Coalescence

No way anyone forgets Jynx. The cry, the Pokemon Snap appearance, and that design which is way better than the annoying Mr. Mime.

Probably shouldn't even call themselves Team Meat when the heart and soul is gone. Refenes was only good when Edmund was there to rein him in. Losing Danny B for the music didn't help either. Hard pass on zombie Meat Boy.

This is like buying a car and the dealership won't let you eat it medium rare. Or something.

People sure do hate fun. It's a silly desk player, it's not meant to be a practical way to play music. Just like the Game and Watch devices were not ideal ways to play those games. Humans are funny creatures, things tickle us like highly impractical vinyl. But evidently a lot of gamers forgot how to be human.

Welp, looks like I'm kicking Haley to the curb for Sandy.

Looking forward to seeing how ambitious the Lego insiders are going to be cashing in their windfall tomorrow. I'm guessing around $200, a dollar per piece seems appropriate.

This looks like one of those custom sets sold at a local shop. I'd say it's worth maybe, I don't know, $20?

Can't imagine living a life where if $5 spent doesn't pan out, I don't shrug my shoulders and go onto something else and at most sending a message of dissatisfaction to the company. Especially when it's something that works but is maybe slightly less than an untempered expectation.

But throwing a tantrum at in the public sphere and at everyone and anyone not also picking up their saber is always fun too. For me, I enjoy a good gamer rage.

This article is a very fine example of why touting machine translation as fact is incredibly irresponsible, that little shoulder shrug aside of maybe it's not accurate? Doesn't count. As pointed out already the brute force translation mangles the original tweet. Even x's web translator offers a different take than Google and it's less harsh. There's a ton of nuance in this language. It's why proper translations take time and why in the world does this need to be pointed out on a gaming website that primarily covers a Japanese company. It's 2026 and people probably still think Japanese to English is a 1:1 swap this word for that word operation.

Maybe next time have someone who clearly hates the Virtual Boy write the entries, that makes for an enjoyable read.

The indginance is funny. Of course people will preload GBA roms. People pay hundreds of dollars for Pokemon carts. People spend hundreds of hours resetting said carts to get slightly different looking Pokemon. I've been cool to load up one of these games on the Everdrive or Analogue Pocket when I feel like bombing round Kanto, but it really doesn't bother me when other people want to drop their money for what they feel is the better genuine experience. Perceived value is in the eye of each gamer but that will forever elude most people.

Six years old, though mostly vicariously because my babysitter's 11 year old son would always be playing it and he'd occasionally let me have a go. Most families in the block didn't have a Nintendo let alone the newly released Zelda, so kids would be gathering there every day after school. The first attempt at Ganon was an exiting disappointment as the silver arrows weren't found yet, vindicating the kid who said from the start that he heard you need the 'magic arrow'. It was pretty glorious when we all felt like we beat it together.

Years later I finally got my own copy, a $5 closeout from Kaybee toys. Grey cart (wish I kept the box), but still all the glory just as I remembered it. I've gotten just about every port and rerelease because I can never get enough. I still muscle memory through the game in a couple hours on the AVS once a year or so. And I've read the Legends of Localization book probably a dozen times. Fair to say it's my favorite game of all time.

People and Pokemon are fools with money. That's why the carts are resold so high, not because they're actually rare. Those price trends surely are not going unnoticed by Nintendo and TPC. If people had any modicum of restraint with this brand it wouldn't be like this, but that's never changing. Might as well fleece while the fleecing is good.

Love that the duality immediately happened. Subscription for retro games? Anti consumer. One time fee to own a digital copy forever? Anti consumer.

People griped about the VC and griped about NSO, but what they really want is stuff to be free or close to it. Which is a weird position considering the roms have been floating around since y'know, forever. If you want to play FireRed for free there's only unlimited options for that including the device used to whine about twenty bucks.

It's a premium because of course it is. People charge the crap out of secondhand carts not because they're in any way rare, but because people pay top dollar for Pokemon anything. That's the breaks. No decently smart person isn't going to take advantage of a fool and their cash.

Been playing with it since the app dropped on the Japanese store. It's top notch, and looks brilliant on the OLED. Red Viper is an amazing reproduction, but it's not even close to how crisp these games look on the app. This is like the fever dream if Analogue made a VR32. If they would have made the VB controller and could have secured the full library it would be definitive, but getting this close to perfection is cool too.

It's probably not going to win over a lot of people, and people are going to complain when they don't follow the usage directions & end up with cramped necks or strained eyes, but this is probably the best thing that could have happened for a VB fan.

Sega pretty much showing why they lost the fight with such a savvy business move acquiring a real winner of a company. Anyone else remember in 2012 when Rovio's head was harping about them being the future of video games and that console gaming was as good as dead?

Really hope it has at least some freshness. Bloodstained was nothing but stale chewed up pieces of every Igavania game. Likewise if it looks and plays like every modern bloated Metroidvania then I'll pass.

Defiance is pretty cool but they are really milking a relatively short series here. I suppose the Blood Omen games will come in yet another collection. Par for the course though for how much they repeatedly manhandled the golden egg laid by the first game.

In other words, 1200 people just wasted a few days drawing targets on their backs for a company all too eager to make cuts. They should leave altogether. Ubisoft isn't getting any better or releasing anything good. No amount of trying to teach them some lesson with pointless time-limited strikes is going to fix this company. Same with all the big bloated giants.

I mean they did put fear of missing out right in their company name. Oh, I mean Limited Run. Because they're on the side of games preservation, not selling overpriced adequate at best ports of mediocre at best old games for abbreviated purchase windows because they couldn't care enough to keep the licensing longer than needed to milk their whales.

Spin the NES soundtrack and watch in amusement Grant shooting down dinosaurs with his cannon. Play the readily available roms on any device with modern bells and whistles. Don't panic buy this.

Lol. Guy is unflinchingly passionate about his art, clearly he's awful. Weirdo gamers went after Phil Fish for the same reason. Gaming will be a real blast when all the good original creators are chased out for not spending their days placating a bunch of miserable validation seekers.

Braid really isn't my thing but I'll probably buy a copy because other stuff Blow has done was pretty great and I'd like him to continue.

Some random says so, it must be true. History shows time and again that anniversaries are absolutely no guarantee of Nintendo doing anything.

@N8tiveT3ch growing up is seeing this property for what it has always been. Said as someone who enjoys a handful of gens but this has always been an especially greedy moneymaker of an IP.

Hugely appreciative for whoever has probably for years been gradually laying the bricks to make this Virtual Boy celebration happen. We went from Nintendo Power dumping on the VB and the company notably leaving the console out of every retrospective, relegating it to Smash Bros trophy only status, to all this. As one of the handful of faithful since the 90s, all I can say is feast on that copium everyone who is ill equipped to see the red light. Nintendo is catering to me and ilk and we're going to bask in it.

Some gamers really want to pretend Pokemon was ever built on well developed games, and not a well funded marketing machine. The games were jank with unnecessarily split content right from the start. The games exist to move merch including other games in the ecosystem and amplify the brand, no better than Power Rangers ~ also a show people like to pretend is more than that because they enjoyed it as kids.

@ImpromptuR there's also a separate app for parental controls.

In other news, TIME magazine continues to exist only to sell covers.

Amazing to see actual impressions of the VB, rather than the endless pile on from people who probably never actually played one or touched it for five minutes in a store. The issues have always been overblown (provided one actually reads the instructions and takes the breaks when prompted) and the games are way more than just Wario. But that of course is replaced with the pile on of hating this because Nintendo went the extra mile (more like extra ten miles) to recreate the authentic experience.

Those are amazing pretzels some people are twisting themselves into so they can still somehow make this all Nintendo's fault. The existence of Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk on Switch should immediately indicate they have no outright issue with content but here we are.

On a sidenote what's with coward being the insult everyone reaches for lately. It's so toothless. Might as well call people yellow and chicken so long as you're slinging words that would only enrage Marty McFly.

The minifigs are nice but that's a hell of a steep price for some rubble and Ganon. The fight is amazing but it really doesn't translate well to Lego. The battle with Ganondorf in the tower or his phantom would have been a better set piece.

Still have my operation Rainfall case to hold the three games. According to Reggie that whole thing had no bearing on their decision. There was some weird drama with the manufacturing and distribution of those cases too. I imported PAL copies of Xenoblade and Last Story before they were announced for the US, then picked up Pandora's Tower on the cheap at GameStop years later. Of the three Xenoblade is the obvious winner which of course got the port and remaster. Last Story is pretty and fun in spots but definitely a bit overhyped.

But I would bet we'll get a port or something someday, when heavy wii nostalgia takes the baton from the current GameCube and N64 holders. Maybe the Switch 3 NSO will get the Wii app with its own tiny adorable Virtual Console inside where people can once again buy $5 NES games.

Ah, I've been preparing for this sort of thing my whole life by never letting go of a game or console. That price can spike another hundred and I'll be sitting cool with decades of stuff to play.

There's no shortage of places to gather and be depraved on the Internet. That they chose to do it on Animal Crossing proper says everything about these people, along with anyone who handwaves it because other bad stuff exists on the Internet. Most of us in the civilized world like having nice things and understand the concept of keeping it in the bedroom.

Yikes. Zelda is not landing well in the Lego world. Why pick a scene with tons of details that won't translate to this medium? Why pick an action scene in the first place? Mabe Village with Marin's house, the shop, flying rooster. A faerie fountain. Lost Woods with the Master Sword. Temple of Time. A Cemetery with Dampe. Endless great set pieces that would be beautiful in Lego, and this is the crap they come up with.

They could have left off the scan function a long time ago for all I care. I have a big collection because they are affordable well constructed miniatures of iconic characters. Or at least they were affordable. That was the biggest draw and they've definitely abandoned that aspect. The only scanning I ever had fun with was amiibo's greatest bits on the Wii U. It was pretty cool to bomb around on classic game moments from each character in the days before NSO. Though I may be the only one because I never ever see that game brought up.

Kind of neat they work to establish universal standards on that, though this is pretty mushmouthed. And at the same time I really don't use any of the parental controls with my kids. There's no substituting setting healthy game habits early on, because eventually they won't have the guardrailso. And gaming is probably only going to become more addictive, more ubiquitous, with more insidious/predatory angles. I can restrict access to features in Roblox, or I can teach my kid to play safely and make sure I'm in the room at all times. Same with ratings. They're at best a good rough idea but appropriate content is a lot more nuanced, and we live in an age where one can find playthroughs of anything to see exactly what is in the game.

First of many, I'm sure. It's two hobbies that attract an extremely high volume of fanatics and resellers. I like Lego and Pokemon but I'm not even going to entertain the idea of trying to get one of these or probably the next ten sets.

Great read, I'm one of the few who will always champion the VB as a winner though only for a very particular audience. It was my birthday gift in 96, funnily enough something that only could have happened because the system failed and was deeply discounted. Growing up in a bedroom with 3 other people meant privacy was non-existent, but shoving my head into the VB was the best escape and it meant playing games none of my siblings could touch or know. Having the music surround you with that crystal clear tone was outstanding, like a revved up Game Boy. The controller was so satisfying to hold. The headaches and cramps never affected me, but I also took the breaks when prompted where I suspect most kids didn't. My VB still gets the love, though I never expanded past my 5 cart library.

Red Viper is awesome especially with the latest update for color shades, but it doesn't give the full experience. And Teleroboxer and Red Alarm really don't play right on the 3DS's controls or virtual second pad. Hopefully the Switch controller fares better but they really should have gone the extra mile to recreate the VB pad.

Still, kind of crazy to see it and I look forward to checking this out. People who've never played VB Wario and Telero and such will probably wonder what the big deal is, and the other games will get a fresh round of chuckles. But those who know, know. The VB was something really special to the right people.

I don't even care if it is or isn't at this point. I'm so exhausted of AI experts piping up in every corner as much as I'm tired of hearing the word slop. Get a new word, get a thesaurus. Sounding like a bunch of bots saying the same things over and over really doesn't help the case of criticizing AI as a heartless replacement for originality. AI Bros are somehow slightly less annoying than this rush to pick apart every piece of creative that drops now. A band can't release album art without someone accusing it of "obviously" being AI.

And heaven help the poor people who may not have objectively perfect hands and hand movement. They're going to be accused of being fake people from here into eternity.

Doomed, of course.

But really it's because the Switch 1 is still a more affordable (even with the hike) option with a bottomless library currently overlapping the majority of the switch 2. Converting people from the Wii u or reacquiring people who skipped it was much easier especially with BOTW and MK8 deluxe as huge carrots. I don't buy everyone struggling as a huge reason, probably a factor but not nearly as much as the conversion challenge Nintendo faces. People look towards video games as an escape in hard times and it's not like no one has ever lived beyond their means by throwing a new console on their credit card.

The slack will probably pick up as the Switch 1 gets older and Nintendo drops a mainline 3D Mario or new Zelda. But as the article says but doesn't really underscore, they're still doing phenomenal, just not at the sustained pace shareholders would have loved.

Didn't know they had one, but also haven't used Hulu in a very long time. I'm surprised it hasn't been shuttered entirely and rolled into Disney+ yet. Only streaming app I'd care to have on the Switch would be Plex, but even if it happened it would probably be the mostly useless no personal libraries version.

Edmund's reaction is perfect. A barely excited simple fanfare is exactly what an NES hard game would limply hand a player who just completed a huge feat.

Also wish this game was playable on Switch. No Danny B sounds, no buy.

Didn't happen on my build, which was a christmas gift and an awesome one at that. I can't imagine messing it up if you've ever held a gameboy cart, that notch is one of the most identifiable physical characteristics.

Loved re-reading this one. Still don't understand the criticisms of Metroid II, especially the lack of map. The game is one long tunnel that branches off one relatively small nest at a time and the lava receding with each success keeps you on a path that barely ever backtracks (and the lava comes back to guide that, even). Maybe it's because I like a game requiring a bit of memory challenge, as opposed to Zero Mission and Fusion's incessant handholding, but I've never found the lack of map to be a problem. I love Samus Returns too, but it's a totally different game and mood compared to the original.

Anyway, reminder to play the cart on a GBC or GBA for that sweet custom color palette. I prefer it to the Super Game Boy's and the fan made DX.

If I can muscle memory the Battletoads games with the joycon buttons, it must be manageable. What bothers me more is that Nintendo and everyone else forgot how to make a good dpad. The pro controller dpads are mediocre at best. And don't even get me started on the hot plus garbage on 8bitdo controllers. Just because it looks like a dpad doesn't make it inherently better than the split buttons. It's like the world up and decided that gold standard on the previous controllers just isn't worth shooting for anymore.

They made the right call. Breath of the Wild works because that DNA has been in Zelda from the start. Metroid has been a linear game with a hub and branching paths from the start. Metroid 1 had Brinstar, 2 had the tunnel, 3 had Crateria. This game felt more true to the roots than the last couple of Primes, and even more than Dread.

Great write up. It's pretty awesome how games attach themselves to memories like that. I get red pretty anytime I play SF2 because after all these years I still suck terribly at it, but love the game all the same.

My traditional game has been one that came right before the day, back when my mom finished a late shift at Blockbuster on Christmas Eve Eve and brought home Earthworm Jim on Genesis for me and my siblings. That gesture amid the holiday misery she was enduring, and having a good taste in games imprinted deep on me.

Clearly Nintendo and America are so doooooomed. Gamers always bringing the lol.

It's like the Velvet Underground & Nico of video games, except Super Mario Bros is actually enjoyable.

Almost immediately the dooooooomed comment. Gamers lol. Obviously it was just an extra hook to blunt the new console price a little until enough big titles & Switch 1 upgrades were out to bolster the console. The Switch 2 isn't going to live and die by Mario Kart World sales, because this isn't like the Switch 1 where BOTW had to carry an enormous load to pull people in after the Wii U. Makes no business sense to continue this sku.

Good example of why it's a very bad idea to invoke the ire of Nintendo's legal arm. They have the resources to run as long as it takes, and they'll take an extra pint of blood on top for your troubles. That some people out there intentionally provoke this legal behemoth is astounding.