Raylax

Every peripheral thing for the Switch is a big ol' price gouging exercise, isn't it?

I am fully on "Brexit is idiotic and harmful" side of the fence, but honestly I think this had much more to do with Apple's eagerness to constantly crank up its prices than it has to do with Brexit. Brexit here is just the scapegoat they're using to justify it.

I will absolutely be double-dipping on this one. One of the Wii U's best platformers

£30 markup for a plastic sleeve and different cover art? Yikes.

"we estimate that the game would add an estimated 2.825 million years of additional lifetime to its US users."

Each.

"A handful of pairs"

Just the one pair, then 😜

@SLIGEACH_EIRE As far as marketing is concerned, "loyal nintendo fans" don't need persuading to buy everything nintendo releases

Well, as usual its in London and as usual Nintendo isn't providing travel or accommodation, so it's basically a competition for the people of London specifically, as usual

@brutalpanda "if you are being paid by a company you should do the job they want done, if you don't like it then leave in peace. If they fire you then yeah it's probably your fault. This person did something against Nintendo's employee policy and is now acting nasty about, taking advantage of it and asking for donations. Complete crock."

What? Laura isn't employed by Nintendo. Laura has never been employed by Nintendo. Nobody in this story is or has been employed by Nintendo.

Nintendo's employee policy therefore has nothing to do with anything. Nor does Sony's employee policy or McDonald's employee policy or any other company that has an employee policy that is also totally unrelated to this story and the people in it.

@darkgamer001 "your point is invalid because anything is possible" is a curious defense to reach, but okay.

Sure, but I find it's general useful to take the most likely assessment of events as the most likely to be true. Look up Occam's Razor.

LPVG may well be breaching an NDA that they have signed, and are revealing information confidentially disclosed to them. Nintendo may have therefore have grounds to sue but have decided not to because of the effect it has on their PR, despite showing no concern about such effects when taking down other things they have legal precedent to, such as fan games. LPVG may have also signed NDAs for other supposed leaks about Sony and Ubisoft and others, who have all also decided not to sue but also in fact continue to provide LPVG with further information under an NDA they know will be broken. LPVG may be publishing every article in the knowledge that several companies have the legal grounds to sue them.

Or LPVG never signed any NDAs in the first place, so they're totally legally in the clear.

Take your pick.

Nintendo doesn't sue because there's literally no legal grounds to sue. None. At all. That's why Nintendo has blacklisted LPVG and not sued LPVG. Believe me, if LPVG had signed a Switch NDA and then proceeded to reveal this much information about the Switch, they'd be being sued into oblivion, not removed from a review code list.

It is also not the responsibility of journalists to keep the secrets of companies. It's the companies' responsibility to keep the secrets of companies. The person arguably being "unethical" here and probably breaching a contract is whoever in Nintendo or Any Arts Production is stealing content and sending it to journalists. Don't shoot the messenger.

@darkgamer001 because if LPVG had signed an NDA, LPVG would be liable to be sued for breaking a signed legal contract. In my experience people generally avoid doing things that could get them sued.

Being sued is expensive and generally pretty bad for a career.

Also as noted in my first comment, LPVG is not supported by adverts. The number of clicks does not help them in any way. If anything, higher traffic causes higher server costs. It causes downtime for the website. "Clickbait" would cost them more.

@darkgamer001 I'd also invite you to explain what exactly is non-ethical about this leak. Does the leak personally identify somebody who could be hurt by this information? No. Has LPVG hacked or otherwise stolen information? No. Has LPVG broken any laws, contracts, etc in order to provide this information? No. Is this information likely to hurt the sales of the Switch or the game in question? That's not even the concern of a reporter but even still, no.

@darkgamer001 "Are NDAs being broken?" LPVG has not signed an NDA regarding the Switch or this game, so no. NDAs do not apply to anyone except those who have signed an NDA. Determining whether a source is breaking NDA is not LPVG's responsibility, liability or concern. Protecting an NDA signed by someone who is not associated with LPVG is not LPVG's responsibility, liability or concern. A source choosing to break an NDA to leak information to an outlet is entirely the source's choice, and their own risk.

This, again, is how journalism works

Man, so many people getting angry at Laura for doing her job. The "revenge leak" tweet was in jest. She has been leaking Switch details before being blacklisted and is continuing to do so after being blacklisted. Being blacklisted is completely meaningless.

Don't people realise that for a site like LPVG, which is not funded by advertisements and gets zero benefit from page clicks, being blacklisted has little to no impact whatsoever? LPVG being blacklisted is not a negative to LPVG, therefore the idea that this is a "revenge leak" is laughable. Revenge for what exactly? "oh no, nintendo isn't sending us review code any more. Now we can't get reviews up on launch day which really affects us... oh wait no it doesn't at all, we don't get money for clicks."

Reporting on leaks like this is literally journalism. "Hey someone has come forward with this information that is of interest to the public. I am going to release it." That is literally the point of journalism. Just playing PR for Nintendo, being a good girl and only saying what Nintendo wants you to say when they want you to say it, isn't journalism, it's marketing. Marketing that Nintendo isn't paying you for, I'll add.

I would even be so bold as to suggest that in Laura's job as a journalist she should do journalism and be paid for journalism. I know this is a stunning revalation to a big part of the internet but that's actually how careers work.

Nintendo are the kings of terrible artificial scarcity. The NES Mini sold out! That's because they shipped very few, with many stores receiving literally single digit stock. Thus, when they supply more, suddenly everyone has to have it because it's like, in really high demand and really rare you guys while nintendo pretends that they didn't think an obviously big seller product featuring some of the most famous IP in the world wouldn't be a big seller.

See also: amiibo

@Waninoko I don't know about Amiga, but given this appears to be RetroArch in a box, I know that there's currently no Commodore 64 core available for that, sadly. I think there's one in beta though, so perhaps soon enough.

@Turniplord This "random nobody" is ex UK editor at Destructoid, has written for Polygon, The Guardian, and a bunch of other places, and is widely known and well regarded across the games journalism industry. Currently operates LPVG, a new site which nonetheless has been a huge part of reporting on Switch details from inside sources at Nintendo and Ubi - and by the way, knew what the Switch was called and that there was a 3-minute trailer coming 24 hours before Nintendo announced it, so I'd say pretty solid sources. Also reported on the PS4 Slim and physically got hold of one to prove it existed before Sony announced it.

Just because you personally have not heard of somebody does not make that person a random nobody. The world does not revolve around your personal social circle.

The NX actually looks like a ? Block, you guys have known all along and have actually been showing it to us in nearly every single NX article

Alolan Persian is literally Garfield. I love it.

Those Gameblog.fr rumours are absolute nonsense, I'm very sure.

WHAT A
HORRIBLE
NIGHT TO
HAVE A
CURSE.

"Nintendo Duo" was confirmed fake yesterday by the artist who created it https://twitter.com/VOOK64/status/786154004929585154 (language warning)

If they want third party and indie support they need to get the console revealed and start rolling out dev kits very soon. Unless they plan to delay the console further, most developers outside major publishers are already looking at less than a 6 month turnaround time to get titles ported to the system, and there's simply no time for new titles to be developed for it for launch. I'm sure some developers could chug out one or two though. That would not be a good look for your new eShop, Nintendo, you don't want the only titles on there asides the £50 retail games and 1st party stuff being whatever chancers can churn out a game in a tiny timeframe

wait, the cable is only wiimote accessory length? Bahahaha, good job Nintendo. Glad I didn't preorder one

I mean I'm not gonna complain too loudly about free stuff, but so far I've redeemed Twilight Princess Picross and literally nothing else. The discounts for Platinum are barely worth it. Gold is a little better, but I rarely buy things on eShop so I have very few gold coins

@ShadJV It might be a UK thing but yeah, Drowzees in most towns and cities are literally more common than Pidgey and Ratatta. They're a plague.

Everyone must be getting a 100% capture rate for Pidgey, Zubat and Drowzee.

Heavily marketed Nintendo merchandise falls far short on available stock. Nothing new here. Now we just wait for Nintendo's press release that they're "surprised" that such a product would shift as many units as it has

A reveal surely can't be more than weeks away now. Once large scale production starts, keeping the lid on it is gonna be practically impossible.

Hype culture is horrible.

Hype couture might be worse.

I was out shopping with some friends on Saturday looking for a copy and it seems many retailers just haven't bothered to stock it, we couldn't find a copy anywhere. I do want to play it (still haven't got around to Triforce Heroes either actually), but I'll probably wait a while

Because the spirit of the handover portion of the closing ceremony is to highlight the global significance of the next host nation through its major globally understood exports and culture, and not to be an advertising platform for the present and upcoming products of a particular corporation?

Yeah the NX still being a total mystery for even big developers like Eidos is a tad concerning. I hope Nintendo's not expecting all except its handful of core third party supporters to just rush ports out under 6 months to launch when dev kits finally get out.

Hmm, well I was previously (fairly) certain that DQXI's presence on NX more or less confirmed the console's parity with PS4/XBO since developing a third version of the game for a different graphical spec (especially if we're talking PS3/360/WiiU graphics) if likely to be stupidly expensive with little chance of turning a profit against it. Guess I forgot to factor in Squenix's deep pockets and willingness to throw all the money in the world at their projects haha.

Gonna peg this one up with the Tegra X1 rumour as an indication of the NX having closer to Wii U power under the hood. Guess we'll wait and see.

I hope the plaque on his office door says:

Bowser's Castle
(The princess is in another castle)

I was a Mega Drive kid back in the day but actually not many of what are considered the archetypes for the system (very 80s themed brawlers etc). I liked platformers, so Rocket Knight Adventures, Dynamite Headdy, the actually pretty excellent Disney platformers of the time, etc. All good stuff.

Anyone who used a tracker that didn't require login (ie pokevision) will be safe, and others... well, they do often suggest setting up a dummy account specifically for the tracker for exactly this reason

I used PokéVision for a bit back when it existed but never tried the other tracker software. Hoping the new nearby system comes out of beta soon.

My understanding of Puyo games is that "currently" a Japan exclusive means "always and forever" a Japan exclusive. Never got into the series myself (never been into falling block games - not even Tetris!), but a friend of mine is huge into it and the lack of Western releases is always a disappointment for them. Sega just doesn't seem interested in localising it very often unfortunately. Let's hope this one makes it over.

Haha, that looks fantastic. Good work. Love the lighting on it.

Whether this is an acceptable demand or not depends entirely on who the phone belongs to - if it's Volkswagen's phones that it proves to employees then yeah they have every right to control what is on the phone. If the phone is the employee's own property then they have no right to control the contents. It's pretty much unenforceable in that case anyway unless they screen employee's phones, which is probably in breach of some law (obviously not a lawyer disclaimer).

As other people have mentioned, it does seem to overlook the fact that an app with camera functionality is in no way unique to Pokémon Go, so it's odd to exclude specifically this app.

Ah well, the kneejerk commands of our corporate overlords are rarely particularly well informed

Yeah, me and my friends are all still playing it daily, and currently our weekend socialising revolves around figuring out where we should go walking to catch stuff and hatch eggs (usually with a Wetherspoons visit for some mid-walk eating ). It's even got me, probably the most microtransaction-averse person in the group, spending a little for some more incubators and lures. For the amount of additional walking it's got me to do (this thing is the best fitness app I've ever tried) and the number of people I see and talk to who are still using it, I'd say the success is pretty well deserved. Do please fix the bugs though, Niantic.

Glad I grabbed a copy before it was pulled, I missed the Metroid 2 remake (I'm sure I'll find a copy somewhere though). Haven't had chance to give it a try yet but it looks really good.

The original Pokémon GO

Unless that Pikachu pedometer came out first in which case I guess that's the original Pokémon GO haha.

Great game though. Can definitely recommend. Actually, adding Pokémon Snap mechanics into GO could be a fun idea - photograph a Pokémon in its attack or jump animation for a small Exp bonus.

THQ was one of those groups heavily associated with both awful licensed tat, but also genuinely great, interesting, original IP (de Blob, Darksiders, Saints Row, etc etc). Kinda like WayForward on a much larger scale. It's an interesting move to rebrand your company to incorporate the name of a publisher with such a chequered history and violent collapse, but I hope it works out for them. It's nice to see ol' THQ back in a fashion.

That Alohan Raichu is adorable. Some really great new Pokémon this gen, I already have about a dozen I want on my team haha. Gonna be difficult to narrow it down to six! Team Skull's designs and animation looks really nice too.

I was planning on waiting a few months after launch to pick this one up, but now I don't know. Might have to be a launch day purchase after all. It's looking superb.

Sandcastle Pokémon. Alright. Sure. Why not?

Alohan Marowak looks great and Alohan Meowth looks sassy as hell. Good stuff.

Niantic really doesn't like rural players, huh?

Otherwise, pretty nice update. I only have "Sightings" but it seems to be more accurate and better at updating then the old system. I live in quite a rural area but work in the city so hopefully should be able to make good use of the new system when it rolls out to everyone.

I think I disagree. A huge part of Pokémon Go's mass appeal right now is the Pokémon included are the ones almost everyone recognises. If we can assume that player drop-off over time somewhat correlates with their familiarity with Pokémon (people who only really remember gen 1 stop playing first, then gen 2, and so on), then adding the gens in order makes more sense in the long term for player retention than attempting to turn it into more of a marketing platform for Sun & Moon.