You can tell a Nintendo game not just from its feel – the satisfying swish of Link's sword in the Zelda games, the weight of Mario's jump – but by its look. They are bright, energetic, characterful. In Splatoon, the game-maker's most recent hit series, the shooter is reimagined as teams of transforming squids splattering arenas in glossy paint. Mario's red cap and blue overalls, originally designed to create a recognisable character with just a few pixels for 1981's arcade hit Donkey Kong, is now a stylistic signature – Nintendo's logo is the same shade of red. When you look into the company's department store outlets in Japan, a dozen colourful characters stare back at you from reams of merch: Animal Crossing cookware, Super Mario gloves, Zelda wallets and ties, Pikmin vases.

When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: "What, the one with all the sailing?" To many, that's all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a "swift sail", allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. The seafaring was the point. It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it's time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong.

Sunday will mark 35 years since the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived on America's shores, saving a crashed video game industry and making a generation of gamers out of people who first learned to "play Nintendo" on the NES. For this 35-year-old, it's striking how Nintendo's breakout home game system, which my parents bought for my older brothers and which I literally grew up with, remains not only the bedrock of the company's corporate identity--witness the 8-bit Mario on your browser tab if you visit the Big N's website--but its creative wellspring too. Witness how Super Mario Bros. 35, Nintendo's new contender in the über-popular battle royal genre, is a thin remix of 1985's Super Mario Bros., an NES launch title. Or see the NES Classic, the recent bestselling miniversion of the console with 30 games packed in. While very few people may have the original gray-on-gray NES hooked up to their TV anymore, the titles designed for it will remain relevant for Nintendo fans of all ages as long as the company stays in the game.

Nintendo Creative Fellow and game design luminary Shigeru Miyamoto is renowned for his work on foundational franchises like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. But there are a few things you may not know about the 64-year-old gaming celeb, like what he thinks of artificial intelligence or what he's been doing in his spare time. TIME spoke with Miyamoto mid-January, just after the Nintendo Switch hands-on for press in New York City. TIME: A question that goes back to the beginning, about Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi's idea of "lateral thinking with seasoned technology." Shigeru Miyamoto: As a company, we take in all different kinds of new technologies as they become available.

A funny thing happened during Nintendo's January presentation to show off the Switch, its upcoming games console. So intent were viewers on gleaning details about the company's mystery-shrouded new system--a portable game device that can dock with televisions--that they may have missed another kind of "switch" being presented. Amid the psychedelic lasers and quirky presentational humor, the storied company trotted out not one, not two, but six Nintendo executives and creative luminaries. None were familiar faces, though all bore impressive titles plucked from the company's inner sanctum. The company was effectively reversing years of precedent in which its front-facing communiques, dubbed "Nintendo Directs," had been shepherded by icons like late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aimé. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima led with the Switch's price ($299) and launch date (March 3), as if to clear the table for what followed. Next up was Nintendo Director Shinya Takahashi, who offered a historical montage of Nintendo platforms designed to cast Switch as the culmination of the company's decades of unorthodox bets.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display