Fath

As a Switch owner, I'm not particularly interested in pontifications on where the Steam Deck fits in a gaming lifestyle, like most of these reviews (or at least their quoted bits) seem eager to harp on. We know it lets you unchain the concept of gaming from a static PC. That's the whole point. Duh.

What I would be interested in reading about would be the ergonomics and performance of this thing. Do the sticks and buttons have the right amount of resistance? Does the screen perform well for the PC games it's playing? Does the utterly absurd size of this thing strain wrists over short or long gaming sessions? How's the real-world battery life, or heat dissipation?

This roundup is disappountingly lacking in reporting on most of those factors.

So after watching the trailer, I'm left thinking "Binding of Isaac meets Cartoon Network meets... lootboxes???"

I can't deny that the graphics are sumptious, but the component vibes here are setting off all the alarm bells D:

"Mario Kart" and "level cap" are two phrases that should never be in the same sentence or headline together, and shame on those who would put them there (which technically includes myself for bothering to click and write this comment ).

This review constantly reads as though it's making glowing excuses for the game's dogged frustrations and shortcomings, and I can see nothing of the claimed audio/graphical majesty from the provided screenshots - I can hardly even tell what's supposed to be going on in most of them.

I'm not necessarily knocking the reviewer here (since an entirely different reviewer for this site seemed to enjoy this game's predecessor just as much), but man, the dissonance between the description of the subject material and its reception in this piece is weird.

"Thousands of dollars worth" is underselling this story by quite a bit. Though that video is... atrocious... I count at least 15 of those plastic bins of games, with around 30 games per bin, for at least about 450 games total, each of which are probably going to be worth a minimum of, what, $100 in today's market?

This haul will clear $50,000 without breaking a sweat, and very likely reaches comfortably into the six-figures.

@PinkPuffball Then per the contact information (recklessly?) provided in the screenshot of the usage instructions, you could always try giving ol' Joe Conklin down at NOA a ring at the listed number .

@Ogbert A couple of decades? If only. 3DS games were still being actively released as recently as May of last year; that doesn't even give them a couple years lifespan on the eShop before they're going to be gone for good, with no secondary used market to fall back on.

@Ogbert It's my understanding that DLC on most platforms is tied to a specific user account via encypted digital signatures, same as digital games themselves. The PSP may have been an exception, since it was such an early foray into the technology, but no users on any extant digital platform are able to download DLC they've purchased onto a memory card and just hawk it on eBay or something.

The memory card market you suggest as a digital analog to physical used game sales just doesn't exist, unless you're talking about buying pirated products, which a) are their own thing, and b) are a total ripoff and support of bad actors to pay money for instead of just setting up yourself.

For the love of whatever God exists in Dream Land, you get that thing out of your mouth right now, Kirby; that car is absolutely filthy!

It took me entire minutes to get something of a handle on what the heck was going on with those room pictures.

My conclusion: the words "luxury" and "capsule hotel" should never be used in the same sentence.

Geezus. My wrists get noticeably sore enough after too much time playing the Switch in full handheld mode; if I tried to rassle with this monstrosity (which, looking it up, is nearly twice the weight), I think they'd just snap clean off.

This thing is RSI just waiting to happen, no joke.

I have absolutely zero interest in any of the parties involved in this story, but that subtitle is low-key brilliant. Kudos

I kind of hate that I understand the cold corporate logic behind why this hasn't been and isn't likely to be localized, despite it looking like a rather beautiful and fun romp. It's just too darn niche (and that weird title isn't doing it any favors in that regard from a Western perspective), and conveys too darn much of its charm, character, and substance through expensive and thorny to localize language, instead of universally-understood kinetic gameplay like many of Nintendo's blockbusters.

This game practically screams "subpar potential return on localization investment," and that's a crying shame.

Having seen a few fragments of what human players can achieve in modern Tetris games, this one must really control strikingly sluggishly if the speed at level 29 here is all humans can manage =o

Beyond that, this is really super cool from a hobbyist AI perspective, not only in the elegance of the decision-making algorithms that must be underpinning it, but in the system's ability to either handle the sudden outlandish palette swaps without breaking a sweat, or alternately in its hooks into the native NES code to reconstruct and track the board state that way, depending on the approach the programmer might've taken. Neato!

Pokemon left realism behind all the way back when they decided that 'mons would "evolve" from one species to another instead of changing form by, y'know, growing up like a proper animal. I know that sounds like a petty gripe, but it's an original sin that's kinda directly responsible for this mess, wherein size variation has to be artificially applied to ageless creatures in a twisted simalacrum of reality instead of just naturally following from younglings being smaller than their elders.

Aaanyway, the result is something that superficially looks fine so long as you don't think about it too hard - except for the Pokemon that've also committed the arguable design sin of cribbing too much from humanity, since our brains are hardwired to notice when things have gone terribly out of whack with depictions of the human form. They've painted themselves into a corner with these freakish Lopunnies and Gardevoir in particular, and there's no easy way out.

I was going to make a joke about this maybe just being the luckiest player in the known universe, but after crunching the numbers, I can't begin to grasp how to even refer to what turn out to be roughly 1-in-10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (that's 130 zeros) odds .

Anyway, though, it's only natural for Niantic to give this bug top priority; bugs that hinder a handful of users are unfortunate, yes, but a bug that "helps" players bypass an online, connected game's rules and natural limitations can quickly and irreversibly upend the entire game's balance.

It sucks, but the asymmetrical logic that this stuff is subject to really is a case of what players want not being the same as what they actually need.

Wow, even though I can't be bothered to actually watch through the video, this article was actually eye-opening for me, since I'd just scrolled past the first headline on this project the other day assuming it was one of those "shove-a-console's-guts-into-an-old-handheld's-shell" sort of deal. The thought that in some alternate reality this full-fat polybeast could've been legitimately run on the same lil' thing I played Circle of the Moon and Golden Sun on is actually low-key mindblowing.

For anyone who didn't grow up in this era, there was a distinct order to what sort of porting wizardry could possibly be achieved on Nintendo's handhelds, fanboy or not. The GBC was the first system that could faithfully reproduce (and sometimes improve upon) full NES games; I had great fun playing Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on it. The GBA was the first system that could master the sophistication of SNES games; Super Mario Advance's port of SMW on it was an acclaimed demonstration of its power.

Nobody dared dream, though, that a full, polygonal N64/PS1 behemoth could be played on a Game Boy until Mario 64 DS came along the next generation and blew all our minds (whatever the port's quirks may be in retrospect). The crazy thought that this could've been achieved a full hardware generation sooner makes calling this an "impossible port" well deserved, however cranky the Nokia fans in here might be that their odd little technological sidebranch never really caught on.

@Nintendo_Thumb Is that so? Huh, that's even weirder, then; thanks for the context .

@CactusMan Mountains of well-deserved invectives aside, that 10% royalties bit was the real eyebrow-raiser for me in this story, too - not for any issues of legality, but from a pure investment product standpoint.

Tacking a mandatory double-digit future-sales surcharge onto something whose value comes almost entirely from the expectation of flipping it for a profit seems like one of the absolute worst things you could do (or best, I suppose, if you were trying to kill this fad dead). Like, anyone who bought this for $26k thinking they could sell it next week for $27k would now be actually losing money on doing so, instead of clearing a cool grand, and you would think the resulting disinterest from people staying away from it accordingly would deflate the value significantly.

Konami somehow found a way to make the bottled stupidity of NFT's even stupider. It's almost impressive.

@Muddy_4_Ever As a counterpoint to bringing a Switch on the road, I once read about a few hotshot NFL(?) players that would jaunt on over to the nearest department store whenever they stopped, buy a new PS3 to play in their hotel room, and then just... leave it there when they left.

Not to condemn pro athletes as a species or anything, but throwing ridiculous amounts of money at the world's most meticulously supercharged sacks of testosterone et al can result in strange effects .

@Davzilla I'd point out that even in his moment of using the internet as a shoulder to cry on, this piece of work can't help but stroke his own ego off:
"I'm picturing my [$300k-$1m] Charizard in my head...something real, something worth a lot of money that is real. Damn bro, I just went from eleven first edition boxes to five[...]"

Just because somebody loves Pokemon doesn't automatically make them a good person, and most everyone can smell the spiritual stank this dude's putting out from all the way across the interwebs; he's practically made a career out of broadcasting it, after all. If Logan Paul himself can't help but to keep bragging about how good he's got it, with his million-dollar cards and multiple remaining first-edition boxes, then what place is there for us to feel any shred of sympathy for him?

I caught Blabuff, a T-posing lizard with a grass mullet.

@fafonio I probably went a bit overboard on the whole 'dinner party' skit, but I needed something to occupy my fingers with, and NFT defenders are just such an easy target to mercilessly roast

Sufficiently compensating artists for a craft that's simultaneously so precious and so selfless is an age-old problem that's been tackled by an ever-changing mix of altruistic patrons, avaricious collectors, and exploitative speculators; humanity has yet to find a perfect balance for it, but NFT's are a particularly silly one, leaning pretty much exclusively on the last leg of the tripod while disregarding the others to the point of absurdity.

Setting aside patrons as their own thing, the point of collectors throughout the ages, whether they dealt in original works or artificially-scarce reproductions, is that they've collected art embodied in actual things. First-print books and records. Framed animation cels. Limited edition artwork prints. All respectably tangible things, all reasonably well-received and regarded, and all still forms of media that 99.99% of the people suffering existential digital angst could still be churning out.

As far as I'm aware, NFT's don't capture the art itself; the blockchain, as a fundamentally massively-mirrored concept, would quickly grow unmanageably huge if they did. All an NFT is, fundamentally, is a digitally-authenticated certificate of authenticity, divorced and detached from the actual art it's supposed to be authenticating. And nobody throughout all of human history has ever made such a sad collection as one comprised solely of certificates of authenticity.

@fafonio The difference between the Mona Lisa and an NFT can probably be illustrated most directly by observing that somebody - anybody, really - could trivially make and sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa (some big markets might arbitrarily decide not to touch it out of bad PR if it wasn't being officially done by the nation of France or the Louvre, but it'd still exist just as well either way).

You could then, I suppose, brag to people about it at dinner parties:
A: "Y'know, I made a big purchase this summer; perhaps you've heard of her, her name is Mona."
B: "You don't mean... you actually bought the Mona Lisa??? Wow, can I come over and see it sometime?"
A: "Even better; I can show it to you right now!" [Whips out phone]
B: "Oh, uh, yeah, that's nice, but I was really hoping to see the actual painting."
A: "Ah, sorry, that has to stay at the Louvre. Cultural treasure and all that."
B: "I guess I can see that; that's very considerate of you. Well, can you get me in to see it sometime, then? It's always been a dream of mine."
A: "Oh, no, I don't actually have any viewing rights or anything. Have you tried to get tickets to that place? It's booked solid for months!"
B: "Wait, I'm confused; if you can't actually do anything with the painting, and don't even have permission to see it, then what exactly do you own?"
A: "I already told you, look!" [gestures towards phone]
B: "Well, I guess it is a nice picture of it; send me a copy, 'k?"
A: "Sure, I can send you the link, but just know that I'm the one who owns it, ok?"
B: "Um, yeah, ok. So, yeah, congrats; I guess it's kind of neat knowing that you've got something unique, at least. I mean, it's not like France could just up and make another link to the same picture or anything, right?"
A: "..."

That's a pretty ballsy markup for putting two extremely tiny decals on a ~$50 base model. Geeeeeeeesh!

@SleepyAnimal Difficult and impossible are two very different things (and for a tangential soapbox, IMHO there are far too many people these days conflating the two in more ways than in defining art). I mean, agreeing to disagree would be one thing, but to effectively say that the definition of art is entirely subjective is to render the word - and the concept - entirely meaningless, which would be a real shame.

Ah, well, I appreciate the civility of your response, at least, and it's not like I have the stamina to argue the point to the bitter end myself. Thanks for the modest discussion.

@SleepyAnimal Not really, though. Art is notoriously difficult to precisely define, of course, but if there's one thing it fundamentally is, it's a form of communication. There has to be some sort of actual meaning being appreciably imparted from artist to audience, even if it's a wordless emotion or self-referential metacommentary.

The sort of pieces you describe aren't art because the maker was "the only person in the world who thought to do it, thought to call it important and actually put the work in to do it," they're art - if they are at all - because they capture, crystallize, and convey the artist's novel perspective on life, the world, or art itself.

What you described would just be self-gratification, and a narcissistic expectation to be praised for it by hangers-on and enablers.

Sigh. If one's really dead-set on dedicating years of their life to building a monument to their own virginity (s'ok, I can joke about it because I'm one too), it would really behoove them to at least do so in a format that can survive having a humble fridge magnet thrown at it.

@Shambo I'm sure I've never seen anything half as bad as whatever horror stories you might have, but man, the PSP's UMD discs sure were a design nightmare, weren't they? Whoever thought cramming a high-speed spinning disc drive into a handheld system, outfitting the disc-cartridges with wide-open windows that dirt or anything else could fall into, and closing the whole thing up with a low-resistance pop latch that you could practically knock open with a light tap was a good idea... really shouldn't be making those sorts of decisions.

(Though if you told me that they also stayed on the team long enough to mandate that the system's successor had to use a proprietary and expensive memory card format that invariably suffered from fatal read-write wear degradation after a few years, I'd believe you.)

@Spider-Kev It sounds like you're just having a bad day, so by all means get it out of your system, but this technically can be done on the original hardware and software using a Game Genie (which for the born-yesterday folks was a contemporary piece of 80's tech that wedged in as an interposer between NES and cartridge and merely twiddled the signals between the two), so... fawn away?

@MrFred89 It's not a gussied-up slot machine that autoplays its core gameplay while compelling you to log in every eight hours to spend your accumulated stamina, so no, it's not a great fit for a phone game.

These aren't your everyday game boxes; they're apparently specially-marked display-only variants for use on store shelves, and ones that have never been folded into shape at that.

They're actually legitimately rare to the point of likely near-uniqueness, but just being unique doesn't make something valuable - Goldeneye boxes can't very well become "the next form of currency" if there's only two such 'bills' in existence.

I have to admit, though, I do kinda like the thought of pristine empty boxes becoming the de facto collector's items instead of sealed games - an empty box (usually) means there's one more game cartridge that's been used and enjoyed as it should've been out there, instead of being sealed in the crypt of its own sacrosanct packaging for all time.

@nessisonett Your comment is ironically a bleaker condemnation of capitalism than anything one could find in a GTA game .

A huge amount of this side-by-side comes down to lighting, and seeing this side-by-side diverge around the 4-minute mark into a difference between night and day (literally!) makes it clear that that wasn't controlled for here.

I'm no defender of this remaster's hack job, but this video's actual value is limited.

@KateGray I was honestly puzzled as to why this entire article wasn't a Kate Gray nerdgasm, but I suppose you must be in a food(?) coma from all that sea-bass pie.

Reporting on a video showing an easter egg, then embedding a screenshot of said video player, complete with "play" button, is a mean trick, NLife .

This news has legitimately moved this game up a few notches on my radar. I can't say I've ever realized how far diligent foley work can go to building immersion before.

I get that y'all are just following the press release's lead, but "cutesy" is a weird way to describe this game's art direction.

Grizzly Man: Pokemon Edition.

I always liked the look of this and hoped it would turn out alright; given the ambition of what this game was aiming for on such a shoestring Kickstarter budget, "it's pretty jank, but nails all the important parts" was about the best one could reasonably hope for.

This review's a win in my book!

@nhSnork You may not be directly replying to me, but I see you calling me out there. Perish the thought of getting into an argument over it, for many reasons, so let me instead reemphasize that for all my griping, I'm coming from a place of love - I still enjoyed the game and am glad it exists; it's just almost as fun to chew it out as it was to play, too.

Respectfully disagree - Apollo Justice is the last Ace Attorney game I've gotten around to playing so far (tackling them in order), but IMHO while still enjoyable, it's probably the weakest of them.

Scruffy Phoenix - fine. Mysterious bracelet powers - fine. Trucy - a cutie. But the framework of the trial system loses a lot of its driving narrative tension by having its main "antagonist" in Prosecutor Gavin be such a by-the-books, heart-of-gold guy - instead of battling to reveal the truth in a nefarious system determined to hide it, it all too often comes across as just trying to play your assigned role with enough threadbare competence to not entirely grind things to a halt while the opposing prosecutor leads you along by the hand at getting to the truth of things.

Beyond that, the final case in particular ends up being a trainwreck, with glaring plot holes big enough to drive a noodle cart through (I'd say more about them, but wouldn't want to get into spoiler territory), and a "time travel" system as you put it that's rendered a hot mess by its inability to keep the past and future causally separated - asking questions to people in the past about things you've only learned of in the present day (to say nothing of presenting evidence to them that you won't have picked up for years to come) is cool gameplay-wise, but it makes absolutely no actual sense. Additionally, putting so much of that case's attention into the past/present investigation gimmick leaves the trial itself as being just... dull - mostly just a relatively straightforward presentation of all the things you've uncovered, at least as it struck me, without much of any challenge or surprise to speak of. To top it all off, the subversive commentary and moralizing around the in-game judicial system is highly dubious, and arguably drastically undermines a lot of what the previous games had built, in a not-good way.

And while the music case may have been conceptually quite clever, if I never hear or see that banal set of chords with poorly-matched lyrics again, it'll be too soon!

@HeadPirate No offense meant, really, but that's the most absurdly earnest effort to defend indisputably clear musical plagiarism since Vanilla Ice's infamous soundbite defending his Ice Ice Baby bassline (https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4).

Anyway, as I was going to post before seeing a wall of text I just had to comment on... at least this ripoff's actually a pretty nice rendition of the tune!

What exactly is "FOMA" supposed to stand for, again? Fear Of Missing Aran?

I know there's ample room to criticize this from every angle - priced too high for such a minimalist game, way too minimalist for a SE game, SE fantasy games inevitably end up comically bloated and self-indulgent, etc. - but damned if something about it doesn't scratch the exact itch that says "this is what I need in my gaming life right now" for me. Might preorder this.

The review's complaint that you "have to" grind for DSS cards in CotM misses the point entirely - you aren't supposed to get all the cards your first time through the game, or even know where they are!

To that purpose, the quality of life upgrade to notify the player of failed card drops actually runs counter to the original game design; it would be like putting a popup in SotN every time you kill a Schmoo saying "Drops Crissaegrim!," and having reviewers dinging the game for "having to" stop and farm it for an hour straight to get it on their first playthrough.

Forget "adorable," the sound of that music box is downright **haunting**. Really sublime.

@MikaelForslind Thanks for the clarification; with a little bit of programming experience myself, I respect the work that went into the NES port and the impracticality of considering backporting (frontporting?) individual features. You should be proud of what you've accomplished here, and deserve to have it viewed only as a positive, not as something missing!

As a consumer, it's just unavoidably unfortunate. It would've been awesome if the USB drive as part of the Collection limited edition could've just included the ROM for the 8-bit version as a bonus, but I can understand how that would've essentially devalued the product from a sales side and cut the legs out from your separate publishing deal for it. Ah well, wishful thinking.

In any case, congrats on your games and all their physical permutations.

My knowledge of Bluetooth protocol stacks is about as dated as... well, Nintendo's feature support, but last I checked, high-quality audio playback is handled through a completely different firmware profile to two-way voice-optimized audio. It's an awkward implementation under the best of circumstances, and with Nintendo already apparently pushing the boundaries of their chip's bandwidth by supporting simultaneous audio and controller profiles, these circumstances look far from ideal.

I really wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the big N to add wireless voice chat on top of what they're now supporting, and this is coming from someone who feels hella vindicated that my confident prediction at the Switch's launch of Bluetooth headphone support being only a firmware stack update away is finally coming true. The technological limits of their implementation just don't look conducive to it.

So I don't want to nitpick here, but am I correct in parsing out that the Collection doesn't include the extra areas from Awakening's 8-bit version? I can see both the technological and marketing reasons for them to be limited to the latter, but it's a bit troublesome to have a bundle that's missing content like that.