Comments 223

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

@Project_Dolphin Okay yeah, I see what you're getting at now.

I do think there's still some hope for now. Sticker Star was the first bad Paper Mario, and Color Splash looks like it could end up being the first lazy one (lots of love put into the graphics at least, but the actual gameplay so far looks functionally identical to Sticker Star; no indication of the massive expansion of 64->TTYD or the complete reimagining of TTYD->SPM, just replacing the sticker gimmick with an equal-sized gimmick). If Color Splash bombs, the most likely scenario is Nintendo just says "well I guess no one likes Paper Mario anymore" but I think there's still a chance that they'll listen (and then say "oh, well if they want that kind of Paper Mario, let's not bother").

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

@Project_Dolphin A lot of people bought all the Paper Mario games. If all you're saying is "If it takes less effort to make a game like Sticker Star than to make a game like TTYD, then it makes financial sense to make a game like Sticker Star and get comparable sales with lower costs", then that's what I've been saying/lamenting all along. (Though, again, I think Nintendo really ought to be looking into whether a significant portion of Sticker Star's sales came from people expecting a game like the first three, who will now know better than to expect that.) (Also, considering how much time they spent on Sticker Star before deciding to remove all the characters and plot they had come up with, I don't know that it even did take less time or money than it would have taken to make a real Paper Mario)

But if you're saying that and also not saying "It would make no sense to make a Paper Mario game like the first three anymore" then I have no idea what you're saying or what we're even arguing about. You emphatically denied that your argument was "Sticker Star sold way better than any other Paper Mario game; it makes no sense to make a Paper Mario game like the first three anymore...", but then all you talked about after that was how well Sticker Star sold?

Again, I get that people bought Sticker Star, though far fewer than bought Super Paper Mario. I still don't get how you think the number of people who own a console is completely irrelevant to how many copies a game sells — especially when you deny that in the same sentence where you include that as a factor! "Gamers who could buy Sticker Star and who wanted to buy Sticker Star bought Sticker Star; that was the cause of Sticker Star sales, not the install base." — 'Gamers who could buy Sticker Star' is the install base! Sticker Star had three times as many potential customers as TTYD. That matters.

"The other fact is that from a financial perspective, software sales provide an incentive for Nintendo to make more video games based on the video game formulas that provide those software sales; whether they are actually good Nintendo video games or not. So, from a financial perspective, what some gamers feel about Sticker Star is irrelevant if millions of copies of Sticker Star are sold."

  • Every Paper Mario game sold well over a million copies. Super Paper Mario sold four million. You make it sound like the series had always just been struggling along with 100,000 or so copies sold and then suddenly Sticker Star was a runaway success and now Nintendo's like "Ah, finally we've found a profitable model for this!", when the reality is that it sold almost exactly as many copies as you'd expect a Paper Mario to sell — if we assume that TTYD was an outlier because the Gamecube's smaller audience had a higher concentration of loyal Nintendo fans*, history shows that about 4% of console owners will buy a Paper Mario game on that console.

*-This factor may also apply to the Wii U, but then you have to consider that Color Splash is clearly not the kind of Paper Mario game that those "loyal Nintendo fans" have been asking for, and many of us are not going to be fooled twice.

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

@Project_Dolphin I never said there's no rationale for Nintendo to make Sticker Star 2. I've recognized all along that it makes financial sense to crap out another soulless game like Sticker Star if it can get comparable sales figures to a more content-rich Paper Mario game that has more effort and time put into it. I think I'm allowed to be mad about the fact that capitalism has killed one of the greatest RPG series of all time.

But I really have to dispute your apparent notion that Sticker Star is the only financially viable way forward. You can keep dismissing it by saying "attach rate" but I just don't see how you can say that it doesn't matter that Sticker Star was selling to 60 million 3DS owners vs. TTYD selling to 20 million GCN owners and TTYD still sold almost as many copies. I don't know how else to word it. Sticker Star didn't sell the highest absolute number of copies — it's a distant second there — nor the highest number of copies relative to the number of potential customers — it's in last place on that metric. If every previous Paper Mario had barely broken a million and then all of a sudden Sticker Star was a runaway success with five or ten million sold, you'd have a point, but Sticker Star's sales were well within the range of what was already a reasonable amount of sales for a Paper Mario game. There's no reason to believe that the drastic cuts to the Paper Mario formula led to a massive increase in sales. Rather, it seems that it retained much of the audience of previous Paper Mario games while also bringing in a bit of new blood.

I'm not saying "Sticker Star sold horribly; it makes no sense to make another one," I'm saying that it sounds like you're saying "Sticker Star sold way better than any other Paper Mario game; it makes no sense to make a Paper Mario game like the first three anymore" and that just doesn't make sense.

Reputation matters to sales. I know that I for one bought Sticker Star because I thought it was going to be more like TTYD or at least SPM. I went in holding onto an expectation that it would continue in the tradition of the series before, and that's why I bought it. I thought it might be worse than SPM but I never once imagined it could be as complete a departure as it was; I was sure that whatever faults it may have continued or intensified from SPM or whatever new faults it may have introduced, it would still be a Paper Mario game. It wasn't. Sales figures can't reflect the fact that I've regretted downloading that game every time it's crossed my mind over the past four years. But what can be reflected in sales figures is that if Nintendo makes another game that is clearly just Sticker Star HD, I will not buy it. And again, if the sales numbers were dramatically different — if the first three Paper Mario games had sold about a million each and then Sticker Star sold ten million — then it would be safe to assume that Sticker Star tapped into a new audience and it would be best to just keep going down that route, and not worry about what old-school Paper Mario fans like me think. But since it only just barely outsold TTYD and didn't even come close to outselling SPM, that probably means that most of the people who bought Sticker Star had bought a Paper Mario game in the past — meaning that Nintendo really should be careful about disregarding the things people liked about the previous games.

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

@Project_Dolphin So TTYD would only count as a successful game if it had single-handedly turned around the Gamecube's sales figures?

Both the 3DS and Gamecube had more than one game; Paper Mario doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sticker Star released on a console that had triple the potential audience of TTYD, came out after New Super Mario Bros and the DS and the Wii had brought Nintendo back into the mainstream, was available digitally in case your store ran out of copies, it had the reputation of the previous Paper Mario games behind it, and with all those advantages going for it, it was only able to outsell TTYD by about the same rate at which the world population had grown in the intervening eight years (1.91 million - 2.24 million; 6.4 billion - 7 billion).

And again, if we're just going by absolute numbers of sales and not percentages (and ignoring any factors that could have affected things), Super Paper Mario is by far the best-selling Paper Mario.

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

@Project_Dolphin
"Attach rate can be useful information to have in certain cases, but gamers don't buy a video game because of its attach rate. Video games are what video game companies ultimately want to sell; consoles are just a means to play video games."

..um... I... what? No, people don't buy a game because of its attach rate... but the attach rate goes up because people buy it. The point is, Sticker Star only outsold TTYD because more people had 3DSes than had Gamecubes. If there's something about TTYD that made people want to buy it more, Nintendo should be looking to emulate that if they're looking purely at a business standpoint, because if they can get 8% of people to buy it instead of 3-4%, that's double the sales.

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

Thousand-Year Door was actually the most successful game in the franchise. Super Paper Mario by far sold the most copies, with Sticker Star in second, but they were both on consoles with much larger userbases.

Paper Mario 64 sold 1.37 million copies, with 32.93 million N64s out there; attach rate of 4.16%.
Thousand-Year Door sold 1.91 million copies, with 21.74 million Gamecubes sold; attach rate of 8.78%.
Super Paper Mario sold 4.23 million copies, with 101.63 million Wiis sold; attach rate back to 4.16%.
Sticker Star sold 2.24 million copies, with 57.94 million 3DSes sold; attach rate drops slightly to an all-time low of 3.87%.

There are currently 12,600,000 Wii Us. If Color Splash sells like Sticker Star, it would sell about 487,000 copies; if it sold like Thousand-Year Door, that would put it at a respectable 1.1 million copies, putting it just behind Tropical Freeze at 1.12 million.

Re: Soapbox: It's too Early to Judge Paper Mario: Color Splash

Abighoul

Nintendo heard the complaints about Sticker Star. If they'd addressed the issues we had, they would have demonstrated that in the trailer. They wouldn't be blatant about it, because that would be admitting defeat, but they'd be in there for the fans to find. They'd show Mario being followed by a green Bob-omb with a bowtie or a yellow-shelled Koopa with glasses and pigtails. They'd show a battle ending with Star Points. They'd show a couple of Toads with different hats and outfits and spot colors. They'd be brief enough that you'd have to watch the GameXplain to see them, but they'd be there. But no. From the footage they showed, the best case scenario we're getting is that Color Splash succeeds at what Sticker Star was trying to do, and that's not what we want.

If they were planning on fixing the things I hated about Sticker Star, they would have shown it. They haven't shown partners and original characters and experience points and a story because they don't have them, because they know they don't need them — it's been so long since we had a real Paper Mario game that everyone's forgotten about them, and now there's a big enough fanbase of kids who were born after Thousand-Year Door came out that it's more profitable to just make Sticker Star and sell it to this completely different audience who doesn't know what they're missing — who have no context to know what "Paper Mario" means other than "Oh, it's that guy from New Super Mario Bros Wii, but made of paper!" and don't know it's supposed to be an RPG with a story — than it is to take the time to make a fully fleshed-out Paper Mario 3 and sell it to Millennials who probably don't even have the disposable income to buy a Wii U anymore after making their student loan payments for the month.

Paper Mario has mutated into something I have no interest in, and trying to deny that and hold onto hope that it will someday come back will just make me more disappointed (Inversely, letting go of that hope will make it all the more satisfying if it miraculously does come back someday when I was least expecting it).

Re: Editorial: Nintendo's Virtual Console Revolution Must Wait as We Pay Once More for SNES Games

Abighoul

Didn't the 3DS Virtual Console start with only handheld games? That's probably why they never planned on doing cross-buy. They probably wanted to do GBA games on the 3DS but realized early on that it wasn't up to their standards, and then pulled it back out of the trash for the Ambassadors. This world now where DS and GBA games are on the Wii U and SNES games are on the 3DS has drifted pretty far from their original vision.

Re: Konami and Capcom Are Bringing Some SNES Classics to New 3DS

Abighoul

From what M2 said about how much trouble they had getting a Genesis/Mega Drive emulator working properly, needing the power of the New 3DS to get SNES emulation to an acceptable standard is totally plausible. The SNES is a more powerful console than the Genesis, and many must-have games on it needed extra chips on the cartridge. I'm sure the old 3DS could handle Super Mario World, as I remember DS homebrew being able to do it without too much trouble, but accurately emulating more complex games at full speed with restore points and suspend play and Miiverse integration and StreetPass and the whole 3DS OS running in the background, and getting all that working to Nintendo's standards - that could be pushing it, especially if they don't have a lot of resources to push into VC development right now. The GBA is roughly on par with the SNES, probably a little behind overall, and the Ambassador games were not up to Nintendo's usual quality standards - they don't even go into sleep mode when you close the lid, or pause emulation when you press the Home button.

Re: Paper Mario Colour Splash Coming to Wii U

Abighoul

I know I'm getting angrier about this than someone my age probably should, but I've never been more disappointed by a game in my life than when I expected something like TTYD and got Sticker Star. This is dredging up all those memories again and I need to get them out - and if I can be part of helping to show Nintendo that there is still a market for actual Paper Marios with real effort, that even a decade out there's still hope, all the better.

Again, I'm not irrevocably condemning the game - if it comes out and it turns out it actually does have some of the PM characteristics I want, I'm not going to pout and say "Well the trailer was bad, so I'm not getting it." I'm saying that at this point, with the material they've given us to try and sell us on it, they have not given me any reason to believe that they've fixed any of the reasons I hated Sticker Star. Nothing in the trailer does anything to indicate that they've suddenly reversed the trend of Paper Mario being a game where Paper Mario finds folded up Paper Toads and nothing interesting happens. The Iwata Asks said that Sticker Star was going to be the new standard for PM, and now they've put out a trailer for a game that looks exactly like Sticker Star 2. To assume that things have changed would be to not take Nintendo at their word, and to set myself up for disappointment again with false hope. I believe Nintendo when they say that this is all we're getting now. I want them to change, but it would be stupid for me to assume they have.

Re: Paper Mario Colour Splash Coming to Wii U

Abighoul

@TheRealThanos You should have continued reading the rest of my comment. I never claimed to be every customer. I am making my own opinion known. If Nintendo keeps making Paper Mario games like Sticker Star, I will not buy them. I recognize that making games like Sticker Star is more financially viable for Nintendo, and I am lamenting the loss of a series I used to love.

@bobbypaycheque I played through Sticker Star, and it had none of the characteristics of Paper Mario that I loved. No story, no characters, no attempt to make it feel like an actual living breathing world, no interesting settings, no dialogue from Bowser or Peach. The lackluster gameplay was secondary; Paper Mario to me was always about the world it was in, where I could feel like characters were actually going about their lives in the Mushroom World and I actually had reason to care about them. This trailer shows no indication that any of that has changed. There's still no partner characters, no lines from Peach or Bowser, no signs of an actual plot, and no characters at all other than the nameless faceless personalityless legion of Paper Toads — not even Toadsworth! Until I see otherwise, I'm going to stop getting my hopes up for a dead series. Nintendo clearly has a completely different vision of what the series should be than I do.

And why is it so far-fetched that I've formed an opinion of this game based on a trailer that Nintendo's shown? Isn't that the point of them showing a trailer, to get me to form an opinion on it? They're showing this footage to me (us) to try to convince me (us) to buy it. That's what marketing is. After the way the Paper Mario series has been treated in Sticker Star and Paper Jam, I have no reason to believe that this game will have any of the elements of the series that I liked, and this trailer showed nothing that would change my mind on that. I will continue to follow the game's development and read all the reviews when it comes out, but right now, I have no reason to believe I will like it.

Re: Paper Mario Colour Splash Coming to Wii U

Abighoul

This is not "entitlement." Nintendo is a business; I am one of their customers. They make things that they think I want; I buy them or don't buy them. If they want to make money, they make things that people will want to buy. I do not want to buy Sticker Star again. I'm making my opinion known so that Nintendo can get an idea of who will buy the games they make.

I'm not saying I deserve a Paper Mario game in the vein of the first three, but I would really like one and it makes me sad to see that what used to be my favorite game series is now gone. What's worse, it's not even dead; it's mutated into something else. F-Zero fans can at least hope F-Zero comes back someday, but if you want a Mario vs. Donkey Kong game like the first game or like Donkey Kong '94, that's never going to happen because Nintendo decided that's not what that series is anymore. The same thing has happened to Paper Mario.

Re: Paper Mario Colour Splash Coming to Wii U

Abighoul

I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt on this anymore. If things don't look more Paper Marioy and less Sticker Starry the next time they show it, this is going to be the first time in 20 years that I skip a Mario RPG* (or second if I change my mind about eventually using one of my Christmas gift cards to get Paper Jam).

*- That's if this even counts as an RPG anymore. "Mario & Luigi, as we showed today with Paper Jam, combines some of the world of Paper Mario, the characters and elements of gameplay there, but brings it into a role-playing game like the Mario & Luigi series." ~Scott Moffitt. Nintendo apparently doesn't even consider Paper Mario an RPG series anymore.

Re: Three 'Solid' Pokémon Offered as Free Extras to Pokémon Bank Users

Abighoul

You don't actually have to keep paying the annual fee if you're not using it every year. The Pokemon you upload don't get deleted if your subscription expires - they don't even get locked. When your pass expires, you can still download everyone you uploaded, you just can't upload anyone until you renew. So if you haven't been using it lately, go ahead and wait until October to renew it.

Re: ENKKO to Restore the N64 Controller to Its Former Glory with New Kickstarter Campaign

Abighoul

Most of the best N64 games will probably never be on the Virtual Console because of rights issues (Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye, Star Wars, Beetle Racing, etc). N64 emulation on PC is still pretty imperfect, and even then, it's hard to find a modern controller that maps naturally to N64 controls because no one makes controllers with 6 face buttons anymore. Right now your best option for playing N64 games is still getting an actual console and a new controller; fortunately it had so few games when it came out that there's still a reliable supply of never-used controllers out there, but we're going to have to work on more longterm solutions.

Re: Fire Emblem Developers on How the Series Can Maintain its Momentum

Abighoul

The split versions make a lot of sense, being able to cater to two different sides of the fanbase without too much more work than making one game, since they share so many resources. And I have to say, if you're going to get them all, $80 for three similar games with different stories and tones and themes and gameplay styles is a better value than Pokémon's $120 for two identical games and a third game that's the exact same thing but slightly better. It's weird that people are finding reasons to complain that there's more unique content in a $20 second Fire Emblem than in a $40 second or third Pokémon (though to be fair, B2&W2 might be an indication that they're changing that up a bit in the future).

As someone who kinda sucks at thinking strategically and really loved the characters and story of Awakening, I like that I can have an enjoyable experience without hurting the hardcore strategy fans, by getting Birthright, and I'm probably gonna end up buying all three though it sounds like I may have to turn on Phoenix mode (and I like that I'll be able to enjoy the story of Conquest, which was the one that interested me more, even though I can't actually play it).

If we want our favorite serieses to survive, we're going to have to be open to ways of broadening their base - and this is pretty much the best way to do it. All the hardcore fans can play Conquest in Classic mode on the highest difficulty and have the experience they want, while more casual players can still enjoy the experience they want, and the casual players end up subsidizing the smaller niche of hardcore players, and the game doesn't have to be "dumbed down" if you don't want it to be. In any other medium, you can't really do that, not nearly as well as you can with video games. When movies or books or TV shows need to broaden their audience, they can't have two discrete experiences based on what the viewers want to see, but video games can. Adding stuff like Phoenix mode and white tanooki suits and Super Guides and Sheikah stones is what makes the games that hardcore gamers want still be commercially viable. I certainly prefer this over what they did to try and make Paper Mario more broadly appealing (namely, remove everything that made Paper Mario what it was). We need to get over the elitism that says you shouldn't be allowed to see the story of a game unless you have the necessary reflexes or strategy or just hundreds of hours to grind. There are people in the movie theater whe aren't appreciating it on as deep a level as you because they didn't read the novel explaining why the New Republic capital is on Hosnian Prime, there are people who read Cliffs Notes of your favorite book, there are people who skipped your favorite season of House on Netflix, and there are people who used Phoenix mode so they could see their favorite characters smooch (and the fact that they were able to do that by buying a $40 game instead of watching a Let's Play is good for the series' future). None of that has to affect your enjoyment.

I do have to say that I hope the fanservice doesn't get any more embarrassing than it is, but other than that, the future looks pretty bright.

Re: Video: Nintendo Reminds Us of Just How Much DLC We Had for Super Smash Bros.

Abighoul

I just wish they would organize the character select screen. It was okay at first (though I have to question why Dr. Mario is in the clone corner with Lucina and Dark Pit when he's a returning character and is arguably more different from Mario and Luigi than Toon Link is from Link, and it was also weird that Shulk is kind of treated as a third-party character when Nintendo actually has more ownership of Xenoblade than they do Pokémon) but now you've got Fire Emblem characters spread out in four different places (Fire Emblem section, clone strip, beginning of DLC strip, end of DLC strip), you've got first-party characters in between the third-party characters, and Pac-Man's over in the clone corner on the Wii U now.

Re: Video: Nintendo Introduces the Battle Mechanics of Fire Emblem Fates

Abighoul

@FRANKLIN_BADGE Mario Kart isn't an RPG with a story. Different people play games for different reasons; if someone is really invested in the story and characters but isn't able to beat a hard level, what's it to you if they're given the option of just seeing the story? It makes a lot of sense from Nintendo's standpoint too - by adding a feature that took maybe two days to program, they can potentially sell the game to a lot of people who might have otherwise just watched a Let's Play. And it also frees Nintendo up to make the actual game more difficult if they want.

Re: Review: Super Mario 64 DS (DS)

Abighoul

I wish Nintendo would take all the games that have had remakes and make definitive versions of them — Mario 64 with Yoshi, Luigi, and Wario and analog controls; Mario World with the Yoshi Coin counter and the sound quality of the original; Super Mario Bros with You vs. Boo and red coins with the full resolution; with each element able to be toggled on and off individually.

Re: Cloud Will be Available to Buy 'Within Hours' of Sakurai's Final Presentation for Super Smash Bros.

Abighoul

@rjejr Assuming that the new Mii costumes will be $0.75/$1.15, it would cost $103.18 to buy all the DLC on Wii U and 3DS. If you can get all the amiibos at MSRP, assuming you're getting both ROBs and assuming that the Retro pack and the Mii Fighters are the only bundles, that's $758.45 plus tax. Include the price of the games, and that's $961.61 to have everything on both consoles. If you factor in getting the consoles, assuming the cheapest options of a $200 Wii U and a $60 2DS refurbished from Nintendo's website, plus a $19.99 amiibo adapter for the 2DS, that's $1,241.60, or approximately one student loan payment for me. Plus tax.

Re: Review: Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash (Wii U)

Abighoul

It's pretty ridic that this costs more than Captain Toad (which clearly has way more content).

"It's worth slogging through 50 knockout matches to get a fully beefed up amiibo if you fancy some online doubles, though the figures can't be used in any other offline modes."

Wait, you can't even use amiibo in local multiplayer?

Re: Preview: Crossing Over With Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam Bros.

Abighoul

I'm holding off on this until I hear if it has an actual Mario RPG-caliber story with actual characters and settings — all I'm seeing is Goombas and Toads in a plain grassy field. At this point in Dream Team's prerelease era, we'd already seen a variety of unique settings and original enemies and a new villain and references to previous Mario RPGs with Beanish and Hoohooligan characters. If Nintendo's killed off both Mario RPG serieses, I'm gonna be really pissed.

The potential of two Bowsers with dialogue is definitely promising, but after Sticker Star, I'm not letting myself get my hopes up for a Mario RPG again.

Re: Pokémon Red, Blue & Yellow Are Coming To The 3DS Virtual Console on 27th February, 2016

Abighoul

From what I understand, Link Cable emulation is really hard to get working reliably. So did they figure out how to emulate it, raising the question of why they never bothered doing that in the first four years of Game Boy Virtual Console games (or even unlocking the characters and courses locked behind the Transfer Pak in the GBC and N64 VC versions of Mario Golf and Tennis), or are they reprogramming the games, raising the question of why they aren't adding Pokemon Bank integration while they're at it?