RadioHedgeFund

It’s amazing the effect gaming can have on your musical tastes.

My interests were a mix of pop and indie until O heard the soundtrack to Wip3out in 1999 and it blew my mind. I heavily got into progressive trance and house because of that game and discovered tons of artists and DJs I still follow within that scene.

I think it was the release of SSX3 that got me back into rock and indie. Love me some Yellowcard and Placebo.

The most recent (?) is Forza Horizon. The OST to the original 2012 release is on constant repeat in my car. They created the perfect driving playlist within that game.

It has to be a classic Sega character. Billy Hatcher is a good bet but I’d also guess Alex Kidd, Vyse or Aika from Skies of Arcadia or Alis from Phantasy Star.

That said Sega do have a history of putting some proper left field secret characters in their games like the Horse in Daytona or even the Daytona car in Fighters Megamix. Heck, the final secret character in Sonic Racing 2 was a Dreamcast controller!

That is an amazing collection of mods backed up by some inexplicable changes to the foot sound effects that are REALLY annoying to listen to.

2 steps forward, 1 step back.

That’s easy: Galbadia Garden from FFVIII.

TBH I thought Dragon Ball Z Popotato and Cucucumber were much better.

With effort it is clear the Switch smokes the 360 and PS3 in terms of processing power and yet there are still a dearth of games that skipped the Wii that would be right at home on the console.

I’m looking mainly at SSX which deserves another shot at greatness, minus the terrible krschk big jump incoming krschk pilot on the radio.

Oh great. Another 6 months of ‘The Pokémon Company lied. They could put in 900 Pokémon’ from so-called ‘fans’.

Yay.

@Bentendo1609 It’s more they don’t feel safe going out. Nothing wrong with giving players choice. Maybe give them more rewards from Pokestops for being further away?

On topic: what the heck Niantic? Where is all the Alolan Pokémon?!?

I wouldn’t mind some news on Gen 8 for Pokémon Go too.

If Nintendo just bundles all their old ROMs together and sold them on a per-console basis for £30 a pack and the money went to some sort of gaming charity they would raise a small fortune.

@JasmineDragon I was just kind of winding up the title! 😅

Getting real for a second a person can totally be lonely despite being surrounded by people. Sometimes we can even be lonely if we are loved and in love. Love doesn’t steal us from loneliness as a famous band once sang.

@YorkshireNed But how can a group of Assassins be lonely? Surely the title should ready ‘The Lonely Assassin.’ Lonely implies singular, alone. Yet the ‘S’ at the end of Assassin means there is a group.

It’s a double negative: a singular plural (Like The Lone Rangers from Airheads. You can’t pluralise Lone Ranger)

@BloodNinja To be fair I on two occasions in my first year skived off my weekend job and told my girlfriend I was ill and not to come around just so I could play Metroid Prime and later Wind Waker for the whole time without any interruptions!

I’m 38 and certainly hasn’t ruined my generation.

I would argue the next pandemic is far-right governments and their news outlets failing to do anything about the environment.

Shame we cannot vaccinate the population against their propaganda.

How can you have a pluralised group that is lonely, implying it is singular ie alone?

This will be one of those American/English thing won’t it like the nonexistent word ‘Addicting’ or how Soldering is pronounced how it is spelt and not ‘Sawdering’.

It’s obviously Fi like the Greek alphabet Phi. In all the examples above Americans are wrong. Queens English ftw.

We need both. Physical to keep a permanent record and digital so that prices stay down. It’s about £60 for a 2nd hand copy of Persona 4 Golden on the PSVita from Cex and £9 from the PSN.

LOL at the fanboys getting in a twist about a Nintendo site covering a rival platform.

You’re all probably too young to remember Nintendo magazines in the early 1990’s detailing what Sega’s plans were and vice-versa.

So instead of changing what probably amounts to a couple of lines of arbitrary code they will now come up with some F2P way of making the distance double via an item you can buy from the shop.

Cheers.

@DTfeartheBEARD I’ve been after one for a while but the fear of drift puts me right off. Have all yours been ok?

Stone cold fact: Advanced Battle had the best theme tune.

I never understood the animosity towards the Wii. It remains Nintendo’s best console. It had 2 quality Zelda releases, 2 Metroids, 2 absolutely stinking Mario platformers, some very clever mid-life games like Kirby’s Epic Yarn and frickin’ Sin and Punishment 2 (a sequel nobody expected!) and it’s latter years gave us fruit like Xenoblade and the highly underrated The Last Story.

But it was the golden age of local multiplayer I will remember the most. I was 23 at the time and had friends around every week. They’d bring some controllers and we would blast Wii Sports, Super Monkey Ball and l, yeah because it was pretty good Red Steel. Ghost Squad brought back hazy memories of cinema arcades and HOTD Overkill was hilarious.

Wii Sports Resort was an ingenious title. The skill required to master table tennis was genuine. The OG Wii Sports cleverly compensated for the original remotes lack of precision with programming tricks but there was no hiding with the W+.

I can only imagine people who hate on Wii Sports Resort were just crap at it! A Switcb rerelease is long overdue.

@Kreko There was a 2 year gap between them both and if you already have them digitally there is no point buying a second copy.

So Ariana Grande then as leaked in the court case earlier in the year.

That means that we might still see Samus.

Oh my smeg. I am totally buying MHR just for that Amaterasu skin!

It’s a shame Nintendo don’t set an example to the rest of the industry and release an update so the title can be played offline, blocks all IAP but moves it into and delists the title. That way existing players can continue to enjoy it but no new players can accidentally download it.

Happiness on SSX3. I played through the whole game with every character on GameCube, Xbox, Xbox 360 backwards compatibility and Xbox One rerelease. They also reused the SSX3 levels on the PSP version of SSX On Tour so this only adds to it.

I’ll regularly replay it just to see if I can beat my times. Normally I have Bitter End by Placebo or Way Away by Yellowcard playing in the background.

Streetpass was a very Nintendo solution to the question of how to convince the smartphone owners of 2012 that they still needed to carry around a portable console with them.

I would go as far as to call it the cleverest piece of software of the whole 3DS/Vita/PS4/X1 generation.

@PhhhCough life’s also to short to take a chance that a hot girl or guy might sit next to you and want to play Mario Kart 😅

I see it this way:

I am sat on a train with my Switch playing Mario Kart 8 DX. A stranger (who may or may not be attractive....) sits down next to me. I offer them a joycon and we play a few rounds of MK8. This starts up a conversation about gaming, what the other person does or does not play and we both have a pleasant journey reminiscing, debating and talking. This did actually happen to me.

I am sat on a train with my Steam Deck playing League of Legends. A stranger sits down next to me and asks wtf that monstrosity is I am playing on or outright ignores me because I seem like 'one of those people'. I either do not care and keep playing or put it away, self conscious of the thing.

Which scenario do you want to be in?

The arcade in Shenmue I think is the pinnacle of games within games. You can even unlock the games to take home and play on your out-of-time Saturn!

@BloodNinja My point was the reasons people are jumping on the Gabe Boy are the same reasons people jumped on the PSP and they might get burned the same way. And the PSP is still my favourite console of all time.

@BloodNinja if those games were built that way out of convenience not to be played on the bus. Nintendo don’t have some sort of exclusivity on great portable games (Locoroco says hi!) but going back to the original argument: part of the reason the PSP didn’t do so well was because developers were building PS2 games for the format whereas Nintendo had over 15 years experience with the Gameboy line by the time the DS came along and then the iPhone launched the App Store in 2008 which necessitates short bursts of gameplay.

There’s just something about titles built for dedicated portable hardware that home titles just don’t have in their DNA. I could play Starcraft on the Gabe Boy but Advance Wars will always be a better option.

@SwankyKong64 I can and do play Forza Horizon 4 and PSO portably on my phone and they work really well I the format but they weren’t designed that way from the ground up. That’s the difference.

@BloodNinja there are a lot of modern gaming sensibilities like auto save which play well with the idea of portable play but still weren’t built for that play style.

Nintendo have these subtle design cues that were the results of many weeks of brainstorming how they can make titles that can be played for 10 hours like a home console game but also designed to be played for 10 minutes like a Gameboy or DS title.

The bite size challenges of Mario’s moons and Links Shrines is a testament to this.

@Geonjaha It’s not though. Games designed /for/ the Switch are cleverly built with handheld play in mind as well as TV. Your steam games are PC games that you /can/ play on a handheld but that doesn’t mean they were designed that way. The PSP and the PSVita both suffered with titles built for the wrong direction.

@WhiteUmbrella I often feel getting nowhere was often the point of BOTW. It was the journey that was as important as the destination, like a good walk in the countryside! I did miss the traditional dungeons and hope they manage to add some in to the sequel.

@Spiders Did they, or did they announce an underpowered PC?

If you are a PC gamer you want the best of everything and therefore only a custom rig with the best parts will do. Why compromise for the sake of portability, a portability that likely won’t be used outside the house?

I think the machine great and it has the potential to become an emulation powerhouse. I’d buy one for that alone. But I don’t see the larger steam customer base buying it.

@Stocksy The PSP failed because it carried on the legacy of the PS2 generation and only ever marketed itself to traditional gamers. By the time it had decided to play host to some more innovative portable titles the DS had ran off into the sunset with consumers cash. The stream of games kept coming but between the DS opening up an entirely new revenue stream and the iPhone taking everyone by surprise (this was the real 'walkman of the 21st Century') it was getting squeezed.

I say all of this and yet the PSP is probably my favourite console of all time! It played host to my favourite games in many franchises like WipEout and it had an almost obscene collection of quality JRPG's. In 2005 hooking your console up to Wi-Fi to download some DLC was like something from the year 3000. Grab one now and a cheap memory stick and you can turn it into the emulation console of your dreams, especially as it has native PS1 emulation baked in.

The PSVita was a worthy successor but the software dried up, 1st party games were not as good as the PSP and Sony's insistance on proprietary memory cards gave it no chance out the gate.

@Kirgo Games like Stardew Valley will work well on the platform because they work well on mobile. The advantage I see in the Steam Deck is that it will become an emulation powerhouse. Why not just shove every GBA and PSP game ever made on there?

But there are very few titles designed with portable play in mind. The Nintendo difference is that you can play a game like BOTW, Mario 3D World or Animal Crossing for hours in front of a TV or for 20 minutes on the bus. It’s a balancing act few developers manage to get right.

This looks like a great device but I can’t help but feel the lessons of the PSP have not be learned.

Sony’s console was great but it was hampered by developers making home console games for it. Nintendo kept making portable games and won.

People might be going ‘but you can get Skyrim on Switch!’ and you’d be right. But most people buy a switch for Nintendo franchises first. Look at the best games: BOTW and Mario Odyssey are actually portable games in disguise, able to be played for 10 minutes to find a Korok or grab a Moon. It’s a testament to Nintendo that these games do not feel like portable games yet have that baked into their DNA.

Your steam library is not built for portable play.

I think a lot of players dislike the game because their expectations were 'Wind Waker in the Skies' but what we actually get is 'Diablo, but Zelda.'

Think about it: in Diablo 1 you have one village as the overworld with a handful of NPC's and then a dungeon experience that you do a few floors of, go back to the village to sell some stuff and then go back down.

Hyrule in SS is basically one big dungeon split into smaller sections. You can pick the order you tackle the sections in and in between you return to the village (Skyloft in this case) to uncover a few secrets and sell some stuff and restock before diving back in. You could argue the big dungeon world is reminiscent of Vagrant Story.

And what dungeons they are! This is Nintendo at its boss designing, puzzle-solving zenith and it shows up the otherwise brilliant BOTW for not having any proper dungeons which I hope the sequel rectifies.

@The_Pixel_King We are talking about the worlds 2nd most respected gaming publication after EDGE Magazine.

I maintain Red Steel on the Wii is one of the greatest corridor shooters ever made. Oh sure it’s janky as heck being a rushed launch title but it makes great use of the Wii remote, doing shoot outs through warehouses never gets old and it has one of the best 2-player vs modes in the genre.

Just think for a minute about how many FPS games have a good 2-player vs. mode. Most multiplayer levels are built for a lot of players and thus suffer when there are less because there is too much space eg Halo CE. Red Steel has some pretty good small arenas perfect for local play. Medal of Honor on the PS1 and Red Faction on the PS2 are two other janky FPS games that are really good 2-player vs. titles.

I do miss the awesome low-tech stuff Nintendo used to do. The e-reader looked hugely impractical and yet scanning 20 cards to unlock a NES game in Animal. Tossing just sounds AWESOME

If you were stranded on a desert island and had a solar mains charger, a GBA SP and a copy of Advance Wars you would never need another piece of software again.

The GBA SP is sex. It was comfortable to hold, folded up to protect the screen and fit in the back pocket of your Jeans perfectly. The front light made a good makeshift torch and it was a GBA giving it access to an unrivalled software library. Have Nintendo made a better console since?

It also had a pretty good marketing campaign in the UK which was a rarity for Nintendo at the time.

@TheRedComet A lot of people over here VPN to get American Netflix! But at the same time it does aggregate a to of content, for example I can watch Titans, Star Trek Discovery and Cobra Kai on the same network. In America you’d need 3 different subs for that one.

I feel sorry for US viewers and all these fragmented streaming services.

Here in the UK Netflix just picks up the best of everything and runs with it. It makes life a lot easier.

@WoomyNNYes Nintendo never bettered the SNES original. 2-player battle mode on that is one of the greatest multiplayer experiences of all time.

I always find local races on the newer ones always play out the same: one player is amazing and finishes in 1st every game. The other 2 tussle mid-grid and the one person who isn't that great finishes somewhere near the bottom ie no fun for anyone.

The Blue Shell finsihed it for me. Doesn't matter how good you are against the CPU it always manages to BS you at the wrong time.

@Thegrimrecapper Whats the point of even buying the physical release if you don't have shelf of nicely arranged game cases? You may as well just download it and help the environment.