Fath

I can't believe that in all these comments, nobody's pointed out the game's most obvious, glaring flaw yet:

Main character is not, in fact, bald.
1/10 Literally unplayable.

Ok, AI has officially gone too far. Google's entering mad-scientist, "I sewed a human head onto a cuttlefish's body because I could, mwahahaha!" levels of out-of-control here.

That update is perhaps the weakest legalese denial I've ever seen. WATA needs to get better lawyers if the strongest defense they can muster is no more substantive than "Nuh uh!"

"...one turret in particular on the Aztec level, a seemingly unavoidable obstacle sat in a duct that tears player's health to shreds..."

So the thing giving speedrunners grief has been a "tear duct," if you will?

I'll see myself out.

After seeing the size comparisons of this thing on the article adjacent to this one, it occurs to me that the man in this article's image must have hands about the size of dinner plates.

As to the insipid meta-argument going on here, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this site presenting general gaming news from a Nintendo perspective. I'd even go so far as to say that it's this kind of coverage that elevates NLife from being a slavering fanboy mouthpiece into an actual, respectable news site.

This site exists to give Nintendo fans news that's interesting to them as well-rounded human beings, not to relentlessly blare weaponized and blinkered propaganda to fight a neverending console war.

Huh, never noticed until that last pic how almost absurdly wedged into the top corner the Deck's face buttons (and d-pad) are. It's not that far off of, say, the Switch's positioning of them, but combined with the Steam system's absolute chonkiness, it seems like it would be kinda weird to grip and play properly.

A "personal," "sentimental" drawing, eh? Y'all are missing the obvious; clearly this is a pseudo-commisioned piece of Reggie's robot waifu.

@CactusMan Given that Xseed's parent company has actually owned the Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons developer for almost twenty years now, it's a biiit different of a situation than NISA scooping the localization job for the Ys series in particular by promising Falcom a same-day PC release of Ys 8, then not only spectacularly failing to deliver on that by over six months, but doing such an utterly abysmal job of their core localization duties that they literally had to redo the entire translation just to save face.

That all said, I do hope that this is in fact a brand new NIS IP as the article suggests, and that the whole argument I've started here is moot.

Some good atmosphere for such a short teaser, but given its Corpse Party vibes, the most horrifying thing about this trailer is the thought that NISA might've stolen yet another localization gig from the folks at Xseed. I swear...

NLife's sister site Push Square also reviewed the (PS version of the game) at https://www.pushsquare.com/reviews/ps4/neo_the_world_ends_with_you; I'm not sure which is worse about it, though, their 7/10 score or their byline bizzarely characterizing the series as "Kingdom Hearts' little brother."

Either way, I can see why it was left off this list.

"Are you just upset that the original Space Jam is 25 years old and time is slipping through your fingers?"

This one, yes.

Makes some sense in a nefarious sort of way, since catching these bosses is fundamentally a gussied-up gacha system, and gachas tend to heavily revolve around 10-pulls.

I have little interest in either device, but the amount of prospective Steam Deck buyers who answered that they've never used Steam before is shocking. I figured pretty much everyone who's ever used a PC (certainly, anyone who's used a PC and is happy to plunk down $400 on a dedicated handheld for it) would have something on Steam by now, but I guess kids these days really must just be growing up that much on their phones instead of on the ol' family desktop?

If people got as excited about Earth as some of the people in the linked Reddit threads are about Minecraft, our planet might be a bit better off. I know it hasn't gotten any feature updates in a while, and the mining interface is slow and cumbersome, but it's still got, um... stuff, and... things?

Burn-in is only likely going to be a consideration if you're playing the same game for something like hundreds of hours, at max brightness, without playing anything else, and only in handheld mode.

It's unlikely to begin with, and the visual upgrade from an OLED screen massively outweighs the risk, IMO. All else being equal, there's maybe a 1% chance of your screen experience degrading by about 30% over time from the OLED screen, compared to a 100% chance of your screen experience relatively being about 20% worse sticking with the original model.

It's human nature to be scared of flaws. Human nature, in this case, is counterproductive.

I've no intention of playing any version of this game, really, but the pushback to this review is fascinating. It really reads as though too many professional game reviewers are liable to be snookered by a shiny coat of paint, and this review is an indirect broadside calling them out on it.

"Did you get any good cards, Sonny?"
"Sure did, Dad; I got Mewtwo's Crotch Bulge!"

By the by, it's not a Nintendo deal, but in the spirit of gaming being gaming wherever it is, the Lego Harry Potter Collection (with both Years 1-4 and Years 5-7) is on sale for just $4 on PS4 right now in case anyone is interested in picking that up: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP1018-CUSA05954_00-HARRYPOTTER17000

Meh. Wake me up when we get a Washing Machine Banjo figure, with exclusive edition LED pants sloshing around inside.

Man, imagine being so consumed with your own political grievances that you can't even hold them in reading a NintendoLife fluff piece on image formatting, of all places.

Life is tough, eh?

@SenseiDje IMHO, the Judge would be a large old-fashioned quill pen, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill#/media/File%3A%D7%A7%D7%9C%D7%A3%2C_%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%A6%D7%94_%D7%95%D7%93%D7%99%D7%95.jpg ... "Improbably fluffy, you have a sneaking suspicion that this pen is somehow exactly as ancient as it looks. It's honestly anybody's guess whether it's actually functional or not, but with gravitas like this, does it really matter?"

The art and musical direction of that trailer are instantly compelling, but that absurdly slow walk cycle looks like pure torture, and I have no doubt that it's 100% intentional.

Waiting 400 days while you live your life outside the game is one thing, but waiting a full minute or so just to cross from one side of the screen to the other in-game is a test of patience on a whole other level.

In unrelated news, also suspicious are the ads I'm seeing on NLife today supposedly for Humble Bundles including Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon and Pokemon Crystal.

I've gotta say, your caption for the first picture of Wide Link absolutely nails it. Good job, indeed.

Eh, I don't know if I'd really trust a leak from a guy who apparently can't even count to two, much less three.
#nobadzeldas

"It's a campy..."
Sure, good, good...
"... anime..."
Fine, I can still get behind this...
"... speedrunning game"
Oh.

So since both components of "fluff-fruit" can't actually be pronounced as a single word (try it), is this supposed to be pronounced "flu-fruit" or "fluff-root?" Because either way, you're even more wrong.

Seriously, Bandai (wait, Bandai is developing this? ...Huh.), I mean this with all the love in the world, but did you even give this abomination of a name enough thought to try to say it out loud even a single time, or did it actually go straight from a stoned-out-of-his-gourd intern's mind directly into your press kit with no sober review at all?

@Kevember In all your discussion here today, you never have provided even a single example of the "independent media" that you claim meet your standards for journalism. Awfully easy to lob bombs when you don't actually stand for anything yourself.

@Kevember Third-largest newspaper in the US by circulation (behind USA Today and the Wall Street Journal), coming up on 170 years old this year, most Pulitzer Prizes won (at 130) of any newspaper ever. The literal origin of the term "paper of record" was in reference to it. Also, they've got a pretty kickass daily crossword.

You should check it out sometime.

@FiveDigitLP Probably because Nintendo fans are used to treating games as visual art that their brain can appreciate the details and beauty of even as it forgives/fills in the missing background elements, instead of needing a photorealistic documentary experience to elicit even the slightest suspension of disbelief.

Also, fair warning, if your focus in pictures from this game is the ground and foliage textures... you might find yourself not getting very high scores in the game itself.

[edit: On reflection, most of that wasn't very fair or nice of me to say, and didn't address the specifics of what you said very well. I'd just delete it, but I can't take back the automatic email copy that replies generate, so instead I've gotta make a public apology out of it. Sorry, ugh.]

Kind of a journalism fail that the headline of this story isn't actually mentioned anywhere in the body of it, NLife...

@TheLightSpirit Cool, then allow me to offer my apologies; I'm happy to hear I had you read completely wrong, and I can totally agree that this is super duper not a place for getting into that.

Let's both just have a big ol' humble laugh at how badly some things can be misinterpreted from one person to the next, then, and go our separate ways with no hard feelings, if possible. Best wishes to ya'.

@TheLightSpirit Are you trying to say that you were just describing the broad evolution of the site, and that it's purely a coincidence that you were condemning it and accusing its operators of being nefariously suspension-happy mere days after its banning of the almost-certainly most polarizingly controversial (and 100% non-gaming-relevant) account in the world?

Because if so, then ok, but your timing of finding this hill to die on is awful.

@TheLightSpirit Anyone who honestly believes that "Twitter is a horrible website now" was never really the target audience for this bit of play (that actively disproves their thesis) to begin with.

The differences between these two renders are so minute, especially when cropped to just the head and shoulders of the icon in question, that I'm trying to come up with any plausible chain of events that would've led to this actually being noticed and drawing a blank.

I know, "because the internet," but that's not enough. Does this guy spend his days poring obsessively over every scrap of Mario media released in furtherance of his craft? Is he regularly running image searches to try to catch anyone using his renders, that are such faithful reproductions of copyrighted works that there's not a chance in hell he'd ever be able to claim any royalties from anyway? It doesn't make any sense.

"- 'Tricks' such as Sting Shards, Pimpillo Bombs, straight pins, can be crafted at benches from shards gathered from defeated enemies."

Bleh. Never been a big fan of combat consumables in games where combat involves actual action. Either the fights are designed to be beaten without them, making them effectively limited-use cheat codes (and inevitably pointlessly hoarded according to the megalixer rule), or... the game actually expects you to get through fights by item-spamming, making it bad. Real bad.

Team Cherry notably skirted and subverted these pitfalls brilliantly in their first outing, so I have to imagine they know better than to fall into them now, but... it still sounds worrying.

I haven't played the game, but I'm more upset at that wildly meandering world map down a straight-line red carpet than I am about Dr. Harrelson there.

The article's description of the app as the "very first (and only)" one of its kind is a bit redundant when talking about something that's yet to happen, lol. Aside from that, this is nice news for the Switch.

Side note, y'all should, in fact, not trust people like Snatcher throwing out blanket claims against Funimation that "there dubs suck."

So the review mentions that you're able to control fire, earth, and water... but I can only assume that control over wind is an integral aspect of gameplay as well, given that the game's all about being silent but deadly.

In modern interface language, it's basically a large, unhidable, permanently unresolvable notification dot, and that alone is unforgivable even before how much it clashes with the rest of the UI.

Ironically, Cave Story+ is going to be the Epic Games Store's free weekly giveaway (permanently, no subscription fee required, just have to put up with their store environment) for the week of Dec. 3rd-10th (see https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/free-games or your regional equivalent). Since I can't imagine Nicalis making any money off of a free giveaway, this seems like a better than usual opportunity to avail oneself of the deal.

I'm just amused at the effect it creates of the titular Warriors battling a rampaging horde of out-of-control signage. Strangely appropriate, for a Musou game!

@Ventilator Re: icons... you'd be surprised. The original game, naturally only playable by GameCube controller, wouldn't have had any existing code paths for dynamically detecting input changes, changing the icons, or reconstituting the UI with them.

Actual controller support in the remake can be achieved surprisingly easily by just fiddling with a self-contained interpretation layer in "Switch space" that takes whatever you're throwing at it and converts it into the GameCube inputs that the original game is expecting, but dynamically switching the icons would probably involve writing and integrating entire new code structures into the game itself, and exhaustively testing the additions to make sure they didn't break anything along the way.

I really don't understand the reviewer's confusion over who this game's target demographic is - the default demographic assumption for pretty much any non-otome visual novel of "lonely guy without much going on in his life" would seem to be the correct fit, from everything described here.

Not making it clear why that doesn't work sounds like either a personal conceit gone wrong, or a failure to describe the game properly.

edit: I can't be too hard on this review after reading sister site PushSquare's of it, though (https://www.pushsquare.com/reviews/ps4/five_dates); at least this one actually tries to describe and evaluate the game instead of just having a laugh at its expense.

@BanjoPickles The original Crystal Chronicles was great, but only for the extremely narrow slice of the gaming population that had both the requisite friends and hardware to play it the way the devs envisioned. The enthusiasm for a remake that could break through those barriers should be understandable, at least.

@RazumikhinPG With Sega out of the console wars, a lot of older Nintendo fans have developed a special kinship with their erstwhile foes, bonding over the pixels of their shared history in a way the young upstarts at Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be able to understand.

Simpler times, man, simpler times.

@Entrr_username Crowdfunding is not preordering; it's an investment that carries significant fundamental risk.

If you're not going into these projects with the mindset that you're likely wasting your money from the moment you click confirm, then you really shouldn't be messing around with them.

Ulp. This article reminded me just in time that I'd been meaning to pick up Hatsune Miku for the Switch while it was on sale.

And the backlog grows...

@Guybrush20X6 Fair point!