Comments 263

Re: Nintendo's Bringing Mario Kart Junior Esports Tournaments To UK Primary Schools

Matroska

"And 100% of teachers reported all their children now wanted their parents to buy them a Switch."
I think that's pretty obviously the real reason Nintendo are involved. It's like Coca Cola helping with special Coca Cola drinking lessons in order to teach kids social skills, and maths skills like how many delicious, refreshing cups of Coke can you get from one affordably priced 2 litre bottle.

Re: Random: Have You Seen This Hidden Dialogue In Zelda: Breath Of The Wild?

Matroska

@noobish_hat Yep, was gonna say something similar. Not as bad as Luke's "English" accent in Layton, that's a tragic attempt, but Zelda's accent doesn't quite sound fully English, or perhaps like someone from England who's lived in North America a long time. It certainly sounds nothing like Diana's accent which was very upper class whereas Zelda is a pretty average middle class accent.

Re: This "Premium" Pokémon Ultra Ball Replica Looks Ultra Fancy

Matroska

>it's less than the 800-1,200 Poké Dollars it costs in-game, at least.

Well, I reckon the Pokémon currency is probably based on yen, just automatically. Like, if you made a game and did some made up currency, you'd probably automatically think in terms of your own currency. So for me, 5 of something isn't much, 100 is quite a lot, 50,000 is loads, etc. But to a Japanese person, 100 is not much at all, it's about a dollar. 50,000 is a good amount but not as much as it is to a Brit or American. It's about $500.

Anyway, long story short, 800-1200 "currencies" to a Japanese mentality used to yen is about $8-12.

Edit: A quick bit of googling later and apparently the idea of it being a "poke dollar" and the symbol in-game is just made up for the localisations. In the original versions of the games they just use 円, the yen kanji.

Re: Talking Point: What Are You Playing This Week? (August 28th)

Matroska

I've been in a Zelda mood lately. So I'm playing BotW again (as Linkle this time), I'm also playing LttP Redux which makes lots of great improvements to that classic game (not least of which is being able to cycle through items with L and R) as well as adding higher quality music and even an opening and ending animated cutscene. Even Picross Twilight Princess is getting a look in.

Re: Random: Speedrunner Beats Zelda: Ocarina Of Time In Smash Bros. Brawl

Matroska

I love speedrunning though I'm terrible under pressure and hate being timed so I'd be awful at it. I did used to be about to complete RE2 in about 1h45 mins or thereabouts, though. Talking of which, that also had a timed demo back in the day and I used to wonder how far you could actually get in it.

@PBandSmelly Well bear in mind how small the game is. The biggest N64 carts were only 64mb. That means if you used the largest carts, it'd take 21 of them to contain Final Fantasy VII, a game from the year before OoT. Incidentally, that would've cost about £1260 at the time (£60 a cart). When you adjust for inflation to see what that'd be nowadays, it's a whopping £2,267! Holy crap.

Re: Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 'Second Wind' Expansion Mod Adds Age Of Calamity Boss And Mammoths

Matroska

I still haven't finished BotW despite getting it in early 2019, but after I have (I restarted recently) I'm looking forward to trying this. BotW is a great match for mods since it has that kind of Bethesda feeling (a lot more soul and less jank, though) where it feels like a backdrop for things to happen rather than a more focused, directed game. Like, for example, I wouldn't be interested in modding Skyward Sword or FFVII, yet I can't imagine playing an Elder Scrolls game without them.

Anyway, always great to see talented and dedicated fans creating stuff like this.

Re: Soapbox: Attacking Pokémon Creator Game Freak Isn't Cool, But Biting Back Isn't The Answer

Matroska

@Paul1994 To be fair, they've coasted along making games that look and play like basic SNES games for their whole existence. Now they're trying to really move it forward and are developing on a home console and can't just do the extremely basic models and environments anymore. They're putting more effort in because developing for a modern home HD console is way more demanding. The problem is that they're not used to it and they're struggling, but not for lack of effort.

Re: Review: Dragon Quest III: The Seeds Of Salvation - Third Time's A Charm

Matroska

Unfortunately this is a port of the old flip phone version of DQIII. One of the issues with that is that in the SNES version enemies were animated but I've heard from several other DQ fans that they're not in this port as it's the old Java phone version.

Plus, those hideous character sprites that look like something a 12-year-old made for his RPG Maker project thanks to them being redrawn and/or filtered. Really, just stick to emulating the SNES one.

Re: Video: Overwatch On Switch "Works" But It's Far From Perfect, According To Digital Foundry

Matroska

@CurryPowderKeg79 NES games ran at 60fps. Read the third paragraph.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-21-man-completes-super-mario-bros-with-the-lowest-possible-score

And SNES, though of course you'd get occasional slowdown in some games.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/997614-nintendo-3ds/74192582

It was only with the N64 that we got stuff like OoT being 20fps. Even then there's over 100 games on PS1 that run at 60fps so that gen wasnt all 30fps or less.

Also, the difference here is that this is a game that has been out for years on other platforms, running at 60 or more. That obviously wasn't the case for, say, OoT.

Re: Review: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition - An Incredible Action-RPG Stands Strong On Switch

Matroska

In reference to the combat, you can cancel any animation with a dodge so you don't need to worry about the longer animations. Dodging is broken in the game, by the way. If you just hammer dodge, almost nothing can hurt you. They went some way to fixing this in the expansions but it still trivialises almost every single fight in the game even on the hardest setting.

Re: Two New Pokémon Anime Characters Revealed, Including A New Professor

Matroska

@BLD What you're thinking of as her breasts is actually her entire torso. Her top curves out just before her waist. You and some of the other posters have her proportions mixed up. She has a small body compared to her her head but you guys are thinking of her having the head to body ratio an adult would have and it's messing up how you're seeing the pic.

Re: Hold On Tight As Digital Foundry Tries To Nail Down Zelda: Link's Awakening's Performance Hiccups

Matroska

To be fair, Mario Odyssey cheats in busier places:

"For starters, there's animation at a distance. In some of the busier scenes with lots of characters on-screen, animation updates at a lower rate. At close range it's a full 60fps but back up a little and animations can drop to 30fps. Step back even further and it cuts down to 20."

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-how-super-mario-odyssey-pushes-switch-to-its-limits

Re: Review: Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition - A Gift That Keeps On Giving

Matroska

The review doesn't mention that to go into 2D mode you have to go back to the start of the game. You can't transfer at will, it's a parallel playthrough. Also the graphics took a real beating. It's blurry and flickery as hell and large objects pop into existence right in front of you. It's very distracting and feels like the game is barely managing to run. The game itself is amazing, a genuine masterpiece, but it feels like additional content is being held hostage by a terrible port.

Re: Video: Digital Foundry Explores Zelda: Link's Awakening's Technical Wins And Losses

Matroska

The fps issues aren't just when there's a lot of enemies, it can happen as you're just walking around. It might be to do with loading new areas near to the one you're in.

As they say in the video, in docked it only runs at 720p when you're outside, 972p or so inside, yet plummets to 30fps even when you're just walking around. It feels worse than 30 though because of how jankily it's flitting between framerates. It's very poor that such a visually simple game has all these problems.

@m8e3point1415 OoT ran at 20fps at best, 2nd party N64 games like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark would drop to single digits. Starfox on the SNES was 19fps. I know they've had stuff that ran better but when their games run badly, boy are they awful. Oh, and XC2 has to drop as low as 330p in handheld and even then struggles to keep 30fps.

Re: Video: Yet Another Musical Easter Egg Has Been Found In Zelda: Link's Awakening On Switch

Matroska

I posted about some issues with the game the other day. I've played it more since then and you do get used to the 8-direction analogue control though it's still odd to have to use it rather than tbe d-pad. The huge fps drops seem to be when a new area is being loaded in as you near the edge of your current zone. It's still terrible for it to drop to less than 20fps with some regularity but you can at least predict when it's gonna hit. Haven't tried handheld yet.

It's got that great addictive Zelda feeling, still. A little tip: in the crane shop there's a purple rupee in the crane game that seems to respawn on re-entering the shop until you collect the Yoshi doll and/or heart piece that's in there. You could easily farm a lot of rupees that way...