Maxz

Miyamoto cannot be stopped. Prepare for the Expanded Pikminematic Universe.

I found the first one to be not only colourful also broadly tolerable (admittedly, not having to deal with the English voice cast may have helped somewhat). The sequel at least seems to have first box ticked.

Not sure if I’ll be rushing out to see it, but it’s on my list of ‘films to watch the next time I find myself on an aeroplane’.

My dad is Nintendo.

He came home late this evening, drunk, disheveled, and yes, furious.

I’ve been cowering in my room trying not to draw his attention.

@Agent_P I’m sure you’re right! I only picked up a Switch 2 recently and I’m still working through DKB (currently my only game). I’ve also been enjoying the NSO GC library (well, F-Zero). There are quite a few games in my Switch 1 collection that I haven’t finished (TotK, Legends: Arceus) — or even started — which have been given S2 upgrades , and I feel they deserve a playthrough before I jump into anything new.

Huzzah! I was gifted this game a long time ago but never got around to playing it. The high price and lack of physical has kept me away from Pokotopia, but I’m not immune to the hype and this might be the next best thing.

Hubris. Stupidity. Incompetence. Higher prices. Limp memes.

This is what winning looks like. Apparently.

“It once again reiterated that retailers can set their own prices.”

This has been the case in Japan, to the point where physical games are actually still (marginally) cheaper than digital.

You can see on GEO’s website that DKB is priced at 7,898 yen which is over 1000 yen less than the physical RRP of 8,980 yen and undercuts the digital RRP of 7,980 yen by a fraction. This seems to be pretty consistent across new games, making the Switch 2 pricing a bit easier to stomach.

https://geo-online.co.jp/campaign/special/game/donkey_kong_bananza.html

The real news here is that Saizeriya — the chain of cheap(ish) Italian(ish) pasta restaurants — is apparently a stronger brand than Disney. Not just among the under 20s, but overall.

Disney Tokyo World and Sea can close up shop cuz Mickey is cooked like fettuccine.

It appears they’re manufactured in Vietnam.

I suppose if you want the amiibo functionality and don’t already have the plastic models and also have a child and other wooden blocks and very deep pockets, then… well, it still doesn’t represent good value, but it could be considered a justifiable purchase.

That’s quite a long list of conditions though.

pineco? more like shineco am i right!?! ooooh c’mon let’s go foghorn foghorn foghorn wooooo

Each Sonic the Hedgehog movie is better than the last as they keep adding progressively more characters who aren’t Sonic the Hedgehog thereby reducing the amount of screen time given to Sonic the Hedgehog which consequently raises the overall quality of the film.

It’s a winning strategy.

Could anyone tell me how much input lag there is compared to the original? I’ve been playing F-Zero and enjoying it, and finding it damn hard, but I assumed it was just as damn hard as it was when I first played it.

It hadn’t crossed my mind that the emulation might be making it even damn harder.

Can I enjoy this without having played Pokémon ROFLcopters: Hurricane of Lightness?

@datamonkey My issue is less that the level disappears and more… well, everything that @mystman12 has said.

There’s a sense of satisfaction in solving a puzzle in a novel, unintended, and potentially clever way. But just rampaging through the terrain until you dig up everything in a level — without actually engaging with any of the subtler elements of game design — feels somehow shallow.

Of course, the solution to this is just… not to use the Bananza transformations where possible. This is how I’m trying to play the game. But it feels slightly odd to have to exert such self-restraint in a game that’s all about the opposite.

…I still think it’s a great game though! It just lets you steamroller over its best parts.

Haven’t unlocked the ‘phant yet, but I’ve been trying to restrain myself from using Bananza transformations as much as possible.

It’s not that levelling the level isn’t fun… but it’s only one kind of fun, whereas actually engaging with the each individual challenges set up by the designers is generally more satisfying.

I kind of wish there was some greater cost of using Bananza transformations, like draining your gold or something, just to make you feel clever for… not over relying on them. Maybe this could be removed after completing the game, but I think it would draw attention to the more cerebral elements of the game, rather than just encouraging the player to bulldoze everything.

I went on a date once and I told my partner that if she didn’t foot the bill then I would eat all the food from the other customers’ plates and it would be entirely her fault.

…Maybe that’s why I only went on a date once.

When one sees a translation from a language knows well into a language one doesn’t, one’s attention is naturally drawn to what has been lost, because that much one can immediately grasp. At the same time, lack of familiarity with the other language naturally hinders one’s capacity to appreciate what has potentially been added. The result is that practically all translations feel like downgrades unless one is intimately familiar with both languages.

Certain nuances of language A will inevitably be ‘flattened’ in the translation process because they simply do not exist in language B. A good translator with a degree of creative freedom will compensate for this by taking advantage of the target language’s own characteristics, working not only with individual words and sentences but with the broader context of the story and the culture into which a work is to be localised.

Translating for one audience necessarily means translating away from another. Translation is a process of both decryption and encryption.

Simplistic understanding leads to simplistic conclusions. This is why the Earth was flat for millennia, until it wasn’t. This is why the Earth sat at the centre of the solar system, until it didn’t. This is why the Earth was cobbled together in a mere week, until a better explanation was arrived at. The physical laws that governed nature were simpler in Newton’s time than Einstein’s, despite the two men inhabiting the same planet.

Ultimately, it is the bluntness of the eye that renders the world shallow and simplistic.

@RadioHedgeFund In Europe we celebrate the great Persian polymath Omar Khayyam on 10MAR, known for his elegant and memorable catchphrase, “It is I, OMAR.”

He is distinct from and much more respectable than the lowly plumber known for his similar but vulgar expression, “It’s-a me, MARIO!”

Let us not confuse the two.

@AussieMcBucket Yeah, fair enough! It does make Pikachu look oddly ectoplasmic, or at least extremely malnourished.

But it’s a novel idea and appears to be selling well (admittedly to scalpers) so I can’t knock it from a business perspective!

Well I’ll be darned. Green as an ogre’s arse.

They’re clearly not frogs.

@AussieMcBucket I wonder if they’ll ever make a Pikachu plush in full colour…

I thought Alex was real, but it turns out he’s just mocapped by some wrestler in a studio?

What about Mai? What about Jon, Zion and Felix? Did you lose the licenses so they had to be discontinued?

@KayFiOS Thank you for the addendum! That’s a really useful insight.

Yes, it’s seemed clear for a while that the mainline Pokemon games were being deliberately kept away from NSO. If the relevant parties had wanted to include them, they had the Switch’s entire seven year lifespan to do so. There was clearly a reason why the best selling Game Boy games of all time weren’t on the Game Boy service that Nintendo was trying to promote as part of its online subscription package.

GF clearly doesn’t treat the core games as one-and-done ‘walled off’ experiences, but as part of a giant Pokéweb that they’re trying to organise around Home, with Champions as a sort of battling-dedicated offshoot. It’s a perhaps slightly cumbersome solution they’ve arrived at, but I don’t envy those in charge of who have to coming up with a system that consolidate the contents of dozens of games released over literally decades.

The lack of Home compatibility has more of less confirmed my suspicion that NSO and Home are mutually exclusive.

I have a feeling Save States might have something to do with it, though I don’t know for sure. It seems like an easy system to abuse, I imagine GF don’t want those Pokémon included brought into the broader Pokécosystem.

I know some people are sceptical but my Gran works at Turismo as she said this is definitely true.

Great games, but I picked up a bunch of secondhand GBA games for tuppence a while ago, including both Fire Red AND Leaf Green. If I get tempted I’ll delete the former owner’s save files and play them.

@Kirbyo I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I’m genuinely of the opinion that Pokemon graphics peaked in Gen 4 (with Gen 3 close behind).

I’ll take pretty pixels over poorly-done polygons any day of the week.

I’m somewhat tempted by the cheaper model. I already pay for £7.50 a year for NSO+, and the VB hasn’t made that any more expensive.

In Japan, the cardboard thing costs just under ¥3,000, which less than 15 quid. That’s under half of a GameCube controller (~¥8000), under a third of a Pro Controller (~¥10,000), less than a single Joy-Con 2 (~¥5,500), and less than a SNES/Super Famicom Controller (~¥3,300).

If you’re willing to shell out ¥6,578 on a pair of boxy Famicom controllers to get the ‘authentic retro experience’, then ¥3,000 for a pair of 3D goggles that open up an entire chapter of gaming history doesn’t seem too bad.

@Kiz3000 I am very much on board with you on Her Royal Majesty the S.S. Conflicted Feelings.

I want this to be a good game because good games are fun to play and I like playing fun games, but also, the fact that it’s very expensive and doesn’t exist in a fully physical form rubs me up the wrong way.

So the way I feel is BAAAAHAGGAHDISPAPAIDHDHSUSPFFFD.

You really wonder why big companies bother to rush out half baked ports of old games, only to update them later.

Even if they eventually get polished up, the reputation of the game is already tainted. The reviews are written. The initial excitement and potential good will surrounding the launch has faded.

It’s not as if the world was so desperate for another Skyrim port that it couldn’t wait a few more months.

@ShadLink People buy the new FIFA (okay EA Sports FC) game every year not for any drastic gameplay improvements (which are iterative at best), but because the newest game offers the most faithful in-game recreation of the current, real-world footballing landscape — down to the players, stadiums, teams, and kits.

The best Super Mario Football game you can imagine cannot possibly compete with FIFA for realism, precisely because it contains Super Mario: a fictional mushroom-guzzling plumber who exists in a world of friendly ridable dinosaurs and dastardly anthropomorphic turtles.

I fear your assessment is grossly mistaken.

This man is incredibly good at reviewing LEGO products.

I don’t quite get the ‘pointless’ comments. Are lavender and mint somehow more ‘pointless’ shades than the light red and blue?

These are hardly going to the world on fire, but they’re essentially just a continuation of the Switch 2 aesthetic. I imagine we’ll get more adventurous offerings and special editions somewhere down the line, but it doesn’t seem too surprising that the second batch of Joy-Con 2s sticks to the same core design principles as the first.

@Member_the_game Yes, very much joking!

I found the assertion that golf/tennis/football/etc. are ‘niche’ to be pretty wild.

@Member_the_game Beer pong and shin kicking.

@somnambulance …But… but… that doesn’t fit the narrative! And I’ve internalised the narrative!

‘Mario Sports title gets “generally favourable” reviews on Metacritic’ must be indicative of something greater!

For any other sports game the fact that the multi-player outshines the single-player would come as no surprise, and certainly not a source of disappointment.

But the shadow of the Game Boy titles’ excellent RPG modes looms large with this series. I’m glad the core gameplay holds up, and that the single player at least seems like a step up from Aces, but I also would have loved to see a fully fledged Adventure Mode on par with the old games. The wait continues.

@Dev-N I could be misinterpreting the notes, but didn’t the Rapid Blaster get a buff (in the form of more paint coverage)? It seems like it was the Pro that got nerfed.

@Olliemar28 Luigi is the long green one.

This is a highly exclusive and collectible post limited to only one of one and it comes with a unique serial number (#67489655gd6436) and is personally written by the author who is me who is @Maxz and you can buy it from me for $€£1087578399 except you can’t because it is too exclusive and valuable and I would never dream of selling it and you’ll just have to deal with the resulting FOMO and sorry not sorry and also I win at capitalism because I own this rare and valuable and ultimately worthless thing.

It’s not

“Let’s go”

it’s

“Mamma mia, pizza, pasta, fettuccine, gotta go fasta”

Can’t believe the writers can’t even get Mario’s most basic catchphrase right.

Nobody seems to be mentioning the fact that Switch games are in fact Switch 2 games, many with Switch 2 exclusive upgrades.

By keeping the Switch 1 library alive and relevant, they can keep selling old games to the current crop of Switch 2 owners. All they need is a lick of paint and some bells and whistles.

Heck, sometimes not even that. People keep buying Mario Kart 8 to this day, despite the fact it has a direct successor, hasn’t actually received any major updates since the Switch 2 launched, and is originally a port of a decade old Wii U game.

Related Articles:

REVIEW Overwatch 2 (Switch) - Solid F2P Shooting That Doesn't Yet Justify The '2'

It seems they took that to heart.

“Manifestation of my own resentment”

Buzzwole the Ultimate Edgelord making Shadow the Hedgehog look like Hello Kitty’s pet cat Charmmy.

Still holding out for the Pokemon TCG 2 on the Japanese eShop. The prices of carts are fairly steep!

@Zero2990 My commiserations. Thank you for offering a peek behind the curtains. That’s a really interesting and quite depressing insight into the whole affair.

@SuntannedDuck2

”Doubt it has anything interesting in there.”

Did you read the book review?

If not, here is the opening paragraph (…and the one after that).

In the introduction to Super Nintendo: How One Japanese Company Helped the World Have Fun, Keza MacDonald makes a simple promise: over the course of the next 12 chapters, you'll read something you didn't already know.

It's the kind of gauntlet-laying that would have any self-respecting Nintendo fan click their knuckles and close their Bulbapedia tab in a 'challenge accepted' kind of way. And yet, 250 pages later, I can honestly say that it rang true.

This is where the Apex Leg ends.

The comparison video makes for fascinating viewing. The most immediately striking thing is the difference in voiceover duration, despite both narrators describing the same thing.

At the risk of incorrectly extrapolating cultural differences from a ludicrous video game trailer, this does seem to bear out the tendency for Americans to want to ‘fill the space’.

They say nature abhors a vacuum, and I feel that nowhere is this truer than the Home of the Brave and the Land of the [REDACTED].