MysticX

Anything being down "For maintenance" for weeks is a bit dubious, what could possibly take that long to fix?

Frankly, they should just face it: they hit a perfect storm with "Pokemon GO", and will probably never get even close to that ever again.

Nintendo should stick to the Switch concept, innovating every console is interesting, but very risky, if the gimmick catches on, you’re golden, if it doesn’t, you’re hosed, also, what viable gimmicks are left?

Sony is doing fine just iterating on the Playstation-concept, whereas Nintendo’s track record is more… varied, Wii did great, but WiiU did so poorly that Nintendo could recycle the biggest games for Switch because nobody played them, with present-day development costs, the risk is just too big,,,

@jowe_gw It's not about defending the pirates or claiming that what they did was somehow right, but years in jail and a fine they won't ever be able to repay for what isn't even a blip on the financial radar for Nintendo seems a bit excessive.

It's purely making an example of them, excessive punishment as supposed deterrent, and that sort of thing is, for this kind of petty crime at least, pretty medieval, but i suppose all these privatized prisons need to be filled up somehow, right?

Pretty poor headline, implies that he doesn't care about the guy in jail, while it's more of a "I don't care about a billion-dollar company"-statement.

It's the sentences that boggle my mind, Bowser is looking at 3 years inside, this guy had 5, what do people get for, you know, actually serious crimes?

Mind you, i don't think either of them is some martyr for a good cause, they were in it for the money, that much is obvious, but years in prison (And a fine he can never, ever, pay) for this sort of thing seems quite ridiculous to me.

I don't know about the new Sonic game, but i do know that responding to internet outrage with any permutation of "They just don't understand" is just pouring gasoline on the fire...

@Abweegee Depends, how many of those people would have actually bought those games if there was no way to pirate them?

It's easy to say "Every pirated copy is $60 lost" (Also makes for spectacular claims for damages), but it's not quite that straightforward in real life.

"Manage expectations" is PR-slang for "It will be disappointing, don't get your hopes up"

Yeah, i'm sure the French terms which are much longer than the English ones the entire rest of the planet uses will catch on so well!

Doesn't anybody in French government have anything better to do than invent French words for terms which are hardly ever used in any government writings, anyway?

@BrazillianCara Um, hate to break it to you, but video games are luxuries everywhere in the world.

And let's be quite honest here, you have to be incredibly... um... let's say naive, to see something like this and fail to wonder if maybe it's too good to ever be true.

If you live in a part of the world with such minimal income (As noted in several posts before me), there should be greater priorities than video games, anyway.

@IceClimbers Still, occasional additions of some furniture items, maybe a few new text lines (Villager dialogue gets repetitive after a while), that should be doable without harming Splatoon 3 development...

It just feels like a shame to leave ACNH to wither like this.

@BTB20 Fair enough, it's in the top 10 out of... how many games?

Still quite a staggering feat, and still hard to understand why no more updates are coming, unless they're working on another Animal Crossing game but haven't announced it yet...

I'm still amazed by now that there are no more updates for "Animal crossing: New horizons", it's a massive seller, second only to "Mario kart 8 Deluxe", and #5 most played!

It's a massive success, still popular after 2 years, there's no sequel on the horizon (That we know of, anyway), why drop update support for it?

@Serpenterror Re-texturing models has always been a nice graphics shortcut, and back in the time when all game characters looked like they were constructed from shoe-boxes, just slapping a new face and/or outfit texture on a single model and calling it an additional character was easy.

What also (In retrospect) makes the 16-bit to 32-bit leap such a stark contrast is that we went from the apex of sprite-based graphics to the infancy of 3D-graphics, and once you're over the shock of seeing 3D graphics, that's quite a contrast, indeed.

The last year or two of a console are always rough, and when the competition (Sony, with the PSX) makes the leap to 3D games first, that's a big market shift. (Especially in the eternally "Next big thing"-chasing gaming market)

It's easy to forget nowadays with the more incremental visual improvements between console generations, but the leaps in graphical quality from 8-bit to 16-bit and from sprites to (By today's standards, terribly aged, but back then amazing) 3D graphics were quite astonishing...

I think it's going to take a while, with the current chip shortage, they won't be able to produce enough of the Switch pro (Or whatever they'll call it), so they'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place, either it sells well and they can't deliver, or (Admittedly highly unlikely) it doesn't sell well, by my limited knowledge, businesses tend to avoid situations with only bad outcomes.

@Yosher Well, apparently (According to the museum's website) a big factor was that Ms. Pacman had the first female lead character, as well as the interesting history of having first been created as an upgrade-kit for existing "Pac man"-machines.

I had the same thing Ollie had with the GBA (The only console i ever bought day 1), the first few months are always rough, sparse lineup (Which inevitably has a few games that, while not bad per se, aren't your thing)

But when the launch months were over (Good thing i love "Super Mario advance") and the releases started picking up pace, the GBA proved one of my favourite consoles.

SNES for me, it had this combination of wow-factor from the technical advancement and the games still holding up well today.

Second place GC/GBA era, but that’s mostly carried by the GBA.

Many series, especially ones that started around the NES-era suffer from the "Aged poorly"-problem with the first installments, speaking for "Legend of Zelda" and "Super Mario bros." (Two series i have most experience with), you can see the seeds of things that came after.

But due to hardware limitations (And lack of programming experience, those being early games even for NES), there's also a lot of roughness around the edges, and i don't mean just the sprites. (For both series i'd recommend starting with the SNES instalments, you can always go back to the very originals in the knowledge that things got a lot better.)

I want Pokemon Amie/refresh back, camping is fun, but there's something soothing about petting a pokemon.

In a perfect world, i'd want all pokemon back (Sad Delphox fan here, no sign of it for the entire generation), but that's a passed station by now, but at least now the models actually look better.

Endgame that isn't battle-focused, i'm a wuss, i keep pokemon i like whether or not their nature and IVs are perfect, and postgame battles assume both to be maxed out, give big postgame areas with pokemon and other things to collect.

Leave the battle style as it was in SwSh (Shorten the pre- and post-battle sequences though), people buy Pokemon to collect monsters and do turn-based battles, have done for 25 years.

Finally: Put Cinderace in there, the Spanish love football, it belongs in the game! (Leave out Charizard for once, instead.)

I’m missing a “Any one of them is better than that insecure tosser”-option, TBH.

It’s so utterly pathetic (And kind of creepy) that i’d seriously rethink the relationship altogether, what will be the next thing he’ll feel threatened by? (And what lengths will he go to to remove that?)

Call me callous, but aren't we going just a tad overboard here?

I know that what's going on in Ukraine is terrible, but how does delaying games help them? Are we going to push back every other game that references war as well?

Good, leave the sneaking/dodging stuff to PL:A, chain-catching like in that game only makes any kind of sense in games where "Catch 50 Bidoof" is the sort of thing you have to do, imagine the utter mess in your PC-boxes if that was in mainline Pokemon games! @_@

Besides, can you imagine those two wussy trainer characters we were shown, being thrown into a wilderness where the wildlife can and will plow you into the ground?

The presentation said you can find and fight pokemon, anywhere, even in the streets, try to imagine that with wild alpha pokemon...

The games look good, they just need to work on the player characters, they look like those bug catcher kids with 3 metapods or something.

If they hadn't shown the starters too, i'd have thought the starters were Caterpie, Weedle, and Wurmple!

It's a bummer, and i don't believe the "Gameplay balance"-excuse for a second, but it's to be expected by now, isn't it?

They got away with it with SwSh, so why not repeat it? They can sell part of the missing pokemon back to us with DLC again, as well, who said GameFreak doesn't learn from their previous games?

@Fazermint Yeah, i mean, how dare people, wanting Nintendo to emulate their own old console properly?

It's not like we're expected to pay $60 a year for it... oh wait, yes we are.

Sure, complaining can go too far, but expecting subscription-based emulation of a 26 year old console to work properly isn't "Going too far".

@Screen They're reporting from court documents (Which might be biased, but that's another discussion), no value judgment is made either way.

Besides, "Criminal" is an awful big word for what looks like a patsy for the people who actually got rich off it, but then again, that's what his defense lawyers are saying.

I'm also curious about what they're going to tell us about Sword and Shield, while i'm trying not to get my hopes up too much (To avoid disappointment), i also think "New Raid event, lol" would be rather meager...

@GameManAdvance It's not obsolescence, or the shutting down of those stores, it's that there's no way to get those games once the stores are gone.

Nintendo are purely focused on selling us "Legend of Zelda" and "Super Mario bros." again (Well, renting them out, with a Switch online sub), but they don't try to somehow bring VC (As it was on the Wii and WiiU) to Switch, which leaves a big gap for Piracy to (Eagerly) fill.

They never think "This worked well, let's expand it on the next console", it's always "Start from scratch, by selling them SMB1 again".

@Dm9982 Cool, we can call it "Harvest 'Mon"!

In the "Like 'Harvest moon', get it?"-sense, not the "Tauros steak for dinner"-sense, that is.

@victordamazio That's so very true, i play a bunch of PC games that released 30 years ago (Games by Apogee, big part of my childhood), but PC emulation like DosBox is allowed, whereas Nintendo will fight you tooth and nail for trying to play their 30-year-old games because they want to keep selling people "Super Mario bros." again on every device they release.

Nintendo do a lot of great things, awesome games and stuff, but they're such horribly conservative dinosaurs in many other areas, it's quite galling really...

…and this is why i’ll buy physical versions of any game that has one, although with the advent of day 1 updates, that doesn’t help much either: publishers can just decide “We don’t want to support this anymore”, and you’re hosed.

If this “Rent a game until we’re tired of supporting it”-scheme is the future of gaming, it’s a bleak future indeed…

@Dr_Lugae True, but the first week or so also has all the pre-orders and stuff, i’m not saying that sales going down is a bad thing, it happens to every game, for anticipated games, there’s no beating those first weeks.

I’m impressed that the sales of the first few weeks minus 45% is still #1 on the sales charts, goes to show how massive those early sales were.

Makes sense that PL:A starts losing sales, by now everybody who wants the game has it already, it's still quite impressive that even after a 45% sales drop, it's still #1 on the list, shows how huge the lead was the last two weeks...

I'm not saying that Bowser (The hacker, duh) is a good guy, far from it, but this punishment is quite frankly ridiculous considering the crime he committed, you'd think he was a big time drugs dealer or something. (Except those get less jail time due to fancy lawyers)

But when a big company wants to crucify somebody to scare off hackers/modders, the justice system is apparently puppy-dog eager to do the dirty work for them.

And then that sickening "Thanks for ruining his life for our bottom line"-message Nintendo posted, ugh...

I love the smell of copium in the morning!

Everybody snapping out of their "Legends: Arceus" reverie just long enough to spout the usual SwSh-hater clichés (Sales don't equal quality! Bad message to GameFreak! Laziness rewarded!)

Sorry (not sorry) guys: Sword and Shield sold like hotcakes, after all the pre-orders (And reviews) went out as well, so i guess... people liked them?

And that's fine, not everybody likes the same things, PL:A seems like a pain in the neck to me, but you seem to like it, go you! Just leave out the SwSh-bashing out next time.

Wow, i figured $14.5 million in fines would ruin the guy's life enough, but 5 years in jail as well? (Gotta fill those for-profit prisons up somehow, right?)

I understand the need for punishment and "Deterrent effect", but doesn't "Way more than he ever made (Or ever will) in fines" cover that already?

There are crimes where the "Get him off the streets"-argument makes sense (Violent, sexual and/or drugs-related crimes, mostly), but is software piracy really that kind of crime?

@NDragon1412 Paper money and coins have value because a country backs it up, it's commonly accepted, and (Often enough) the value is reliable, same for money on bank accounts.

Crypto-currency has none of those, its value is too volatile to use as payment (Imagine a shop that has to adjust prices every hour because the value of currency changes that much), it's a failure as a currency (Who needs utterly untraceable money, anyway? Except for criminals.), but it's successful for value speculation, until the bubble bursts, anyway.

NFTs... I don't even understand how there's any value in it at all, copying a picture is as easy as a right-click on a mouse (Seems pretty fungible to me), but the original one is for some reason really valuable, i just chalk that up to "People are crazy", TBH.

NFTs, crypto-coins and all that nonsense are all pyramid-schemes, things with no inherent value and nothing propping up the price except faith, the early people get rich, and at some point people start wondering "Why exactly is this so supposedly valuable again?", and the whole thing comes tumbling down, hosing everybody who hasn't cashed in yet...

I don't mind graphical quality much (I still play 16-colour EGA retro games on my PC)

I even think Sword and Shield looked fine, but outright glitches like the grass going all funky during battles and the purple blotches on the ground are things that do bother me, not aiming for the stars graphically is one thing, but make sure that what you put in works properly.

I never understood the "Not enough games"-complaint, the thing is new, of course there aren't many games yet!

Back in the (very) old days, i bought a GameBoy Advance day 1, oh my, only half a dozen games (Although one of the launch titles was the excellent "Super Mario advance", a remake of my favourite Mario-game ever), while that was pretty meager for a while, it's that way with all consoles, it just takes a while for games to come out.

Looks like the employees took the advice to "Look forward" and "Move on" to heart then, is this what good management looks like?

@dustinprewitt In all fairness, it's just one letter difference, easy mistake to make...

Am i the only one who finds "Order now and get it in 2023 (If nothing more goes wrong)" rather silly?

@Dr_Lugae They are scare tactics though, no way in hell that he can pay 14.5 Million dollars (So most likely some other arrangement will be made behind the scenes), it's this high to scare off other people.

I voted Zelda II (Yes, i played it, when i was younger, way more patient, and still hated it), Triforce heroes, and (And i'm going to take a lot of flak over this) Majora's mask.

There are a few "meh" ones (The DS ones never really grabbed me, and the NES original, while revolutionary for its time, aged poorly), but those three just strike me as "Now why did they have to go and do that?"

@sanderev How are they going to prove a pokemon has been duped though?

Like @Bakfug said, things they check for (Proof of foul play) is stats/pokeballs that are wrong, moves a pokemon can't learn legally, shiny versions of shiny-locked pokemon, anything other than that might be improbable, but if it's conceivably possible, it's not proof of hacking/duping.

If the pokemon you hack or dupe is possible in-game, there's no competitive advantage anyway...

Still not as impractical as those "Light and magnifying glass"-things they sold in the GameBoy era...

@mr-duster That complicates matters a bit, things like Dexit are a big deal for some people (I'm one of them, i want my favourites together, and i don't mean in PokeHome cold storage), while others don't care as long as they have Pikachu and Charizard...

Still, BDSP is a particular omnishambles, a 3Gb day 1 patch, and still no proper online (A mainstay of the series for several generations now) would be damning for any game, but here people just yell "ToXiC pLaYeRbAsE!" and gloss over it, but how long will they keep doing that?