Utterly absurd pricing. I may have considered signing up for an extra $10 per year, but $50 US (roughly $70 Australian dollars) is asking way too much for games that are 25+ years old. No way I’ll be signing up for this.
No surprise that the share price dropped. Nintendo Life may be sipping the kool aid, but in The Real World most people recognise the E3 Direct for the fizzer that it was.
I don’t know what Nintendo Life is smoking but it must be pretty potent. I thought it was a distinctly average Direct. Honestly, between this and the last one I’m so disillusioned with Nintendo right now, I’m considering selling my Switch. If it wasn’t for BOTW2, which isn’t out until sometime next year, I’d definitely have it up on eBay by now. I buy Nintendo consoles for the first party games and right now there’s not a whole lot of the, coming up that I care about.
Only interesting things for me were Metroid 5 and BOTW2, and the latter doesn’t even drop until next year. All in all, pretty disappointed in this one. What are Nintendo and all their first part studios even doing with their time right now?
"After playing for a few hours, and realising that this game would probably require a bit more explaining than a simple 1000-word review, I asked the editors if I could also write a diary, of sorts, to get all my feelings across. Again, they said yes, for some reason. I think they trust me too much."
I don't blame them, Kate. I don't leave a lot of comments here, but when I do I try to make them meaninfgul. And so please believe I am sincere when I say I have really enjoyed your writing on this site so far.
I'm an old school gamer who was raised on a diet of Mean Machines and CVG, two classic British video game rags that had that dry British humor I came to enjoy and have missed as everything got so 'professional' and serious. Your writing reminds me of those days.
Case in point; this article. I read the whole thing and after realising I have no interest in ever playing this game (not a fan of visual novel style games) I still look forward to reading the next diary entry and your eventual review.
To your editors, I say "great hire." And to you I say "keep it up!"
I’ll probably get a lot of flack for this but I have to say that that was one of the most mediocre Nintendo Directs I’ve ever watched.
After over 500 days, the promise of a “full fat” Direct was exciting. I hoped that with basically nothing big from Nintendo themselves on the horizon, that this would be the day we’d learn about the first party titles to get excited about in 2021. I tempered my expectations as best I could but it says a lot that after that Direct, the game I’m most “excited” about is Mario Golf. And I use that word “excited” very, very loosely in this context.
Seriously, if you think about this Direct through a dispassionate lens, what did this Direct offer us in terms of big “OMG” announcements? Legend of Mana was interesting but hardly huge news. I already pre-ordered Bravely Default 2 so nothing new there. I will concede Splatoon 3 will be huge news for many (but not for me personally) and it’s not even coming this year. The aforementioned Mario Golf looks interesting but only because of the speed golf concept but which, frankly I still have no interest in buying because ultimately it’s still just a golf game (and because the Mario sports games have a mixed track record at best). And that’s it. There was nothing else. Nothing. I mean, we’re one week away from the 35th anniversary of the Zelda series and the only Zelda news we got was “BOTW2 isn’t coming any time soon” and “here’s Skyward Sword, one of the most underwhelming Zelda games ever made, in HD. Buy it please.”
Where’s an update on Bayonetta 3? What the heck is Retro Studios doing? And while I didn’t expect it to be in this Direct, I feel compelled to point out that it’s been almost seven years since Mario Kart 8 came out and almost four since Deluxe. WHERE’S THE NEW MARIO KART? Don’t try to tell me about Home Circuit or Mario Kart World Tour. The former was fun for five minutes but is plagued with technical problems and the latter is a micro-transaction fuelled train wreck. All I want is a proper new Mario Kart, or at the very least some new MK8 DLC. It’s time, Nintendo!
So ultimately, for a Direct that promised to tell us about what was coming in the first half of 2021, I’m left feeling empty with no first party games to look forward to at all in 2021.
At this point, I have to say that I honestly feel that Shuntaro Furukawa has been a disaster for Nintendo. Under his watch, the quality and cadence of Nintendo titles has gone down considerably, with a stronger focus on casualisation and ports and remakes. This culminated in the disaster that was Mario 3D All Stars, a game that could have and should have been amazing and instead was just three games running in an emulator and sold for a full AAA price.
I really, really, really miss Iwata. He didn’t always knock it out of the park, but he was in touch with what Nintendo fans wanted and his leadership is sorely missed.
“ Say what you like about the barebones presentation of Super Mario 3D All-Stars...”
OK, I will. It didn’t deserve to be on this list at all, let alone 2nd place. That game would get first place on my list of biggest gaming disappointments of 2020, beating even cyberpunk (a close second).
I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit Decoration Kit should have come with the game. It shouldn’t have been a platinum reward.
That said, I suspect you’ll be able to download copies of these to print for free in the months ahead.
I have to say, as a lifelong Nintendo fan (my first console was an NES and I've owned every Nintendo console - except the Virtual Boy - since then) I'm EXTREMELY disappointed with Mario 3D All Stars.
I had, of course, heard all the rumors of the upcoming 3D All Stars prior to the announcement and expected to see a compilation worthy of the "All Stars" title. I remember the massive rework Nintendo did with Super Mario All Stars back on the SNES, modernising all the games from the ground up, and I would have expected 3D All Stars to do the same. I thought Mario 64 would probably get remade in the Odyssey engine (remember the Mushroom Kingdom level in Odyssey - I thought for sure that was Nintendo testing the grounds for a more fulsome project). I expected Sunshine and Galaxy to mostly be upscaled (as they were) but with some better textures.
Instead we got an upscaled Mario 64 (which didn't even come with any of the extra features from the 3DS version) running in a horrid 30fps. This is one of the most important and influential games of all time - it deserved better.
Sunshine also runs in 30fps and since its release we've seen that it has debug boxes because the whole thing is just an emulator. Galaxy, meanwhile, looks fantastic but the motion controls feel awful and just a bit of work from Nintendo to create a new control scheme that makes using the Pro pad a bit easier could have fixed that.
Basically, 3D All Stars doesn't feel like a celebration. It feels like a quick cash grab, a lazily slopped together collection that is little more than an emulator running on official Nintendo hardware. It isn't worthy of the All Stars name. I found I couldn't enjoy myself playing it, such was my disappointment with what Nintendo have done here. If I could return it I would, but alas, I bought it from the eShop so a mere deletion from my SD card must suffice.
I'm also disappointed with the gaming press, including Nintendo Life, for giving Nintendo a free pass on the laziness of this release. Nintendo Life's own review bemoaned the lack of extra features, yes, but said that the underlying games are still incredible and gave it a 9. While one can say that a review is subjective by nature, I feel that noting the laziness but giving it a 9 is being far too forgiving. Nintendo Life in an article earlier today tried to excuse the debug boxes in Sunshine by referencing the pandemic, which is yet a further example of how the gaming press are trying to apologise for Nintendo with this slipshod release. Pandemic or not, I think it's disappointingly clear that Nintendo probably always planned to do as little work as possible and simply cash in on nostalgia with this one. If not, they would never have released this for public consumption.
I don't think we should excuse what Nintendo has done here, we should condemn it. Mario, and Nintendo fans in particular, deserve better treatment than this.
I don’t like the Animal Crossing series but even I am irrationally angry about this. Can a fan of the series explain to me if the save game manipulation Nintendo is worried about is really a big deal? Seems no different to me playing Civ 6, not liking that an enemy Civ took my city and reloading an earlier save to avoid that.
The issue as I see it is that “getting used to the controls” shouldn’t be something you need to do with Mario Kart.
I’ve played every MK since the original on the SNES and all of them, even the atrocious Super Circuit, had controls where you could just pick up and play them. Mastering them to get perfect power slides and using that mastery to get to 1st place consistently was the real challenge, but even the filthiest casual could pick up MK and start playing with some degree of competence.
But Mario Kart Tour has such badly tuned controls that it’s hard to want to even try to “get used to them”, let alone spending a couple of hours trying to do so as your review suggests.
The control scheme issue is made even worse by the fact that the game launched on the same day as ios13, which included support for third party gamepads like Ps4 and Xbox One S controllers. Nintendo could have easily added in game pad support so long time veterans of the series like me could have enjoyed it. But they were clearly too lazy to do, preferring instead to put in the bare minimum of effort into their control scheme and all of their effort into greedy cash grab micro transactions.
I guess my feelings are best summed up by saying I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. While I agree Nintendo shouldn’t be considered to be above MTX in mobile, I did expect a higher quality from a game that bears the name of one of their most beloved series.
I deleted it from my iPad after about an hour of trying to like it. What amused me was later my 7 year old son, who LOVES Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, was playing Tour on his iPad and I heard him say “this is quite a weird game.” He also stopped playing it and returned to Mario Maker on his 3DS.
Mario Kart Tour is an abomination. It’s not worthy of anyone’s time and whilst I generally agree with scores handed out by Nintendo Life, a 7 was far too generous in my opinion. This game is a 1 Star game at best.
I’ve played Mario Kart since the first one released on SNES oh so many years ago. Have played every MK game since then and loved almost all of them (the less we talk about Super Circuit the better).
This MK is now the worst MK game ever made since Super Circuit (ok, we can mention it just that one more time).
Why is it so bad, you ask? Many reasons but probably the Top 5, in no particular order, are...
1) Doesn’t work in landscape mode. 2) Touch controls are awful. 3) Gyro controls are even worse. 4) No game pad support whatsoever. 5) Chock full of micro transactions.
As MK fans wait for the true successor to MK8, many hoped that MKWT would fill the void while we waited. But it doesn’t. It’s a massive disappointment from the Big N and I’ve already deleted it from my iPad. If gamepad support ever gets patched in I’ll try it again but until then, I gave this one star on the App Store and a big miss.
@mjhopkins81 Speaking as someone who owns both a PS4 and a Wii U, I respectfully disagree. The PS4 has far more internal storage, granted, but that is running out quickly for me. My only option is to open up the console and put in a bigger hard drive, and the options for 2.5" drives are expensive and only afford me up to about 1TB. External drives may be supported one day, but if its anything like the PS3, I won't be able to store games on the drive, which makes it basically useless.
Whereas with the Wii U, I can hook a 2TB drive up to it, which set me back $100, and store all my game data on there. I've basically only used about ITB of internal storage. I think that's a far better option than what Sony offers.
Comments 14
Re: Poll: What Do You Think Of The Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass Price?
Utterly absurd pricing. I may have considered signing up for an extra $10 per year, but $50 US (roughly $70 Australian dollars) is asking way too much for games that are 25+ years old. No way I’ll be signing up for this.
Re: Nintendo's Share Price Drops 6% Following E3 2021 Direct Broadcast And Switch Pro No-Show
No surprise that the share price dropped. Nintendo Life may be sipping the kool aid, but in The Real World most people recognise the E3 Direct for the fizzer that it was.
Re: Talking Point: Nintendo Delivered An Excellent E3 Direct For Fans Old And New
I don’t know what Nintendo Life is smoking but it must be pretty potent. I thought it was a distinctly average Direct. Honestly, between this and the last one I’m so disillusioned with Nintendo right now, I’m considering selling my Switch. If it wasn’t for BOTW2, which isn’t out until sometime next year, I’d definitely have it up on eBay by now. I buy Nintendo consoles for the first party games and right now there’s not a whole lot of the, coming up that I care about.
Re: Poll: What Did You Think Of Nintendo Direct At E3 2021?
Only interesting things for me were Metroid 5 and BOTW2, and the latter doesn’t even drop until next year. All in all, pretty disappointed in this one. What are Nintendo and all their first part studios even doing with their time right now?
Re: Feature: A Perfect Metascore? We Play The Switch Game "Better Than Zelda: Breath Of The Wild"
"After playing for a few hours, and realising that this game would probably require a bit more explaining than a simple 1000-word review, I asked the editors if I could also write a diary, of sorts, to get all my feelings across. Again, they said yes, for some reason. I think they trust me too much."
I don't blame them, Kate. I don't leave a lot of comments here, but when I do I try to make them meaninfgul. And so please believe I am sincere when I say I have really enjoyed your writing on this site so far.
I'm an old school gamer who was raised on a diet of Mean Machines and CVG, two classic British video game rags that had that dry British humor I came to enjoy and have missed as everything got so 'professional' and serious. Your writing reminds me of those days.
Case in point; this article. I read the whole thing and after realising I have no interest in ever playing this game (not a fan of visual novel style games) I still look forward to reading the next diary entry and your eventual review.
To your editors, I say "great hire." And to you I say "keep it up!"
Re: Round Up: Everything Announced In The February 2021 Nintendo Direct
I’ll probably get a lot of flack for this but I have to say that that was one of the most mediocre Nintendo Directs I’ve ever watched.
After over 500 days, the promise of a “full fat” Direct was exciting. I hoped that with basically nothing big from Nintendo themselves on the horizon, that this would be the day we’d learn about the first party titles to get excited about in 2021. I tempered my expectations as best I could but it says a lot that after that Direct, the game I’m most “excited” about is Mario Golf. And I use that word “excited” very, very loosely in this context.
Seriously, if you think about this Direct through a dispassionate lens, what did this Direct offer us in terms of big “OMG” announcements? Legend of Mana was interesting but hardly huge news. I already pre-ordered Bravely Default 2 so nothing new there. I will concede Splatoon 3 will be huge news for many (but not for me personally) and it’s not even coming this year. The aforementioned Mario Golf looks interesting but only because of the speed golf concept but which, frankly I still have no interest in buying because ultimately it’s still just a golf game (and because the Mario sports games have a mixed track record at best). And that’s it. There was nothing else. Nothing. I mean, we’re one week away from the 35th anniversary of the Zelda series and the only Zelda news we got was “BOTW2 isn’t coming any time soon” and “here’s Skyward Sword, one of the most underwhelming Zelda games ever made, in HD. Buy it please.”
Where’s an update on Bayonetta 3? What the heck is Retro Studios doing? And while I didn’t expect it to be in this Direct, I feel compelled to point out that it’s been almost seven years since Mario Kart 8 came out and almost four since Deluxe. WHERE’S THE NEW MARIO KART? Don’t try to tell me about Home Circuit or Mario Kart World Tour. The former was fun for five minutes but is plagued with technical problems and the latter is a micro-transaction fuelled train wreck. All I want is a proper new Mario Kart, or at the very least some new MK8 DLC. It’s time, Nintendo!
So ultimately, for a Direct that promised to tell us about what was coming in the first half of 2021, I’m left feeling empty with no first party games to look forward to at all in 2021.
At this point, I have to say that I honestly feel that Shuntaro Furukawa has been a disaster for Nintendo. Under his watch, the quality and cadence of Nintendo titles has gone down considerably, with a stronger focus on casualisation and ports and remakes. This culminated in the disaster that was Mario 3D All Stars, a game that could have and should have been amazing and instead was just three games running in an emulator and sold for a full AAA price.
I really, really, really miss Iwata. He didn’t always knock it out of the park, but he was in touch with what Nintendo fans wanted and his leadership is sorely missed.
Re: Feature: Nintendo Life's Switch Game Of The Year 2020
“ Say what you like about the barebones presentation of Super Mario 3D All-Stars...”
OK, I will. It didn’t deserve to be on this list at all, let alone 2nd place. That game would get first place on my list of biggest gaming disappointments of 2020, beating even cyberpunk (a close second).
Re: Frame Rate And Resolution For Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity Demo Revealed
I liked the first Hyrule Warriors but not enough to want to play through a sequel. This one will be a pass for me.
Re: New Mario Themed Physical Goodies Are Now Available On My Nintendo (US)
I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit Decoration Kit should have come with the game. It shouldn’t have been a platinum reward.
That said, I suspect you’ll be able to download copies of these to print for free in the months ahead.
Re: Video: The Problem With The Super Mario 3D All-Stars Release
I have to say, as a lifelong Nintendo fan (my first console was an NES and I've owned every Nintendo console - except the Virtual Boy - since then) I'm EXTREMELY disappointed with Mario 3D All Stars.
I had, of course, heard all the rumors of the upcoming 3D All Stars prior to the announcement and expected to see a compilation worthy of the "All Stars" title. I remember the massive rework Nintendo did with Super Mario All Stars back on the SNES, modernising all the games from the ground up, and I would have expected 3D All Stars to do the same. I thought Mario 64 would probably get remade in the Odyssey engine (remember the Mushroom Kingdom level in Odyssey - I thought for sure that was Nintendo testing the grounds for a more fulsome project). I expected Sunshine and Galaxy to mostly be upscaled (as they were) but with some better textures.
Instead we got an upscaled Mario 64 (which didn't even come with any of the extra features from the 3DS version) running in a horrid 30fps. This is one of the most important and influential games of all time - it deserved better.
Sunshine also runs in 30fps and since its release we've seen that it has debug boxes because the whole thing is just an emulator. Galaxy, meanwhile, looks fantastic but the motion controls feel awful and just a bit of work from Nintendo to create a new control scheme that makes using the Pro pad a bit easier could have fixed that.
Basically, 3D All Stars doesn't feel like a celebration. It feels like a quick cash grab, a lazily slopped together collection that is little more than an emulator running on official Nintendo hardware. It isn't worthy of the All Stars name. I found I couldn't enjoy myself playing it, such was my disappointment with what Nintendo have done here. If I could return it I would, but alas, I bought it from the eShop so a mere deletion from my SD card must suffice.
I'm also disappointed with the gaming press, including Nintendo Life, for giving Nintendo a free pass on the laziness of this release. Nintendo Life's own review bemoaned the lack of extra features, yes, but said that the underlying games are still incredible and gave it a 9. While one can say that a review is subjective by nature, I feel that noting the laziness but giving it a 9 is being far too forgiving. Nintendo Life in an article earlier today tried to excuse the debug boxes in Sunshine by referencing the pandemic, which is yet a further example of how the gaming press are trying to apologise for Nintendo with this slipshod release. Pandemic or not, I think it's disappointingly clear that Nintendo probably always planned to do as little work as possible and simply cash in on nostalgia with this one. If not, they would never have released this for public consumption.
I don't think we should excuse what Nintendo has done here, we should condemn it. Mario, and Nintendo fans in particular, deserve better treatment than this.
Re: Soapbox: Confounded By The Animal Crossing: New Horizons Cloud Save Situation? You're Not Alone
I don’t like the Animal Crossing series but even I am irrationally angry about this. Can a fan of the series explain to me if the save game manipulation Nintendo is worried about is really a big deal? Seems no different to me playing Civ 6, not liking that an enemy Civ took my city and reloading an earlier save to avoid that.
Re: Talking Point: Mario Kart Tour Is Certainly Dividing Opinion, But Why?
The issue as I see it is that “getting used to the controls” shouldn’t be something you need to do with Mario Kart.
I’ve played every MK since the original on the SNES and all of them, even the atrocious Super Circuit, had controls where you could just pick up and play them. Mastering them to get perfect power slides and using that mastery to get to 1st place consistently was the real challenge, but even the filthiest casual could pick up MK and start playing with some degree of competence.
But Mario Kart Tour has such badly tuned controls that it’s hard to want to even try to “get used to them”, let alone spending a couple of hours trying to do so as your review suggests.
The control scheme issue is made even worse by the fact that the game launched on the same day as ios13, which included support for third party gamepads like Ps4 and Xbox One S controllers. Nintendo could have easily added in game pad support so long time veterans of the series like me could have enjoyed it. But they were clearly too lazy to do, preferring instead to put in the bare minimum of effort into their control scheme and all of their effort into greedy cash grab micro transactions.
I guess my feelings are best summed up by saying I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. While I agree Nintendo shouldn’t be considered to be above MTX in mobile, I did expect a higher quality from a game that bears the name of one of their most beloved series.
I deleted it from my iPad after about an hour of trying to like it. What amused me was later my 7 year old son, who LOVES Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, was playing Tour on his iPad and I heard him say “this is quite a weird game.” He also stopped playing it and returned to Mario Maker on his 3DS.
Mario Kart Tour is an abomination. It’s not worthy of anyone’s time and whilst I generally agree with scores handed out by Nintendo Life, a 7 was far too generous in my opinion. This game is a 1 Star game at best.
Re: Mario Kart Tour Is Now Live On Smartphones, But Good Luck Getting To Play It
I’ve played Mario Kart since the first one released on SNES oh so many years ago. Have played every MK game since then and loved almost all of them (the less we talk about Super Circuit the better).
This MK is now the worst MK game ever made since Super Circuit (ok, we can mention it just that one more time).
Why is it so bad, you ask? Many reasons but probably the Top 5, in no particular order, are...
1) Doesn’t work in landscape mode.
2) Touch controls are awful.
3) Gyro controls are even worse.
4) No game pad support whatsoever.
5) Chock full of micro transactions.
As MK fans wait for the true successor to MK8, many hoped that MKWT would fill the void while we waited. But it doesn’t. It’s a massive disappointment from the Big N and I’ve already deleted it from my iPad. If gamepad support ever gets patched in I’ll try it again but until then, I gave this one star on the App Store and a big miss.
Re: Nintendo Outlines Confusing amiibo Save Data Limitations
@mjhopkins81 Speaking as someone who owns both a PS4 and a Wii U, I respectfully disagree. The PS4 has far more internal storage, granted, but that is running out quickly for me. My only option is to open up the console and put in a bigger hard drive, and the options for 2.5" drives are expensive and only afford me up to about 1TB. External drives may be supported one day, but if its anything like the PS3, I won't be able to store games on the drive, which makes it basically useless.
Whereas with the Wii U, I can hook a 2TB drive up to it, which set me back $100, and store all my game data on there. I've basically only used about ITB of internal storage. I think that's a far better option than what Sony offers.