Agriculture

The Escapist had 3 things going for them, Zero Punctuation, their forums and Jim Sterling. Jim Sterling left, they banned everyone for anything from their forums, and Zero Punctuations shtick got old.

I'm more interested in the release of Pike Men.

@Jayvir They need to find a balance, like Sony and Microsoft has. Obviously some mistakes can be made, but with too many mistakes, the eshop will become too littered with bad games.

@DevlinMandrake There's no right or wrong answer, but it still needs to be answered. Nintendo will have to do a better job at figuring out which games should be allowed on the eshop. This isn't even a case of a hard decision, it's clearly an asset flip that they missed.

@DevlinMandrake A huge part of running a hardware business like the Switch is to curate content. The Switch eshop is completely littered with bad games, and everyone knows it. The other two consoles aren't as bad.

Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey has sold exactly the same amount of copies. It could be because it's manufactured copies, but it's still pretty amazing.

A metroidvania? Huh. Colonel, wasn't metroidvanias out of fashion? I'm voice acting in it? Wasn't Metal Gear turned into a pachinko machine? Huh.

@Steel76 It's especially infuriating that they haven't added any N64 games yet.

It's time for round 2 against Birds of Prey: https://i.redd.it/ai6zdm462eh41.png

The opposite is also sometimes true. Microsoft for example showed Halo 2, in a version that was very impressive, but the Xbox had no ability to run. When the game was released it was a completely different Halo 2.

I think it was a good thing that Sony revealed that their SSD would be able to handle 5.5 gb/s read times, especially since they explained that it would mean much more rich environments. Of course eventually they will have to show a game, but knowing the specs was still a good thing.

Think of the pachinko machines! Won't somebody think of the pachinko machines!

Y'all everybody all still gonna get all the content from E3, just as trailers and presentations without an audience. It's not like whatever the big N been working on vanish into thin air.

@Darlinfan Yeah, the guy who just said 1.2 million created a sense of greed in the seller. Though I don't think the offer was serious, because then the guy who won this auction would have contacted him to sell it for 1.2 million.

@Darlinfan Sometimes people get carried away. Just because someone said that they would pay 1.2 million dollars doesn't mean they would follow through with it.

This is an interesting machine, but it's still just a SNES-CD in an all-in-one package. It's not some lost console with a bunch of unique never released games or ports of games.

Obviously. People seem to think that because they have something unique they can demand a gazillion dollars.

That's great and everything WHERE'S THE REST OF MY N64 GAMES?!

That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that the PS1 won because it had Pepsiman.

@Leo_ascendent To some extend, all entertainment is in competition with each other. If people spend more time on Netflix, they have less time to play Switch. Playstations and Xboxes are way more similar to the Switch than Netflix is.

In other news, Nintendo does not think there is anything outside the sand which they put their head in.

@electrolite77 I also wish they would re-think their ideas surrounding narrative driven games. If Nintendo, or one of their 2nd party studios, would attempt something similar to Knights of the Old Republic, it could be great.

@electrolite77 Look, I agree that it's a problem, but it's the way the system is right now. It's wishful thinking that Nintendo could continue to exist without breaking into new market sections. They themselves know it, which is why they've been trying to get into mobile games.

@electrolite77 Your pension fund invest in companies, and those companies need to have as high of a profit as possible. And more specific regarding Nintendo, they do need to be constantly growing, or the company will erode away.

Nintendo has a lot to grow in, like more story oriented games, and more online multiplayer games.

@electrolite77 How much money do you have in stocks or funds? Would you accept 6 % profit? I wouldn't. If every company had 6 % profit, the no one would be able to retire.

It's incredibly expensive to produce such large and detailed statues. It's 1/4 the scale, so no wonder it costs so much.

"Square Enix Indie Division"? So it's a part of an entertainment giant that is somehow also independent?

When did we start calling all simpler games "indie"?

Apparently what they do is "service provider for Indie developers", so basically they remove the indie out of indie games, but they say they let the developers keep creative control, so that's good.

This is actually for a new MTV show called Pimp My Switch. I was a contestant on this show, and I told them I'm a big fan of cheese, so they added a cheese grater attachment to my Switch. This contestant probably just really hated Steve Jobs and wanted a touch pen just to spite him.

@Ulysses I'm sure that will work out great. Hollywood had such success trying to appease China and they didn't have to alter all their movies or anything like that.

Obviously gorilla glass. How is that not on the list of suggestions?

Also, I want it to be purchasable with nothing. No dock, no joycons, no charger. That way you can upgrade your current setup much cheaper.

@Kalmaro Yeah, unless they plan to release the entire trilogy as a single purchase, they should be quiet about "something extra".

@Averagewriter Nintendo relied on the idea that they would develop the must have games for a console, while 3rd party developers would create additional, less important games. The CD changed the whole dynamic of the industry, because must have games were things like Metal Gear Solid. Ocarina of Time was of course also a must have game, but people wanted things like a complex story to follow, full voice acting and lots of cutscenes.

@Averagewriter Yeah, that's one way it could have gone, but that would still make Sony launch the PS1. People always act like the decision not to co-operate with Sony is their worst decision, but it would have gone the same way regardless.

@Averagewriter I meant the successor to the Snes CD. And yes, the contract wouldn't extend to the next generation, but Sony would have demanded a new contract that did stipulate that Sony would collect the licensing money from CD games.

And of course Ocarina of Time would have been made differently on such a console. The alternate history that turned out to be good for Nintendo is if they had never even talked to Sony about making a CD add-on, and maybe, but not very likely, that would have made them never consider making a video game console.

It's funny how the eshop is packed to the brim, but there isn't anything to play. It's sort of like a fridge. The sale had about 40-50 games with an anime girl and a vague title.

@Averagewriter Between Sony and companies like Square, it's very clear that there existed better plans for CD than FMV games like Night Trap. Here's a short description of what I meant:

Nintendo agrees to Sony's terms. Nintendo and Sony launch the Snes Play Station (all-in-one Snes with disc add-on), and much like how the Sega CD had lots of FMV-games, this one has that. Fast forward 4-5 years and a console somewhere between the N64 and PS1 launches. A 3D capable console with an optical reader, and a cartridge slot that can be used for games or ram-expansion.

Now, with this new console ALL games are on disc. When Nintendo develops Ocarina of Time it becomes, without a doubt, completely obvious it needs to be on CD. Now Sony is the one collection the licensing money from that game, and Nintendo is basically out of the hardware business.

@CurryPowderKeg79 No. Sony wanted the rights to all disc games, which would be all games, so if Nintendo had agreed to the terms it would have ended their console business and Sony would probably still have made the next Playstation on their own.

@Krisi That's what I figured, that it was a rendition of the NES/Famicom music. Thanks for the info.

@RupeeClock Oh, wow, I didn't realize the Famicom had all along been a CD console with real songs on CD-rom just like the Playstation, thanks for the enlightenment!

Isn't Earthbound a NES game? Why is this not 8-bit music?

@JayJ Yes, and the cords even attached on the back. The famicom is a much better design in every way, except that.

Still, I'm glad they didn't release a NES with non-detachable controllers.

@XBontendo They're really breaking our balls

The toads are so happy because Bowser locked them in the dungen with the princess because he didn't realize the toads are male.

@KitsuneNight Yeah, it's the same with the Switch, it's way more successful than the PSP and the Vita because it launched the right time to be using mobile processors.

The time of release is something people tend to forget when arguing about which console should be successful. Right now for example, you can't release a console with a proprietary processor.

@KitsuneNight Another big factor was that it was significantly cheaper than the original Xbox. Few people even remember this, but the original Xbox launched for $500 and Microsoft had to quickly drop the price and compensate those who bought it for $500 by giving them 2 free games.

The Xbox was much more capable, and got games like Morrowind and Halo, which probably would have never run on a PS2. The Xbox even got a nerfed version of Half Life 2. That generation of consoles was my favorite, and all 3 consoles had a ridiculous amount of great games.

@KitsuneNight Like you said, it was released in 2001. There's tablet computers from 1995 and they are all awful. The PS2 won over the original Xbox because it used cheap memory cards, while the PS3 overtook the 360 because it didn't use cheap memory cards.

My point is that things change with time. When the PS3 was just released, having a harddrive and bluray optical reader was probably bad for the console, since it drove up the price, but during the last few years, having those things meant the console was still viable.

@Darknyht Yes, Sony has even admitted that they deliberately made the PS3 difficult to program for so that game developers had to pick a side, which they assumed would be their side due to how successful the PS2 was. Needless to say, it backfired big time.

Even with all that said, it's not entirely easily to claim Sony could have done much better. The unique processor of the PS3 was conceived back when consumers expected new consoles to show something they hadn't seen. It wasn't until the PS4/Xbox One that someone took the step of launching a console that was just a PC with lower specs than you could already buy.

If Sony had launched a console with more standard hardware, like the 360 had, it still would have been very expensive since the harddrive and bluray drove the price up.

@Darknyht The reason why eventually it overtook the 360 is that it did a lot of things right. Most importantly, all version had a harddrive and a bluray optical unit, and the harddrive was even interchangable. That meant that late in the console cycle, the PS3 could handle the huge games with huge patches that were released at the time.

@KitsuneNight Lol! I never heard that description, but when a console launched in 2013 is about to be outsold by the Switch launched in 2017, I guess it's pretty sad.

@glaemay The Playstation is a cash cow for Sony. Sony as a whole aren't doing too well. It's not a situation were Sony just plows money into the Playstation to ruin the market.

The best part of the PS4 is how cheap it is, with games like 2016's Doom sometimes selling for as low as €6. The PS4 could outsell the PS2 if they do what Microsoft did with the all digital Xbox, except make it actually have a point.

They could release a PS4 without a disc drive, that was smaller than the PS4 slim, and cost €200 with a 1st party bundled game. If they did that, they could sell 55 million more during the next generation. This is how the PS2 reached 155 million.

Nintendo should do the same with the Switch, keeping the original when the next gen rolls out.