously tricky process of recreating N64 graphics accurately. While working on that project, Mr-Wiseguy said he stumbled across an existing project that automates the disassembly of NES games and another that emulates an old SGI compiler to aid in the decompilation of N64 titles.
YouTuber Nerrel lays out some of the benefits of Mr-Wiseguy’s N64 recompilation tool.
“I realized it would be really easy to hook up the RT64 renderer to a game if it could be run through a similar static recompilation process,” Mr-Wiseguy told Ars. “So I put together a proof of concept to run a really simple game and then the project grew from there until it could run some of the more complex games.”
A basic proof of concept for Mr-Wiseguy’s idea took only “a couple of weeks at most” to get up and running, he said, and was ready as far back as November of 2022. Since then, months of off-and-on work have gone into rounding out the conversion code and getting a recompiled version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask ready for public consumption.
Trust the process
At its most basic level, the N64 recompilation tool takes a raw game binary (provided by the user) and reprocesses every single instruction directly and literally into corresponding C code. The N64’s MIPS instruction set has been pretty well-documented over years of emulation work, so figuring out how to translate each individual opcode to its C equivalent isn’t too much of a hassle.
Enlarge/ An early beta of the RT64 renderer shows how ray-tracing shadows and reflections might look in a port of Wave Race 64.
The main difficulty, Mr-Wiseguy said, can be figuring out where to point the tool. “The contents of the [N64] ROM can be laid out however the developer chose to do so, which means you have to find where code is in the ROM before you can even start the static recompilation process,” he explained. And while N64 emulators automatically handle games that load and unload code throughout memory at runtime, handling those cases in a pre-compiled binary can add extra layers of complexity.
Enlarge/ Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.
Aurich Lawson
While the past few months have included plenty of informed speculation about the so-calledSwitch 2, Nintendo hasn’t given even a bare hint that the system is in the works. That changed at least somewhat last night, as Nintendo President Shinto Furukawa shared on social media that “we will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” which ends on March 31, 2025.
In his pre-announcement announcement, Furukawa warned that an upcoming Nintendo Direct presentation planned for June would include “no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor,” suggesting more information may be coming closer to the end of the fiscal year than the beginning.
We probably won’t have to wait two years between the formal announcement and retail launch of the Switch 2, though; multiple reports have suggested that Nintendo is aiming for an early 2025 release for the updated hardware. The nearly eight-year gap between the launch of the Switch and its successors would mark a historically long wait for Nintendo home console hardware, which tends to see a refresh every five to six years. But Nintendo did wait nine years before following the original (and best-selling) Game Boy with the Game Boy Color.
The Switch 2 pre-announcement comes alongside the release of Nintendo’s latest financial results, in which Nintendo said it sold 15.7 million Nintendo Switch units in the 12-month period ending in March. That’s down quite a bit from the system’s peak sales in the 2020–2021 fiscal year, but it’s still a substantial sales performance for an aging system that has now passed 141 million total units sold since 2017. The overall numbers are closing in on the record currently held by the PS2 (155 million sales) and the Nintendo DS (154 million).
The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons “difficult.” Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system’s magnetic connection points. Current Switch Pro Controllers, which do not physically attach to the Switch, should be fully compatible with the Switch 2, according to the report.
Vandal cites several unnamed accessory and peripheral makers who reportedly got to touch the new console inside of an opaque box, which was used to balance design secrecy with the need to provide general knowledge of the unit’s dimensions. According to those sources, the Switch 2 will be “larger than the Switch, although without reaching the size of the Steam Deck.”
Microsoft has made a point of highlighting that the Xbox Series S/X works with all standard Xbox One controllers (not you, Kinect). PS4 owners, meanwhile, had to purchase new DualSense controllers to use on the PS5.
Regarding software, Nintendo has offered only vague answers on whether the upcoming Switch 2 will be compatible with the thousands of games designed for the current Switch generation. However, some reports suggest that developers are already testing this kind of backward compatibility on Nintendo’s upcoming hardware.
Enlarge/ Scale is important, especially when talking about relative console sales.
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it made 31 percent less off Xbox hardware in the first quarter of 2024 (ending in March) than it had the year before, a decrease it says was “driven by lower volume of consoles sold.” And that’s not because the console sold particularly well a year ago, either; Xbox hardware revenue for the first calendar quarter of 2023 was already down 30 percent from the previous year.
Those two data points speak to a console that is struggling to substantially increase its player base during a period that should, historically, be its strongest sales period. But getting wider context on those numbers is a bit difficult because of how Microsoft reports its Xbox sales numbers (i.e., only in terms of quarterly changes in total console hardware revenue). Comparing those annual shifts to the unit sales numbers that Nintendo and Sony report every quarter is not exactly simple.
Context clues
Enlarge/ Significant declines in Xbox hardware revenue for four of the last five quarters stand out relative to competitors’ unit sales.
Kyle Orland
To attempt some direct contextual comparison, we took unit sales numbers for some recent successful Sony and Nintendo consoles and converted them to Microsoft-style year-over-year percentage changes (aligned with the launch date for each console). For this analysis, we skipped over each console’s launch quarter, which contains less than three months of total sales (and often includes a lot of pent-up early adopter demand). We also skipped the first four quarters of a console’s life cycle, which don’t have a year-over-year comparison point from 12 months prior.
This still isn’t a perfect comparison. Unit sales don’t map directly to total hardware revenue due to things like inflation, remainder sales of Xbox One hardware, and price cuts/discounts (though the Xbox Series S/X, PS5, and Switch still have yet to see official price drops). It also doesn’t take into account the baseline sales levels from each console’s first year of sales, making total lifetime sales performance on the Xbox side hard to gauge (though recent data from a Take-Two investment call suggests the Xbox Series S/X has been heavily outsold by the PS5, at this point).
Even with all those caveats, the comparative data trends are pretty clear. At the start of their fourth full year on the market, recent successful consoles have been enjoying a general upswing in their year-over-year sales. Microsoft stands out as a major outlier, making less revenue from Xbox hardware in four of the last five quarters on a year-over-year basis.
Those numbers suggest that the hardware sales rate for the Xbox Series S/X may have already peaked in the last year or two. That would be historically early for a console of this type; previous Ars analyses have shown PlayStation consoles generally see their sales peaks in their fourth or fifth year of life, and Nintendo portables have shown a similar sales trend, historically. The Xbox Series S/X progression, on the other hand, looks more similar to that of the Wii U, which was already deep in a “death spiral” at a similar point in its commercial life.
This is not the end
In the past, console sales trends like these would have been the sign of a hardware maker’s wider struggles to stay afloat in the gaming business. However, in today’s gaming market, Microsoft is in a place where console sales are not strictly required for overall success.
For instance, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue for the latest reported quarter was up 51 percent, thanks in large part to the “net impact from the Activision Blizzard acquisition.” Even before that (very expensive) merger was completed, Microsoft’s total gaming revenue was often partially buoyed by “growth in Game Pass” and strong “software content” sales across PC and other platforms.
Enlarge/ Owning Call of Duty means being one of the biggest PS5 game publishers almost by definition.
So, while the commercial future of Xbox hardware may look a bit uncertain, the future of Microsoft’s overall gaming business is in much less dire straits. That would be true even if Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell by 100 percent.
One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the “Short Stack,” a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console’s internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.
“You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii,” writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.
Like many space-saving console mods, the Short Stack requires a cut-down version of the original Wii’s PCB, retaining (and occasionally relocating) the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash chip. Power delivery, USB, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and GameCube controller ports were all relocated to separate custom PCBs, which also allowed Smith to add HDMI output and a microSD card slot (the original Wii used a full-size SD card and didn’t support digital video output).
The Short Stack cleverly hides its GameCube controller ports behind a sliding panel on the side.
A headphone jack-to-GameCube dongle preserves GameCube controller compatibility while saving space in the console itself.
The cut-down Wii PCB, featuring the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash.
The Short Stack next to a deck of cards.
Some sacrifices were made in the name of miniaturization. The console’s disc drive is gone, so any games will need to be loaded from a microSD card instead. And the four GameCube controller ports are actually headphone jacks that work over a special adapter. Smith made these headphone-to-GameCube dongles pin-compatible with an earlier mod called the GC Nano, a project that did for the GameCube what the Short Stack does for the Wii.
Smith also designed custom front and rear PCBs for the console to handle things like the power button and the glowing blue light around the Short Stack’s (aesthetic, non-functional) DVD slot. A custom heatsink (Smith uses aluminum, though it can also be made with copper to improve heat transfer at the expense of weight) and a tiny fan keep the console cool.
Nintendo released its own Wii Mini toward the end of the Wii’s life in 2012, but it came with significant compromises: no online connectivity, no GameCube controller ports or game compatibility, and no SD card slot. The Short Stack loses the optical drive for space-saving reasons but otherwise retains all of the features of the original Wii.
Smith says that the Short Stack could probably be as much as 20 to 30 percent smaller without giving up features. But one of the goals of the Short Stack project was to make a scale model of the original Wii, and further shrinkage would make the project “tricky to assemble.”
In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Wonder producer Takashi Tezuka said it wasn’t that tough to get that kind of creative continuity at Nintendo. “The secret to having a long-tenured staff is that people don’t quit,” he said. “For folks who have been there together for such a long time, it’s easy for us to talk to each other.”
That said, Tezuka added that just getting a bunch of industry veterans together to make a game runs the risk of not “keeping up with the times. Really, for me, I have a great interest in how our newer staff members play, what they play, what they think, and what is appealing to them. I think it’s very interesting the things we can come up with when these two disparate groups influence each other to create something.”
Young and old
For Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the development team solicited literally thousands of ideas for potential game-changing Wonder Effects and badges from across Nintendo. In doing so, the game was able to incorporate the viewpoints of people with a wide variety of histories and memories of the series, Tezuka told Ars.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder Producer Takashi Tezuka.
Nintendo
Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri.
Nintendo
“Among our staff, there are folks who actually maybe haven’t played some of the [older] game titles we’re talking about,” he said. “So I think there was some familiarization for those folks with some of those titles. And maybe there was some inspiration drawn from those titles that I’m not aware of.”
For a series as long-running as Mario, though, even some of the relatively “younger” development cohort can have a deep history with the series. Super Mario Bros. Wonder Director Shiro Mouri, who joined Nintendo in 1997, recalled playing the original Super Mario Bros. back in elementary school, and being “so moved and awed by the secrets and mysteries I discovered in that game.” The Wonder Effects in Wonder were an explicit attempt to recapture that feeling of being young and discovering new things for the first time, which can be difficult in such an established series.
Mouri also drew some parallels between Yoshi’s Island—where Yoshi could sometimes turn into a vehicle—and Wonder transformation effects that could turn the player into slime or a spiky ball, for instance. “That’s not to say that we drew [direct] inspiration from [Yoshi’s Island] or anything, but I think… providing surprises has always been a theme throughout our philosophy,” he said.
