RadioHedgeFund

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.

@SwitchForce I think the point they are trying to make is that whether you buy a 2nd hand copy or download a room Nintendo isn’t seeing a penny of it. They got paid at the original point of sale for the 2nd hand copy just as they did for whatever disc or cart got backed up that first time.

The ridiculous prices for retro titles coupled with failed battery backups, disc rot and other physical failures will mean that eventually the only way to experience many of these older titles will be via roms.

@SwitchForce I see it as people having to resort to 'theft' to maintain wider access to culturally significant pieces of artwork. To quote Indiana Jones: it belongs in a museum.

In the case of software, and software alone the law is wrong and needs to be updated for the 21st Century.

A good few examples of this would be how the pro-firearms groups keep mentioning their 'right to bear arms' but neglect to include the part about fighting as an organised militia. The USA isn't at war with the British Empire anymore and that law no longer applies. And yet it stays, has been twisted by the modern world and now there are children out there that have to go through armed intruder drills at school. You know how many school shootings we have in the UK since the law on gun ownership was changed in 1997? Zero.

Another good example is the amount of religious folk who read the book of Leviticus and use it to justify their own prejudices against people with a non-conformist sexual orientation. This was a series of rules written thousands of years ago as a constitution for a group of people (the Hebrews) who had just escaped a generation of bondage in Egypt and had no idea how to function as a state. These rules were not written for the modern world and yet are still twisted by the church. You know how much Jesus said about these things? Nothing, he said respect and love everyone even if you disagree with them!

Older laws need to be updated or we end up in a situation where corporations control all your access to culture and artwork, the lifeblood of a society. It is inevitable gaming will move to a 100% digital only medium meaning physical access is out the window. When that happens and your only option is to pay a subscription fee to a corporate entity to access something you do not own, what then?

@1SDANi It's not that copyright is theft but rather that having a century or more's control over artwork and culture, something that belongs to everyone is theft from society at large.

Copyright should be limited to a decade to creators can still make money but are also then motivated to constantly create new things to do so instead of monetising nostalgia.

@BlueBeemer But I didn't steal an Apple: I took a photograph of the Mona Lisa and then put it up online for people to save to their own devices. I didn't steal the Mona Lisa.

The rules for physical objects and infinitely replicable software are not the same. This gets even more complicated when that infinitely replicable software is also artwork which, ones it's commercial viability period is over, should be out there in the world for humanity to enjoy.

Saving a copy of the Mona Lisa to your hard drive lets you look at it but it also doesn't take away from the power of visiting the original at the Louvre so you can see every brush stroke in person.

Playing a rom on an emulator is the same: sometimes you just want to have a 5 minute go to see what the fuss is about or just experience the plot for yourself. But to properly /experience/ that game you want the hardware and a physical copy. This goes double if the game is multiplayer.

Notice how nobody steals books because we have libraries you can borrow them from if you just want to read a story? But if you have ideas you buy the book to scribble down notes and then maybe talk about it in a group or write a blog about it.

https://emreed.net/Speculation_2020

Give that article a read and see why artwork, once it is no longer commercially available should not be vaulted away for a century. Culture should not be locked away.

There is also a massive upside to this idea as well: if copyright was stripped right back to just a decade of corporate ownership then the industry, addicted to its profits would have no choice but to constantly, constantly be churning out /new/ things.

We are all tired of remakes, attempts at big shared universes, tired sequels and reboots. If copyright was a decade there would be a constant search for the new which in turn creates new fanbases and new culture.

Yes. They could flood the whole map with water, change the mountain tops to islands and then finally add in underwater swimming mechanics

@Sambuc I'd expect them every 6 months with Prime 4 a launch title for Switch 2

I want a remake of Minish Cap with Wind Waker graphics. Full 3D, the open world would get 10x bigger as Link shrinks down.

@shaneoh 100% this. I emulate 3 consoles on my phone: GBA, GC and PSP.

I already pay for the GBA sub so Nintendo are getting something back. I own every PSP title I emulate either as a PSN purchase or physical copy.

The GameCube? Let me give you money, Nintendo.