RevrsblSedgewick

I think the psychic ability stuff is falling into the trap which Remedy Games often fall into, if you've played American Nightmare or Quantum Break. You can dress up a lock and key puzzle in whatever fancy story clothes you like, but it's still a lock and key puzzle at the end of it. And therefore not inherently very new or exciting.

You probably still have time to change the subheading to “Ship Aloy”.

That wasn't so much a teaser, more of an early 2000s 'I've got a new graphics card' screensaver.

Spirit Train is a complete slam dunk. With the figures being the same style as the Powerpuff Girls from Lego Dimensions. Maybe mix and match the carriages from the different train styles.

A miniature SS Linebeck could also be fun. 8 tiny ships where you can mix and match the components.

Should’ve been the Spirit Train!

You’ll probably find that whatever lads’ mag they were originally in still own the image copyright. It will be something that tedious, and everyone here screaming censorship will look quite silly.

“creating a weird juxtaposition when you whack a 3D cowboy hat on top of Bandit’s 2D-looking head”

Being placed in time-out before you have completely finished drawing your cowboy hat is a pretty common occurrence. Don’t be too hard on them.

I'd say they should have given it to the John Wick people. They have the track record of stringing together a series of action setpieces with a protagonist who doesn't say a great deal, in a way which doesn't feel silly (or which only gets silly on its own terms).

Was there an option in the settings to play using Lucky’s Dad’s Rules?

Blind bags with furniture in them innit? Has to be.

I want me a tiny Resetti though.

It's a Bone Mama.
Don't let it lay an egg!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-L6BfpYrc

A mini-OST?

Most of the original games had a flipping sound test menu. What do you need an OST for?

So I believe that - contrary to what you might expect - publishers have to order cartridges and boxes and labels individually from Nintendo and then pack&seal them themselves. So we might just be dealing with a law of averages here; more manual packing (by people who aren't used to doing it) than maybe we're used to from earlier systems, so more overall mistakes.

@Pak-Man I’d cook a Slowbro. Surf ‘n’ Turf.

When I started the second game and he tore his little cape that was so hard-won in the first game, that gave me the feels. Same shock and terror as the horse going over the cliff in Shadow of the Colossus.

A ‘Rambi the Rhino Expansion set’?

I was hoping for a Winky Expansion set.

It’s been far too long since that Winky has seen the light of day.

Who wouldn’t want to see Lego Mario riding Winky? Nintendo and Lego should just get that Winky out.

@Bizzyb No, I know, I was just being needlessly rude and I shouldn’t be. Didn’t want to undersell the artists. I’m just frustrated that there’s no interactivity or movement or hazards in those stages like Delfino Plaza or Mute City equivalents. I thought Kingdom Hearts was particularly offensive with the animating platforms that I’m just… not allowed… to play on. Feels like all the stage development work went into Minecraft.

Don’t have a bad word to say about the Midgar stage. Very interactive cool features.

Man, the new stages in the downloadable content packs really were terrible, weren't they? Floating platforms in front of what amounted to a video clip. Particularly the Square Enix ones. Dire.

I'm still confused if Agahnim and Ganon are the same person and have been for 30 years.

Writing up Skyward Sword like Peatrice ain’t nobody. Shame on you.

“Tregare”. My friend’s suggestion to name him after the, um, host(?) of children’s TV gameshow classic Knightmare. But getting back into games with a pre-owned N64 in the year 2000 it was pre-Wikipedia and so no way for us to check that his actual name was “Treguard” so we had to go off faulty decade-old recollections. Pretty close all things considered.

Used in every game since unless I’m replaying Link’s Awakening in which case “Trega” has to suffice.

Absolutely criminal that you couldn’t rename the player in Breath of the Wild. For the small amount of useless speech in it you could have easily replaced every instance of “Link” with “Champion”. But I did at least get to name a horse “Falconhuf” (flippin’ length restrictions) after Limmy’s Adventure Call.

No mentions yet for the theme from Robocop on the GameBoy? It’s famous for going unreasonably hard. Even made it onto Desert Island Discs.

@Jacoby I suppose it is quite snowy?

Anyway, anyone voting for the US cover needs locking up. Between this and RE4 they are just jealous of our lovely red European GameCube boxes and their petty envy should not be given the time of day!!

Call me a traditionalist but I think you should deepen your bond with someone BEFORE you attempt to polish his or her ring.

Oh, that SNES shaped HORI pad for the GameCube. Wonderful little thing. The only sensible choice for Soul Calibur 2. And even compatible with The Twin Snakes if you're being bloody-minded enough.

Ecks vs Sever was a cracking technical showcase on the ol’ Game Boy Advance.

Space Channel 5 based around viral dances is a smart as heck move. If it’s basically just a showcase for the most impressive stuff that people are doing on TikTok; let them get paid for the skills they’re showing off for free, string it together with a bare-bones plot, the audience will show up for it and a dormant franchise gets a shot in the arm and some modern relevance. Everyone wins.

Nothing that would interest me because I am an old, old man. But the kids should get a SpaceTikTok movie. Good on ‘em.

So none of the NaturalMotion animation behaviours in this version then?

I played Twilight Princess on GameCube and Breath of the Wild on Wii U as the Godess Hylia intended.

If you don't play the games on the consoles they're announced for then you're letting companies get away with LIES.

Like... GameCube Virtual Console or NSO collection on Switch is super, super unlikely to happen simply because of the Switch not having analogue triggers. Nintendo aren't prepared to swallow the customer support grief of people buying a game that won't work properly with the controllers you have. I know they did it with SNES/N64 on the Wii Virtual Console but (i) I bet they were dealing with plenty of complaints and (ii) they had a Pro Controller in wide circulation from the start.

"Moon Cup", huh?

Well OK then. It's a time to be celebrated.

I hesitated a long time before getting this on Wii U since I had the DS version already (and since the multiplayer isn't much use on the Wii U), but I'm glad I did. Nothing on the Wii U really used the touchscreen FPS aiming like this game did, despite the gamepad being great for it, so I wanted to own at least one title which did!

And while I'd normally steer clear of automatic smoothing features (which the Wii U seems to do for all DS games... I had no idea!), it really does improve the visuals in this case.

That bl**dy first person mode in Wind Waker HD trails SO MANY unintended problems with it. It's an afterthought that almost breaks the controls. Mostly with the boomerang - if I remember rightly, when you're aiming the boomerang while sat in the boat you end up with a completely different arrangement of turn/move/look logic than anywhere else in the game. It's a mess. STRAIGHT TO BOTTOM TIER.

Having seven chaos emeralds in Green Hill Zone is (moto)bugging me greatly.

Here's hoping if they ever do get round to Lego Zelda it'll be the Spirit Train. May not be most people's favourite game but I don't think Lego have ever done a fantasy train before.

Link to be in the style of the Lego Powerpuff Girls, obviously, big oval head and tiny legs.

I'd reckon we're more likely to get Animal Crossing first though. Blind bags with different furniture in them, yeah?

Lord, the music in the first part of that video is downright upleasant. Sounds like two tracks playing at the same time.

I've got such a specific issue with Spirit Tracks. On the plus side the music is some of the absolute best, and the Sand Rod is wicked fun. But the single thing that crashes it into the basement for me are the sidequests which activate without warning. Suddenly some rando in a station which you'd previously rinsed for all available content wants a delivery of goods, and there's no clue the quest is active, there's nothing that the character had previously said which might indicate that they might want something later on, no clue to come back to a station that you thought was done. It just makes the game require a guide or walkthrough, because whole areas are locked behind it. And all the other Zeldas are SO GOOD at NOT doing that. I don't know why Spirit Tracks got it so wrong.

@RupeeClock ...yet?

Good luck to them, I say.

ROMs are a feisty topic?

And 'selling & streaming re-recordings of music by people with no revenue going to the original composer' isn't?

That Bandcamp page is getting nuked from orbit, isn't it? Shame. They're kinda good. Bless 'em.

Is there any way at all we could have a moratorium on the words "jank" and "janky" in reviews? It seems to be creeping in more and more frequently on NL in recent months. And... I'm not really sure it means anything?

Is it framerate? Slowdown? Bad UI? Just something the reviewer thinks doesn't fit with the rest of the game? I think I've seen it used for all of those.

Appreciate that the amount of reviews we get here must mean that people are on crazy tight schedules, and maybe reviewers won't always have time to scrutinize a problem to find out what's actually wrong. But when I read "janky" it doesn't tell me anything concrete anyway!

So is that two stages in this second DLC pass which are just static platforms in front of an animated background? That's a bit of a boring comedown from where the game started.

I don't think we even know if Dread has the Morph Ball, do we? I know the idea of a Metroid without one is a bit sacriligious but during that presentation it really looked like it had been replaced by the slide move.

50% off what? It doesn't have a price.

It's no Moog Cookbook, is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHPkgIPDfcE

@Desa

But you can teleport out of a dungeon at any time with the mirror in Link to the Past, and the ocarina in Link's Awakening, and Farore's Wind in Ocarina of Time, and Oocoo Jr. in Twlight Princess...

I'd say teleporting might be quite a frequent part of Zelda design.

Urgh, I'm going to be That Guy. Hate being That Guy. Was hoping someone else would have been That Guy first then I could sneak away.

Tingle's weird family were in Wind Waker before Minish Cap.

Sorry. Sorrysorry.

@COVIDberry Most games aren't bad, they're just fine. The problem is that games are a relatively new medium (so the pipelines for getting them translated aren't as settled are equally new), in most cases they have way more text than linear TV or film, and they're never finished until the last possible minute.

All of that means that everything gets rushed, so it's not as easy to get the same level of consistency like those linear media.

So if you're looking for a great translation then you're most likely to find it in a game which added the translations some time after launch, when the game was already finished and settled. Which will be most common with indie titles.

Unsolicited Diglett Pics.

Then bless you @KateGray , you have more self control than I do. When I've been on the other side generating source text for a game then I've probably gone worse on the idioms (on the flip side I'm happy that it's the translator's business whether it gets retained/replaced/removed and will keep my nose out).

I did read the full Twitter thread and most of it was great, discussing the different approaches. I just had to wince for the poor translator every time that the thread author pointed out a "wonk"!

Always an interesting topic, but as someone who used to do this for a living, a thread like this is a nightmare.

Slogging through thousands of words with insufficient budget, tools and time only to have a stranger on Twitter get picky about the six mistakes which slipped through the net? It’s a rotten experience.