RadioHedgeFund

I have a friend (we are both 40) who is well into this sort of thing. We were in the pub once and he pulls a silver toolbox-style case out of his bag and unfolded it. Inside was an LCD screen, QWERTY keyboard and a Raspberry Pi-powered emulator stacked with ROMs. Just to show off his nerd cred he went on to demonstrate how to play N64 Perfect Dark with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk!

MAR10 day, much like Star Wars day is another useful reminder on how America needs to modernise its calendar system to the DDMMYY the rest of the world uses and, for smegs sake adopt the metric system.

Amazingly FFXI is still up and running on PC on official Squaresoft servers!

I would argue that you never truly finish a good game. Instead you come back to it just to live in that world for a bit. Great gameplay mechanics on their own can be quite cathartic.

I must have finished Secret of Mana over a dozen times and yet I will happy just dally around the Ice Country or Upper Land just because I like the music and game mechanics.

BOTW has a wonderful roleplay aspect where you can move in to Hateno Village and just go out gathering resources for the village. In many ways it becomes a Hyrulian Animal Crossing!

The entire racing genre is based on the idea of chasing better lap times in a never ending cycle. I often boot up Forza Horizon 1 on the 360 just to have a drive around the map.

Given you can’t drop Korok seeds, how is this supposed to work?

Why not just have a blank slate and come up with 150 new Pokémon and leave out all the old ones? This would require less balancing work and leave more time to work on battle animations. It would also put a stop to all ‘but you didn’t include my favourite’ whining from a minority of fans.

I thought all the new mon in S/S were really good but there were too many old faces for me to bother with them.

There is a place in the market for both devices just as the Switch coexists with the PS5 and Xbox Series.

But let’s be real here: this thing is a behemoth and really just for playing games around the house.

Are you really going to get that thing out on the train or a flight? It does scream ‘nerd’ at the top of its lungs and whilst I’m not self conscious enough that it would bother me what other people think, the OLED Switch has a better screen and the ability to offer a stranger a controller to play a spot of Mario Kart which could lead who knows where.

Before I fell out with Nintendo for having such shoddy controllers and a save corruption bug in ACNH they still refuse to patch or refund me for many a family train journey was enlivened by 4 joycons and some Mario Party.

Our skeletons might be soft but our grandparents fought tyranny so that we wouldn't have to know war and violence ever again.

Capt. Blondin and her generation haven't done a very good job keeping the world that way.

Even with all the bells and whistles of Valhalla, AC2 is still the best in the series. One could argue that the combat has gotten more grindy as the games have gone on. The straightforward 'counter' mechanics from AC2 are brilliantly cinematic.

AC2 has just the right amount of open world nonsense in terms of the collectables and the assassin tombs are like well-designed Zelda shrines.

For the exact same reason any extra Switch consoles you buy and log into so your kids can share your purchases has to connect to the internet to do a licence check before you can play a game.

Connect to the internet. On a portable console. Every. Single. Time.

Because it’s Nintendo. They’re like an abusive partner that we constantly convince ourselves loves us because the shiny things they give us paper over the cracks.

1. Buy a regular 3DS
2. Hack the firmware
3. Install the VC games you cannot buy as ROMs. You’re not depriving Nintendo of profit because you cannot buy said games in this country anyway.

@HenHiro The only pro I’ve seen use an analog stick is JigglyNorris.

Also I don’t use anything but: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hori-Fighting-Commander-Controller-PlayStation/dp/B01GVOFIAA

@HenHiro

1. The controls in Arcades were just d-pads with a huge stick on them. They have no analog functionality and do not drift, unlike every Joycon ever made.

2. Fighting games are a lot better with a d-pad than an analog stick. Its a lot easier to combo, double taps are fractionally quicker and you can react faster.

I’m not sure they are Mario: the outfits are £8.99 and then they jump up to £16.

My money is on Animal Crossing. That’s such an obvious idea for a range.

And surely Zelda is on the cards?

That is the greatest subtitle your website will ever produce.

Honestly the Sonic Advance trilogy is not only much better classic sonic platforming but also overlooked in just about every compilation and rerelease they bring out.

There is 3 games I wouldn’t mind seeing remastered. The ability to download Chao from the GameCube and take them with you was a neat little VMU nod.

Fantasy in general has always had a relationship with medieval England: you don’t hear anybody speaking in an American accent in Lord of the Rings do you?

I actually found the accents directly improved my love for the original XC. At the time very few RPGs had a mix of British voices and so as a Saxon myself it was nice to hear.

I’ve sheas assumed America equates Fantasy to England because our country has 2000 years of history that is still visible all around us. People literally dig up old Roman coins in they gardens and the amount of churches and castles we still have surviving from the time of King Alfred is incredible.

Compare this to America where the majority of people are descended from colonists and therefore do not have links to the ancient cities of central and South America. Their own National history only stretches back 350 years.

Not that it plays badly but I was always disappointed that Mario Strikers never stuck with the art style from its artwork and defaults to the usual.

A cel-shaded style almost like Okami but with the overly sketched outlines would look amazing as a game.

Nothing humanises a celebrity more than telling us their favourite video games.

NFT games are a terrible idea because you cannot recode a token on the blockchain and the network itself is crap for actually storing data. This is why current NFT purchases amount to a link to a webpage with a piece of artwork (or whatever) on it. Of course if said link expires or some sod like me just makes a screenshot of said artwork your NFT link is worthless but I digress.

Thus if you tokenise a load of data and then discover a bug you cannot reopen the original tokens to fix them (non-fungible remember?) you have to make a load of new tokens with the bugs fixed. Owners of the original, bug-ridden tokens will either have to repurchase the bug-fixed tokens or be given the new ones for free and leave a footnote on their original tokens so they do not get resold as there are now 2 (or more) of their supposed 'collectable thing' floating around, one bug-ridden, one not.

Given the state of the current games industry and the day-one patches released for software do you really trust any company to release a game directly onto the blockchain completely bug and glitch-free? Creating some sort of backend blockchain where you can recode or recreate tokens completely defeats the point of using it in the first place and you're back to square one: the networks we have now where things can be changed at a moments notice.

@Grumblevolcano Animal Crossing has always had this sort of gameplay though. If anything Nintendo deliberately launched it feature incomplete to both prevent cheating and to keep players coming back. City Folk has ongoing DLC updates.

For all its levels of customisation the core game I felt just wasn’t as good as New Leaf. The Amiibo update for that was a huge shot in the arm. That’s how you keep a game interesting over time.

It’s always nice to see Nintendo doing well. Even if you’re not a fan I think they are encapsulate everything right about the games industry and prove that you don’t need some sort of ‘live service’ game to keep players engaged for years; you just need good ones.

This is precisely why Microsoft's acquisition of Activision can be seen as protectionist rather than capitalist.

MS won't stop releasing gam,es on PlayStation because they know that there is still money to be made there but equally Microsoft do not want some unknwon chinese company, a foreign power or a rival tech firm like Amazon or Google coming in sweeping things up.

But an NFT is in effect a serial number proving ownership, not the art itself which any idiot can screenshot if they wish.

That is to say if Konami wants to ‘preserve’ digital art it just has to make it a free download.

Bring out some new controllers that don't need repairing after 6 months and I will pay whatever they want. Then I will get back to loving the Switch. The 4 broken joycons I have at home (which I shouldn't have to send off) are why it only gets used for couch-co-op Fortnite anymore.

Until Nintendo wield their lawyers of course.

@AG_Awesome 2 is the best assassins creed game.

@anoyonmus I bet you can find it for a decent price so yeah give it a go!

@Dethmunk My fear is how they continue that wave. At some point a new Switch is a given and I hope they just upgrade the thing rathern than coming up with some new concept.

@Astral-Grain Triple Triad is as an ingenious mini game because you could pretty much play it whenever and it was kind of integral to the game. With the right combination of card to magic you could massively overpower your characters for disc 1 easy.

Thats actually a very interesting point of view. Microsoft might actually view the aquisition as a protectionist strategy. By buying up a huge 3rd party and then still making games for Sony and Nintendo platforms but crucially not anything Amazon, Google et al might cook up they can maintain the current status quo.

If that is their plan it is certainly a clever one.

@Duncanballs Old man Sega walks past: "Ha, old friend. Remember whan that was us?"

Nintendo is the one company that can probably go ‘meh’ and ignore the news. Microsoft have a friendly relationship with Nintendo and the Switch (2) is an additional marketplace rather than a rival. Franchises like Crash and Spyro are hardly Mario or Kirby!

@HeadPirate An NFT is nothing more than a serial number or certificate of ownership contained on the blockchain. A digital record that says you own a particular item. A physical item cannot be an NFT because the clue is in the name: it is a receipt, a record of a transaction that cannot be changed but can be resold. It’s like a deed or a green slip for a car. It can be associated with an item (file/biscuit/house) but it isn’t the item itself.

Video game companies have a tight control over their markets and do not like succeeding that control to other. Games like Animal Crossing might offer the ability to create bespoke items just for that game but without a Nintendo-supported, blockchain-backed marketplace that worked across all their titles it couldn’t spread and having a blockchain that worked just across Nintendo consoles kind of defeats the purpose of a decentralised ledger system. It will be a cold day in hell before they let players resell licences for 2nd hand digital products!

If a company like EA starts to do it across their own games it won’t be compatible with Ubisoft titles or anything else because they will want control over the it own version.

@Deerock69 The video is strangely well lit on the screen. Even a backlit GBA doesn’t produce CRT levels of picture quality! There are Also mysterious gaps in the controls. Tomb raider used every button on the ps1 controller and the GBA has half that. The player mysteriously uses the same button for jump and 180 roll….

@HeadPirate So in effect they are a waste of time on the games industry because software rises and falls so quickly that having permanent ownership of digital assets is in fact a liability. What good is being able to sell on a 2nd hand software license to a dead console? Retro gaming is only big business because the copies of games are physical. A company like Nintendo would rather sell new licenses for digital games than allow players to buy and sell licenses on an open market.

You have 2 issues with video games here.

In theory NFT technology would allow artists and developers to create skins for games that are unique and can be exchanged with other players. They would also be cross-game compatible. A 3rd party like EA or Epic is never going to set up something like this because it is something they cannot control. Epic rakes in millions from Fortnite skins; you really think they’d open that market up? Decentralisation wouldn’t work for video game commodity’s without a platform holder like Nintendo making it mandatory and since when do Nintendo like losing money?

On a centralised network the technology has promise. Going back to Fortnite if each Fortnite skin had an NFT attached to it players could create an internal marketplace buying and selling skins that are only useable in Fortnite or other Epic releases. This however goes against the entire idea of blockchain as you have a walled garden approach where the whole thing is regulated by a private entity, not the marketplace itself.

So it is catch 22: Publishers and platform holders are inherently greedy and do not like sharing profits or opening things up and the only way a decentralised technology like NFT would work in video games is if it becomes centralised which defeats the purpose of the whole premise. Epic could create its own internal marketplace if it wanted to without blockchain technology.

The major issue with an open marketplace is that all digital goods are inevitably pirated. An Art NFT is worthless if I can just screenshot an image and then print it off and frame it myself. All movies, music and games are inevitably pirated.

@timp29 "I am Raziel, first born of Kain's lieutenant's. I stood with him at the dawn of our Empire...."

BAM BAAM BAAM-BAM-BAM-BAM BA-BA-BA-BAH

ALSO GOOSEBUMPS

SSX

/Article

This needs to happen.

@NintendoWife I wouldn't say ALL but there is a lot more than last year

@Bl4ckb100d In what world does the Switch have decent thumbsticks?

I've had the same PSVita console for 10 years. It has taken a beating and full of scratches and nicks. I play on it every lunchtime at work still. The thumbsticks have not once skipped a beat.

I've had a Switch for 3 years. It barely leaves the house. I have gone through 5 Joycons and they have all developed drift to the point of becoming unusable, the internal shoulder buttons do not work and the LEDs have gone.

What happened to that famous Nintendium indestructability?

The obvious answer to E3 is staring the industry in the face: Game Streaming.

A company like Google that cuts across the industry could offer their very-good Stadia servers up to publishers to let them rent and host E3 playable demos.

The ESA could then offer gamers like you and me a 3-day pass for say £25 where you can play all the demos yourself at home. Stadia is playable on most devices so has a far reach and because the games are streamed there is no risk of datamining spoilers.

They'd make a LOT of money doing this, gamers who would never otherwise get to participate in the show floor get to play the demos and they could even get the developers to host play along sessions with design commentary. They could include online seminars in the ticket price too and make a big deal out of it.

28th January.

99% of the world's countries use DDMMYY despite Hollywood's attempts to crowbar us into MMDDYY.

Surely the popularity of Forza Horizon can't have escaped Nintendo?

Mario Kart World seems like such an obvious concept: separate tracks joined together by an overworld full of places to explore, collectables to gather and quests to complete.

@NintendoWife Windjammers 2, Elden Ring, R6 Extraction, Arceus, Dying Light 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Sifu, Total War Warhammer 3, CrossfireX, Monark, Destiny 2 The Witch Queen, Grid Legends, Babylon's Fall, Gran Turismo 7, Triangle Strategy, .hack last recode, Chocobo GP, Strangers of Paradise, Advance Wars Reboot Camp, STALKER 2, Forspoken, Forza 5 DLC, TDU Solarcrown, Starfield, FFVII Origin Compilation, Splatoon 3, Gotham Knights, Bayonetta 3, Zelda, Braid Anniversary, Diablo Immortal, New PGA Tour, God of War Ragnarok, Ghostwire Tokyo, Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga, Sonic Frontiers, TMNT Shredders Revenge, WH40K Darktide

There's more than enough already in 2022 without the mystery releases to blow 2021 out the water!

@Rob3008 Forza Horizon X Mushroom Kingdom = Super Mario Kart World

Its worth mentioning that the Sega Saturn analog controller (and later the Dreamcast) used hall effect sensors for its analog sticks.

Looks like Sega still does what Nintendon't.

If this were a good year for gaming Forza Horizon 5 would be nowhere. It is at best the 4th best in the FH series and more of the bloody same. It makes no real attempt to evolve the gameplay that was getting tired in number 4. The series needs a big reboot for number 6.

The only reason it had made the lists is because 2021 had been a terrible year for games and therefore the lists are starved. The Xbox platform had also been starved of decent exclusives for so long that an average title seems like a big deal. Sable made a lot of lists and it was a really good game but plagued by more bugs than the joycons.

Somebody should remind epic games that there aren't 24 months in a year.