NEStalgia

@Ralizah Maybe, but usually GF's annual Pokemon is treated as separate from Nintendo's internal big Holiday promo.

It took me like 30 reads to figure out what "sendnudes" was. Amazing how spaces and punctuation change how you see things. It looked like an autocorrect fail of something involving "sen dudes."

Banning various words of "death" is a little weird though for video gaming. I know in Nintendo games Mario never "dies" he just "get defeated", but I'm pretty sure in Doom there's a lot of death going on, for example. And Dark Souls... "YOU [REDACTED]" Just doesn't have the same edge.

Wow, this might be the first time ever that I can think of a game releasing BEFORE the set date. Other than Sega surprise dropping Saturn and its games to edge out the 3rd party sports games which backfired badly, but that was a different thing.

Pretty exciting. Nintendo went like 2 years with virtually no games, now they're dumping like 6 big games all in 6 months. They really need to sort out pacing. Not that I'll complain about an early XC3!

What are they going to have during their usualy holiday window, though? BOTW2 was delayed and I think all the big games will be out by Fall. Bayo3 and MP4 are still unknowns, so maybe it means something.

IDK why, but I still could not get into this game. I'm a big SMT fan, but this entry for some reason does not click with me. 4 clicked very fast. This one just...IDK, it's not hooking me really at all.

Glad it's selling well though, hopefully the next one will work for me.

@BAN That's sort of a generic application in itself though. The adjective discourse is inapplicable.

Take for example Wii (or Switch if you prefer.)

Wii, as a brand name is also the product's name. People didn't buy a "Wii gaming console", people bought a Wii. It's the name of the video game console, naturally a noun, not an adjective.

At best, it was a Nintendo Wii (in which case Nintendo is used as an adjective, even though Nintendo is also a noun as the name of the company.) But in that adjective case the trandemark "Nintendo" modified the noun "Wii". You can't modify an adjective with another adjective without a subject noun.

@BAN That's safest use, not case law.

And when the trademark is also the name of the business, that no longer applies. It's not Nintendo Brand Video Game Company, Inc., it's Nintendo of America. And in the US a business is a person. BAN isn't an adjective, it's your "name", it's not BAN brand human.

I was among those that referred to all games as "Nintendo" back in the day. But then again, there was really only one alternative, Sega, which was used maybe 25% of the time.

Also, "Nintendo is an adjective, not a noun".......? I'm not sure those words mean what the authors thought they mean...

Also some of the other words I'm hearing are becoming generic here and the rate at which it's happening makes me weep. We've entered an era were people can't even distinguish a specific item for the concept of the item. Generic trademarks have always happened but not so much so fast. It's like the modern world doesn't even bother pretending to think about anything placed in front of them, they just absorb it as-is.

I never really could click with Carey's juvenile brand of humor. Couldn't take Ace Ventura even when I was young, and while The Grinch is absolutely classic, I still always felt a different actor that felt less like Ace Ventura in a Grinch suit might have been a lot less campy. But he actually sounds a lot more balanced IRL than I'd expected.

@BartoxTharglod @TimGibson OMG, yes, I can't stand Keighly. Not only is his 3 months of randomly staggered gaming not a replacement for 5 concise days of dense content, but he's one of the smarmiest self-aggrandizing spinsters I've ever seen in gaming this side of Randy Pitchford.

@HamatoYoshi Totally agree. I think over the past year the buzz of gaming has just largely evaporated. It's not that I don't still enjoy playing good games, but it's that engaging with the industry and culture of it is just suddenly a lot less interesting. E3 was a holiday, a festival where we were all engaged all at the same time. Fans, industry, all at once looking on on what's on offer and digging into it. Now? There's tweets, PR statements, randomly at random times, everyone in the corner doing their own thing. There's no energy or excitement to being a gamer all of a sudden. It's just a consumable consumer product like any other, and we still enjoy consuming some of it. Alone.

Kit and Krysta have finally redeemed themselves in my eyes today...

NSO is just...so...bad.... I pay an annual fee for cloud saves and online which I've only ever used for Splatoon. It's not really worth a dime for anything else.

They're delaying it until the Switch Pro is out.

O
M
G.

The series seems like pure trash, but, this review is probably the funniest review I will ever read.

So much blackmail to use here. So much.

@HIGHscores85 Mokuzai would like to have some words with you....

The unsettling bi-product of this human experimentation at Nintendo is Tingle.

@BlueMonk If so, that's interesting. Never heard of bone density being connected to fitness in anyway. As a concept, it doesn't even make sense.

Wouldn't a "soft and mushy" skeletal structure be less prone to breakage? I also didn't know one's skeleton could lose rigidity through lack of muscle use. Medical science today is quite a marvel, it seems.

@Richnj Ooohh, so that's what's wrong with Push!

This counts as local multiplayer, right?

@UltimateOtaku91 Daaaang, shots fired. Dissing Octopath around these parts is asking for trouble.

I happen to strongly agree, though.

@Dirty0814 The algorithm is still an algorithm. Seeding it with exponentially greater data to change it's decision trees doesn't change the fact that it's still just an algorithm with plain old decision trees. Real AI as a concept exists, but nothing called "AI" today is anything more than a really complicated algorithm. It can't actually break out of its decision trees.

@johnvboy Facts, sarcasm, it's all the same thing.

NFTs are nothing more than decentralized DRM and accomplish nothing DRM didn't already do!

Talk amongst yourselves....

Step 2: Open the box

"It's an algorithm, not an AI"

So you mean like "AI" then?

@blindsquarel Like @Medic_Alert said, most games these days release with vital patches and half the content missing from the media. Even with Nintendo, most of ACNH is inaccessible without the online component, on the cart you get an empty shell of a game, and it's becoming normal. Look at Switch and the massive amount of games that half the game doesn't exist on the cart. Even Pokemon XY, on 3DS had a game-breaking save bug without the patch. Physical is becoming every bit as useless as digital. Neither physical nor digital buyers are affected by this shut down for the games they already bought. But both are equally affected by the next shutdown when you can no longer download or patch.

There's no digital vs physical debate with this stuff. It's everyone.

@Banjo- Reggie didn't lie. They made all the first party games available on the Switch, for slightly more than full price. We got those details soon enough.

Nintendo's cavalier approach to their storefronts and disposable hardware never cease to amaze me. I like Nintendo's games, but as we've moved more into a perpetual ecosystem, Nintendo the company seems ever less likable.

This isn't about ending legacy support, they were still selling 3DS, what, 2 years ago? This is about shutting down a way of getting retro games without subscribing and taking the rest of the store as collateral damage. Nintendo will control when and were you buy the content on a given year, and they've decided it will be through subscriptions this year.

I'll always enjoy their games, but I've got to the point of actively avoiding giving them money anywhere I don't have to and can't do something somewhere else. Doing business with them feels like I'm in a glass cage.

@Ryu_Niiyama Clearly, you have not watched chipmunks in mating season.

Just saying.....

PREORDERS WHEN!?!?!

So if we can't sit on it, drop it, or let animals urinate on it, what good is it?

At least we can still scuba dive with it.

I'm a Game Pass subscriber that is looking forward to hoping Sony's "Spartacus" is a good buy, but nothing about NSO seems like it will be a reasonable value until at least years of DLC are added by which point most of us will have already bought what we wanted. Still a terrible value.

The game back in the day was one of the best co-op games around. I loved that game, and played it way too many times.

This movie...so they stole Alvin and the Chipmunks back in the day, merged it with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? today, and called it a day. Genius. Getting tired of Disney taking a dump on all their classics. And how can you do a chipmunk film without chipmunk voices? Ross Badasarian set the template for this back in the 1950s. Disney successfully copied it for decades with their own twist. How could they possibly fail now? Who says lets take iconic characters and make them sound less iconic, just have Dwayne Johnson record some lines.???

This idea sounds a little bit off, if you get my drift.

Why do they keep trying to put Musou on Nintendo platforms? And why does Nintendo keep partnering with them to make Musou Nintendo themed games? Nintendo hardware will always be the very worst hardware to play a Musou game on since the series' main gimmick is its enormous battlefields with ridiculous number of NPCs at any one time. Of all the series that you can do a "this should be on Nintendo hardware", Musou seems like the worst choice this side of a hard simulator or RTS.

That's aside from the fact that it's basically become Japan's CoD.

@TowaHerschel7 LOL, I definitely spent way too much time trying to figure out how a 7,000 year old dead civilization/language was factoring into the conversation before I realized what that meant

I love the British accents and dialect in XC. It's part of the games identity at this point. Wouldn't be right without it. But, I grew up watching BBC, so.....none of it seems unusual to me.

@nhSnork I had no idea Skye was British. At no point across her 2.5 characters across 2 games did I ever think she was anything other than American. That's a heck of a perfect accent even across subtle differences in character tones she had.

@Mattock1987 That's a California accent (or a sub-regional one at that.) As an eastern yank it irritates the heck out of me, too.... Nobody else across the entire US other than middle school girls talk like that....but everyone on TV does. But Hollywood's in California so that's what the local talent sounds like. Waddayagonna do aboudit?

@TowaHerschel7 The regional accents still exist, but it seems like it's so much more pocketed than it was even just 30 years ago. The accents have been so homogenized and blended out so much you kind of have to try to find them more times than not now. I mean there's still the pockets of the Georgians, Tennessee, TX (in some areas) where ya'll have the draawl, and the Bostonians that still paahk the caah, and the Noo Yawkas being Noo Yawkas. And then?? There's the Californians? But more and more of the accents have been blending through where they're barely detectable and hard to isolate one from another even as a native. So much of the midwestern accents have seemed to blend together into some big combination of the old midwestern accents, canadian accents that all sound generally like the bog-standard Ohio. And the Chicago sound is all but gone. It's sad, real life has lost a log of character here were people both through the US and Canada kind of all just sound mostly the same now except for handfuls of extreme locales. I blame television homogenizing everything to Californian. It's like a mass media RP.

@Ryu_Niiyama For most of the game with metroidvania exploration you should feel bad. When you get to the robot bosses, you should feel grateful you got a much less frustrating way to play it. When you get to the final boss, you should be so grateful that you will ever see the ending thanks to rookie mode.

I did manage to beat it on normal because I couldn't stand the idea of not beating a 2D Metroid game now that I finally had a new one, but it was not remotely fun in any way whatsoever, it was miserable work, I would never do it again for any reason, ever, and I can't believe I didn't break the joycons trying.

Besides, I would never have beat the NES game without a Game Genie....#noshame.

The update seems a little tone deaf. The biggest criticism I could lodge at the game is that the last third of the game already is a boss rush. Why does it need a dedicated boss rush when there's already too many back to back boss battles in regular play?

Which plugs into the dread mode. The existing hard mode is pretty good until you start getting to the harder bosses that were already frustrating on normal. I couldn't imagine bothering with that horrible last boss on hard let alone "dread" mode.

It's been years since RF4 to the point I don't remember it, so RF5 sounds like an excellent way to revisit the excellent gameplay in a new place.

I'm worried about the framerate though. 4 worked on a 3DS and ran beautifully. If this one has terrible framerate as everything on Switch does these days, it's going to bother me. A lot.

GTA6 & Kunckles Confirmed!

@Maxz Same. This shocks me, actually. I always felt the energy from them was somewhere between "awkward colleague" to "awkward ex's forced to work together, one of which REALLY regrets that night in Vegas a lot more than the other one..."

If they actually don't hate each other and want to continue working together that's.....either really interesting or even more awkward than I imagined.

""Nintendo's mission is to put smiles on the faces of everyone we touch."

Isn't that Activision's mission, too?

The store is doomed, and I have no interest in their product. But darnit that store space is the way a store space is supposed to look! Blue and pink neon wave. I want to live in that room.

I would not have ever guessed I'd live in a world with PlayStation Studios games appearing on a Nintendo console.

How is someone that's not Japanese that was at Platinum only a few years, worked on a game that never released, and worked on this game for only half a year (and the article headline says lead designer, and the article says assisted on the title) that interesting?

The most interesting thing the guy did was level design in Astral Chain, which was indeed good. But that's a far cry from a lead designer of all of 6 months mid-way through development...

@MegaVel91 when was the last time since n64 you saw infinitely pixelated and stretched textures like the ground textures above?

The biggest problem with Pokemon is that it really follows the same design ethos as CoD and EA Sports. From a business view, it'll sell every year on brand. Why spend a dime adding anything unnecessary for sales? Why put out the best possible Pokemon game if one made to the minimum dollar required to pull a return meets sales goals? That's not going to change until fanta stop selling.

It's good to hear that someone that's bored with Pokemon AND hates the graphics still thinks the game is good. That's surprising. But that gameplay had better be pretty special to make up for the fugly graphics that look half way between N64 and GCN.

@johnvboy At least I now know what nightmares to look forward to!

@johnvboy "Excuse me, sir, but there appears to be a man in Spandex playing with furries outside your window..."

@johnvboy I don't think Pokemon should look like one of those "If God of War artists made Pokemon for Series X in UE5" articles NL loves posting. But I think it should live up to its own anime. Or basically any other Nintendo first party title. Metroid Dread, visually is on another level, and that's an indie studio compared to the wealthiest studio there is. Or it should at least look like an X360 game..... PLGP/E had ok visuals for what it was, so did X/Y and Su/Mo (but the technical performance was horrible) but it was clear with Sw/Sh that GF simply doesn't know what they're doing with 3D, and didn't seek people that did. It was pretty basic in the open world parts, and this seems to follow suit. This game looks like they tried to copy BotW, but forgot to ask Monolith for the engine... It may not look "bad" but it looks "primitive", and not like what you'd expect from the flagship series of gaming. Much as I hate what happened to AC, visually, look at ACNH, then look at the screens of Arceus.

If the gameplay holds up it can be overlooked, but it definitely deserves to be called out. And I don't disagree that the mass market of kids won't even notice the visuals, but I'm not sure it's ok to hold one of gaming's premier series to a low technical bar because we acknowledge focus testing revealed higher quality wouldn't affect sales.

I am now going to read every post you make in a gravelly narrative voice......

@johnvboy With GF it's not about choice of art style. The fact that they always have underlying technical issues, even though they also always have significantly outdated graphics on each system, implies it's not an art style by choice, it's an art style based on that's the best they could get barely acceptable performance out of with their technical limitations.

I'm not too moved by what the mass market of casual players thinks is "fine" - the casual mass market things Candy Crush is "fine." One would hope the biggest gaming franchise in existence would strive to be the "greatest that ever was" rather than finding the minimum the casual mass market will find passable enough to pay for....which is kind of the central complaint around GameFreak...

If you have relatives impressed by Switch's visuals while sitting next to a series X, have you considered a new career as an ophthalmologist? Or considered the possibility that you are, in fact, genetically part bat?