Like they say, once you're at the top, there's nowhere to go but down. In Shigeru Miyamoto's case, he went down quite a bit. After being at the top of Time 100 last year, the Nintendo gaming mastermind drops to #42 of Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people from various fields and industries. So who else made it to the list? Find out after the jump.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's main man, says that he is "concerned" that developers are using violence too much as a way of grabbing people's attentions. Well you know what they say. Violence isn't the answer.

Nintendo and Capcom's big bosses are headlining this year's CEDEC over in Japan. At the developer conference, Shigeru Miyamoto will talk about how to start game development while Inafune will be lecturing people on an area yet to be revealed. More in the full article.

(Editor's Note: Seven days have come and gone, and you know what that means! Another QuickJump QuickPeek edition!)

And just like that, it's another weekend. You've probably been busy scrounging up pennies and loose change to save up for GTA4, so there's a chance the you might've missed out on a couple of things that happened this week. Man, have we got a story to tell in QuickPeek 43!

If your bet during last year's Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA) wasn't able to nab first place, then perhaps you'll have better luck this year as the Game Developers Conference has opened up the nominations for the 2008 GDCA event to be held this coming February 20.

Read more about it in the full article after the jump!

 

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it seems that Ratchet & Clank is being flattered by a lot of game developers - one of them being Shigeru Miyamoto, the mind behind some of Nintendo's most beloved franchises. This little nugget of information comes from an interview with Ryan Schneider, Marketing Director of Insomniac and a creative contributor in most of the game development firm's biggest titles.

In the interview, Ryan Schneider mentioned that a lot of upcoming games today (as well as games from the last generation) have been influenced by Ratchet & Clank in some way or another. His statement (unedited and presented as is) went:

Yeah, I think that it's flattering... well OK, first of all, there was a PlayStation 2 game which I won't name, that was more or less a direct rip-off of Ratchet and Clank. There's evidence all around us I think, of certain games that have borrowed from Ratchet and Clank.

One that we're even extremely flattered by is Super Mario Galaxy, with their spherical worlds; we did spherical worlds in Going Commando, and Up Your Arsenal. It would be amazing to think that Miyamoto-san thought that was so cool that he wanted to incorporate it into Mario Galaxy. Granted, he's doing it in a different way, but it's still a spherical world, so it's flattering to see those sorts of things.

Flattering indeed. Of course, we can also cite previous games that have also meddled with spherical worlds - such as the special stage Sonic & Knuckles on the Sega Mega Drive, way back in 1994. Ratchet and Clank's first game on the PS2, Ratchet & Clank, was released on 2002.

In any case, it's certainly good that game developers influence each other in making more fun and exciting worlds for us to play in. Updates as we get them, and you can check out the full interview from the read link below.

  

There was a time when Sega had 65% of the gaming industry's market share in North America - the time when Sonic the Hedgehog was a lot cooler than an Italian plumber, the time when Yu Suzuki was comparable to Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto. Arcade fans spent countless hours getting the fastest time in Hang-On, perfecting the act of not killing civilians in Virtua Cop, and trying to beat in Virtua Fighter.

It's sad to see one of the most influential companies in video game history struggle in today's tough competition, but we have to admit that Sega's presence is not as strong as it was before - not as strong as it should be. Some credit this to the losses that came with Dreamcast's fall, while some point fingers at lackluster games in recent years. What we can be certain about is that fans want to see Sega in its former glory.

A quick look at Sega's upcoming and recent games line-up reveal familiar titles for young and old, most on multiple platforms. Where's the problem, then? Pretty much every gamer is part of their target market, especially since most of Sega's established franchises are aimed at the biggest audience possible, so why is the company not doing as well as other publishers?

Without having to nitpick on quality of particular titles that didn't experience warm reception, let's just put up a battle plan that would rile up Sega fans while giving the former champ a good chance of propelling to the top. In other words, a Sega fan's wish list.

Read the entire article right after the jump!

In a talk with Free Radical Design, Kotaku was able to find out what developers Rob Yescombe and Derek Littlewood thought of Nintendo boss Shigeru Miyamoto's reaction to their Sony PlayStation 3 project Haze, along with some statements regarding the Wii game console.

The issue stems from Miyamoto's reaction while watching a Haze video where it seems that substance abuse took center stage and was the most talked-about underlying theme of the game.

"Drugs in the game was something that we wanted to be very careful about," explains Yescombe. "The over-arching message is that Nectar (the substance in question) is an enormous mistake."

He adds "we didn't come up with the idea of including the drug first, we had the story and the distinction in gameplay ideas first and Nectar became a tool to get those points across."

In Haze's story, soldiers from the future have taken on to a new trend in warfare. By taking in a battle performance-enhancing substance called Nectar, movement, alertness and instincts are boosted. Along with it comes a sense of invincibility that sober players can exploit to beat their doping enemies.

When asked about what Free Radical thinks of the Wii, Littlewood expresses his admiration for the system and says that the Wiimote has great FPS potential. "Let's just say there is a Wii in the office," he concludes with a laugh.

 

David Jaffe is a pretty cool guy. Not because he's crazy enough to create something like God of War or Twisted Metal, but because his blog entries put a smile on our faces. His latest  entry is all about the E3 experience, something far different than it was years ago.

Like some guys in the industry (even Hideo Kojima), Jaffe obviously isn't fond of how E3 is like today. "E3 was so lame this year," he posted on his blog. To be fair, he found it cool that getting hands on games is less messy this time, but he expressed his anger at the event quite clearly.

Another that he finds noteworthy during E3 was actually meeting with Nintendo's big man, Shigeru Miyamoto. His thoughts on it:

Maybe I should have gone: 'You have made some of the best games- hell, the best pieces of entertainment EVER but since MARIO 64, I have not loved anything you have done? I have respected all you have brought to the industry and world, especially in the last POST-Mario 64 years but for me personally, none of it floated my boat? But still dude, thanks so so so much for pretty much creating the modern incarnating of this industry?"

And then he would have just looked at me and said: 'You are fat. Use Wii Fit for 2 months and call me back. Bye fatso'

As you would've guessed, it didn't go exactly as planned. Jaffe was still happy that he got a picture with him, which you can see above. What they talked about, we wouldn't know. When the man behind the most brutal titles meets the man known worldwide to make family games, we can't even imagine what would happen.

Included in the 200 candidates for Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People of the Year" is one of gaming's very own icons, Shigeru Miyamoto. His page in their poll for the list describes him as such:

AGE: 54
OCCUPATION: Game Designer for Nintendo game systems
NUMBER OF TIME COVERS: 0
PREVIOUS APPEARANCES ON THE TIME 100: 0

PRO: Most successful game designer, creator of Super Mario, Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda, whose new platform, the Wii, is currently the top-selling game console.

CON: His perfectionist tendencies often result in games being significantly delayed and, despite the Wii's gameplay innovation, its graphics are far behind the competition.

Console preferences aside, if you're a gamer, you'll definitely agree that it's time that this guy gets recognized by Time. Sure we could all name a whole other game designers that have made games that rival his, and we all have our personal favorites but we can all agree that this guy has something iconic about him.

Given his influence, and the inspiration he's given to the gaming industry and to gamers in general, we here at QJ really wish that that "Number of Time Covers", and that "Previous Appearances on the Time 100" figure be more than zero. We feel that he deserves the inclusion.