Star Fox Wii U Will Have You Piloting A Helicopter With GamePad-Based Controls

Shigeru Miyamoto recently sat down with TIME magazine to discuss his latest Wii U projects, including the newly leaked Star Fox game. Fans have clamoured for a new game to the series since the GameCube days, so it’s no surprise the game initially started out as a Wii title. However, since Nintendo has lacked the ability to utilise the GamePad fully in many of its first-party titles, rather rendering it as a map screen for the most part, Star Fox Wii U is set to change that.

Unfortunately, TIME magazine’s link to the article has been pulled, but we’ve gathered a few snippets from the interview which you can see below, including the control learning curve and the new helicopter vehicle within the game.

“I think Star Fox will be a game you spend a little bit of time getting used to the controls, but that once you do, then you’ll understand what’s fun about that experience. I don’t think it’ll take a lot of play time for people to get used to it. For most people, it’ll take maybe 30 minutes to an hour. So from that standpoint it’s not a game that’s particularly well-suited to displaying at a show like this, where you only have a short amount of time to play, so that’s why we held the event yesterday, to get everyone in to play for a longer period of time than they might normally.

“And then once you get used to the play style… I didn’t go into this detail the other night because it starts to get a little bit complicated, but once you get it, you’ll also be able to press a button to switch the view from one screen to the other. So you could play with the cockpit view on the TV and the fighter view down on the GamePad screen if you feel like that’s a better way to play.”

Miyamoto also mentioned how the new helicopter vehicle came into play: “With the helicopter, we’ve been thinking of the two-screen gameplay, and so that was one of the early ideas. One of the things we’re considering at this point is making the helicopter so you could have two pilots, two people playing together, and what that’ll allow is you could have one player piloting the helicopter, and another player who’s using another controller to control the robot.

“In the case of the Arwing spaceship, if you have two pilots, they’re most likely going to be sitting front-to-back, and you’ll have one piloting, the other able to look around. When you have someone piloting but someone else who can look around, what’s most beneficial to the person who’s looking around is the ability to look down below. In designing the Arwing we couldn’t quite think of a good way to have to redesign it so you’d have one player who could look down below. Thus we decided to create the helicopter.”