If a game keeps you on your toes for 100 hours, much better than for 2, who cares if it takes one year to finish it as long as you are enjoying every minute of play. But if you want a closer example, go and see what happened with Metroid other M compared to Prime and you will have an answer about how good is to create simpler and shorter versions of games. Or comparing Twilight Princess (6.5M copies) with the Skyward Sword (3.2M). Yep Nintendo, the most you simplify your games, the most you simplify your sales

Ornamental or a fix for the failed one? Might be it works for small thumbs but mine slides out most of the time.

@ApparatusMini, cannot agree more on that. For my the DS was/is a great device only because of the 3th party support, something that is not really present for the 3DS.

If it turns to be Metroid hope Sakamoto is put well well away from the project.

I guess Nintendo would not allow this to be multiplatform, and I guess Lego and TT will not want to risk a Nintendo exclusive.

In fact my biggest issue is not the controls, but the controls + the 3D effect ON + holding the 3DS with my hand, that 3D sweet spot was gone most of the time. Aside of this, personally I cannot find anything about this game outstanding or amazing, not even the dialogs which are localized in English only.

Why? it is better to concentrate on WiiU Parties, Mario Bros XVIII and similars, after all these are the only things that sell well for Nintendo, right? I would add that "Nintendo gamers have BEEN FORCED to become accustomed to an entirely different games catalogue from those on the rival systems".

With dual stick they can always fire to the closest enemy to the aiming center, or is that with KI we are supposed to be snippers? For me trying to play with the stylus while holding the console with a single hand and with the 3D effects enabled is simply impossible, and if I'm supposed to play over a desk with the stand then the game is not designed for a handheld system. The picture with the stand says it all.

And that's shocking, why is that colours are so important for some ones in Zelda? Microsoft is changing the colour scheme of its flight simulator in each release to please people? Do you have each Bioshock released with a fully different pallete and art style? Zelda is not Mario, it has never been. The most significative Zeldas were OOT and Majora's mask, both of them following the same art style, same "dark" colour scheme and TP was following that line, the very same presented by Nintendo with the WiiU Zelda demo, even A Link to the Past 2D dungeons were "dark", why they try to transform Zelda in what Zelda has never been? If now they are trying to please Mario fans, they will fail for traditional Zelda fans. Zelda has been always a bit creepy, as immersive as current tech was allowing, it has been about exploration more than about minipuzzles.

Weird news. As far as I remember Wii version is the same as PC version but with graphics and music reworked. They already had the PC version working in English so what is stopping them for releasing it outside of Japan?

So if UK doesnt like Nintendo it is a problem of UK or a problem of Nintendo? And while UK might be the most revelant case, you may extrapolate this to most countries in Europe.

And why Nintendo keeps changing the art style of Zeldas all the time is something hard to understand. Lets have a look at Bethesda, Elder Scrolls have been there since the times of MS-DOS, always with the same art style and nobody says hey they must do it more cartoon-like, or they should use a happier colour palette or they should do nice looking evill enemies. You may like them or not, but when you buy an Elder Scrolls game you already know how it is going to look like. Bethesday is not trying to content everybody's taste, that is a waste of time that would have backfired to them long time ago.

I've always been a Zelda fan and I cannot recognize Zelda in SS. Link is there, Zelda is there and that's all, the rest is just a set of mini puzzles one after another with great focus on the WM+ and pretty weird graphics. Probably this is the Zelda that non-zelda gamers would like, but these would have little interest into buying any Zelda anyway. Similar case did happen with Metroid other M, after the three last outstating Metroids Nintendo came with that thing "full of innovations", and as expected, a sales dissaster. And I'm pretty sure in few months we will see another article wondering why the hyper hyped Ikarus was selling way lower than expected. Said that, comparing Skyrim or Fallout with any Zelda is like comparing any Zelda with 1$ smartphone games, they are playing in different leagues.

Nintendo's end of 2011 fiscal year is written in blinking red with a net loss of 474 million €. If you look at the first page of that report it is also significative that in US Vita has catched 3DS sales, in Europe PS3 is already ahead and 360 matching 3DS while 3DS stalls and 360 has a rising tendency. The very only market where Nintendo keeps strong is Japan.

Or the shareholders think that's the only thing Nintendo can sell or Nintendo ran out of ideas or the result of pure laziness or any combination of the previous.

The total lack of respect that you people demostrate for these that are trying to bring any fun for you while risking their time, effort and money is disturbing. And if many of you dont know Beamdog is because Nintendo and its Wiiware service are failing miserably to publicit their work, as it happens with many others.

If this is an RPG then most Castlevanias are (and they are not). And might be this weird categorization will damage its sales, people looking for an RPG will say it falls short, people looking for an action adventure and not RPGs may pass while they should not.

KI is lucky I'm not a reviewer, got patience just to finish up to chapter 4 and so far my score for that game would be lower than for monkey ball.

They need something else and in enough numbers to attract these that simply dont like marios. One Zelda or one Metroid every 5 years will not be enough. As far as I remember the WiiU launch star will be a Pikmin and not a Mario, but for thousands of potential new Nintendo users I bet Pikmins and Marios are all in the same bag.

Just another rumour, but if true then WiiU would be more or less in the same league of PS3/XBoX.
The most important part for me is:
"Nintendo wants investors to view Wii U as a less risky proposition"
And probably because of that Nintendo might pretty well be following the very same path the Wii had. All these millions of "casuals" aproaching to the Wii might be catched again by the Wii U if cheap enough and considering that Wii games batch is actually dry. But it also means that Nintendo will be again far away from competing with next gen of MS and Sony.

I think Wii third party poor catalog is not only related to the poor performace of the Wii, but to the marketing target of the Wii, which were the "non-players". Many third parties were creating tons of shovelware for that public and then supporting with these sales the development of their main IPs for the other platforms. If third parties conclude that a Wii Party game types will sell much better than anything else for that platform, then they will invest their time and money on that type of games independently of the power of the console.

And do you think game devs will risk their games to be dependant on new gameplay ways provided by a controller exclusive for a single console with a null install base? That would work only for Nintendo exclusives. If you are a game dev company and you have one WiiU for every 1000 PS3 and 1000 XBoX, would you invest your time for a game that depends on this new controller? Someone will say that top on gaming innovation is Kinect, and only few companies are risking to develop pretty cheap casual and exclusive games for it (and the install base of Kinect is already huge).

They are already away from the others in terms of software, if you want to play Marios, then you need Nintendo, but if they stay away from the others in terms of hardware then the chances of being skipped by the third parties would be high. Just imagine they release the current Wii with the new WiiU controller and just enough extra power to handle it. They may say, hey gents get this and feel the new gaming experience, and yep, thousands of Nintendo fans will go and buy that thing saying that this is wonderful and how much they love it, and again, the rest of the world will simply ignore it. Nintendo seems to believe that hardware innovation relies only on how many new gadgets can you attach to the console until you transform it into a toy, obviously pretty different than the rest.

"We do not focus on technology specs." -> it is like saying, hey third parties, we dont care about your needs, go and adapt your designs the best you can to our limitations. The comment is a total nonsense, as these creating games are the devs, a console is just a tool to play these games, if the tool is not on the required level, then the devs will simply choice another tool. Nintendo should stop looking at them as the center of the gamin universe, because today they are already far away from that spot. They should ask third parties what do they need, what do they want and then try to bring to the table the best suited solution for them. Third parties represent 90% of the gaming software out there, if Nintendo just design their consoles thinking on their own needs it will not be any surprise to end with the very same situation the Wii had (and same as for 3DS) with everybody ignoring Nintendo except Nintendo itself.

BTW, in PS there is leaked target specs for the Orbis. If they plan to use ATI 7670 GPU then the PS4 will fall well behind todays top gaming PCs again, so it might really happen that distance between WiiU and PS4 will not be that huge at all.

A console (bunch of hardware working together) is not designed to have good games or bad games, that is up to the game designers. But the power of a system will determine which games can work on it and which ones simply cannot. By 1990 someone might have concluded that games cannot be any better than these running on SNES (mostly if all your gaming experience was limited to the NES), and 20 years later we have super mario galaxy, but to run it you need a system that is many many many times more powerful than the SNES. The same happens today and will happen in the future, power opens many doors for the devs, it is up to the devs to use it or not, on the other hand lack of power is the most limiting factor for devs. Is that you think that Nintendo cannot take any advantage of a future console equivalent to 100 Wiis?

It is pretty incredible that even specialized sites like this one assume that more power can be used only for graphics. It is also pretty amazing that some ones here believe that power only means higher resolutions. Or these thinking/believing that the PS3 can render graphics of real-life quality, so that there is nothing to improve.

Check these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X03SVGktjLs&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KK6Fo3Y0AU

You may need a battery of PS3s working together to have something similar, and none of the two examples is running on max video settings.

By any standards would 768MB be considered today a decent ammount of RAM??? My PC's vcard already has 1GB just for textures and that is not even a decent quantity for some games.

What these anonymous devs post doesnt matter at all. Just before or just after WiiU realease how it compares with 360/PS3 will be public and everybody will be able to take this into consideration (or not) as a factor to buy it or not.

I'm pretty sure you all cannot be wrong. Got it and after chapter 2 I can say this is one of the very worst Nintendo games ever, I really hope it gets better and better as you advance in the story. What cannot be any better in further chapters are the controls, they cannot be any better nor any worse, they are terrible, neither the feeling that you are on a permanent on-rails adventure even in ground stages.

Not impressed at all with that first year. And having devs trying things for the 3DS that the console cannot really support well is even more frustrating, RE and Metal Gear are good examples of poor controls and/or performances, and this also applies to Nintendo with Kid Ikarus and the most terrible way I've seen to implement camera/sight control, all these only help to make more evident the critical design flaws of the device. On the other hand you also have "modest" games that suite perfectly with what the console is able to do, as for example Mario K 7.

And how big of a problem it would be if it is 1/5 the power of a PS4? Would the devs keep creating games calibrated for the power of the WiiU or would they jump to the next generation power level? What if Nintendo, Sony or MS launches a 800$ console able to run games of the graphic quality and density of Lord of the Rings film in real-time? I remember the critical jump from SVGA games and these with real 3D acceleration with the first 3DFX cards, they were pretty expensive, even more if you run with SLI configuration, but this was massively accepted by the PC gaming comunity.

@JimLad , graphics can be way ahead of what you have now for consoles. You can say, the dwarf of this RPG is excellent, as well as this tree and that mountain. Fine, now what if a game must render 100 dwarves instead of one, 1000 trees, several mountains and all of a visual horizon of several kilometers. The heavy work to design the dwarf is the same for one than for 100, the difference is that might be your console can only render 3 of these at the same time instead of 100.

But what means more powerfull here? PS3 (as far as I remember) is already more powerfull than the 360, but if you create a game calibrated for PS3's power then you will not be able to port it decently into 360. Power becomes a critical factor when the difference is in orders of magnitude, as Wii compared with PS3/360.

So if you want to check the map, stats, bio, etc you need to look at your controller, and while you look at it you are not looking at the TV. Where is the big advantage between that and displaying map, etc in the TV with a toggle button?

Survival might be, but "Horror" with the small screen of the 3DS and poor audio?? I guess these titles should be limited to the big screens and they can always mix the old style with a more action ortiented one.

Are then the ground stages also on-rails or almost?

Is he talking about japanese style games (manga flavour, jrpg, ...) or about japanese game industry in general? If the former, then at least I would say that these need to be renewed and refreshed urgently.

I dont thing game is overpricing games at all, I find similar prices in all the stores, only difference is if you buy via web. I guess most of the price is mostly imposed by the publisher with a pretty ridiculous margin for the store: New Super Mario Bros 46€ yet, I would put the blame on Nintendo not in GAME.

At least here you may have copies of what you already have, it doesnt matter if the copy has been made by another one, you simply need to have the original. Basically, as long as you have something (music, video, games, books) you may have back ups of them in any available media. This thread is becoming absurdly dramatic for what the original article describes, it is like avoiding to talk about mp3 players because many people will fill them up with pirated music.

3DS depends also on the support from selling points. PS Vita will be released on Europe in 2 days, and what's the new offer from GAME? Bring your old 3DS and 2 games and get a Vita Wifi for 99€, they call it "Renewal plan": http://www.game.es/Custom/PlanRenovePSVita/

Now it happens that these that we call here "third parties" are companies that develop AAA games for other systems, with a quality equal or sometimes higher than anything made by Nintendo. Best DS games are not Nintendo at all. The problem is that during years Nintendo has been targeting a quite specific type of user, and they did it pretty well. So now the point is that third parties are not interested on Nintendo typical users because developing something for them ensures this will never sell well for any other gaming system. The problem is the user base, and it is too late for Nintendo to change that.

I guess that the driver part of a game handling this IR device will be different that a built in one in the console handling a built in second analog. It might happen that next 3DS with a second analog still needs this addon if you want to play RE, MG or KI with a second stick.

I cannot believe they are using their limited resources to create more 2D games, hopefully a 5€ 3dshop download.

The message is clear, porting the game to WiiU costs X, WiiU expected sales are Y and Y is not expected to justify X. This is not a decision taken by devs but by company managers.

This demo idea is good as long as you are pretty sure that the game is good enough. I bet RE sales will suffer badly because of the demo.

If the game is bugged, and they are pretty aware of this, and if they refuse to fix it, their only "honorable" movement would be to reduce its price drastically.

Might be they are admiting that with the 3DS there is no way to patch games (again).

Is that now they dont know what to do you have their "3D" games playable at all?