Mario creator: My style is changing

Wednesday 28th May 2008 - 11:00

Nintendo legend in shock admission, GTA IV stays top of the charts and Venetica screens

The legend behind Mario, Donkey Kong and most recently, Wii, has gone on record to admit that he uses his imagination less now than he did five years ago when designing a new game. In an interview with the New York Times, Shigeru Miyamoto agreed that he was having to think of more realistic ideas to meet the demands of current gamers.

Miyamoto admitted: "I would say that over the last five years or so, the types of games I create has changed somewhat. Whereas before I could kind of use my own imagination to create these worlds or create these games, I would say that over the last five years I've had more of a tendency to take interests or topics in my life and try to draw the entertainment out of that."

Although Miyamoto was keen to keep any future developments under wraps by cryptically adding: "I feel that people like Mario and people like Link and the other characters we've created not for the characters themselves, but because the games they appear in are fun; and because people enjoy playing those games first, they come to love the characters as well."

One character that the games playing public clearly do love is Niko Bellic. The anti hero star of legendary crime caper that is Grand Theft Auto IV is once again sitting pretty at the very top of this week's videogames chart. For the fourth week in a row GTA IV takes the top spot, most shockingly Wii Fit, last week's number two has now dropped completely from the top 40! Second place now goes to the excellent PC online adventure that is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures with Haze, the somewhat disappointing PS3-exclusive shooter debuting in third place.

We finish off with the first selection of screens from a brand new game called Venetica. No, it's not a new title about a Spanish footy team, rather an RPG that casts you as the daughter of Death. Set in the sixteenth century and promising to mix 'real emotion' with RPG gameplay, few other details are forthcoming from German developer Deck 13 - except we know it's coming out on Xbox 360 and PC mid 2009 and looks pretty impressive so far!

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