Rosalinho

Don't freak out. This is Nintendo's standard noncommittal "we are always interested in exploring new whatever" answer that they give whenever people ask them about what they're doing next.

Nintendo tend to be very cautious about jumping on new and recent trends. NFTs will have gone the way of smoking on planes long before they decide to get involved.

Everyone: "Nintendo, start buying your way to world domination!"

Furukawa: "Why should one buy what one already has? drops mic"

GET EXTRA ENERGY WITH PIZZA.
YOU CAN DO IT.

Oh mercy. 90s me in the playground being ridiculed for my console preferences by PlayStation owners dreamed of news like this.

(It's all water under the bridge though. I love the PS1 now.)

@Dingelhopper Well, a lot of people enjoy the NES/8-bit aesthetic and have an appreciation for the console which more or less rebooted the industry. And the people who are obsessive enough about it to want it to be a living breathing platform tend to have a certain type of personality.

Cringe away if it's not your thing, but I appreciate what these people do, even if some of them get a little overexcited about it.

Looks like they're setting up shop in a synthwave album cover. I'm not going to complain about someone having a go at physical retail though, even if it is the kings of collector's edition silliness, so good luck to them.

I'm glad they balanced their albeit colourful statement with a plea against harassment. As much as I hate NFTs and every other crypto/blockchain scam and want them out of our hobby, I don't want the NFT backlash to be the next Gamergate.

Nintendo, just put your gosh darn soundtracks on streaming services if you're that precious about them!

It's worth mentioning that with a bivert mod including a green backlight, the original Game Boy's screen can look razor sharp and clear while still retaining that green and grey quality.

It's a bit of a tricky mod to do DIY, but for those serious about mono GB games on original hardware who like to be able to see what they're doing, it's worth paying out for a pre-modded unit.

The best arcade I ever went to was on Santa Monica Pier when I was in LA in 2005. Classic 80s arcade games in various states of disrepair (had a go on a Pac-Man and a Vs. Super Mario Bros.) mixed in with newer stuff like Time Crisis and Dance Dance Revolution. Absolutely blew my mind. I have no idea if it still exists.

@Erigen You've just described the only plot that would actually make me want to see this movie.

Gaia is a heck of a strange name for a demon general. Makes me think more of dolphins and incense than malice and evil.

I don't know why but watching Tetris played with machine precision is strangely calming, like a beautiful piece of visual ASMR. Nice job Mr Cannon.

I've noticed that the same people who are outraged at how video games are supposedly "addictive", "harmful" and "rot the brain" tend to be just fine with drinking alcohol.

This would have been an N64 Magazine cover if it had ever come out. Wil Overton would have been right in there.

Navi never bothered me either. This whole thing is an Internet meme that began years after Ocarina of Time was released. In fact, as a kid, I often wished she had more to say when I was stuck.

You guys are all way off. He's playing Groose in Skyward Sword: The Movie.

@HammerGalladeBro You took the words right out of my mouth. Several of our childhood N64 cartridges, complete in box Wind Waker collector's edition with the OoT Master Quest disc, Baten Kaitos, endless controllers... just some of the things that vanished after my brothers handed them out to their friends.

I had no friends, so never had this problem.

To be fair, Nintendo's whole strategy with the DS was to sell it to people who weren't normally into video games, and it was pretty successful in that regard. This kind of thing is out of character in the grand scheme of things but it fits with Nintendo trying to branch out beyond core fans like you and me.

It's almost a meme by this point. "Man on Mars! Cure for cancer found! Elon Musk's head in a jar elected president! Mario Kart 8 Deluxe tops Switch charts!"

My uncle who works at Nintendo is the one responsible for all the fake Switch Pro leaks.

Why won't Nintendo just let me give them money for these?!

I've set My Nintendo as my homepage. (Which is a bit like putting my seatbelt on after the car's crashed...) Cheers @RupeeClock for the heads up.

This subject reminds me a lot of a certain US president seriously believing that he could negotiate the purchase of Greenland, both in terms of how unlikely it is to happen and how little sense anyone would have to have to try it.

I wonder if the trust account is what was Hiroshi Yamauchi's holdings? Presumably his widow and children would have inherited his shares, but we all know Yamauchi-sama's history with family members...

As you approach the Divine Beast, a Sheikah monk speaks to you...

"O hero, you have done well to break this game... but know that even open world games have their limits."

Finally! The pandemic is being removed!

I'm getting bored of talking about how silly NFTs are, and there's not much left that hasn't already been said. It's just that it almost moves me to tears that Konami, whose name is attached to some of the greatest games ever made, is now diminishing itself by selling speculative assets.

https://imgur.com/a/Jk2hNzP

Well, this is going to replace the whale in my nightmares.

Thud, thud thud. (That's the sound of my jaw hitting the floor.) The kind of skill that some of these people have just goes to show how wrong the late Clive Sinclair was with his "Nintendo doesn't give you programmers" guff.

@Specter_of-the_OLED Of course it can. PlayStation discs were 700MB or so, but only a fraction of that was required for game logic and level/model data, with the rest usually being filled with FMV or CD audio. With clever compression it could be possible to squeeze that into 32MB too. It would be poor quality but it would be GBA authentic!

This is an excellent, well balanced article. What I think was represented very well was that basically nothing that is being proposed requires the use of NFTs to work. To the extent that any of this stuff ever takes off it will have nothing to do with blockchain or cryptocurrency as crypto-utopians advocate it (which is fine by me).

How would I explain this to a young child? Hmm, let's see...

"You, yes you, could be the undisputed owner of this genuine original Rosalinho comment! Yes, it's totally worthless, and yes, anyone with an Internet connection can read it, but you, good sir or madam, could one day sell it to an even bigger berk with even deeper pockets (but probably won't)! Step right up? Do I hear £10000?"

More hyped than Whispy Woods on Miracle-Gro.

@TheRedComet You forgot the Super Game Boy 😁 Though I do think that that and the GBP are different, as they're just about playing handheld games on a TV, not taking TV games on the road. But yes the Switch is what I thought the Wii U would be when it was first announced. The hybrid concept was something I'd wanted for a long time and clearly millions more did as well.

@Alex78 This is exactly it. By this point Nintendo had owned the handheld market for nearly three decades and for a lot of that time the handhelds had carried them when the home consoles struggled. The 3DS also held its own long into the smartphone era, which was yet another thing that the "industry experts" had predicted would kill off dedicated gaming hardware.

Nintendo has been "doomed" since 1996 and yet here we are. Strange, that.

@bluesdance That and "bowing to the fecal-lord." NESticle is like a time capsule of edgy 90s DOS haxor BBS culture, it's almost a nostalgia trip all of its own.

Hail to the puff! Interesting that the Waddle Dees seem to be allies. I wonder if the Waddle Doos are still with the bad guys?

@Dezzy70 It's pretty likely that Switch 2 will be an incremental upgrade, whenever it eventually happens. Nintendo normally follow a "tick-tock" upgrade cycle, where a tick is a refinement of the existing platform and a tock is a big change. NES to SNES was a tick. SNES to N64 was a tock. And so on. I'm pretty sure Switch 2 will be to the Switch as the 3DS was to the original DS. Same concept, just more power.

@1UP_MARIO Is it wrong to want new Mario Kart content just because MK8 is still selling well? We're players, not Nintendo's accountants.

The thing is, I'd quite happily pay for MK8 DLC, assuming we're talking about extra tracks. And I already paid for the Wii U DLC... (I really am Nintendo's b--ch, aren't I?)

But sure, this game is just free money for Nintendo at this point, and I can't see any DLC happening. The economics of adding content just aren't there for them when they're raking it in week after week just with what's there already.

It could work, but I wouldn't be disappointed if Mario Kart stays primarily about Mario's universe with a few guest characters and locations a la MK8. If there's anything from Smash Ultimate that should be copied for Mario Kart, it should probably be "every track ever".

I'd guess that the "twist" is more likely to be to do with the mechanics. Transforming vehicles is my guess, like karts which can shapeshift into planes or boats during races. This is already sort of teased in MK8 with its heavy emphasis on gliding and the possibility of driving underwater.

I went with "not totally convinced". The game could be 99% finished or a lot less. We have no way of knowing.

This isn't a game that is going to be released half-finished. Yes, a lot of games are released that way at the moment, but I can't see Nintendo doing that with this one. I think we're going to see classic Nintendo release engineering with Breath 2. Heavily delayed, but great when it gets here.

Of course, if there's a surprise launch next week I won't be complaining.

Why is it that nonsense like NFTs and the metaverse goes from buzzwords that no one had heard of a year ago to having to be incorporated into absolutely everything? One's a scam to part rich and stupid people from their money, one's Facebook's "hey, look over there!" operation following Frances Haugen's disclosures.

Has anyone ever actually said "Man, I'd really like to be the exclusive owner of some video game item and have a really energy and carbon intensive way of proving it?"

Anyone? clock ticks loudly

@Toads-Friend. Agreed. Hey, it's worth shouting!

The main reason Nintendo rarely has much "official" success in China is because the Chinese government oscillates between trying to grow the market for video games and creating a hostile environment.

Right now the official Xi Jinping Thought line still seems to be that video games are "spiritual opium" and buying or selling them will adversely affect your social credit score. That could change, but Nintendo aren't going to commit huge amounts of money and resources to "operation corner the Chinese market" under these circumstances.

Nintendo still does have a big following there, thanks to generations raised on Famiclones, but it's hard for them to capitalise on it the way they'd want.

I haven't played Balan yet, and for all I know it's as bad as the worst reviews say it is, but online hatedom flash mobs really get on my nerves. It's one thing not to like a game (or any work of art) and another to actively harass people who do like it for not having the hip and trendy opinion. I just can't get on board with dogpiles of negativity and I wish people wouldn't take it to extremes.

I might yet be tempted to try it. I play games from the 90s that I didn't play when they were new all the time, so I have a pretty high tolerance for low framerates, janky controls, samey textures and the like.

Take your time Sakurai-san. Burnout is a beast. But no one's forgetting you any time soon. Your mark on video games is indelible. 👏

Well, my bejewelled silver crown is tipped to GoldMetalSonic for making a higher quality version available. People talk a lot about preserving video games but I think preserving everything around the games sometimes gets missed, and I'm glad stuff like this is being archived and shared around.

The Wii era is such an underappreciated chapter in Nintendo's history. I actually barely played the Wii when it was a current product (a combination of tough personal circumstances and disliking motion controls at the time). Now I've gone back and explored the quality of its library I realise I missed out in a major way.

Anyone else remember the F-Zero webcomic that was on nintendo.com in 1998 and is now lost to history except for a couple of frames that N64 Magazine printed? Did Imamura draw that? Probably not, but seeing his original art brought it to mind.

"Great Vargon! The Emperor's son is dead!"

It took me until 2018 to finally realise why Pallet Town had that name. Pallet, palette, all the other towns have colour names... only took me 19 years to get it.

Whichever you take will probably do enough damage on the way down that you won't care that you're in the Matrix for long.

@Cia If you add nothing else to that "still great" list then add Star Fox 64. However I disagree with the idea that any generation of games are inherently dated and not worth playing. People often talk about how you need nostalgia to enjoy certain games or eras of gaming, which is untrue; nostalgia can actually be a pain in the neck if you replay a game and it isn't as great as you remember. However, if you genuinely want to "get" a classic, you do have to play it mindful of the context in which it came out as opposed to if it were a brand new game. I actually did that with Tomb Raider a few years back and enjoyed it, because I put my mind in 1996-7 mode. Of course, it helps that I was alive then. It's probably harder if you weren't. But many people enjoy movies, music or fashion from decades when they weren't born, and games can be the same.

Some people can't do that and aren't interested in doing so, which is fine, but to me playing older games which I've never played before is like looking out into distant space and seeing the universe still being formed. It's fascinating and rewarding if you're interested in how video games got to where they are today.

@Anachronism I can go halfway on some of your issues with the game. It could have had a greater variety of enemies, and knowing that by exploring an interesting nook or cranny you're going to get either a shrine, a Korok seed or a rare item can sometimes be a drag. I also wouldn't be opposed to optional traditional dungeons as long as they weren't excessively linear and you could find fun alternative ways of doing them as with some shrines. For me, the exploration itself was its own reward and that aspect of the game came into its own during the many times in the past couple of years we were stuck indoors. Knowing that if I wanted to go somewhere I could find a way to do it instead of being halted by some tiny rock or knee-high barrier was refreshing.

On the idea that the overworld is quantity over quality and asset reuse is a problem I'd have to disagree. Firstly, many areas do have unique environmental features that are found nowhere else. More to the point though, the fact that the world feels very cohesive is a plus and not a negative for me. It makes Hyrule feel like a real place, instead of an obstacle course or giant puzzle box. Super Mario Bros., the game which made me fall in love with video games, actually has all the same characteristics in terms of being based on simple mechanics and assets combined in interesting ways which encourage exploration and experimentation while making the game world feel consistent and unified.

We all like what we like and I'm not disowning classic Zeldas, I love them. I think part of the problem is that Ocarina of Time got so much right the first time, within the confines of the available technology, that so many other Zeldas have tried to be "Ocarina but better" which has sometimes worked and sometimes not. BoTW "fixed" Zelda for me.