Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

Yeah it was kinda cringy, and definitely inappropiate. I'm surprised they lasted so long doing it.

That was the exact kind of “brilliance” I was thinking. Primates flinging feces at each other. I’ll search in the forums for a “Yo, wanna Smash” thread. We could always use the NSO thread as well.

Didn't get to watch a lot of Treehouse stuff besides some Cadence of Hyrule today. Very busy setting up my new work PC/toy after the noon hour onward.

@ThanosReXXX Sounds like when I've tried sending in news tips here lol. They either get ignored, or I'm beaten to the punch. Then when I see something and think 'I could send this in, but they'll probably ignore it...." the article pops up before long. XD

@NEStalgia Barring the creepy Great Fairy laugh, I don't usually mind Audrey either. IIRC, she used to work for IGN. I'd leave there for a dream job at Nintendo too. 😁

Wait...they switched some of the content in the full Treehouse videos around? O.o Odd, if I'm reading that right.

In other news, it makes me a little sad how mobile games are the most common video game I hear my students talk about these days... Knives Out is almost obnoxiously popular. Even among the girls.

But I know that is because they can just play it on their phone, which almost all of them have. They don't need a Switch or PS4. It really does make me think that the era of dedicated video game hardware is on its way out. I don't think it'll happen soon, but it seems like the industry, and children, are trending in that direction.

"Old people" (I'm only 27 darn it!) like us who grew up with dedicated game systems remain loyal to the concept I think. But many kids are growing up with most or all or their gaming on smartphones or tablets.

Tbh I often find more chances to play on my iPad than the switch or Xbox.

Mostly stardew valley and fire emblem.

@Heavyarms55
Don't worry. 😀
#TeamConsoleGamers
#TeamHandheldsGamers
I don't even have any interest with mobile games.
Btw, you better brainwash them to get into dedicated video games. 😏

I don't feel that 27 is all that old. But when you consider how fast technology commonly moves....

Gives in and waves 8-bit Mario cane

Force them to like 18+ games while you're at it as well

@Anti-Matter @Octane Oh I do put an effort in. I have several Pokemon and Mario theme activities and Mario and Satoshi(Ash) are common go-to example characters when explaining new grammar points.

@Tyranexx In before Nintendo licenses and sells ones.

Mario doesn't need a cane yet, he's on his late 30s.

@Heavyarms55 Well, it's Japan. Wasn't the obsession with mobile a given there? Of course they're still in the honeymoon period having moved from flip phones recently. That'll roll back a bit. And Switch is certainly the right tool for the job over time. Wait for November....

In the US, you don't really see the obsession with phone games. Yeah, lots of people play time wasters like Candy Crush and the like, not so much "console game wannabes" like Knives Out.

For Japan it comes down to convenience and not carrying a lot of stuff. But everywhere else kids and phones go together not because it's what kids really want so much as because that's what parents that aren't gamers want to buy their kids. It can be a hand-me down, every kid these days seems to have a phone (I find that absolutely abhorrent. Why does every child need a telephone. Remember when they had parents instead? But wait, we have to feed the cheap labor machine so parents can be replaced with phones...it's fine..) Basically it's "cheap'....it's not "cheap' but it's a multi-use device that they were going to buy anyway. Amazon in the US changed things with the Kindle Fire. For $99 or less on sales/refurbs you can get a "gaming system" for the kids, and every game is $4.99 or less. It's a cheap digital babysitter the shut the kid up and keep it out of the way, and all the other kids have one anyway. Comapre to a Switch: $300 out of the gate, another $60 for a normal controller, and $60 each major game. Not exactly hard to work out the math difference as to why parents that don't care about games aren't going to even consider that route. If tablets and $1 games existed when we were kids we'd probably never have had NESs and SNESs no matter how much we wanted one....

But then that gets into the bigger dispute beyond just the hardware purchase. Media no longer has value at all. Music is $10/mo for all of it. Moves are $10/mo for huge libraries of it. Games going the same way. Nobody wants a $60 game when ad sponsored games exist free. Everything is free! Therefore nobody can put a budget into anything and all you get is mass produced "engagement time" and "active player base" oriented "product." Even the big Ubisoft games and such are going that way, and once Streaming scales up that will accelerate.

By the end of it, I think the debate of "mobile versus console" is wrongly framed. It's barrier to entry and cost of remaining engaged that is the barrier. In that sense I feel like, console gaming will continue, though it will blend with PC, but it's going to become basically an upscale hobby for older adults, like being an audiophile, rather than something for kids. We see Sony and MS pushing that general direction for a decade or so now. Nintendo's the hold out because they still have kid oriented monopolies.

Stadia, OTOH I feel will be this decade's Virtual Boy. A product so poorly rolled out, so poorly timed, so poorly performing it will set the entire streaming industry back 15 years. Which I'm giddy about...but still... Today is definitely not the time or place for that product. And the usual Google "fire from 6 directions at once then just step back and let it crumble" product rollout isn't going to help. XCloud will be better, but I think they're content tacking that on as an extra service to things like Game Pass for now - a feature for their existing market rather than trying to invent a new market.

@Morpheel - I can’t remember the source, but I think there was something from Nintendo that put Mario in his early to mid 20s in the late 80s. So, he looked really old when he was young, but that came around full circle, and now he looks really young in his 50s. I hope I’m still spry enough to break bricks and do triple flips in a decade or so. He’s probably still in his mid 20s though as I don’t think time exists in the Mushroom Kingdom.

I was talking more about the age of the character/series in real time

@NEStalgia It's not that I'm into her or anything, it's just that I think that she looks fine, objectively speaking, and that I really can't see there being anything wrong with her, and as such, finding your diagnosis of her completely blown out of proportion. I don't think she's even remotely scary either. If you think she's scary, then you'd probably never want to meet me in real life...
I'm anti-authoritarian, confident, extrovert, in your face, scared of no one, dominant and very direct.

But over the years, I've managed to gain control over all of that, and through it all, I've still always been extremely social and a people person. Getting the job training that I've had, certainly also helped. The sales business is slicker than a snake in a bucket of olive oil, but certain aspects of it can certainly be beneficial to key parts of the human psyche and behavior.

Concerning Audrey: I really think that it's just your personal sentiment, and much like with all of us liking or being attracted to other kinds of people, so will most of us also have other ideas about what is okay and what is not okay, or what is too much and what is not too much, and so on.

For me personally, she's okay, and there's nothing wrong with her, while you seem to think she's either slightly cray-cray or completely insane. However, as objective evidence has already shown, namely the simple fact of her still being employed/hired by Nintendo, this is absolutely not the case.

So, what that ultimately leaves us with, is that it's really just your own, personal view and/or sentiments, nothing more, nothing less. In essence, there's nothing wrong with that, much like with having an own opinion on things, but when we start pointing fingers and are calling people crazy, or even worse: psychopathic, that is simply where I draw the line. A VERY firm line...

On top of that, I just don't like men mistreating, accusing or slandering women either, so that's kind of a sore spot for me, so you'll have to excuse my sometimes possibly harsh responses. It's just that I really don't like that kind of behavior, so that's just not done, and it definitely flips my nice guy/angry Titan switch...

And then there's also this thought floating around in my head, that I kinda expected better from an intelligent guy such as yourself...

@Tyranexx Well, I didn't send it in, so it's not that they didn't reply to me. Besides, seeing as they were all watching the Treehouse as well, it would have been pretty hard for them to miss it, so that article was always going to be made. I think...

Concerning the bit of switching stuff around in the Treehouse videos: if you're talking about them removing this error message and the power outage from the recorded videos, then that's not the case. It was mistakenly assumed by several people, NLife crew included (it was even in the article, and then corrected with an update), but if that's not it, then I'm curious to find out what they DID change around, since I've seen all Treehouse sessions, so I'm wondering what the differences are.

I see. Well, there’s only one person who truly knew, and he took that knowledge to his grave: Captain Lou Albano.

@NEStalgia I don't know where you get this idea that Japan only moved to smartphones recently. Unless by recent you mean more than 6-7 years ago. Because they've been huge here ever since I first came here. Smartphones haven't been dominant in the states for that much longer.

@ThanosReXXX "I'm anti-authoritarian, confident, extrovert, in your face, scared of no one, dominant and very direct."

Yeah, truth be told, your self-description is that of the exact kind of person I ruthlessly despise, except for the anti-authoritarian bent which I value

RE: Audrey she's her own meme. She's built that imagine over years and her odd statements at E3 2017 just kind of added to her existing memability. This is the internet. It's how it works. Audrey = scary is kind of the thing. And for the record, I said sociopath, not psychopath. It's different.

@Tyranexx more to the point I think the first post of Day 1 got chopped. It skipped the whole Pokemon segment and started right with the Audrey tour of the LM3 haunted hotel. THey since re-posted it with the Direct, the Pokemon segment and all the rest all attached it seems.

@Heavyarms55 Yeah, I mean in the past decade. Here the smartphone revolution really started back in 2008, 2009 or so and we went through the whole "real gaming is dying" thing in that time period when everything was all phone all the time. That cycle ran it's course in about 5-7 years. Kids aside, Japan was definitely still buying a lot of flip phones at the time, so I don't know when it changed over, but I'd heard about it being more recently...maybe that 5-7 year timeframe, I can't recall, but it's the same pattern there where everyone went all crazed over the phone games..... I expect it will taper and return somewhat traditional there as it did here. Maybe less so since here it's all about TV consoles/home theater. But Switch sales do indicate there's a good chunk of people yearning for that upgrade experience there. Not sure how much that touches the kid market, but wait until November. Cheap-Switch + Pokemon will definitely get more Switches into kids hands there (and yes, I'm betting on November for Cheap-Switch for that very reason.)

For the US we went from weekly Patcher updates on how phones will take over the whole market to the modern world that we almost never here something that crazy and hear about crazy Playstation numbers. I see Japan shaping more like that with Switch in the coming years.

China on the other hand is a whole other thing since the whole of their society is run through the smartphones as a practicality and a control mechanism. I don't see the admittance of real consoles making even a realistic dent there, and all the investor pipe dreaming about hitting that market is insanity.

@ThanosReXXX I knew I'd find it if I kept looking.

The Passage was so awesome for the first 8 episodes that I kept thinking I should stop and rewatch from the beginning with my wife. Even 9 was pretty good. But OMG epsidoe 10. It was like they were planning a 5 year show and then they were told - sorry guys, canceled, wrap it up ASAP. The guy next door, gone. The military woman, gone. Wife, gone. Antidote gone, whole country gone. Reason why they needed 12, never even tried to explain. Hated it. Complete and utter garbage. The people who were compalinign about season 8 of GoT have no idea how good they had it compared to The Passage. So I started watching Preacher season 2. Only 3 eps in but still good.

@rjejr I just started watching The Rain. It’s cool. That’s all.