Nothing causes Nintendo more pain than watching a perfectly good character or franchise go unexploited. Of course Nintendo’s own characters have all been squeezed to their last drop, but what about the properties of other companies? What about all those potentially profitable series being squandered over at Sega, Capcom and Konami?

Well, according to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Nintendo is so serious about getting 3rd party support for the 3DS and their upcoming WiiU that they’re planning to partially fund and help develop sequels to properties owned by other companies. Top on Nintendo’s list of other people’s stuff they want to revive? Sega’s weird pet sim Seaman.

So yeah, this certainly opens up some interesting possibilities. What neglected and/or mistreated properties from other companies would you folks like to see Nintendo revive? There’s about a dozen horribly mismanaged franchises at Sega alone — Toejam and Earl in 2012!

via  GoNintendo

So, Nintendo’s 3DS has had an up and down 2011 to say the least, but as we sit here at the beginning of 2012 things definitely seem to be more up than down. That said, the 3DS still has a way to go before it can call itself the equal of the original DS. The 3DS is a good system — the DS was one of the greatest of all time.

I have a feeling the 3DS may never quite match up to the DS, but delivering the following six things will get it as close as it possibly can…

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: haters gonna’ hate. Guinness Book of World Records Gamer’s Edition 2012 confirms that an engineering team from the Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, has officially constructed the world’s largest gaming controller. Students Benjamin Allen, Stephen van’t Hof, and Michel Verhulst are the ones responsible for the giant NES controller; taking nearly four weeks to assemble, the 12ft X 5ft 3 in X 1ft 8 in controller cost the team around $6,000 to build, weighing in at a whopping 265 pounds.

And just in case large-scaled controllers aren’t your thing, the video after the jump also features other winners from Guinness this year: the world’s first female Street Fighter champion, some dude who plays Wii inside a wind tunnel for 18 minutes and let us not forget the world’s most successful Pokémon playing family. Like I said: haters gonna’ hate.

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So, around 15-years ago a few Japanese guys got together and made this simple little RPG for the original Gameboy filled with cute imaginary creatures. There was a little lizard with a fiery tail! A chubby cheeked electric squirrel! There was Squirtle! Awesome!

Then this cute little RPG somehow became one of the most popular video games of all time, and suddenly these Japanese guys were sentenced to a lifetime of hard Pokemon-creating labor. For a while they tried their hardest. It really seemed like they were trying to come up with the next Pikachu or Bulbasaur, but somewhere around 2007′s Pokemon Pearl and Diamond, it became obvious the guys at Game Freak (the developers behind Pokemon) were starting to burn out. It only got worse with last year’s Pokemon Black and White.

The following aren’t necessarily the worst or weirdest Pokemon from Diamond/Pearl and Black/White, but they are the most half-assed. The least creative. They’re the Pokemon scribbled on a napkin over lunch and dumped directly into the game. In other words, you’ll spend far more time trying to catch most of these guys than was ever put into creating them…

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How do you know a science fiction or fantasy series is really worth its salt? When it creates its own spoken or written language of course — that shows the makers aren’t just lazily tossing aliens and elves around, they really put some thought into this sh-t.

For some time now (at least since Ocarina of Time) the Zelda series has had it’s own Hylian alphabet. The latest game in the series, Skyward Sword, switched things up a bit and replaced the familiar Hylian alphabet with an all-new version. It’s taken Zelda fans a while, but it’s been translated and you can now download a font of the Skyward Sword Hylian alphabet right here.

Downloaded the font kids? Here’s a super-secret message for all you true Zelda fans to decode…

via Zelda Universe

Getting a bit fed up with DLC? Well, too bad, because Nintendo, the last major holdout when it comes to paid DLC, is finally relenting. As recently as a couple months ago Nintendo was still sticking to a defiantly anti-DLC stance — making players pay extra for a full experience was against everything Nintendo stood for gosh-darnit! What a brave moral stand! Of course the real reason they haven’t done DLC yet probably has more to do with the fact that DLC arrives via the Internet, and Nintendo finds the Internet confusing and scary.

Lately though, there’s been a thawing of relations between Nintendo and the Interwebs. The 3DS has largely done away with friend codes, and the system’s eShop is actually shaping up to be pretty solid. They even recently released a pretty rad little messaging system for the machine. Nintendo is beginning to realize the Internet isn’t just a terrifying wasteland of pirates and pedophiles, but something they can actually use to make money.

In that spirit, spring 2012 will see the release of a new Fire Emblem game in Japan, and the game will offer a variety of paid DLC. The kind of content you’ll be able to download is unknown at the time, but whatever it is will cost 100 yen (about $1.30 American) a piece. Seems like not a bad deal — let’s just hope Nintendo doesn’t get carried away with this DLC thing in the future, although they probably like money too much not to.

via Geekosystem