Next year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival is to feature a two-hectare Super Mario-themed display area created in collaboration with Japanese video game company Nintendo, the Chiayi County Government said yesterday.
The announcement was made at a news conference promoting the annual event, which is to take place in Chiayi from March 3 to 15 next year.
The themed area would enable visitors of all ages to interact with their favorite game characters and take photographs, creating lasting memories, Chiayi County Commissioner Weng Chang-liang (翁章梁) said.
Photo: Lin Yi-chang, Taipei Times
Nintendo participates in major events in Taiwan to engage local fans, and recently held its first “Super Mario: Run to the Goal” race in the country, said Hiroyuki Matsumoto, head of Nintendo Taiwan Co.
Super Mario has been around for 40 years since its 1985 launch, Matsumoto said, adding that he is delighted that next year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival would include a special zone inspired by the character and Nintendo’s latest games.
During yesterday’s event, the county government also unveiled a limited-edition handheld lantern modeled after the mystery block featured in the Super Mario series.
Visitors who stay at designated hotels or join related tour packages during the festival period would be eligible to receive the lantern, the Chiayi County Cultural and Tourism Bureau said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS