DanElectrode

@SpaceEcho Yeah, I feel like Zimmer was really influential in that, with both Gladiator and the Nolan Batman trilogy - everyone is aping his "two alternating notes" thing, which, while it does create a thrilling sense of urgency during a scene - isn't exactly something you're going to be humming later, as Grant said.

I was really disappointed when Man of Steel didn't use John Williams' Superman theme, which is probably my favorite piece of film score of all time (then again, that movie has a lot of other problems as well).

My main takeaway between this and Donkey Kong apparently being in the Mario movie is that they're almost certainly going to release a new Donkey Kong game relatively soon to go along with them.

I felt at the time that the little niggling issues really prevented people from seeing what a great game this was - sure Fi was a little annoying and the "it's one rupee!" thing every time you get one was obnoxious, but the core game was great.

I'm glad to hear the quality-of-life tweaks are helping people to see past those surface issues to the great game underneath.

My second favorite 3D Zelda after Wind Waker.

@IndoorHero Yeah, evidently they mean the 30th anniversary of Sonic as a character, but it's misleading at best to rerelease a 3 year old racing game supposedly in celebration of that

I do like to use the Joy Cons detached in the rare occasions I play while not on the TV, mostly because I have big hands and holding the Joy Cons while attached is awkward.

However, I agree that the idea that you'd play multiplayer in that mode for any length of time is pretty silly.

It'd probably look better if they could bump up the draw distance instead of ratcheting it up to 8K which is imperceptible over 4k to the human eye unless you're looking at a movie-theater size screen anyway, not to mention that nobody owns 8k screens.

Having it be artificially high res but still having elements popping in constantly doesn't really make it seem better IMHO.

As others have noted, as far as the portable screen goes I'd rather have AMOLED and gorilla glass and better framerates before worrying about bumping up the resolution, personally.

The only reason a 4K handheld screen really makes any sense is if you're going to use it for VR where it's like two inches from your eyeballs, but I don't think Nintendo really has much plans for VR on the Switch, aside from the Labo kit - which is fun, but it's not like, intended to compete with the Oculus or whatever.

Either way I just hope there will be some firmware updates with improved stability

They're repairing both of the ones that came with my console (which both exhibited the issue recently) for free, so I feel like, as long as they're fixing it for free I don't really feel bad if they don't also pay out a huge class action settlement

I played it long enough to realize it's completely ruined by being clogged to the gills with micro-payments and pay-to-play time gating nonsense, same as the Dr. Mario game.

The fonts in Mario 64 are indeed a completely new version, comprised of higher-res PNGs for each letter which are swapped into memory at runtime in place of the old version.

Interesting Twitter thread on it here: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1307137636474204161

It's interesting that the Gamecube and Wii games are also using emulation, I would think at some point they'd be able to just create a build of the more modern games that can run natively on newer hardware since the game engines are so much more sophisticated now and don't rely as much on, like, putting things in specific hard-coded memory registers and stuff the way NES/SNES/N64 stuff did.

I felt like the original Galaxy was way too easy and short, but I really liked Galaxy 2. For my money the best 3D Mario games are 64, Odyssey and Galaxy 2, which could all essentially be tied for first. Then 3D World, then Sunshine/Galaxy 1.

I also didn't really dig 64 DS, to the point where I gave up and sold my DS after playing Phantom Hourglass and never finished it. I never played 3D Land because I never got a 3DS.

@Doktor-Mandrake yeah, as I said I'd prefer if they were all 1080P 16:9 and 60FPS (with no color banding issues). Just saying I'm fine with them not like re-building all the 3D models and stuff.

I'm kinda fine with just keeping the games true to the original but with modifications for modern displays.

It's a shame that Mario 64 isn't 16:9 and of course it'd be great if they were all 1080p and 60FPS, but I'm kind of fine with them leaving the original 3D models and stuff intact and to retain the original experience and not like, doing a full remake with newer game engines or whatever.

@Dubbicakes The Switch only uses USB 3, not Thunderbolt, meaning anything connected that way can't access the PCIe bus, which is really want you'd need to make some kind of graphics expansion thing feasible.

I suspect Nintendo wouldn't want to do that anyway for a host of other reasons - they just went though the whole Wii U debacle where everybody (mistakenly) thought it was some kind of upgrade for the original Wii, and it created a bunch of confusion around which games it could play and whatnot.

I don't think they have the stomach to create a similar situation with the Switch right now where some games leverage this external dock upgrade thing, some don't, some require it, etc.

Anyway, I suspect they'd rather just wait a year or two and then sell a completely new console anyway.

@Dubbicakes I... don't think that's true at all, if they were to release such a thing, I don't think existing games would just automatically leverage it. And even if it were, you're now talking about a new dock that would probably cost more than the Switch itself.

Can you read the text on the "L is real" sign in the courtyard in Mario 64?

@Dubbicakes What are you expecting the dock to do, exactly? It's just a USB-C port, so it's not like it has the bandwidth to act as an external GPU or something.

I suppose they could make a dock that does integrated "upscaling" of the video to 4K, but that would probably be both prohibitively expensive and not really all that much better looking since it wouldn't be "true" 4K, plus it'd introduce at least a little latency.

@johnvboy Yeah, there's time. It's just kind of weird to pre-announce that the digital version will be time-boxed like this. It's the first time I've seen it happen.

@DanTee Yeah, my guess is either that or they just don't want people to go "ah, I'll wait until it goes on sale."

I'm curious what the idea is behind making this a limited-time thing. I mean, I get only printing a certain number of physical copies, but why limit the digital release? Just to create artificial demand?

I think I'll probably go in chronological order, despite the fact that Sunshine is the one I haven't played in the longest.

I'm curious if there's anything else "optimized" about them... like are there higher resolution textures, anti-aliasing, further draw distances, etc?

I suppose we won't know until it's closer to release.

@RiasGremory If you go by the EU release dates, Super Mario World and Link to the Past were both 1992, so I think I'd call that a tie 😋.

But if you go by the Japanese or American dates, they were in different years, and 2017 is the only year they've ever released arguably-best-in-series games for both Mario and Zelda.

So yeah, I think I've gotta go 2017.

I'm split on either 1992 or 2017.

@MrBlacky ah yeah, that was pretty great. The reveal of the location of the key to Peach's castle was another good one.

@MrBlacky What's the troll? The sniffit "what face am I making" game?

Relax folks, they released a large, complicated game in which a single confirmed glitch has been discovered, one that 99.9% of people would never hit anyway, and they've committed to fixing it. This is not a harbinger of the death of quality control.

@Bruh I wonder if it's a restriction that only applies to games that aren't fully "in house," like the Intelligent Systems Paper Mario series, but not to a true first-party game like Odyssey.

Still seems really short-sighted and hampering to the game's quality, though. It's not like the companions in any of the other Paper Mario games were damaging to the Mario IP (especially since most were just individualized versions of established enemy "species" anyway).

I could see this restriction applying more to something like the Mario & Sonic at the Olympics games or the Rabbids Kingdom Battle game, but it's weird for something like this where is an original story set it the Mario universe.

@inenai - Yes! I feel like my two daughters would love that.

@Smashfan502 - As I just said, I have daughters and I think they'd really like having some choice of female characters in Mario games who aren't always the stereotypical damsel-in-distress. There's Toadette, but why not some more "heroic" type female characters? If there's gonna be a bunch of baby/gold/whatever variants of every character why draw the line at having a female version?

@inenai It'd actually be pretty rad if Nintendo introduced a "long lost" set of female Mario sisters. Like they could also be overall-wearing plumbers and not pink frilly dress princesses.

I'm no copyright lawyer, but wouldn't the game be considered "prior art" or something? It came out in the US in 1993, and Yahoo! wasn't founded until a year later. Do new printings of books have to remove any words that have become copyrighted in the intervening time since the first pressing?

This is definitely a copy-cat... if they wanted to make a game "inspired" by Cuphead, they would've had to bring something new to the table. This is the same '30s animation style and the same gameplay, although not executed as well, from the look of it.

They could've used the '30s animation style in a different genre of game and nobody would've complained, or make a game with similar gameplay but with a different aesthetic and nobody would've complained.

But you can't just copy both the aesthetic and the gameplay of another game without introducing anything substantially new to the formula, and then be surprised when people call you out on it.

While you can point out that every Mario game is technically a sequel, I don't think that's probably what he meant, but more too many barely-differentiated FPS games and the like.

I'm a big Brewers fan so I'm definitely buying this. Pretty rad to have the new logo and the 50th anniversary patch featured on the cover. Hopefully the lack of gameplay footage is just because it's still super early (pre-orders aren't even available for four more months).

Blech. I like the bright and colorful look of the Link's Awakening remaster, but I'm glad they stepped back from the cliff of going completely overboard with the "cutesy" aspect.

I really enjoyed Super Mario Run but I feel like all the rest of Nintendo's mobile apps are just delivery systems for microtransaction nonsense.

Too many zillion kinds of coins and rubies and gems and time-based lock outs of everything to keep track of.

Looks like another set of 1-2-Switch style minigames...?

I wonder if there was supposed to be a star inside that statue at some point in the development of the original N64 game (maybe for killing all the boos in the courtyard?), but they nixed it so then they made the plaque illegible on purpose?

The level of Luigi's Mansion 3 they played on the Treehouse thing featured both a pineapple-spitting haunted plant and a giant watermelon, so it might just be because of that and not some connection to Super Mario Sunshine (although I would welcome a Deluxe edition of that game).

Course 55 - "Koopa Troopa Car, Go!" is better for coin farming I think; it's pretty short and you can get around 115 coins every run (just be sure to get the 50¢ coin by hanging a U-turn when you get to the big fire brother).

It would be really amazing if they just continued on and remade the Oracle of Seasons/Oracle of Ages games in this style too.

@FTL Not really a fair assessment, AAA games today are orders of magnitude more complex and expensive to develop than they were twenty years ago, plus this isn't exactly a "bug," as it doesn't adversely affect gameplay in any way.

I suppose the difference is they could easily fix this with a network-delivered patch to Odyssey

If this game ever actually comes out, I'll eat my hat

Sweet, sweet stability!

@jly1987 It may be worth noting that the demo was the first level of the game, and it does get more difficult from there. It's not hard by any stretch, but it's kind of like if there had been a Yoshi's Island demo that was just "Make Eggs, Throw Eggs."

@KingdomHeartsFan So is you being rude and unreasonable the fault of the Wall Street Journal too?

@KingdomHeartsFan That's kind of an absurd position. I doubt the Wall Street Journal is just inventing things whole cloth. If they report a rumor why not assume it's in good faith because they have sources telling them these things are in the works?

If Nintendo subsequently decides to kibosh the idea and changes course, the Wall Street Journal and/or Nintendolife have no control over that. Companies plan new products for years before ultimately deciding not to release them all the time, that doesn't mean the journalists who reported on the plans before the company changed course are a "pack of liars."

Blaming people being rude to each other in the comments section on the journalist for reporting interesting information instead of blaming the individuals who are being rude is silly.