Maxz

Big LUV 2 BIG Z!!!! Fare be well ye mighty lovely stallion!!!! May your coming adventures take you from A to Z and on and on and on!

Don’t give up hope yet, guys. It’s like Sonic always says:

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

…Pretty sure that’s Sonic’s catchphrase.

Huge, huge love and respect for everything Zion has brought to all of us through Nintendo Life, and also much respect for his decision to move on — through I won’t pretend I’m not sad!

Like many curmudgeonly Brits I was a little dismissive when this bubbly new chap turned up and merrily Americaned all over the lovely-but-sardonic ‘Alex from Nintendo Life’ show… but over the years that followed, he has channeled that positivity and enthusiasm time and time again to create some truly wonderful pieces of work — in addition to being a consistently charming presence on the channel.

Good luck with whatever comes next Zion, even if it’s just watching staring out of the window and watching the birds for a few months. Thank you so much for everything you’ve made for all of us.

Once we establish the monetary value of a standardised a unit of ‘fun’, then we need to address the issue that certain players will be playing certain games for longer than others and therefore having more fun. This is clearly not fair.

We can ensure the ‘fun to cost’ ratio is kept consistent by tying ‘fun-inducing’ game actions to their associated costs.

For example, I think we can all agree that Mario’s jump is, on some base level, ‘fun’. Therefore, we should establish how much ‘fun money’ (henceforth referred to as ‘funny’) a single Mario jump equates to. I propose $0.03.

This can be scaled across all games to ensure everyone is fairly paying for the fun they’re getting. I think this is a system everyone can be happy with.

Don’t tell me this doesn’t sound like fun.

EDIT: I see @Slideaway1983 has presented us with a much more sophisticated system. Let us use that instead.

@nessisonett They are no longer on speaking terms after an acrimonious and irreconcilable dispute over the correct order in which to spread jam and cream on scones. In fact, they can’t even agree on how the word is pronounced.

I’m not normally one to plug Kit and Krysta content, but they’ve put out a video on this which is fairly insightful (if a bit on the long side). Worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/Y9fW2TGXxco?feature=shared

@jojobar To be fair, the only condition she need meet to have a bigger personality than Doug Bowser is ‘having a personality at all’.

_{(Sorry Doug)}

Part of me wonders whether it’s reasonable that we expect the top corporate suits to be entertaining and likeable. They didn’t sign up to be entertainers.

But… this is the entertainment industry, and both Iwata and Reggie really embodied a sense of playfulness that people associate with the Nintendo brand.

Koizumi and (to an extent) Miyamoto have done a decent job is stepping in to fill Iwata’s place in the Directs. It would be good if someone from NoA could bring some of Reggie’s energy to the company, too.

At the very least, as @SpaceboyScreams has said, please stop making the game announcements so cringe. I can’t bring myself to watch the English language Directs because of them.

@FrenchVaniIIuxe Y’know Doug Bowser didn’t actually make Bowser’s Fury, right? Nor did he make Bowser’s Inside Story.

…Although if that’s not the name of his memoir I’ll be sorely disappointed.

…I hear he Doug his own grave.

_{(I’ve heard nothing I just wanted to make a dumb pun)}

@NotASockPuppet I had to look up what Lackadaisy is. Apparently it’s a webcomic about anthropomorphic cats set in a Prohibition-era St. Louis, MO. I don’t know why we’re talking about that, but I’m sure fans of the comic will be relieved that you’re done arguing with them.

I also imagine people who prefer their video games released in a finished state will be relieved too, assuming they fall under the net of ‘people you’re done arguing with’.

@NotASockPuppet The problem is not that he has a problem with you having a problem, for he has no such problem. The problem is you having a problem with him not having a problem.

“A gentleman is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.“

Hershel the White

@dazzleshell Yes, this was a neat little feature in the DS version! Part of me wonders if Nintendo learnt the hard way from Miiverse etc. that letting players… draw stuff leads to… certain stuff being drawn, but it’s still a feature in Splatoon 3, so they can’t have given up on it entirely!

@TrogdorTheBurninator Yes, it would be good if the rewards gained through engaging with the open world actually amounted to something. Stickers are possibly the most underwhelming reward possible, as you can only set one at a time, and even then, nobody will really see it or care.

Some sort of customisation option where you could stack collectibles earned from Free Roam would have made the whole mode feel a lot more worthwhile. Even something as small as Splstoon 3’s locker system would have been a big improvement. A more ambitious option would have been a customisable garage which you can decorate with rewards from Free Roam. An even more ambitious option would have been a track maker mode with various track pieces scattered around the world. So many interesting potential options.

But instead we have stickers, and I don’t think any amount of patching is going to change that.

For what it’s worth, I actually think the open world is really well designed. As a piece of world building, it’s great. What’s lacking is a decent reward system to really motivate players to explore it. It’s like if Tolkien had released all the lore books describing Middle Earth, but forgotten to actually write the stories to go with them.

We should aim for 1 frame per minute, at most. Anything more is crazy. How are you meant to really appreciate each sumptuous morsel of animation if it’s immediately swapped out for something else?

Imagine sitting in an art gallery, peacefully admiring the cascade of colours in Van Gogh’s Starry Sky, only to have it ripped off the wall and replaced with one of Francis Bacon’s bits of moody body horror. Yuck.

Life is right here, in the present moment. Stop wishing for that moment to be whisked away.

_{In all seriousness, 60fps would be nice and it’s a shame there isn’t the option of a performance mode, but the review does a good job of explaining why it’s not the dealbreaker it would be for most other sports games. Football, as a sport, has a degree of lag built it. It’s not ping pong or clay pigeon shooting. Things may look smoother at 60FPS, but waiting a maximum of 0.0167 seconds longer for your ‘shoot’ input to register is hardly a game changer when the in-game character would already take much longer than that to actually initiate the command.}

@TrogdorTheBurninator What is the update you are waiting for? (Genuine question)

I was expecting mainly 7s with a smattering of 8s and the odd 6, so it’s nice to see the game doing better than that! (Not that 7 is ‘bad’!)

@illmatic20xx The ‘X’ is for ‘expat’.

Can’t wait to play this on my Sega SwitchCast.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the assertion that ‘digital outlasts physical’ is surely irrelevant, as the existence of proper ‘on-the-cart physical’ games in no way impinges on the existence of digital games from a digital storefront.

Up until now, the standard has been to offer both options: full digital and (pretty much) full physical. In contrast, the current system offers two variants of the much the same thing: fully-digital digital or physically-gated digital.

‘Digital vs. physical’ has historically been an ‘apples to oranges’ comparison: each offered advantages over the other, and the player was free to choose which best suited their needs. Now we have an ‘oranges to rotten apples’ situation: key cards still posses some advantages over fully digital games (e.g. resale value), but virtually no advantages over the fully physical games they’re replacing; they are simply inferior from a consumer perspective.

From an industry perspective, publishers can now sell a cheaper, inferior product at the same price (or more), which may count as a ‘win’ for those concerned with profit margins, but from a player perspective there seems to be very little to celebrate.

“Clear Bowser history”

YES JIMMMMM!!!!! So goood!

@itsapossum I feel there’s a bit of space between “Nintendo is trying to make money by selling you somewhat unnecessary plastic/cardboard accessories” and “Nintendo hates you”.

Admittedly, my IQ is too low to really make sense of what the statement “Nintendo hates you” means. I haven’t met Nintendo, and can’t work out how or why he/she/it would posses any enmity, or indeed any love or compassion, towards me or anyone else.

I’ll admit it sounds good though: “Nintendo hates you!” I might start saying it myself. “Hey you, man in the street! Did you know that Nintendo hates you!? So much so that it wants to sell you accessories to recreate the experience of playing its least successful games console ever. Yes, really — the one that sold even less than the Wii U! THAT’S how much Nintendo absolutely detests you!”

Well… at least they’re not limited time releases like 3D All-Stars, but… ooph indeed on the pricing. Certainly soured some of the celebratory spirit surrounding the anniversary.

@SillyG Yeah, I experienced a fair amount of terraforming-induced stress, too.

I understand that they needed to develop the series, and introducing more customisation/crafting elements is a natural way to do that, but my favourite entry in the series is either the original or Wild World, where your locus of control is pretty limited, so you just have to learn to love your town for what it is.

You can’t do as much with it, but equally, there not as much to go wrong.

They should have called it ‘Slowpokia’ and had Slowpoke be the main character and obviously he’s too lazy to do any of the tasks necessary to actually progress the game so you just loll around and nothing gets done and it’s the most relaxing life sim ever made.

I’m joking but I think I’d genuinely prefer that to Starview which feels more like a ruthless exercise in productivity and time management than a ‘let’s chill out and enjoy the countryside’ sort of vibe.

@EarthboundBenjy Mario never had a 35th Anniversary. There was no Super Mario Bros. 35 and there certainly was no 3D All-Stars.

@Olliemar28

“It doesn't appear that this release will be enhanced for Switch 2 in any way, but Nintendo is also launching new Mario Galaxy-themed amiibo alongside a physical storybook product from the game.”

This paragraph could do with a trim!

@Dogorilla I was hoping they might at least go down the ‘free for NSO Expansion Pack members’ route.

But yeah, TotK being more expensive than BotW could sort of be justified by the fact that A) it was very, very big, and B) they weren’t trying to sell launch day DLC alongside it. Like, with a bit of mental gymnastics you could convince yourself that ‘the DLC was included’. It would have been nice if that approach held true for most Switch 2 games. If Mario Kart World gets paid DLC, I will furrow my brow so hard it might get stuck there.

Everyone: Odyssey never got DLC.

Luigi: Are my BALLOONS a joke to you?

@Dee123 Okamoto left the company in 2008. That’s 17 years ago.

To make a not-so-bold assertion: things change with the passing of time. And 17 years is quite a lot of time to pass — both in the life of a human, and in the evolution of a company.

For perspective, 17 years is the length of time between Super Mario World (1990) and Super Mario Galaxy (2007). Many of Nintendo’s younger members would have been literal children when Okamoto departed.

‘Things might have changed’ means ‘there exists a possibility of change’. Negating this gives, ‘there does not exist a possibility of change’. That is, ‘we can say with 100% certainly that in the last 17 years since Okamoto left, absolutely nothing at the company has changed’.

Without wishing to be rude, I know which of the two statements I find ‘wild’.

Better be a bloody good cabbage patch.

Sort of reminds we of when Fender started doing reissues of their 50s and 60s guitars and all the marketing material was like “We managed to track down ACTUAL guitars from Fender’s golden age and then reverse engineered them to bring you the most faithful recreations ever.”

I couldn’t help but think, “Why was it such an effort to track these guitars down given that you literally made them, and were there not any records from the time that would have made the ‘reverse engineering’ process less necessary?”

But seemingly not. It’s easy to look at a company logo and assume that it guarantees a degree of institutional memory and product consistency, but really a label is just a label and the actual people behind it are frequently changing — and not always leaving behind the clearest records for their successors.

The real travesty is calling this game ‘football’ when that term should be exclusively reserved for the game where the ball is not a ball (it’s sort of a large, inflated peanut) and mainly played with the hands. They should have called this game EA Sports: Not FootbalL (or ‘NFL’ for short).

If we call this game ‘football’ then that means we have to call the American version ‘Handpeanut’ and I don’t want to do that.

@Olliemar28 As @Late has noted, the version coming to the US is significantly different to the version showcased in the Japanese Direct — in that it’s the original Chinese language version developed by a Taiwanese developer Team9 and first released back in 2022.

I’ve been looking through the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game which goes into just how much of a nightmare it was to localise into Japanese, which is perhaps why the Japanese version has only recently been released several years after the original.

I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with the article as it is, but the fact that this is not the Japanese version (published by Flyhigh Works) might be worth including somewhere as an addendum!

“文字遊戯 "Word Game" looks really intriguing, although I’d put the chances of an English localisation at less than one thousandth of a millionth of a billionth of a gnat’s bum.”

…was my comment under the direct. I suppose it’s not technically wrong, but I really wasn’t expecting it to come to the West in any form, localised or otherwise.

Nor did I realise that the Japanese version is already a localisation of the Chinese language original, which was released way back in January 2022 and seems to be the version here.

There must be a sufficiently large audience of Chinese speakers (well, readers) in the US to make releasing it worthwhile!

I have a soft spot for the European artwork, even if as a child I found it really confusing because it’s so misrepresentative of the game’s general aesthetic.

Looked up ‘Mad Lad’ in the dictionary and there’s just a crudely drawn picture of Zion’s face created in Mario Paint.

Just get Miku to voice them all. It wouldn’t make much sense but it would at least be funny to hear Yakuza's Kasuga Ichiban blurt out his lines in the bleepy bloopy tones of a twin-tailed 16 year old android girl.

They poached the Big Cheese.

I’ve given up pronouncing the letter entirely. To me, all Xs are silent. It makes reading Microsoft products a lot easier. It’s not Xbox Series X. It’s just Bo Series.

Imagine if writers had to deal with the same sort of ridiculous pressure as game developers.

“HEY GUYS. WORKING ON A NEW NOVEL ABOUT THE PLAGUE. GONNA BE SICK.”

“HEY FANS. QUICK UPDATE. CHARLES AND CAMILLA HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE BUT CAMILLA HAS CAUGHT THE PLAUGE!”

“WASSUP CREW. CAN’T REVEAL TOO MUCH AT THIS POINT BUT CAMILLA HAS DIED. OF. THE. PLAGUE. IKR. CRAZY!”

“WHAT’S FLAPPING GANG? DECIDED TO REWRITE THE BIT ABOUT CAMILLA DYING. SHE’S NOW A MUTANT SUPERHERO LOL!”

@SpaceboyScreams Perhaps not, but I’ve grown pretty allergic to it. I find find these sorts of knee-jerk accusations really irritating, pernicious and lazy.

Under game reviews on this site, it’s not uncommon to find someone baselessly accusing the author of being paid off, just because they don’t agree with the review score.

Like, you can’t deal with someone else’s slightly differing experience of a video game so you have to invent a wild conspiracy to explain how a game could get a 9 instead of an 8.

It may not be that big of a deal in this instance, but I still feel compelled to grumble about it. Consider this my misdirected rage at the post-truth world we live in.

It may not be that serious, but as @AverageGamer points out, it is seriously dumb.

What a nutter. What a hero. What an absolutely champ.

Legendary work.

Remember when they pranked us with that Pokemon Battle Revolution trailer 14 years ago we haven’t got anything that looks half as good since.

https://youtu.be/uzpwF7oZZKU?feature=shared

I just call it Rachelala the Green Spaghetti Dragon and people generally seem to know what I mean.

I bet it will just be 44 minutes of Slackerai snoozing on the couch and 1 minute of him waking up to eat jelly filled donuts.

@Liam_Doolan “Tsunekazu Ishiharamade”

I read that and for a second though it was the Pokemon president’s actual name.

@dil_power They usually stick their ‘personal thoughts’ in at the end of the video. It’s typically a pretty short section, but interesting to get another perspective all the same.

Waited all day yesterday for that Slackerai guy to come and make me a sandwich. Dude didn’t even turn up. Simply appalling work ethic.

Also, mad props to Babybahamut for chronicling all those NGC reviews for posterity. Now that guy is not a slacker.

I expect them to come over here and make me a sandwich right this instant.