Nameless_Shame

I both love and hate this game.

I love that there’s incentive to keep coming back, with the change of cups and courses and special events and new characters/karts/gliders added into the mix.

I hate that progress is so dependent on RNG garbage and that “pay to win” is such a slimy tactic for a game series that prided itself on accessibility and “git’n gud,” despite the randomness and rubber banding of AI to incentivize strategy.

It exists in the netherworld between blue and purple. It is neither one nor the other.

Place it next to a proper blue, it’ll appear more purple; place it next to a proper purple, it’ll appear more blue.

The goddess Iris laughs at our meager mortal interpretations of her work - casting her judgements on us with such ease, as we can barely perceive even the machinations of her lesser sister Arke’s scant understanding of her mighty rainbow.

Lo! We defile her blessings with our inane editorials on a subject which we have no business pontificating, nay, DEMANDING our knowledge is greater than that of the work of our omniscient deity. Repent, ye heathens (!) for our doom is not only nigh, it is colour-blind.

...but fo reel tho, dat ***** str8 up purple, yo.

@KateGray Also! Since you referenced his Last Jedi song, you may be interested that Rian Johnson even filmed a documentary/full album performance of John Darnielle’s 2009 album, “The Life of the World to Come” in 2010.

@Luigisghost669 Lol he was using The Rolling Stones as a reference for how people can misjudge a band, chill out. It sounds like you’re arguing for the sake of arguing. He never implied they were bigger than The Rolling Stones and he never implied that tMG’s other albums were bad, just that those four were personally exceptional to him.

But if you want to argue for the sake of arguing, The Mountain Goats have around 700 songs, and MAYBE five of them incorporate a banjo.

@KateGray

Nothing for Lava Juice (an Oracle of Seasons deep cut reference)
Dampé: The Coroner's Gambit
All Hail West Necluda
The Sunset Deku Tree
Beat the Champ(ions Ballad)

Edit: @TheDanslator Ha! Nice, you beat me to it.

@nessisonett The albums you’re referencing are technically his ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth albums. Old boy goes all the way back to 1991.

@KateGray Ha! I actually like Tallahorsey.

Maybe “We Shall All Be the Song of Healing”? Lol I’d actually have to spend some time to do justice to a proper crossover name.

The Mountain Goats have consistently been my favorite band for over a decade. I got into them in early 2007 between the releases of Get Lonely and Heretic Pride when a friend played select songs from All Hail West Texas, Tallahassee, and The Sunset Tree, respectively.

I was immediately hooked, and being the then-collegiate little pirate I was, downloaded his entire discography (I’ve since properly purchased his entire discography available on CD (and a few lucky EP vinyls on tour), made seven “The Very Best Of the Mountain Goats” disc compilations for my closest musician friends, helped teach a friend to play guitar with almost nothing but Mountain Goats covers, and to this day sing along to said covers with that friend once a year at our annual Flag Day party.

My first tour purchase happened to coincide with the release of the EP that this little gem was on that I think you will enjoy:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbYyTlz1Tw

Hail Satan!

Manufactured scarcity doesn’t make sense for a Mario collection that includes two of the most highly regarded games ever for a system that is on its way to reaching Wii/DS levels of sales.

I honestly think this practice made less sense for this game than OG Fire Emblem. But I guess Nintendo what Nintendon’t. Or whatever.

@Wilforce Nintendo actually hasn’t held any rights to the N64 game for over three years. What’s more, back in 2007, they actually negotiated for the game to be remade by Rare with Activision’s cooperation for the XBOX360, but due to even further copyright issues, it never came to be.

https://gamerant.com/goldeneye-007-reboot-rights-issue-824/

Not including the cards or cereal, I’m only missing 32 (but I’m not including the dark variants of the Skylanders because they’re both in big bulky boxes with dumb extra stuff that I don’t care to add to the collection).

Notable missing ones that are extra expensive:
-All the Japanese exclusives
-Pretty much all the others I’m missing too, really.

Notable one in my collection:
-Wave 1 Villager

All are unopened. I may have a complete collection in ten years if I decide to get serious about it again.

I’m here to echo all the current sentiments of “I’d GAF if it was physical.”

Smaller indie games are fine as digital only (and even then, most of those I get physically if they exist anyway (thank you, Limited Run)), but I already had to smoosh so much data from the physical carts of Bioshock, FFX-2, and Spyro onto my SD card that not even having the option for Eternal just keeps it at bay for me.

This is to say nothing of the quality of the game; I’m sure it’s fantastic. But with the ever continuing practice of developers flat-out refusing to utilize 32gb carts, despite the availability of them (thanks, Witcher III, and literally no other game outside of Japan), I’ll continue my practice of not purchasing them.

This used to be an issue for me back in the early aughts, but I was able to successfully program my brain to differentiate the various consoles’ layouts by the time the Wii Classic controller came out.

The SNES was what taught me how intuitive controller designs could be, but the real culprit of screwing with my brain was poorly integrated NES button mapping on SNES controllers.

Key offender: Castlevania Collection on Switch. Having already established with SCIV that when using an SNES button layout, Y is whip and B is jump, because Y and B are the most ergonomically sensible buttons to use for your main actions in platformers, this same input is a no-brainier for how the NES Castlevanias should control on an SNES pad.

But no. Because the NES only has two buttons in B and A (which work perfectly for whipping and jumping, respectively, in that order), it was assumed that players would associate those same buttons on the SNES pad to function the same way. But because the thumb placement of Y and B on the SNES is in the same location of where the thumb placement of B and A is on the NES, a horrible and unforgivable blunder was made.

Such an issue wouldn’t be a problem if the game had mappable controls, but lo! No such configuration exists.

In conclusion, the Virtual Boy controller was way ahead of its time.

The entire series is covered on rpgamer.com, so I say yes.

@KateGray
Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes? There’s one where Calvin’s dad tells the same thing to him and when he asks why old paintings are in color, his dad explains that like everything else, the paint became colorized in the 1930s. Calvin then gets confused and asks, “but why didn’t black and white photos turn to color if the paintings did?!” and his dad explains, “because they WERE color pictures of black and white, remember?”

Bill Waterson is all of our dads.

@jbreez00 You’re in luck! Before they battled in Super Smash Bros., Link could be found sleeping in an inn in Super Mario RPG.

And a year prior, if the player had under a certain amount of DK coins in Donkey Kong Country 2, Mario and Link shared a podium in Cranky’s museum.

And several years before even that, if the player scores a certain amount in Type B in Tetris for the NES, among several others cameos, Link can be found playing the ocarina while Mario and Luigi perform a questionable dance.

I was initially confused by the wording of the SSHD press release; are the controller options for non-motion control input exclusive to handheld or can I play with a pro controller?

@KateGray Haha, fantastic! You’ve made this ol’ man proud 🤗 Really enjoyed the article.

While my brain was a goopy, barely developing wet shell for the likes of the first two Zelda titles, it had formed into a close-enough-to-competent Krang of a problem solving organ by the time I got a SNES in 1992, and while I had enough road bumps along the way causing me to call my older cousin for help more times than I care to admit, it was still the first grand adventure game I actually beat!

If Daft Punk were still together, I’m sure they would approve and be proud of the name drop.

If they bring the complexity and fun of RPG leveling from GBC/GBA with the Miiness of Open Tour, then there’s a Chance it could work. My biggest fear is that the Camelot Mario sports games are suffering from the same forced lack of ingenuity that the Paper Mario series has suffered from. If this game falls flat, at least I’ll know for certain that it’sa lost cause and won’t have to keep an open mind for future installments.

@KateGray Haha, no, I wouldn’t ask or expect you to do that. But perhaps with your commanding knowledge and sway on the topic, you might in the future be able to convince others to 🙂

@KateGray I wouldn’t be as opposed to the mass consensus incorrectly naming and abbreviating it that way if it weren’t for the fact that the same mass consensus correctly names and abbreviates its direct sequel. Consistency matters to me in that regard.

More to the point, where titles such as “The Adventure of Link” and “Link’s Awakening” refer to the Hero’s name, the “Link” in “ALttP” and “ALBW” refers to a connection. I know I’m splitting hairs here, but in the same way Zelda fans mock normies for referring to Link as Zelda, I find it a bit hypocritical that Zelda fans would overlook and/or be okay with this.

I also understand that as far as titles go, articles can be omitted from abbreviations, which is why “The Wind Waker” doesn’t bother me as much, but when the noun of a title is the same as the Hero’s name, I believe the article is necessary to differentiate.

Nitpicking aside, I’m wholly impressed by your dedication to math your way through all of that data to give us the most accurate hierarchy of the franchise. Kudos!

Nitpick: Why is “A Link Between Worlds” always correctly titled, but never “A Link to the Past?” I’ll look the other way on “The Wind Waker.”