After two decades, Nintendo is finally creating a new Kid Icarus, this time for the new Nintendo 3DS. Kid Icarus Uprising's designer has even loftier goals for the sequel, targeting "an overriding problem with a lot of game design."
Masahiro Sakurai, the brains behind Super Smash Bros. Brawl and the new Kid Icarus, says that too many shooters—Uprising's genre—build on the same template thanks to an increasingly standardized control scheme. Sakurai says this represents a "creativity problem" for developers.
"I've found that, in the established genres, the controls are always the same," Sakurai tells Techland. "For example, in shooting games, you find first-person-shooters utilize all of the buttons on the controller and always do the same thing the stick is for moving, triggers for shooting and they're always trapped in this very restricted framework for gameplay. And, that's just not creative.
"It feels like people are taking this empty shell and just swapping out the story and art and whatnot."
Kid Icarus Uprising's control scheme sounds more simplified, using the 3DS's touchscreen, analog stick (or "slide pad") and the L button for much of the action. Simple? Yes. Creative? Maybe.
E3 2010: Masahiro Sakurai Makes Kid Icarus Fly Again on the Nintendo 3DS [Techland]