ECMIM

Perhaps someone else noted this, but this is NOT Fox News--this is a clip from a Fox channel affiliate (read: a regular OTA channel) in NYC, which has nothing to do w/ the cable channel Fox News.

(A small quibble, but accuracy is nice, yes?)

@Spuratis Nice

After Lego City Undercover, I just can't get into Lego games anymore--nothing else comes even close to measuring up.

Scram Kitty (finally), (probably) baseball, and (maybe) Lolo--Moon will be purchased if/when the four eps are bundled for $15 or less.

@TheRealThanos I have that and the only negative is that it didn't result in a Bonk's Revenge remake which, to this day, is one of my all-time fave platformers. Alas!

I see IGN has learned well from our politicians: cry that something was taken out of context even when all the context is right there in black and white, and just hope that everyone--like the rest of our media--pretends that that settles the matter.

(Gee, and I wonder why I have a really dim view of game 'journalism'--"hacks" doesn't even begin to describe these people.)

@OptometristLime That's basically my take on this as well, especially after hearing the (very) positive things from a number of devs: "I didn't get my way, so I"m going to use my perch to shame you and idly speculate on what's going on" all with the veneer of 'journalistic' credibility.

(That said, Gamasutra is a massive, insider, _{watch the language. --Raylax}, so nobody should be surprised.)

This would be one of those cases where Nintendo's obstinate business conservatism (not to be confused with political conservatism!) bit them hard in the behind though, to be fair, who knows how far up the food chain this ever got without Reiche naming names as to who received and vetted the initial pitch.

While I'm sure we're getting this at some point, let me be another American voice stating/reinforcing that we'd really like to see this at some point, NOA, if, for some bizarre reason, you're thinking of skipping us.

snore more (non-exclusive*) indie games--wake me when Nintendo decides to take the U--and its fans--seriously.

*The major sticking point is the lack of exclusivity.

<i>Hitting his target shouldn't be an issue — the digital release of Stranger's Wrath HD (another title in the series which is due to hit the Wii U eShop in the near future) sold more copies than the original retail version on the Xbox.</i>

Uh, Stranger's didn't retail for $30...

(Frankly, I think he's nuts w/ that price point, but we'll see.)

@ThreadShadow real estate and health clubs, the vast, vast majority of their business for the past decade--games are nothing more than a sideline for Konami these days.

This is a terrible, misleading, headline, but I suppose it did what it was supposed to do.

@unrandomsam there was a faux System 16 version made for the Sega Ages Fantasy Zone collection (Vol. 33 and, yes, which M2 did)--which was a 'port' of the SMS/System E (SMS-derived arcade hardware) Fantasy Zone II--but it never actually ran on actual System 16 hardware.

/annoying pedant

(And it would be fantastic if that one got included w/ 3D, since it's pretty awesome even w/o!)

@xj0462 Whoa, whoa, hold up: Shining Wisdom is not, by any stretch, a bad game, and it certainly shouldn't be even whispered as "bad" when the more recent, PSP, games are far, far worse on every level.

@XCWarrior if you're saying what I think you're saying, you are my hero.

LOD improved on this game in every way, rendering it virtually obsolete, and is a great game, to boot.

RELEASE THIS HERE.

It's fair to assume that this is almost certainly (the lion's share of) Yamauchi's chunk of the company and Nintendo has little choice but to buy these up before they are offered on the market to protect the stock price.

Update Amazon Prime, please, if only to deal with the horrendous, inexplicable, lag.

@ferthepoet If the Wii was a fluke, then how do you explain the DS which sold 50% more units than the "fluke"? How about the 3DS? I wager you have no reasonable answer for this because your opinion isn't based on reason--it's based on the lunatic, over-emotional, notion that you should hit a homerun every at-bat or score a touchdown every time you get the ball.

(By your 'logic' Sony should have folded up shop already since they've been teetering on implosion for a decade--and that's corp-wide, not merely the PlayStation brand. And MS? The XBOX biz is such a terrible unit--profit-wise--that potential candidates for prez of the co. are open to getting rid of it.)

@TruenoGT 100% this. If Nintendo wants to keep actually making substantial money, Steam-style races to the bottom are abject poison.

This can work on PC because 3rd parties* treat the PC like gravy and don't expect even 5% of their overall, dollar-value, sales to come from there. But for Nintendo? Who only does WiiU and 3DS games? That's literal suicide this early on.

*3rd parties that invest millions into each game, like Nintendo, not 3rd parties that do not.

I think what we're seeing with this pricing (and NES Remix) is a tacit admission that Nintendo is going to start running discounts pretty heavily, so they're going to make it seem like an artificially better deal when it's at $10, even though that's the price that should have been the ceiling for games like these.

Alien Storm and ESWAT have virtually no parallax in either their Genesis or arcade incarnations--what exactly do you think would make them work well in 3D? The bonus stages are a tiny fraction of Alien Storm and the game isn't even particularity good to begin with, certainly not remotely on par with a game like Streets of Rage 2 (or 3) which would be infinitely better choices as games, than the 30-second 3D shooting gallery mini-games in AS.

Games that take advantage of 3D:

*Ranger X: line scrolling and parallax everywhere, pseudo-scaling effects. etc.
*MUSHA: I'm not sure who owns the rights to his at this point (and i'm too lazy to check the Wii VC) but again, gobs of parallax, and the canyon level--acres of parallax and scaling enemies--would be so mind-numbingly amazing in 3D that I'd need clean pants after viewing it.
*Sonic 2/3/K: parallax as far as the eye can see.
The Adventures of Batman & Robin: *the technical showpiece for Genesis, with gobs of FX that would work amazingly well w/ depth attached to them. (Will never happen due to licensing concerns.)
*Landstalker: this won't happen, but if there is any game made where being able to judge the depth of jumps would benefit immensely from 3D, this is it.
*Vectorman: again, gobs and gobs of parallax, and that lens flare effect would look amazing with depth applied to its various layers.

Aaaand, not a SEGA title, but:

*Night Striker (arcade): in my dreams, but...
*Assault (arcade): in my dreams, but...

I should note that the reason we got the Genesis rev of Altered Beast was, beause unlike the arcade rev, it actually had some parallax, whereas games lik ESWAT, Alien Storm, and, yes, Shining Force have almost zero, so the odds of them porting games that don't at least somewhat show-off the 3D effect are very low. (Which isn't to say I wouldn't love both SF1 and 2, but 'wasting' the effect on the battle scenes seems kinda pointless.)

Why do these articles never touch on the #1 reason why Nintendo (and Sony...MS less so, for a variety of factors) will not go willingly into a software-only role?

**Licensing fees**.

It's amazing it is constantly ignored by people trying to grasp why Nintendo would 'belligerently' hang in on the HW market, despite that 'logic' says they could sell many more copies of their games spread across a half-dozen platforms (itself a very dubious proposition, of course).

Look at it this way: Nintendo might sell 100-150 million units of its own software throughout the lifespan of a given product (e.g. Wii)--a princely sum to be sure--but the overall software market on that platform is 4-5x that, and every one of those games sees Nintendo getting paid for doing, effectively, nothing more than acting as a gatekeeper.

Now, if you take that money away, you're looking at an income shortfall, across one HW product, of potentially billions of dollars--not exactly chump change, and not exactly money Nintendo will willingly walk away from, not because they are belligerent, but because that money is not replaceable, period. Simply putting Mario on iOS/Droid/PS4, etc. will not, in any way, make up for the loss of billions of dollars over a 4-5-year span.

What it boils down to is they simply cannot sell enough copies of their own games to recoup the money they will lose from licensing fees--money they get, again, for a bare minimum of investment.

(These are the 'business reasons' Reggie loosely touched on, I think last week, when asked--for the thousandth time--about going multi-platform. It simply does not make any sense and it will do catastrophic harm to Nintendo once the initial stock surge from going that route runs full on into reality.)

Something like a Nintendo Pico? Sure, why not, thought that seems like a product marketing/differentiation nightmare what with the 3DS and U already catering to the kid market.

First step for Nintendo to start getting Really Serious(TM) about online, on both their 3DS successor and/or the U.

@eza I think they ran into the ol' "we're out of budget and need to launch it now" phase of development--call it the Bethesda Development Method.

<i>You buy the game and it can be enjoyed just with that one software that you buy. </i>

Amen to this.

(And though I'm not a huge--or even big--Pokefan, I don't think anyone is going to complain that these games lack for content by not having DLC.)

@Dogpigfish err, what? What does IBM have to do w/ MS and Nintendo, except for providing some tech for their consoles??

@CaviarMeths in a world with Super Tennis, NES Tennis is a slap in the face

@rjejr I keep saying this (no one believes--or wants to believe--it, of course) but Nintendo does not make it easy to do things like online play and DLC. They are simply well behind the curve when it comes to the tools that they provide to developers.

Online play is a good example where, even now, it's a 'roll your own' mentality which, while it sounds good because it means more 'freedom', it also means more work, more time, and more money that devs simply are not going to spend on a platform that's struggling.

Source? I've been in the game biz for 16-years, and I work with companies--and have friends at many others--that have had to deal w/ these shortcomings.

(It'd make your head spin to know some of the other issues Nintendo's lot check reqs involve, too.)

It takes more work because, again, Nintendo's toolset for online implementation is terrible,something devs cannot tell you due to NDAs.

Memory=RAM
Space=storage device capacity.

Pedantic? Perhaps, but also correct.

Anyone that believes this [that this is a net positive for Criterion] needs their head examined.

@ThomasBW84 is 100% correct. If you aren't in Japan working on the exact project in question, you are literally kept nearly totally in the dark for as long as humanly possible.

If I had to guess, this is something that could be solved simply by rebooting the routers at these locations, but good luck conveying that to the management.

@PinkSpider no, but we do have lives (jobs, kids, second jobs, wives, etc.) that don't conveniently line up with our friends and families, period, and not having online MP for those people--which, if you're over 25, is most of them--is a deal-breaker.

@Minny a company that produces things like the DS family, the Wii, and WiiU, can hardly be called "conservative"--they take more risks in this area than any of their competitors by a mile.

(The PS4, on the other hand, is the epitome of take-no-risks 'conservative', business practices.)

Yes, they are conservative w/ their money, but that's a virtue, as Sony could tell you right about now...

BLAME NINTENDO--this is a tools issue, and until Nintendo's tool chain improves, you're going to keep missing out on online except for those devs that are willing to jump through serious hoops to get it working.

Full stop.

Dig a little (assuming you guys have development--not PR, development--contacts) and you'll find out exactly why games like Batman (among others) have no online MP component.

(Hint: it has nothing to do w/ their [third parties] unwillingness to include it and everything to do w/ tools, or the lack thereof, provided by a co. whose name starts with 'N' and ends with 'O'.)

Galoob licensed their products for release in North America.

Pro-tip: before acting like the Internet, perhaps most of you should wait for more information before doing the dance of doom? Just a thought!

I'm not going to read all these comments so (hopefully) someone already got here, but I registered specifically to say that in all my years in the game biz (including on the 'journo' side), I have never seen such a ridiculous, softball, interview. These questions were so soft that the ball evaporated upon leaving the pitcher's hand.

Utterly laughable and a teaching moment for everything that is wrong with game 'journalism'.

Pro-tip: LEADING the interviewee to your desired outcome--in this case polishing Pachter's shoes--is not valid journalism.

Note: whoever conducted this do NOT quit your day job--game journalism absolutely needs tons less of this and more actual questions with at least a facade of teeth, not this friendly chat over beers at the pub where you help poor old Pachter deal with all those mean people out in the world that just odn't understand him like you do. God help us if you actually land a meaningful interview with someone of note--you'd set a new record for slobbering over your subject.