NEStalgia

"If we buy the product now, maybe they'll make it worth the money when we buy another one next year."

Is this where we really are as a consumer base?

@N1ntendodo This is Nintendo. They have never, ever offered value, anywhere, that wasn't necessitated by disastrous sales, or initial product offering, and even then, they rarely do. They're not going to just start offering a system wide DLC pass if they didn't announce a system-wide DLC pass. Not unless the current pass is such a dismal sales failure they have to pull it out of the fire. They may add some other DLC to some other big game (BotW2 etc) if sales are slumping heavily on the service, otherwise, you might see AC HH as the only DLC ever on the service, forever. That would be classic Nintendo.

They could have taken the existing NSO and added GB. Or GBA. Or N64. They could have added Virtual Boy to 3DS. They could have added lots of value. But they didn't. Because they're Nintendo, and they didn't need to. They finally did add N64. They bundled it with a single game DLC, and the almost 30 year old Genesis and charged more than double the price for the access.

At which point Thomas, here, went insane and had a bizarre public fever dream about how it's not such a bad value, after all.

People complain about PS Plus and XBLG because the monthly games are often terrible (but not THIS terrible.) But the service is offering a lot more than just the games in terms of online features, sales, discounts, etc. Nobody really complains about Game Pass except PS die-hards....what's there to complain about? It's $180 a year for full online service, free games, rental games, access to all first party games on launch day, sales and discounts, plus robust online. NSO+ is $80 a year for low quality online service, and access to some games from 1983-1999, plus one games' DLC?

Imagine if Super NSO + gave you unlimited access to all Nintendo published games, on launch day for $180? That would be the Game Pass comparison. Metroid Dread? Warioware? SMTV? Bayo 3? BotW1, 2, Sushi Striker, Odyssey, FE3H, Pikmin deluxe, etc....all included for $180. Maybe not a fair comparison since Nintendo has more first party titles at the moment...but those titles also aren't as massivley expensive to make as FH5, Halo Infinite, and Starfield.

PS Now sits between. It's very cheap, almost the same price as NSO+. It doesn't give you day and date first party releases like Game Pass. But it gives you lots of newish third party games, classics much newer than N64, and lots of recent 1st party games (imagine all WiiU games included in NSO+.)

In terms of dollar price, NSO+ is cheaper than the other services. In terms of value, it's not even playing in the same ballpark. NSO+ is a sandlot, PS+&Now are a major league field, and Game Pass Ultimate is an Olympic Stadium. And NSO+ want's to charge 50% the rent of that stadium for access to their sandlot. And Thomas thinks it's a great value as long as you like sand.

If your justification for why the service is a good value is that you have to have multiple family members under an account who all happen to want the $25 DLC to the same game, and thus a $45 expense per-year is now justified assuming that whole group doesn't want to play that DLC for more than 2 years, the service is, in fact, not a good value.

I mean a superyacht can be a "good value" if you plan on using it to charge $20 fares to transport people across a canal for 8 years..... that doesn't mean it's actually a good value for most people as a product.

There's a difference between "it's not expensive" and "it's a good value." It's almost $50 a year to get access to 25+ year old video games emulated poorly that you probably already own on more than one system for half the price already and a DLC for a game you may not want for a game you may not own. $45 may not be "expensive" but what you get for $45 isn't worth that under any calculation except splitting the DLC 4+ ways for a single year only.

I have this old 486 PC sitting here......I'll gladly sell it to you for $45 a year..... It's a great value. People payed over a thousand for that back in 1994!

Only at Nintendo can can the corporate rep and the criminal stealing from them both have the same name as their cartoon mascot.

Wonder if Mickey Rooney ever tried to run/steal from Disney?

Speaking of thieves and Nintendo, how about that NSO+ pricing?

@westman98 Carp! You beat me to it!

I heard a rumour that Chris Pratt will be voicing Dora the Explorer next.

@Tasuki Very much this. . Irreplaceable. Same with Mel Blanc. The replacements are just terrible. We're screwed when Frank Oz quits.

@nessisonett It said fortified with iron right on the box.

Cloudhog is still better than Werehog.

@DeusX Fair point in not having risked money (unlike loot boxes), but there's still the implications of taxable earnings.

@RupeeClock @Edwirichuu The emails are weird, but it's not just for not playing, it emails you congrats if you beat it, if you start the DLC, etc....it's just account tied "involving" emails based on your game progress. Creepy on one hand, but innocuous overall compared to.....everything else.

@DeusX On a different planet, playing games to win money would be called "gambling".... I think there's a rocky future with "play to win prize money" and gambling commissions. If the laws actually work (spoiler: They don't) this kind of thing would get rolled into online gambling/casino games and stay separate from retail games. Once we're talking blockchain and currency we're talking about earnings. And where there's earnings theres odds, taxes, gambling taxes, all sorts of fun ways for governments to get their piece of the pie by reclassifying it. Defining them as "tokens" doesn't escape that. Lots of casinos already tried that. The tokens are still taxed and regulated at their currency conversion. And if these assets are unique, they have currency assignment.

Ubisoft Declares It Wants to be at Forefront of Tech Investors are Buzzing About

You could run this headline every day of the calendar year, and be ahead of the news, daily.

@zombi3wolf while I'm a Nintendo fan and a discouraged, critical, jaded Sony fan as well, I'm sad to say Nintendo fans were blind fanboys before Sony fans were. It's just that the current iteration of Sony fanboys are more noxious.

I really think Nintendo could have avoided the backlash by making it monthly. $3.75/mo doesn't have the ghastly appearance $45/yr to play Dynamite Heady.

@Ralizah Reggie went from pizza hut to Nintendo..... There's a revolving door secret society with noa and big fast food.....

Bowser's from. P&G.... And so was Reggie!

@nocdaes This. Plus closing costs, moving costs, selling/rebuying half your possessions at a loss..... Most people other than 18-26 year old just out of school, don't have a place in life young lions, up upper management with enough cash to splash this is impossible. "Relocating to to hq" is a pr friendly way of saying "mass layoff but we want you to quit yourself."

@Anti-Matter I was being sarcastic

There's a bunch of PS people that always go on about how people want mature games with deep stories (I'd argue their precious tlou2 it's neither, it's adolescent fiction at best), and knock "platformers and Zelda"...

And this game....... It's the proof of their claim . PLAYSTATION EXCLUSIVE!!

@Tsuchinoko And FNAF is the state of plays most watched trailer.... You may be into something...

PlayStation fans prefer mature games with adult narratives instead of Nintendo's kids games.

Fluffy bunnies and Ellie's Torture Porn Adventure. Contains no Bareneked Ladies.

This is Error.

y does nintedno hait america?

The poll is incomplete. It's missing Pikmin 4. We all know Pikmin 4 neared completion 6 years ago, so we've all played it and like it the best.

3 did a lot right, but it feels like an incomplete game that arbitrarily just stops immediately after you get your footing and abilities. If it kept going it could easily have been the best, but, instead, right when you hit your stride and look forward to getting into the meat of the game, it just....ends.

@Ryu_Niiyama Eh, I don't have a hard time believing a bad voice actor (or rather someone who's not actually a voice actor at all just recording placeholder audio out of their cubicle) portraying a really different sounding sets of sounds than the intended one. I've often thought how difficult and....awkward...sounding damage grunts must be to not cross over the intended sound like that, and found some VAs do better than others at a task that seems mundane but is actually very difficult. There's subtlety in intonation in various human (and animal) vocalizations, and when you're just acting, it takes uncommon talent to be able to replicate reactionary intonations correctly while pretending. (And I'm sure a lot of adult actors sound more in pain than anything...even if they're trained actors otherwise.) I've no doubt there's some classic Charles Martinet outtakes of "a very special Mario" we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever hear buried somewhere in the Nintendo vaults along those lines. He's loose canon and an actor's actor....I guarantee it. Let alone Robin Williams.............

For a good time (or at parties) try doing untrained VA for damage grunts yourself and play it back for yourself, and think of how unintentionally awkward the resulting sounds are! One doesn't have to be a pervert to hear awkward misplaced sounds and think "OMG WTF!"

Edit: Actually regarding Mario and Martinet, legend has it that at his inaugural E3 when he was just there to entertain the booth, he had some very....off-color Mario interactions with E3-goers!

@kupocake @Bunkerneath
Mad Max Batman (feat. Shaggy)

In our defense, the reality isn't really any less absurd.

@TryToBeHopeful At first I just assumed it was the Gandalf the Yellow from Rogue One or Gandalf the Green from The Walking Dead. I didn't really expect it's the Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Looking forward to Shaggy though. Might be the first Rasta fighter in FG history. Brings a whole new meaning to Flintstones: Dreads.

@impurekind All true, though it's also true that with each new powerful console they launched their sales slumped further behind the previous until it hit almost total irrelevance in the market, while the weak portable hardware sold stronger and stronger, and the comparably weak Playstations dominated.

So they were focused on power for a time, and that proved to be a perpetual downward spiral for them. Though Sega's marketing of the Genesis/Megadrive as the power system probably jumpstarted a market perception of Nintendo that gained its own life.

@Ryu_Niiyama To be fair to Nintendo's judgement, acted pain isn't actual pain, so pretend sounds may not actually convey the same involuntary intonations that would be subconsciously perceived by human auditory processing as authentic pain cries might. (Note to directors, strike actors with batons while recording pain grunts for authenticity.) And the original place holder sounds in question weren't recorded by a trained actor but by a random game design employee told to make painful moaning noises, so it may have been laughably bad "pain" sounds that sounded more like something from a CP2077 brothel than a bounty hunter getting impaled through power armor.

@Eel Do you realize your comment has just imbalanced online Smash play by making Palutena overused and in need of severe nerf?

Wow, what a letdown. That shatters all my hopes for the film. Not true to the source material at all!

That's hot!

@Shiiva NES and SNES are irrelevant as they're in the base subscription that also includes mandatory fee for online play in current games and cloud saves. This is more than double the same price for mediocre N64 emulation plus Sega Genesis/Megadrive games that are mostly already available in a permanent to own package for less money than one year of the expansion pass.

Comparing the per-game-per-month cost is a self-defeating argument. If we're really going to compare the price per interesting game to justify it, Game Pass, and even more, PS Now blows this out of the water, out of the sky, and out of orbit in terms of price-per-game-per-month value.

All for the low, low price of more than double the base subscription!

The real crime here is that the government thought $85k could float a business for more than like a week....

As for the Pokemon card, I bet he could take it to court as a business investment and win. There's more than enough statutory evidence showing appreciable value, and it could be easily argued as as sound as bonds.

@GuitarAnthony It's almost always the virtue signalers that have the most to hide.

@twztid13 I take it back, Z57 is as BS as the x-ray Emmi.... The pink hurdles are just not suited for the controls.

@twztid13 I don't mind the upgrades so much being locked behind them, only because EMMI battles aren't really a battle. Getting past the EMMI to get to the Central Unit and doing the miniboss rooms there is basically a glorified version of finding the normal orb rooms. From there you get an instant checkpoint to continuously retry the pretty fast and simple destruction of the EMMI (finding the right spot to do it can be tricky and take retries, but actually taking down the EMMI once you have the spot is a lot easier than evading the EMMI the rest of the time.) So I don't really think of abilities as locked behind an EMMI so much as finding an EMMI Zone connected orb room that happens to have a connected miniboss battle and the EMMI takedown sequence attached.

But yeah, the anti-EMMI bias taints anything connected with them. Thematically and tonally the game would lose something without them, yet their areas are devoid of any fun because they're just not really a functioning mechanic.

There was one point in the game, when you first get the cloak and have to evade the next EMMI using it that I thought the EMMI thing was going to work out OK. That one genuinely had some stealth mechanic strategy and skill involved. And then the next one or two have room designs where you can't really use that effectively (and the EMMI climbs all the walls you can hide on), and then you get to the BS one that can see through walls and clear through the different doored rooms, so no matter where you hide, he'll find you and you really do have to just keep blind running and hope one time the RNG works for you.

I agree, that even beyond EMMI, there is just too heavy a focus on boss battles. It seems like you come up to bosses one after another, with a combat focus that just wasn't a part of traditional Metroid. Fortunately the parts that are traditional are very good, so the extra bosses are just "bonus" mandatory annoying content that doesn't detract from the good parts, but it annoyingly kills the pace of the otherwise great traditional labyrinth exploration. It think Mercury Steam really nailed what made Super Metroid great, and improved on the feel of controlling Samus greatly, but they padded it with too many things that interrupt the pacing in ways that don't ruin the game, but keep it from perfection.

I could live with the excess boss battles, because while excessive, it's not like tricky bosses haven't been part of Metroid all along. But the EMMI....the design of those rooms and evading just feel ill thought out. Fantastic concept, but broken execution.

I think the EMMI are a one time gimmick, though. I wouldn't expect them to return in a future game even if they were popular. Classic Nintendo that each entry gets some identifiable hook that makes it unique, so we're probably safe with that.

@Octane LOL! Not that you're keeping track or anything.....

It's been like 2000 days since pikmin4 was almost finished, so it may be a while. In the meantime, please look forward to Metroid Prime: Federation Force 2 featuring Blast Ball.

@twztid13 Yeah, I'm not sure how that could have been done better, but I wish it had been. On one hand, emmi are important in creating that sense of dread. You see the checkered doors and you know doom is inside, you try to avoid them, find way around, get in and out as fast as possible, with the tension of the beeping and watching every corner. It works for the mood and tension. Otoh, it's an endless string of unavoidable RNG OHKO attacks.... You can't really play through it or get better. You're backed into a corner with no escape over and over and over again until you're blessed by the RNG gods. There's no gameplay, it's no fun, you just do the same thing over and over until you get a different result. I love the game but hate the Emmi rooms. It kills the real flow of the game.

@Ryu_Niiyama That sounds all too familiar.... I never even got to the time shift in FE3H! I'm still cramming in GAA, though. Sleep can be deferred and reduced. GAA comes first. A little blue light before bed never hurt anyone.

I've become a game snacker. I think that's why Game Pass is working out so well for me. Instead of playing one 200 hour game from start to finish I play an hour of 200 games. But my RPG weakness will kill me.

I'm still waiting for them to process my opt-out form for adulting. It really should have gone through by now. Maybe I should send it again. Are there limits how many times per decade you can apply? Because I think I've applied at least 15 times in the last 2 decades.

@Ryu_Niiyama It breaks my heart, but I hate to say I think I'm in the same place. Even the E.M.M.Is drive me crazy with dying over and over again, even if they're necessary to create the titular "dread", and aren't really that difficult to get around. It's just wasting time I have too little of.

Ouch, the feels.... Seeing Iwata's early Directs really brings me back some years.

I'm glad Directs still continue, but the new slick, polished, externally produced in narrated infomercials really aren't "Directs", they're just commercials. I feel like they miss the whole point of the Direct in that it was supposed to be |DIRECT| from Nintendo to you. Iwata himself bringing the news, along with Reggie, Shibata, Trinen, Miyamoto, etc. It had meaning being direct, and showcased that the leaders of Nintendo are also part of the whole community as well. What we have now doesn't feel like that. It's just a slick produced advert, with a backing track, graphic cuts to product, and an irritating announcer that I just picture as a 19 year old ginger with a s*** eating grin that you want to smack with a brick. It doesn't have that genuine, handcrafted feeling the original direct presentations by actual leadership and staff had. And nobody can bring the charm and sincerity of Iwata.

Also, I wish I'd discovered his Japanese presentations earlier. Maybe it's because I'm used to his speech patterns from his faux-English, but I find his Japanese much easier for my brain to parse and translate than anyone elses! What's a blur from anyone else is actual words from him.

Wait, that's the Metroid where we find out that X is a pokemon and metroids hatch from yoshi eggs, and Ganon is Ridley, right?

At $45 a year? None of them should be played on Switch. Plenty of other places to play them. I payed $60 once for everything that mattered on PS3. Still have it. Could pay like $25 on Xbox on sale and have it for life. Why would you pay hundreds of dollars over years for this? Heck, isn't that collection available even on Switch?

@Richnj lol, we posted that at the same moment!

Fortnite isn't even a game anymore, it's just a cobrand marketing platform.

Oh, that's cool, so it's not another arcade gone, just an arcade moved and renovated.

I love that the sign is all in English without a single Japanese word in sight. This arcade may well be in Cleveland and we'd not know the difference.

@Chowdaire AFAIK the current revision of PS5 with the cut down heatsink now turns a small profit.

@VoidofLight I still don't understand how it bolsters sales. Who buys a game because it has "free content updates"? It seems to, but I don't get it.

And yeah,I was going to say that ac isn't really a multiplayer game, so that theory doesn't work well. Though we don't know if the majority of okay with the casual base is really chilling with friends online, but the game has so little multiplayer content, and what's there is so heavily restricted, I can't imagine most play isn't solo.

Imagine Metroid Dread releases and then super missile, super missile doors are added 3 months later. Boss pack adds Kraid in a year, morph ball and mines in 18 months..... You can just pass through the locks that require them until release. Free content!

@VoidofLight I think with Nintendo in general, it's become best to wait a few years to buy their mass market games. Core games like Metroid release complete and are safe at launch, probably Bayonetta as well. But the mass market games, it seems normal now that the game is released as a trickle for social marketing and is only a complete game after a few years. AC is just the most egregious example. I'm sure Animal Crossing: New Suckers will be a great game. 18+ months after launch...

@VoidofLight and some people will still believe this is all bonus content that wasn't necessary. They literally finally announced the actual game, a year and a half after they sold it.

It's a shame, if I were buying now instead of at launch, I'd probably have really loved the game I waited 8, now 9 years to exist. Instead I burned out on that depressing empty steam greenlight game a year ago and can't foresee going back again.

Next ac I'm just waiting 2 years to buy.

This one was basically Animal Crossing: Avengers

@johnvboy Yeah, the dock definitely has a new design on the rails. It doesn't do anything to help with side to side alignment or skew, which I think is crazy not to have done, there easily could have been a dovetail that lines it up but the slope of the vertical rails does feel like it's tapered to maybe avoid contact above the bottom edge. I'd still like to have seen a soft bumper involved but that angle might also avoid the problem. At least until the presumably sacrificial rail in the dock starts to erode and increase in tolerance.

I sometimes wonder how the og model made it out the door with some fairly obvious, basic design flaws. Nintendo usually does a lot of testing for usability flaws, even if their build quality tends to be rickety, and that was a long way from Iwatas mandate that og 3ds needed to withstand a 4 foot drop into concrete and still work. Maybe they're finding their way again in hardware with oled, but switch og really seemed to be missing that Iwata/Takeda attention to detail, with them gone. Drift aside (and that's shameful they don't just contract new modules for that), it has the iffy kickstand, the exhaust vent that's wide open to debris and too thin be rugged especially when heated, the dock scratching, joy on rails with to much play... Lots of tiny but obvious oversights that I don't think would have passed the Iwata test. (Though the 3dsxl did and that felt like it was a Chinese knock off.... Rough jagged plastic that didn't line up on the seams, creaking plastic if gripped... Real amateurish stuff. But cheap as the build was, the design didn't have any glaring flaws.)

@johnvboy I think they said the applied film on the screen is anti scatter, so it's just there to glue the pieces together in the event the tempered glass shatters. Afaik all "gorilla" type glass has that standard which is why dropped phones crack instead of exploding into crumbs like automotive glass. I don't use screen protectors (and I really wonder how peeling adhesive affects the finish of that anti scatter film, if you try to use one and remove it).

Depends how scratch resistant the film and glass is. My phone's sometimes get impossible to see hairline scratches only visible under scrutiny, and I attribute that to pocket dust of hard minerals more than anything else. If OLED is really gorilla (does Samsung even make non gorilla OLED panels? At that thinness anything else would flex) then the dock would be literally incapable of scratching it and the issue really would be solved. The anti scatter film could be the scratch weakness though.

I have 3 og switches in the house, and I'm reasonably careful docking them, but all 3 definitely have carved a cluster of etches along the dock rails. I don't think scratching on those is even avoidable along the screen edge, it's natural wear and tear with the design. At least the launch model. I'm sure if you look really carefully you'll see them, mostly over the black border left and right of the screen on the clear lens but mostly not over the lcd, so it doesn't interfere with the image (mostly) but it's still not what you want to see when using it properly.

@johnvboy Nintendo hardware usually has pretty chintzy feel to the fit and finish. OG 3DS was uncharacteristically dense and refined. XL was..... The opposite. But the new oled reminds me of that launch 3ds in density and feel.

The dock is less creaky for sure, though I'm disappointed they didn't add silicone or felt or some kind of standoff on the console to align it better and avoid the dock scratching the screen issue. Missed opportunity there. It does have some change to improve it but they didn't go all the way with that.

I haven't scaled it, but holding them in each hand, it's distinctly heavier. More metal, glass, it makes sense.. But it was already a heavy handheld so it was surprising to feel it weigh even more. Surprisingly it hasn't bothered my while playing though, and I thought for sure it would. One handed holding, which I'll do for something like Ace attorney, I don't think would be nice though.

You know, I've only done digital so far. I tried to open that slot just to see, and I couldn't get it open! I thought that was exaggeration, but I honestly haven't opened the cover at all because my day 1 attempts all failed and I'm not playing a physical game currently anyway so I didn't try again. It LOOKS like it should be easier than the old one, but my down-to-the-quick nails just didn't fit in that slot!

Haha, the temperature difference itself didn't matter, but I happened to notice it when I picked it up on a chilly day outside. It just made me realize that a part that looks, feels, and sounds when tapped like plastic is actually metal. And magnesium is one of the few metals that could be that light, rigid, and thin and feel like plastic. That's why Surface and SLR cameras are made of it.... And it still feels like plastic . It's just the kickstand not the whole back, but still, unexpected premium from Nintendo. And remarkable that the 1" wide ABS strip they thought was fine originally got replaced with like 5"of magnesium.

@johnvboy Got it safe and sound! Thanks for remembering. You got white too, right? I'm impressed with the fit and finish... It's unusually tight for a Nintendo product. Shockingly heavy though compared to the already heavy original. Also a surprising amount of metal. The frame around the screen, but also the kickstand might be the same magnesium as the Surface Pro, which explains some of the cost bump. It looks and feels like the plastic above it, but notice it's cold to the touch where the plastic above it isn't?

@johnvboy lol. Mrrrgrrrrgrrrr