@Damo Nope. Pretty certain everyone left-handed (including myself :3) is entirely more comfortable and familiar with the d-pad being on the left, given that's been the set-up of 99% of all controllers ever manufactured for any console :3

I suspect it's possibly even a slight advantage handling the bit of the pad with the most possible/precise inputs with my most dextrous hand :3

When he removed the sword, he found a piece of heart.

@skywake they also the entire original Pokémon series on Netflix. I'm wondering if that's a coincidence too

As a grown adult I will not be watching Pokémon on Netflix with Facebook sharing switched on

So 99 cents to play as Luigi?

Should have phrased it "We are issuing an update that significantly improves Super Smash Bros Brawl's online services by turning them off."

BanNam Style

_{been waiting to use that since the name change article :3}

Oh god, I've quantum leapt to 1932 again. I have to stop doing that.

@uel The HeartGold / SoulSilver soundtracks likely come with the 8-bit tracks as the games themselves came with the 8-bit songs - an obtainable key item hidden in the game would let you change the games' music to the original tracks, including a couple of new 8-bit versions of areas that weren't in the original GSC - whereas FireRed / LeafGreen didn't have this functionality.

And nothing of value was lost this day.

Looks Picross/Minesweeper-ish. Which means it should be great :3

There's an old Gamestation in my town that's been empty since Game started shutting stores down a few years ago. That could be turned into one of these

_{Although there's a CEX on its doorstep, which I already use anyway.}

Bank is great. Transporter is horrible. Useful? Very. We'll designed? Not even slightly. Pokemon Company need to hire some usability testers.

Awesome. I'm guessing his final smash will now be Mega Lucario.

Forever in my heart as Nam Bam Thankyou Ma'am

@Prof_Clayton

Also, I'm just curious, does the shiny charm temporarily give you multiple shiny IDs, or does it limit the Shiny IDs of wild pokemon and eggs to a smaller number to increase the rate?

I believe that when it generate the PID of your Pokémon, having the shiny charm will make the game generate a new PID a few extra times if it isn't shiny. For eg:
Generate PID -> Not shiny (will stop here if no shiny modifiers)
Regenerate PID -> Not shiny (has Shiny Charm, so attempts again)
Regenerate PID -> Shiny (bing! Shiny! Stop regenerating ID)

Basically, the shiny chance modifiers increase the number of times the game will regenerate the PID. (n.b. I don't know how many times each modifier will attempt to regen)

Nandai-Bamco it is, then

[Obligatory Pokémon Serious Business macro]

Nice article, Serebii. Gonna be getting back into this when Bank comes out :3

I'm joining the pack!

#PotStirring #FlameBait

_{(Directed at the 'source', not the article)}

Somebody needs to start photoshopping this pose onto every single publicity photo Nintendo puts out from here onwards. Make it happen

WHAT A
HORRIBLE
NIGHT TO
HAVE A
CURSE.

i met this cute guy called @Philip_J_Reed on this nintndo site and we talked like 4eva about games. we liked lots of the same game but he like megamen but i don't butt hats ok bc i thouht wen we moved in 2getha he cud play it wen i was making him cookies ^o^ but he doesnt respond 2 my calls any more i thought wat we has wuz speshul

Unfortunate news.

I have to say though, it always makes me wince when a games or software company announces that they're building their next product "from the ground up." It sounds great in concept: old bugs annihilated! Absolute control over the codebase! No external dependancies! Shiny new shiny newness! And certainly, if you're a hobbyist, building something from scratch is great. And huge fun.

Not so when you're a company though, and you have bills to pay. Building something "from ground up" is, frankly, a bit of a death sentence. All that time and money spent rebuilding a shiny new graphics handler is time and money not spent making a game. And when making games is your bread and butter, you need to spend almost all your resources making games.

The only time you should build something from ground up is when it gives you a competitive edge. If it's critical to ensure that your product stands out against a competing product, then go for it. Anything else at all, you need to either build on your previous work or use a third-party engine.

Even Nintendo does this, and Nintendo is in the position where it really could build everything from ground-up if it really felt like it. But instead, Super Mario 3D World runs off an improved New Super Mario Bros Wii graphical engine, and Zelda ALBW runs off a further improved version of that. Smash Bros Brawl - one of Nintendo's most ambitious projects to date - doesn't even do its own physics. It uses the Havoc engine, because building a physics engine is expensive, time-consuming, and the benefits would be slim. And then Kid Icarus Uprising runs off a modified Brawl engine, because again it's unnecessary to do it all from scratch.

I imagine this was the cause of death for Two Tribes - the cost of a ground-up build far outweighed the benefits. Hopefully the new company won't make the same mistakes and instead dedicate their attention to making some awesome games :3

Super Duper Metroid

I hope the courts say that Nintendo have to pay iLife royalties for every brand new Wii console manufactured from this point onward.

_{(The Wii is no longer in production)}

And the award for Most Surprising Review High Score Of The Year goes to...

Kinda makes me laugh that the 3DS had a massive games drought and suffered massively, to which Nintendo promised would not happen with the Wii U.
Cue Wii U having a possibly bigger games drought.

Partyyyyyyyyy~

Here's to more miscellaneous awesome in 2014.

Comic Sans! Kill it! Kill it with fire!

[Good luck folks :3]

Second to last picture. Where is Peach's right hand?

I can imagine them creating a "Nintendo Channel" app like the Wii had - game trailers, media, Nintendo Direct footage etc. That could be a cool way to get news out.

Whatever they make, I hope they make a Windows Phone version as well as the typical Android / Apple versions. Windows Phone (and particularly its Store) is awful, and that's from someone who legitimately likes Windows 8, but some of us have one and desperately require something to make the purchase seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Would be nice to open the store page and see something in the Top Rated lists that isn't an awful bootleg Mario endless runner (because there's pretty much nobody other than bored 14-year-olds who have any interest in developing for it - and seriously like 80% of the "top rated" things in the store really are dodgy unlicensed bootlegs)

Didn't indies zero do Final Fantasy Theatrhythm too? Love that game, so will be sure to pick this up whenever I finally get around to buying a Wii U.

DK / Cranky Brofist going memetic in 3... 2... 1...

Azrest are developing it, so I really have no interest in this lol. I'd love to be proven wrong, but given the company's track record (and the previews for this very game), I doubt I will be.

Azrest were previously Artoon, a company that made Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (one of the most horrendous licensed Nintendo games that wasn't on the Philips CDi), Yoshi's Island DS (a passable but entirely forgettable Yoshi's Island 1.5 with almost no new ideas, and what new mechanics they did include didn't exactly work brilliantly a lot of the time) and the terrible Blinx games for the original X-Box. Yeaaah.

Hmm. Announced in 2012. No screenshots or gameplay footage at the back end of 2013, pushed back to 2014. Smells like vaporware. Which is a shame (if that's the case), it looks pretty interesting.

Never played either game, but I heard plenty of good about them.

What I'd really love to see them do is a new console Pokémon RPG - it's a shame Colosseum and XD were so polarising, I personally found them to be extremely interesting alternate takes on how a Pokémon game could be structured. Not that I think the 'main series' (handheld) formula should follow suit, but having a more story-driven game with little to no multiplayer incentive.* Handheld Pokémon is increasingly prodding players towards the metagame, which is in no way a bad thing. But a solid Pokémon storyline without thinking about competitive strategy, and which more-or-less assumes you're already familiar with the basics, is really fun too.

Colosseum handled it fairly well, albeit with a few clunky mechanics - Shadow Pokémon was a fantastic idea that brought fundamental changes to long-established core mechanics, like catching Pokémon, but training them quickly became a chore. So they went away and refined the concept - fleshing the plot, polishing and improving the Shadow Pokémon mechanic, and tweaking a few other niggles - and came back with XD. It's lack of a proper Battle Mode and some area reuse I think turned people off it, which is a real shame. For my money, it has by far the most interesting and engaging single-player experience of any 'standard mechanics' Pokémon game, period (The magnificent writing in the PMD Explorers Of games have it beat, but those are a different kind of game). I like to hope that it's gained at least a cult following, and that that's enough to tempt Genius Sonority to dip their toe into the water again - even after the poorly received (deservedly, frankly) Battle Revolution - and come up with a new console-targeted single player Pokémon adventure.

• nb: referring to such a game's "story mode", such a title would still be well served having an additional "battle mode" dedicated to multiplayer but entirely removed from the story mode, a la Colosseum. XD cut out much of the battle mode, losing it favour, whilst Battle Revolution cut out almost the entire story, losing it even more favour.

Headline should've just been "SEGA MAKING CONSOLES AGAIN", so we can all hear James spit out his coffee.

Yes, all the way from Germany.

Loved me some Super Hang-On back on the Mega Drive. Picking up this for sure

If I'm not mistaken, that's the Fraps screen recording device FPS counter, so I'd assume that these screenshots were sent in by the developer, who took them whilst recording from the development PC.

I have less that zero interest in hunting games, but I do have to ask: why is the fairy ocarina here and what does it do (and why don't I remember Link having a double-barreled shotgun in Ocarina of Time)?

1 in 5 owners? Dang, that's an impressive ratio.

Very nice gesture. Hopefully it makes a whole lot of money

@2Sang - Yoshi 3DS is being handled by the undead leftovers of Artoon (the company that will not die despite Artoon itself having long since gone away, which Nintendo keeps letting make shoddy Yoshi games for some reason), so I wouldn't hold out much hope for that one, lol. The previews already have it down as pretty ropey.

Dang, how do these Kirby games always completely miss my radar? I love Kirby games, but I didn't even know about the second Wii one until I saw it on the shelves haha.

@Swiket Knight to E5

Nintendo's next album release should just be a 10-hour unskippable loop of Floccessy Ranch.

165 hours into Pokémon X and still going strong. I have no need of your newest trinkets, Nintendo :gentlemen:

Remove the 100 EVs cap on Vitamins. I see no downside to doing this. They've gone half the journey to making EV training not psychotically dull, now they can just go the rest of the way. That, or implement more / better EV training mini games.

Breeding is more-or-less fine as-is, now that nature is a 100% inherit with Everstone. Perhaps an item to make eggs hatch faster that stacks with Flame Body / Magma Armour, like XY's Hatching Power Level 3 (but without the time limit)

In terms of sheer volume of Pokémon, which is always tagged up by people as "too dang many", I'm actually in the other camp: more is better. Naturally, there's a few duff designs, but consider what got most of us hooked on Pokémon in the first place - the sheer variety on show. You and 5 friends could all be playing Red or Blue and all be using almost entirely different Pokémon teams. That was cool, it kept everyone on their toes. Now there's over 700 of the things. Imagine what that's like for someone brand new to the franchise - practically an entire ecosystem of critters, from which they're free to cherry-pick their favorites, safe in the knowledge that their friends probably aren't using any of the same things. That's pretty awesome. I don't buy that it makes the game any harder - the same logic applies as it did in Red and Blue. Water types look like they're made of or live in Water. Fire types are fiery. And so on - nobody needs to be an expert in all 713 creatures when the designs usually give a solid indication of what they are. There's a few oddballs that are hard to identify, sure, but that's not new, and it's part of the learning process. How many people were convinced Kangaskhan was Ground-type? Or wondered what on God's sweet earth Mr Mime was supposed to be (asides fantastically creepy)? I still always have to look up Drapion's type since I expect bug/poison and wonder why my psychic moves keep bouncing off it. But that's all part of the learning process, no different to how things were in Red and Blue.

@BlatantlyHeroic It's the Bulbagarden community, so many users, who'll all have either version :3

Nintendo shareholders everywhere just spat out their coffee.