RadioHedgeFund

March is the traditional month Nintendo launches new consoles so 2025 wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

I really hope they surpass the PS2. I have nothing against Sony, I just remember all the ‘Nintendo are teh d00med’ posts from 2004 and it makes me warm inside to see them in such good health.

Here’s hoping the next console is a SNES-style upgrade and doesn’t reinvent the wheel. The Switch sold so well in spite of its innovations because it’s still traditional on the inside.

Not Game but I did work on home tech in John Lewis 2004 - 2010. We weren’t allowed any perks over customers due to our rules of fair play (which was ok).

But I did use the internal stock check to find a gold dust PSP 2 cities over and reserve it.

Xbox 360 launch day was a nightmare. 20 consoles but only 12 Premium ones. Some very disappointed buyers who couldn’t find a HDD anywhere in town.

I hooked up all the display consoles to the big TVs to show them off. We had a secret staff tournament on PGR3 all day!

I did find an old Zelda bonus disk at the back of a cupboard my boss let me buy for a tenner.

@GinMiguel Nintendo know that gamers will fall over themselves for a Retro-developed Metroid Prime 4. They’d be foolish to make it cross-gen. Nintendo know the value of software exclusives to shift hardware.

Bonus feature: if they’ve shut off all access to digital only games then hacking your console is now fair game (and really easy)

Come on Nintendo, you’ve shown more aggression towards fan projects based on games you don’t even sell anymore. This game has blatantly used AI to design the creatures to the point it looks like The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The solution is obvious: get Monolith to make a new Pokemon Legends game that directly adapts the anime.

The three character party system allows for an Ash-Misty-Brock team up and the Blade system from Xenoblade 2 shows how they could turn a tired turn based system into something a bit livelier.

@Thaliard I say VII is the worst but it’s still one of the greatest games of all time; I just don’t think it’s as good as VIII or IX. The latter two games do a much better job of fleshing out their worlds with nations, politics, war and history. X-XVI have also done this really well.

I was gripped by VII at the time just like everybody else. But when you stop and think about anything other than the game quest it kind of falls apart. I’m not trying to insult the game or put it down: it’s still one of the best JRPGs ever made and the defining title of its generation! But VIII has one of the best game worlds ever put into an RPG (and a better soundtrack) and IX was ironically the last ‘fantasy’ game in the series.

I think it suffered because of its 16bit origins. The SNES titles kind of all have the same problem really, especially compared to Secret of Mana

We could suggest retro games but we would judge them by modern standards. I’d love to re experience Final Fantasy VII again but it is objectively the worst PS1 FF title and dated compared to Xenoblade or FFXIV.

Therefore it must always be a more recent title that hasn’t aged. I’d probably pick Horizon Zero Dawn.

Street pass was Nintendo’s clever way of making gamers carry a portable console with them daily in an age of smartphone games. The Switch is just too big for that to be convenient.

However, Apple and Google created their own streetpass protocol for the Covid19 pings. Why not piggyback this system and release Streetpass as an F2P app for phones? They could give you Quest for free and then charge a few of your local currency for the extra games.

I always got the idea that Miitomo was supposed to be the Mii Channel for the Switch, offloaded onto phones. Why not resurrect this idea?

I don’t care what it does so long as they put in hall-effect Joycons. Anything less and I’m not buying it.

Nintendo normally do a winter announcement and a march launch. It will be the same with Switch 2.

For the rest of this year? We still have a bunch of easy WiiU ports left like Wind Waker HD and Xenoblade X. Assuming Metroid Prime 4 is the big NS2 launch title they will have Prime 2 and 3 ready to ship on Switch at a moments notice. I’d be amazed if they weren’t already sat on their staging servers right now.

I’m not sure there will be any big Switch exclusives left in the bag. Prime 4 and Mario Odyssey 2 need to be the carrots for the next console. They night have a few GameCube ports in the bag as well to chock up the schedule a bit.

“The weapon degradation system came from a place of well-intentioned design”

I thought they stole it from Story of Thor?

There was some suggestion that Nintendo patented something during Switch development. Having wheels for shoulder buttons you can scroll and click might be an interesting idea. You could use it to quickly switch items in games.

@Munchlax I say this without irony but my honest opinion is this is one of the most overrated games of all time. I put some time into it. Once I finally figured out how to get into space I thought it might be fun to explore the ocean planet with the winds. My ship got stuck, I fell out and I spent the next 20 minutes waiting for the loop to restart. Tried exploring it again and the same thing happened. I tried following some sort of signal a third time and got nowhere. I then uninstalled it.

I appreciate I am in a minority but I reckon it is one of the worst gaming experinces I have ever had. I'd put it somewhere betwen Last Battle on the Mega Drive and Turok Evolution.

This is one of those games where the hype isn't worth paying attention to because the end title is utter tripe.

Players have been bemoaning 'wacky mechanics' ever since they added in planes way back in C1S7. I recall he backlash there was that you could just fly through people's builds which broke up the metagame.

At the time I thought so what? It's nice to have a leveller against players who are much better at building than I am.

And you know what? I miss all those new mechanics terribly. If Epic had just kept the core build mechanics for 5 years the game would have got old, quick. Things that mess with the metagame are there to keep you on your toes so that you have to adapt and find new ways to win, keeping the game exciting.

I for one cannot wait for planes to return next week and hopefully the mechs the week after.

The only way I see live action working is if they go with a 1980's adventure movie look and feel. The original game came out at the same time as movies like Willow, Neverending Story, Ladyhawke and Labyrinth; if they embraced a well built studio set backdrop with as many practical SFX as possible (and made sure to embrace the inherent campiness of Ganon) it could be something great.

If they end up green-screening it all it will be terrible.

Gamers: "what the heck?!?"

Sega: "Apple paid us a wodge of cash to put the game on a marketplace with hundreds of millions of potential customers that widens the appeal of our brand."

It's the next one I look forward to most.

I'll assume all the portable games get their own compilation ie the 4 PSP titles and the GBC release.

Then it's all the HD titles in one. MGS4 is still imprisoned on the PS3. Will be good to play Revengeance again.

I really don’t see Nintendo selling a console at anything over $350 ever. Their entire mantra is Gunpei Yokoi’s ‘lateral thinking with withered technology’. It pervades everything the company does and has lead to your large pile of cash they are currently sitting on. If they launched a new console at $450 It might attract the sort of gamer who is considering a Steam Deck or ROG Ally but there is no way they’d be doing Switch numbers with it.

The last console Nintendo launched at a high price was the 3DS and that got cut within months of launch and led to a huge increase in sales. They won’t make that mistake again.

The only way it might work would be to sell the dock separately and offer the core handheld component at $300.

@Cia I reckon TOTK has better 'videogamey' mechanics due to its unbridled creativity but it loses out when it comes to the wonder of exploration.

BOTW was the first real open world videogame where you'd just see something on the horizon and then just walk towards it. There are no barriers to exploration and no dots on a map to mop up. You as the player have to find everything and it's wonderful because of it.

@Woderwick Its not that I disliked it per se, I just found it overly long. I like my side quests as optional extras, not baked in to every story mission where to finally get to the point you want you have to do 10 people different favours. I get that this makes it a little more ‘episodic’ in nature but I just wanted to find Ciri!

I found the story and spreading out of map icons a lot better paced in Horizon Zero Dawn which is also an exercise in how to tell a compelling story but not let the game get in the way.

What is the point in having two swords when silver is still better against humans anyway due to its much higher attack power?

What I didn’t like was the levelling system. Unlocking skills and then being unable to use them because you don’t have enough slots is tedious. Just let me be the superheroic killer the game makes me out to be!

I have many of the same issues with other western RPGs. I dislike BioWare games and titles like Baldur’s Gate because of how po faced they can be and how they let the mechanics get in the way of the gameplay.

I much prefer Fable 2 which has a sensible levelling system, pokes fun at a lot of fantasy tropes yet still allows the player to actually roleplay within the game world. Maybe Diablo 3 is the closest Ive come to really enjoying another western RPG

@Woderwick I’d love to hear your other thoughts too! I ploughed on with the game but there are only so many quests you can play that go like this:

• Find person to get quest from. They need a favour.
• Go talk to other person to do with above favour. They also need a favour.
• Go talk to next person to do with the above. They need a favour but you have to meet them 2 miles away first.
• Go to location and have horse race. Horse needs a favour.
• Go talk to next person…..

And so on.

They could make them the next Minifig set but add in the NFC bases from Lego Dimensions and make every figure an Amiibo too.

He’s not that wrong. I think it’s the Fable-esque accents that do it.

“You pay thiiiiiiiiiis much!” And so on.

I thoroughly disagree. It might lack the exclusives of other systems but the reason I stick with Xbox is because it allows me to enjoy my purchases going back 20 years.

Xbox to Series X, PS4 to PS5, subsequent iPhones and so on: the public is used to backwards compatibility being a thing now.

It would be Nintendo's second dumbest business decision ever after the WiiU if it decided to invalidate every Switch owners established software library.

Whole I can still play Sensible World of Soccer on my Xbox Series console I will continue to ignore all modern football titles for not being as accessible or fun.

The obvious answer is ThunderCats. You have an obvious set of characters to play as an exploit and you could include the Thundertank as a special like the cop cars in Streets of Rage 1. A cheat code would let you play as Snarf.

Where are the classic British cartoons though? How about a Cosgrove Hall game where you can pick from Danger Mouse, Duckula, Victor and Hugo or the Avenger Penguins?

They don’t need to bother with a physical convention in the age of streaming.

Licence the Stadia backend (which is just PCs) Google hire out and then have devs run all their demos via a web browser platform. Charge us plebs £30 for a 7-day pass to play all the prerelease and maybe get exclusive access to publisher liverstreams made available to the public afterwards.

Give 20% of all proceeds to gaming charities or perhaps some sort of dev fund.

Why not remaster the whole franchise?

Crystal Bearer is an underrated gem. The Wiiware titles are still stuck on Wiiware.

Bring them back!

I’d be amazed if Nintendo don’t have a 3rd hardware revision lined up for Christmas. Surely an OLED lite model is on the cards?

People who date guys play these games as well, you know!

The Master System was better than the NES.

I will die on that hill.

GX was too bloody hard for its own good. I don’t mind a difficulty curve and I have fast enough reactions that so have 100%ed every Wipeout game. But GX was something else entirely. The only way I saw any of it was via a cheat disc save from Cube Magazine.

AX was the superior title by a long mile. There was something about having the wheel and the chair that kicked from side to side that really heightened the game. It’s the only arcade game I’ve ever played where wearing a seatbelt was mandatory!

But I’ve never liked the series as much as WipEout.

Wipeout Pure.

The Dreamcast used Hall effect sticks and that still feels great 20 years later

I’d like to take a sojourn outside of Nintendo land for a minute.

Fable 2 and 3 have some absolutely brilliant side quests, largely because of the humour therein. There is a great one in Fable 3 where you have to gather some items for Simon Pegg and his friends who then shrink you down into their Dungeons and Dragons RPG. And who can forget the daft brothers from Fable 2 who use the Norminomicon to resurrect their dead mother only for her to scold them?

My absolute favourite is one in Frozen Wilds, the Horizon DLC. You come across a disused dam control station a tribesperson is using to echo their drumming. You have to drain the water from it sequentially so they can use it to make music. All the while you come across a series of logs from the workers in the past who are being replaced by robots. In their boredom they’ve created their own band who again use the acoustics for themselves. In that way you’re passing down the baton.

You think they’re bad?

Back in the 1990s I once heard somebody tell me that the 2D Mario games are better than the 2D Sonic games.

Note there is a myth.

This was always going to happen. A Pokémon GPS title sells itself but that gameplay loop was never going to fit other franchises. Harry Potter isn’t about going on an epic journey and catching monsters. It doesn’t have kleptomania built into its very title.

I hope Ingress stays though. That’s a great game.

There is a really interesting turn-based JRPG lurking within Avatar and yet they continue to go with ropey looking action titles.

Jim Ryan is right.

I have often found Mario and Zelda are popular with players of all ages, eight to eighty.

Call of Duty remains a pretty immature shooter aimed squarely at the teenager market.

@OstianOwl It’s also the best action RPG of the 16bit era.

You guys are in for a treat. It’s not been off my iPhone since release. The game is NUTS and has a theme song by someone who sounds just like Queen.

Fortnite gets some stick from ‘gamers’ but the truth is it takes a lot of effort to not only reinvent the whole game every 3 months but also to have the guts to constantly push forwards and not to take the short, easy out and just capitulate to fans who miss certain periods of the game.

What had it morphed to? Every afternoon sat gathering your action figures for playtime on your bedroom floor. In that imaginary universe the X-Men, Terminator and Transformers teamed up every day and so it is here.

Epic know their audience. For every media play to youngsters there is a Robocop or Ellen Ripley skin designed to appeal to all the parents that play it as well.

Bar the purity of Halo (which will always be great) Fortnite puts every other po-faced shooter to shame with its disorganised chaos and imagination. I’d rather play a Saturday morning cartoon than another tiresome war shooter.

Good. There is no good excuse for pirating current format games.

Entertainment is always a hard thing to price. The average cost of an album, video game or movie ticket hasn’t really risen much in 25 years. I paid £60 for Majora’s Mask in 2000 and £60 for Tears of the Kingdom in 2023.

A bigger issue is perhaps pricing parity between Digital and Physical releases.

It's not for us. It's for the masses. There is nothing wrong with Nintendo making games that do not focus on a classic audience!

@GameOtaku It would be interesting if you could borrow them from a digital library where the files self destruct after a period of time like digital library books do. This would allow access to titles without having to break laws that need changing.

@BlueBeemer The PC I believe represents the ideal marketplace because older titles still work and are often available from stores such as Good Old Games. It’s still possible to buy those titles and recompense the original creators. Thanks to newer portables you can also play them on a variety of hardware.

The fast paced nature of the console business is the opposite. Thousands of titles lie dormant and will likely never be sold again, cutting them off forever. I don’t think anyone would bother with something like Dolphin if Nintendo just put all those titles on a sub service on Switch.