Good-feel, developers of Wario Land: The Shake Dimension, discuss how they brought the garlic-munching brute back to his platforming ways.

Wario is returning to the Wii in a new platformer this week in Wario Land: The Shake Dimension, which sees Wario unwittingly doing the dirty work of saucy pirate leader Captain Maple Syrup by rescuing a doomed kingdom and its inhabitants from the malevolent Shake King - as well as raiding the place for every last coin he can get his pudgy hands on.

Nintendo of Europe have featured a three-part interview with Good-feel, the developers of Wario Land: The Shake Dimension, on their website, translated from a feature in Nintendo's online magazine in Japan.

NOM: What led to the creation of Wario Land: The Shake Dimension?

Takahiro Harada, producer: I had participated in the development of a wide variety of games, but I especially liked platform games and had always wanted to make a Wario Land sequel someday. One day I was playing a platform game for the DS released by a major game developer, and it was so much fun, I thought I would like to work on a Wario Land sequel there. I did some research, and learned that Ebisu-san had been involved in its development.

Etsunobu Ebisu, producer: At that time, I had just quit working for that company and had founded Good-Feel. I had told Nintendo about the new company and was asking if we could work together on something.

Harada: It was perfect timing, so we met face-to-face and I asked if he would like to make a Wario Land action game.

NOM: Why were you interested in shaking as an element of the game?

Madoka Yamauchi, director: I got the idea once when Harada-san said that when he sees something placed high up, he wants to knock it down. Then we began developing plans for tilting the Wii Remote and shaking it up and down or side to side.

Harada: The concept was to hold the Wii Remote sideways to play a platform game like for the NES or Super NES. Then we added the very Wii-like element of shaking the Wii Remote, and it all came together well.

NOM: How many frames did you use for the animation?

Tsukawaki: It depends on the particular movement, but for one action, about 30. For Wario alone, there were over 2000. For the enemies, there were about 6000, including the ones we eventually cut. We had to digitalize all of those to be plugged into the software. (Program director Koichi) Yagi put a lot of effort into that.

Koichi Yagi, program director: I've been a programmer for a long time, but it was my first time to make a game with so many patterns. Like Tsukawaki said, there were about 2000 for Wario�about 200 separate actions. Those are stored in memory, so they can be displayed at any time. It took some clever programming to achieve that.

The rest of the interview can be found here, here and here. Wario Land: The Shake Dimension will be pillaging Europe this Friday.