Coalescence

Hilarious all the crying in the comments through the entire Direct and every Direct for however long this has been going on warranted them exactly one sad little crumb. My slight excitement has definitely progressed from ambivalence to full on misanthropy where I'm actively rooting for delays and a rocky launch.

@Anakin I dunno, this is why Superman works alone with Clooney on the next movie might have been worse.

But also I have a super soft spot for Batman Forever. I'll take the U2 song and potatoface Robin and Val Kilmer's Bruce over most of the other movies. It was the right mix of cheese and serious for what I like in Batman. Definitely didn't know Kilmer for that video game role but his film work vibes with me, especially his Jim Morrison. Glad he got to reprise Iceman before kicking the bucket.

Please not another bloated "remake" spread into multiple games that totally sucks out the personality of the original gameplay and exchanges it for modern blandness with an overdone meta story wearing the skin of the original. I hope current day Squeenix still hates FFIX enough to not mess with it and instead continues to milk the original for pocket change here and there, same with Chrono.

It was a 9/10 on Wii U, the change to party members bumped it to perfection. I still hugely miss the aesthetics of playing on the gamepad but I've warmed up to having the map in a menu - unlike Splatoon, which I just couldn't ever fully accept without a gamepad view. Story is a little more engaging than I remembered but still thankfully light and not as thickly smudged on as with 3. Lin is insufferable as usual and Elma still weirds me out but I don't play this game for its characters. Making your avatar the way they did was the best decision for the game style.

And Black Tar is still outstanding. The Xenoblade 2 and 3 didn't lean into the cheese factor and they suffered for it.

That's one way to start off the app with a bang. And let's face it, Nintendo are pros at the drip feed. I expect consistent quality titillation moving forward with more diminished reliance on other sites for Nintendo news (sorry NL, though not so much with the ridiculous ad content lately).

As for the movie, couldn't care much. Hopefully it'll be entertaining like Mario but if it's a bomb it won't bother me either and I'll look forward to a rifftrax.

Lol ubi just racking up the good rep. Maybe they can get partly owned by the Saudis too. Not that it matters anyway, everyone puts on a good morally righteous act until that hot new Assassin's Creed or Prince of Persia or whatever drops. Same as it is with everything.

All for it. Every big game company should do this, same as pivoting to Directs rather than E3 and the like. Cut out the middlemen. I don't check most gaming sites anymore because they've all become what Destructoid recently sank into. They all have zero integrity and dollar signs for eyes so we may as well just have everything come from through chipper biased Nintendo Power-esque coverage anyway. NL is really the last bastion of me caring about games journalism if only because it stays on track and the comments are generally engaging.

Nothing really for me outside of the Virtual Game Card which is a big deal for my house. But still it was solid overall. I'll get down for a Direct any time, nothing matches the excitement they pack into these. My kid will be super stoked for a new Tomodachi Life. I might pick up Prime 4 but also I loved the first, checked out of the second halfway through and only played the intro of the third.

This one is funny. It's like the need to hate on Nintendo is interfering with basic comprehension and people can't parse out how this simple improvement works. It's a nice bridge between digital and physical ownership and hugely friendly for family households with multiple systems like mine.

I really hope Sak is just totally aware the gravity his tweets cause and is having some fun here.

Clearly needs a countdown clock too. The next update when it is removed just won't cover the gravity of this situation.

The big mystery to me is why people who genuinely enjoy the cards or God forbid actually play the game still turn up for these launches. The amount of fun to be had must be diminished to nearly if not entirely nothing by this point. There's plenty of other ways to get a card or Pokemon game fix out there.

Yeah the reality is most companies not in the too big to fail category are always one big failure away from folding. Probably a little bit of poor planning here but playing to a niche audience in the fickle world of gaming is a risk.

I mean, they're definitely going to need money for that lawsuit so I'm sure they're cozying up to any and all revenue streams. Not like Nintendo needs any more ammo.

My plan is to wait until Nintendo invariably hits their final update and then I'll pull the trigger to get the fully functional Alarmo, and buy it before the thing goes out of production and skyrockets on the market.

@SuperRetroArt I've been hearing variations of peak capitalism for decades, same as we're definitely approaching the end times. Revolution is right around the corner just as the end of days is so obvious if you connect what is happening today in that one region with what was written. Definitely, this time for sure.

Not a shocker, people love their mid and love their Ubi despite always saying otherwise. I'm just glad X DE happened. People will get it or they won't but I'll be loving this game all over again.

If you really want to play the game there's only a billion options for emulation these days and easily accessible complete rom collections on archive. NSO is a game streaming service. Streaming services are subject to change.

I have my three copies CIB: SNES, PS1, and DS. What those two other editions outlined was that the original needed nothing changed or added. The cutscenes ruin the original pacing of each in-game scene, the extra content on DS is like bad fan hacks, and the second screen map is rather pointless considering how small and easily nagivable the entire game is. I'd maybe buy a straight up port but I know modern Square Enix won't be able to resist fumbling it somehow and silly gamers are going to balk at no new stuff no matter how bootstrapped, even one of the rare game that needs nothing.

Those sales are relatively poor anyway. There's a good reason we've only gotten somewhat okay ports from this series instead of remakes and new sequels (god forbid, the manhandling would be extraordinary). Chrono is not a heavyweight IP outside this little bubble.

Nintendo being a prime example of how selectively picking acquisitions for the studios who best augment the existing portfolio is so much better than just gobbling up any successful studio you can get your hands on.

Especially funny for a game where the world comes across as bereft of sex as in the new Star Wars movies.

Lol Nintendo fans. Don't give us the same old games. Oh great, games no one has heard of. Where is this third party game that has no chance of showing up on the app? Why don't I have 600 games on the app yet? I want to buy games but I don't want to pay $5 for a cruddy old NES rom that Nintendo fished from the toilet.

Emulation is ridiculously accessible and easy these days. The NSO apps are for the curated list of games Nintendo can get. They're slick apps for bombing around casually. It's never going to be a complete collection of every game ever. It's never going to have options out the wazoo like retroarch. Just go load up retroarch on any number of devices with the readily available archive rom packs if the app doesn't have that one game you want and swear you'd pay for.

Maybe it will be a later patch, who knows. What I do know I'm weirdly appreciating the synergy of a post on X driving the info for this article for Xenoblade X.

Bought the game for oldest kid to help stave off the lockdown boredom and bring some joy from the utter nightmares that were remote kindergarten and first grade learning. She's never really stopped playing, but I didn't get into it until this year. Not sure why it never clicked before. Only criticism I have is the one island per Switch design, which just got worse when the youngest started playing and now we have fences to mark territories, after carefully negotiating for who gets to live by each resident. The fight for Bluebear almost ended in me taking the game from everyone.

Weird thing is everyone always since New Horizons is too bare bones. I picked up New Leaf recently and found it not relaxing or appealing at all. The minimalist Island setup jives with vibe much better for me.

This need to put gaudy lights on everything is someday going to be so much fodder for "silly things we did in the 2020s" nostalgia bait video shorts. Right up there with loungefly backpacks.

Don't know why they didn't just immediately pivot to a Patreon. Nintendo Power's spiritual successor Nintendo Force has been going strong for over a decade now that way.

Gold points was a lousy program anyway, good riddance. I'd rather have physical rewards than a meager discount and I'd rather fill out pointless surveys like Club Nintendo than remembering to redeem carts within their release year / being pushed to buy digital for an only slightly less meager discount. Platinum is fine even if the rewards are mostly lackluster. Hopefully they've got something better in the works. Club Nintendo was a big leg up on what the other big companies consider loyalty programs.

I was just waiting for the preliminary reviews to verify there were no technical slips, and now I'm definitely picking it up. This and Xenoblade 1 are the two entries in the series I've loved most and I definitely can't wait to get into it again. Whatever the Switch 2 brings it won't be able to pry my attention away from this absolute gem.

Really hope Android Auto support is added eventually. My kids always want to have Nintendo music playing on the drive to school but I still use plexamp instead of the Nintendo app because of the android auto integration.

200 hundred hours of content is good for me when it is content of this nature. I put about that much into Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and loved it. A slow burn of mostly go at your own pace content is what I love. 200 hours of story with endless cutscenes and dialogue is where I'd consider it a negative.

"so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that."

Wow, that's an impressive level of drama queening. They knew what they were doing, and it sounds like their lawyers just yes-manned through it probably seeing the future $$$ should Nintendo's legal arm came knocking.

These along with those button keychains would be absolutely prime for My Nintendo rewards, the kind of stuff Club Nintendo used to bring. If Nintendo wants some crazy good engagement on those platinum points, they should bring back the annual rewards for reaching point goals and have something like a set of those keychains. I'd spend hours doing pointless surveys again for that.

But yeah, that design. Cube is fine and cute but a miniature of the console or controller would have been outstanding.

Lol people just trying to rewrite history to fit their main character syndrome. Nintendo repaired drifting joy cons for free, I sent mine in for that. They absolutely recognized it and some effort to rectify. But sure, anti consumer and all those copy-paste personality traits.

I hope Gamecube titles are made available in a deluxe expansion pack NSO bumping the price again. Not that I really want to pay that, but the meltdowns will be glorious even if it's a minimal hike.

That's a significant one for FFIV, considering how often float is needed in some of those dungeons.

But I'll buy these only when they have an option to play the original versions of swap to the original graphics.

Where's that Norm MacDonald quote about everyone involved in this story.

People like to romanticize indie gaming/demonize big bad companies but the fact is having rails like actual HR departments and company resources is what keeps the many situations like this from happening.

Video Games were just a means to an end for what Niantic wanted to do in their data harvesting. They couldn't get there with Ingress alone and worked out some appealing skins to lure people in. The harvest must have reached what they felt was the maximum value. I've only ever played Pikmin and it's a decently fun pedometer. Hopefully it doesn't change much but I wouldn't be heartbroken for more than a minute if I walk away. And admittedly I'd have some schadenfreude if the hyper playing Pokemon Go members of my extended family have their gloaty addictions wrecked.

@Dee123 other regions and timezones exist, you know.

I've enjoyed a few gens of Pokemon but a gritty baseball themed RPG would be awesome, any time. There's definitely not enough weirdness in Baseball games. Last good one was Rusty's Real Deal, and we're probably only going to get something stupid like the horribly overrated Bananaball in a video game. I want like Mutant League Baseball in the vein of the football and hockey games but beefed up with off game-days fighting through dungeons with baseball weapons No More Heroes style to earn money and equipment.

Imagine being so pathetic as to go through all the trouble to emulate Switch games instead of just buying a Switch. Oh a thousand pardons, to play completely legitimate homebrew because that's all these are used for. This one will either be hobbled to stay in legal grey zones or it'll be btfo'd like the others.

That was amazing. Pokemon TCG has never been my thing but I always follow it for content like this. It's the best thing Gamefreak has unintentionally created.

No one is stiff competition for Nintendo until they have even half the brand recognition and heavyweight IP portfolio. No amount of technical superiority or new gimmick is going to move units like Nintendo and that will never be more clear than when Switch 2 is the most unremarkable console they've ever launched and it still goes hard.

Very neat. And it makes me wish once again they would have done a further depths with no ability to create much light and some horribly abstract creatures like in the ocean depths and monstrously corrupted yiga clan who went too far.

Most of all I just wanted more of this game. I love BOTW a huge amount but I loved TOTK a bit more for the Depths and Sky world (especially for that cashing in on all of Skyward Sword's flubbed potential). It was totally complete but I would have thrown money so fast at DLC.

Lol squenix at 6. Metacritic is only useful for the drama and dumpster fire stories.

Whoa fella, don't strain your brain like that

@Tasuki It's definitely not sloppy. They upgraded the graphics while making it still look and feel like the original and didn't alter much. It is even easier than the original though, with timed hits doing splash damage and the ability to swap party members mid battle. They added some post-game extra boss fights which are kind of interesting and offer a little more challenge but nothing spectacular. New soundtrack is alright but you can always switch to the original too. Movie and other references in the original localization have been removed. Valentina doesn't jiggle when you hit her.

Rather, some guys who have nothing to do with the original failed company have bought the once already desecrated remains and hope to make some cash off the brand recognition. The only Acclaim games worth playing today have already been rereleased anyway or can be bought on gog like ReVolt.

Begrudgingly my second favorite Nintendo console, because I really love the Wii U still but the Switch really is the potential of the Wii U almost fully realized (still long for the double screen of the Gamepad). I never adopt at launch though, so eight years ago I took the day off and spent the full 7 hours while my kid was at preschool playing Breath of the Wild. It was almost perfectly timed for me to paraglide off the Great Plateau right as I needed to wrap up for the day. One of the best gaming days I've ever had by far.

Never happening. People voted with their wallets and they said it was too expensive to pay $5 for NES games and $8 for SNES. That, coupled with the world of subscriptions we live in and third parties wanting to sell their own retro collections means NSO is here to stay. The Virtual Console was fun while it lasted, but even that was subject to things vanishing from the storefront like the entirety of the C64 games. And by the time we got to the Wii U, the library was pitifully small due to the aforementioned third parties realizing they didn't need Nintendo's VC to get into the retro cookie jar.

Super soccer suddenly has a lot of diehard fans it seems. Who could forget how the illustrious Human Entertainment rocked the gaming world with this title. I have a Super NT with the 'jailbreak' firmware, I have a modded Vita, raspberry pi, etc., etc. I have the endless options anyone else does and access to the Internet which means a full archive of roms is always moments away. I also have an NSO subscription with the understanding that it is a curated list in a slick little app. The list can change any time and thankfully doesn't much, but everyone stamping their feet or hefting their silly dunks as if the NSO apps are some bastion of games preservation or the high priced archive with a high expectation are just making fools of themselves. Don't romanticize or get dramatic over a cheap little fling with SNES rentals. Any of us with a lick of sense know exactly what we're buying here.

Might give it a try someday, probably when the new price is further on sale. Dragon Warrior I-IV are favorites of all time but I've never been able to jive with any of the other games. I fell asleep playing the DQXI demo, but it still looks like it could be fun in bursts on the Switch.