Fath

@Bratwurst35 "What modern fare punches down at it's source material?"

Shrek, for a pointed example. Or the Hotel Transylvania series. Or Despicable Me, to use an example from Illumination itself, and the entire genre of the anti-hero more broadly besides. Heck, even the latest Star Wars trilogy wrestled with the idea: "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

There's something noble to be found in the matter-of-fact embrace the Super Mario movie has for its own straightforwardly nonsensical world, where punching a floating block makes power-ups pop out, with no explanation at how or why even attempted. Where even in a fish-out-of-water scenario, Mario's reaction isn't "how does that even make sense," or "how the heck is that block floating in midair," but "ew, why did it have to be mushrooms." Where Jack Black's attempt to make his fire-breathing dragon turtle villain ironically cool by turning him into a lovesick rockstar adds nothing to the character, but is rather actively derided by the rest of the cast and the movie itself, because being a fire-breathing dragon turtle was enough already. It was always enough.

But yeah, rant aside, I can understand where you're coming from at being rubbed the wrong way by the movie's railroaded story; even I commented on that to my friends after the show. In my case, though, I contextualized it as being a curiously pronounced case of Miyamoto's longstanding and explicit dislike of plot in favor of pure aesthetics and gameplay, and genuinely interesting in the way that translated to the screen, successfully or not. The movie was pretty fun for what it was, if you could forgive it for that - in a bizzare sort of way, one could justifiably call it the John Wick of animated kid-friendly films in that regard .

@Fangleman32 'Kay.

@Sherlock- @RainbowGazelle
My expectations for the movie were very low when I let my friends drag me out to it, but I can handily say that it was an enjoyable experience and time well spent. Bowser's buffoonery in this clip and elsewhere is a counterbalance to the shocking brutal danger the movie cultivates around him, and it honestly balances out pretty well in context (going in blind, at least).

As a whole, the best thing I can say about the movie is that it had a remarkably faithful Nintendo-true earnestness to its script, in pointed departure from the cynical edginess of some modern fare that tries to be cool by punching down on its source material. Even in Bowser's case, the cringey absurdity of his motivation stands in distinct contrast to the other characters', and is itself implictly a major driver of why he's the villain here.

Rest assured, this movie gets what makes Nintendo Nintendo; despite the studio that made it, and this clickbaity PR clip, it really does stand strong without collapsing into Miniony rubbish.

@Ralizah And that's putting it lightly. Once people exit their college years into our individualistic, phone-staring, overhurried, stranger-dangered, already-paired-up, and constantly-aging world, social anxiety can be the least of one's problems. Finding a friend is one thing; finding a friend you can wake up snuggled next to is an entirely different beast - er, Pokemon.

@Ralizah The people you're talking about are well aware of that, thanks. It's easier said than done.

Dang, that's an awful lot of packaging to pack up a measly five gummies and a plastic chotchky. Practically makes a typical stateside $1.99 offering of sixty or so gummy bears dumped unceremoniously into a plastic bag look eco-friendly (not to mention a screaming deal).

Also, while I'm being Mr. Grumpy McGrumpspants here, I've gotta nitpick that the 'giant' Minish Cap boss was, rather charmingly, a completely normal chu; it was just the player's perspective that was shrunk down to titular Minish form for the fight. If a magical packet of Nipponese sweets could pull that off, now that would be pretty newsworthy!

Excuse you, Motion Twin, but surely you meant "insanely tough battles with Death and even Dracula himself," not the other way around!

Speaking as someone who hasn't played S/V, I really don't feel spoiled at all from having read this... though I also don't feel like it actually amounts to anything except the literally spelled-out mythical progenitor poke in that book.

I get that some people out there will cry spoiler from seeing two pixels of a game character's ankle, but there's really absolutely nothing of substance here, at least not without the context of actually getting to it in the game.

Man, that second poster gets the eyes all kinds of wrong. Bowser's got a bad case of lazy eye, and Peach's eyes are downright physically wandering - her right eye is nestled up against the bridge of her nose, but her left eye is so far off to the side of her face that I think her father might've been a halibut. Uuuuurrrgh.

Everyone's got their hot takes on the 'rus itself, but meanwhile I'm just over here marvelling at how irredeemably evil "After testing with a Pokémon forcibly given Pokérus..." sounds. XD

That's a great story, but this article missummarizes it a bit, for people who care about that sort of thing.

By my reading, it was a 'bad batch' of Gamecubes that was to blame here, not Metroid Prime discs. The CPU's in the bad batch would basically freak out when the game ran too fast (specifically, a specific pipeline that MP used in a unique way would catastrophically overflow when the game shoved too many graphics into it too quickly), and since there was no function for the game to be able to dynamically detect if the CPU was from a good or bad batch and tackle the problem head-on, the only fix was to painstakingly insert slowdowns into the game code by hand to make sure that the game just never quite overflowed the pipe.

As for why the only way they could reliably reproduce and test the problem was by putting the system on ice, that's anybody's guess. Speaking as someone who's worked in validation testing, sometimes there's just an element of black magic in electronics that you've gotta roll with - if a certain system only misbehaves while turning it upside-down and chanting ancient Aramaic, then by golly, you better break out your inverted English-to-Aramaic dictionary. Serious hats off to the intrepid testers who identified and tested out this bug; even figuring out that abnormal ambient temp was the make-or-break factor, much less exhaustively testing it under those conditions, must've been one hell of a bug report to tease out.

@Deviant-Dork If you want to engage, then engage with substance. Antisemitism has a real meaning, and it's not just "off-color jokes." If you can't identify the specific harmful stereotype or threat against Jewish people that the tweet in question is promulgating, then you're the one doing more harm than good by diluting the meaning of the term into irrelevance.

@Deviant-Dork nuh-uh

@Deviant-Dork Mocking Kanye West's own racism doesn't make one an antisemite. I think what you meant to say was "You're putting up a tweet that exists adjacent to antisemitism, which makes it and by extension you liable to get caught up as collateral damage in a PC clusterbomb if the internet's spotlight-for-a-day happens to swing the wrong way."

@Jireland92 Suppose everything happened just as Taylor says it did, and you're the Platinum exec charged with making sure her departure doesn't put the entire B3 project at risk. Do you:
a) Look around for whatever voice actress you can get for at the original price of $4k or less, knowing that you'll get some no-name that'll likely be of inferior quality to your first pick, likely to sound substantially different from her, and will do nothing at all to quell fan unease, or
b) Break out the emergency piggy bank, and spend whatever it takes to bring in the biggest, most well-reputed VA in the business so that you're able to spin the whole debacle as a net positive instead of an albatross around your neck?

The scenario seems entirely plausible to me. If Taylor was lying about anything she said, then Platinum Games has really dropped the ball in not setting the record straight by now (and no, a vague trollish tweet by their very trollish CEO doesn't count).

Just want to point out that the "professionality" some people are lauding Ms. Hale for is still her very much taking sides in this matter - when all she has to say is that she's not at liberty to say anything, then she's leaving her actions to speak louder than her words.

If you're thrilled to see Hale effectively tell Taylor to buzz off, then just say so; let's not pretend that the former's doing anything noble by staying above the fray while she graciously cashes in her paychecks, though.

@Brett Of course I could answer my own questions if I wanted to, but I'm under no obligation to, because they're my questions, not yours. I even gave you an invitation to adopt one of them as your own, and you declined.

To answer the question you chose to ask, I do find Ms. Hale's public position on VA rights pretty incongruous with her acceptance of this role, and it seems like something doesn't add up there. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, though, I would speculate that she might've been unaware of Ms. Taylor's tribulations when she took the job, which in turn suggests that Platinum's offer to Hale was significantly higher than what they offered Taylor, avoiding any obvious red flags. Would make sense, since losing their longtime star VA due to penny-pinching would be a PR red alert, even in Kamiya's mercurial orbit, and the prudent thing to do to avoid hemorrhaging hype would be an emergency spend to bring in the biggest, best-reputation VA in the industry to protect their own (a strategy that seemed to be working until today).

So then no, my guess would be that Hale was being paid well enough by P+ that she didn't feel there was anything sketchy going on - until now, at least. It'll be interesting to see if she has anything to say on this matter going forward.

Oh, and to get back to your ongoing derision, the "place" I pulled my estimate of the revenue of this franchise from was a combination of the former lead VA's public statements, historic video game sales data, and math. I think you're confusing it with your own "place," which has come from nothing whatsoever besides your gut.

@Brett You know nothing about me or how much effort I do or don't put into any of my comments; don't presume you do.

I'm refusing to walk blindly into your blatant gotcha question both because its a blatant gotcha question, and because the definition of "fair" is actually at the core of the question you're skimming the surface of. Do you mean fair as in "able to support a living wage, absent independent wealth?" Fair as in "appropriate market value for the job being performed, in a transparent market with balanced power between employers and employees and prices set by supply and demand?" Fair as in "sufficiently safeguarding the legacy and continued development of a character beloved by millions of fans?" Fair as in "in-line with Ms. Hale's going rate for her other most recent jobs?" Fair as in "sufficiently progressive for the healthy evolution of an industry plagued by notorious undervaluing of its work?" Fair as in "enough that Ms. Taylor would've taken the job, avoiding this whole mess, if they'd just offered it to her in the first place?" Fair as in "all Platinum could reasonably be expected to have afforded to pay for the work?" Or do you just mean tautologically fair in that both parties to the agreement find it acceptable enough to have agreed in the first place?

@Brett
"In any case, she has been easily replaced by a vastly more successful voice actor who I bet knows what she is doing..."
"What we can be sure of is that a vastly more successful voice actor has taken over the role..."

And I couldn't even begin to speculatively answer your question about Ms. Hale unless you first define what "fair" means in your context.

@Tober I can respect your points too, because I'm not a financial expert either, and I think we're both acknowledging similar levels of ambiguity. Whether we personally agree on whether or not that amounts to reasonable or plausible differences is mostly academic, because your annoyance is rooted in a fair grievance instead of ad hominem attacks on the VA's credibility and talent like Brett insists on continuing to make. Cheers .

@Brett It is just you; your reply backs up exactly what I said your point was (it's the rhetorical equivalent of saying "I didn't steal that car, I just smashed its window and drove off with the keys tucked into the visor"); and I've already amply demonstrated why the number she put out is, if not perfectly accurate, at least entirely unremarkable for the series' sales.

@Tober VGChartz is a useful source, but not an authoritative one, largely because (if memory serves) they have no insight into digital sales, just physical units shipped to retailers. For comparison, the Grand Theft Auto series is reported as having made about $8 billion in revenue since the release of GTAV in 2013, yet VGC only shows that game as having shipped 170 million copies (with 380 million for the series as a whole since 1998).

If we take a rough 40:1 ratio for revenue to sales number from that data and apply in to Bayonetta's 3 million, that puts us at $120 million series revenue. Doesn't perfectly line up with Ms. Taylor's number, but it's in the same order of magnitide. With fuzz factors of VGC's inherent inaccuracy handling different sales patterns over time, potentially different methods of accounting (especially for very different national cultures), and Taylor being a VA, not a CPA, it's totally plausible, at least.

More importantly, though, Brett was latching onto this number in order to try to discredit the entire story, which is completely unfair. Even if Bayo 3 was a no-name Kickstarted indie, they'd get laughed out of the room for trying to pitch professional, multimillion-seller voice acting as a mere $4000 stretch goal.

@Marxally Too many people in this thread seem to think that VA'ing the heavily-stylized main character of an entire AAA game consists of, to quote just one of them, "a couple of days work," sooooo... yeah. =/

@Brett The first game broke the million-sales mark over a decade ago (https://www.destructoid.com/bayonetta-breaks-one-million-sales/). $450 million lifetime revenue for all releases and rereleases of the series is entirely plausible.

@nimnio And customers/fans are free to sympathize with the voice of a beloved character of theirs and boycott the game if they want.

@Poco_Lypso A heck of a lot of humanity's woes come from our silly inability to naturally grasp the differences in numbers. Of course nobody would expect "a million" for this role, but even just four-one-hundredths of that would've still been ten times more than what Ms. Taylor was offered here.

@Truegamer79 Much like you say "Konami kinda boycotted themselves," if this series ends up crashing and burning after trying to stiff their lead VA, the only ones to blame for this tragedy will be Platinum.

@Severian The internet says that your memory is pretty much spot-on: https://www.gamesradar.com/niko-voice-actor-earned-only-100000/

@HxRaider @Grocery-bag Charles Martinet is a multi-millionaire, from what a quick Google search tells me.

@MrGawain I have no idea if what you posted is at all accurate, and really, really don't want to know, but that's a pretty heinous spoiler to be casually dropping like that.

Any $25,000 piece of Mario Kart memorabilia had darn well better be fully driveable, and this thing looks awfully short on legroom.

"...Are you more likely to watch the movie now?"

<raises hand> Oh hell yeah. I was solidly lukewarm about this whole deal before, but this? This does put a smile on my face.

Oh God it's simultaneously eating its own head and wearing its own face as a hoodie; what the hell, TPC?

Urgh, this... ain't a good design, for similarities to multiple creatures both real and fictional that I'll spare the more innocent commenters from having referenced. Just straight nope.

@Chocobo_Shepherd https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/goolies

@Chocobo_Shepherd (et al) You can be sure the phrasing was 100% intentional; old Rare was a team of absolutely incorrigible naughty jokesters when they could get away with it. Doubly so if it happened to dovetail with peculiar Britishisms, as with, say, when they named one of their later games around that time period (for Xbox, RIP the Nintendo-partnership golden age) "Grabbed by the Ghoulies."

@Tangerine The culture that's arisen over third-party reprints of a game being considered "special editions" never ceases to baffle me. Call me old-fashioned, and to each their own, but the idea of a collector being expected to snub supporting a game's official launch in favor of only jumping onto the bandwagon once it's been well and truly played out seems as pointless as it is backwards.

It really should be an expected requirement for any "special," "limited," or "collector's" edition to come with a lifetime pass for content DLC; besides that, though, the way complete-on-disc/cart physical rereleases used to work was as bargain-priced, non-limited "Game of the Year" (whether or not they really were) editions to reflect that you're buying a by then well-known quantity as a sensible and pragmatic shopper, minus the hype. LRG's production runs may (or may not) result in a similar end product, but their parasitic, FOMO-baiting, pre-nostalgia-milking business model is a total perversion of the way things should be, and not worth giving the time of day, much less basing purchasing decisions on, IMHO.

/rant

Ah, I caught a Flaming Espinas once; fortunately, my doctor was able to prescribe a cream that cleared it right up. /nod

@AstroTheGamosian Haha, all fair enough; happy eating .

@AstroTheGamosian I've had Mission white corn tortillas sitting in the pantry for what must be upwards of a year before, and still be unblemished and delicious after an obligatory minute of deep-frying in peanut oil, just sayin'.

I can't comment on flour tortillas if that's your preference (you monster), and I wouldn't expect your family to take food storage advice from some rando on a Nintendo news site, but their corn tortillas don't really go stale or moldy like, say, bread does; a few weeks or months at room temp ain't gonna bother them one bit.

Suggestion: deli slicer.

@Crono1973 People aren't buying these games for investment purposes, they're buying them to (eventually) play and enjoy. You've adopted a beancounter's fallacy of trying to classify life's experiences as financial assets.

No disrespect, but bullet dodged - I'm sure they would've done a fine job in their own right, but the world would be a poorer place without the soundtrack we ended up with.

@Kid_Sickarus Exactly; releasing an entire new revision of a bespoke console just to update its game selection misses the entire point of the commonsense console-and-game model that was fundamental to the thing it's nostalgifying in the first place.

I know it's been a while since you've been in the console business, Sega, but you're doing it wrong.

I'm more interested in the story of how deeply Kate Gray had to dig before finally coming across the perfect picture of a dog and a trophy (apparently taken by a resident of Alpha Centauri VIII) with which to headline her article, personally.

Ma-an, the people spurning BotW as being too empty would absolutely die if they tried to play Wind Waker, especially the original Gamecube version. Poor souls.

@Anti-Matter That may be, but respectfully, it misses the point: Mario games have never been about the weapons, aiming or otherwise (excepting that crazy Rabbids game, I suppose); they're platformers that happen to have defeatable enemies, while I'd wager R&C games are at heart third-person shooters that happen to have platforming (feel free to tell me I'm wrong, though, since I've sadly never gotten around to playing any of the latter myself).

Sunshine would be the second-best 3D Mario of all time (tough to top Odyssey) if it just had a tracker for how many blue coins were left in each stage; that's my take and I'm sticking to it.

Related take: Sunshine's blue coins were the prototype for Odyssey's Power Moons. =o