Salnax

Let me be frank; I believe that generative AI is a far greater infringement on artists’ rights than piracy ever was.

Gen AI is just a tool in the same way Mustard Gas is just a tool: not inherently evil, but its users are not going to be using it in an ethical way

@Charlirnie For a Dragon Quest RPG? It is low. For a compilation of two Famicom remakes, compared to other Squenix RPG remakes? It’s fine.

@Arawn93 We had moving NPC’s on the Game Boy.

The entire series mostly scores in the upper 70's, so this is roughly the usual.

Mario Kart World has already outsold Super Circuit, Doubkle Dash, and the Wii U version of Mario Kart 8, and is only slightly behind Mario Kart 64.

Imagine if they made a second Persona game!

/s

I buy a fair number of new games, but usually cheap ones under $10. The last big budget retail game I bought was back in 2023.

That's the newest game that's featured on Nintendo Music.

Has anyone else been having trouble with the app lately?

Imagine if the people who bash Digital Foundry for focusing on the technical aspects of games did the same thing for people who focused on other specific factors like story or music.

People are allowed to have specific things they focus on.

Don't disrespect a genuine classic.

Throwing out a couple of hits I see!

@somnambulance It's been more like a new game every 5 weeks, but basically yes.

Of course, over 30% of those games have been ports/remakes of pre-Switch games, so compensating for that going forward could be tricky.

Imagine how many minds will be blown when somebody makes a Western dating game isn’t ironic or subversive.

The bottom 4 spots are all Switch entries. I think it's fair to say the series isn't at its peak right now.

The Fellowship of the Ring on GBA was the one game I ever disliked enough to sell for exactly 1 cent, just to get it out of my life where it couldn’t bother me.

@nukatha It took them 30000 tries AFTER setting up everything possible in the Blue dog’s favor, strategically sabotaging every other dog.

That’s like playing a Pokemon game and finding a shiny with perfect IV’s.

Some people are claiming that this is no different than F-Zero and Chibi-Robo or whatever. The difference is, the original Nintendogs sold over 23 million units, more than Mario Kart DS. And even the 3DS sequel, though much less popular, managed to sell over 4.5 million. The worst-selling Nintendogs has outsold the best selling Metroid, Star Fox, or Fire Emblem game.

As for where the series has gone? Well, the first two games were produced by Hideki Konno and EAD Group 1, who also made Mario Kart games. Last I checked, Konno was put in charge of overseeing Nintendo's mobile efforts in 2015, and has likely been busy with stuff like Mario Kart Tour, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp.

I'm guessing Nintendo considers the mobile gaming market to overlap heavily with the Nintendogs target audience, so they're picking one over the other. Still, they might be rethinking that strategy considering how well Nintendo Switch Sports sold despite the mediocre reception.

It was fun. A little bit like Undertale, but more of a surreal horror vibe going on. And Pepper Steak sticks in my head to this day.

@AG_Awesome It's like how different 2D Super Mario games look similar at a glance, but end up FEELING quite different.

Some versions give previews of one or more upcoming pieces, letting you plan ahead. Some let you save one piece in reserve. Some let you drop pieces faster or instantly. Some feature the "ghost" of pieces to show how they'll land. Some have subtly different physics that let you rotate pieces around eachother carefully. And so on...

Classic Ant behavior.

Rarely has a game looked so underwhelming while being exactly what I was hoping for.

We had more information about Duke Nukem Forever seven years in.

In general, if a game costs more now than it did 10 years ago, I’m gonna feel ripped off.

“How would you feel if the next mainline Fire Emblem game was exclusively a social sim?”

I’d be appalled.

@Joeynator3000 Has been since 2001. She’s part of Shadow’s backstory.

I’m still shocked that we’re getting a big budget film adaptation of a Dreamcast game.

What happened in 2004?

If you don’t have an actual definition for indie games, then do you have any business giving awards for them?

@samuelvictor Don't forget, the generic sports audience may be fairly casual, but they often buy iterations of the same game year after year. Meaning that if anyone is going to have enough experience to see a decline in series quality, it's them.

@samuelvictor EA’s sports lineup is still sizable in the USA, but series like Madden seemingly peaked in the later half of the PS2’s lifespan. This is in contrast to FIFA, which is WAY bigger nowadays.

What makes this weird is that American Football did not decline IRL, with the Super Bowl growing in popularity from the mid 00’s to 2015.

My guess is that the football genre in the USA previously existed as a competition between series, and Madden’s NFL license killed not only other football series but also EA’s efforts to make top tier games, leading to slowly decreasing sales. Note that Madden sales peaked in the few years after they got exclusivity, and declined during the console transition.

Madden’s license exclusivity has been a disaster for the genre.

@Miu “I don’t need evidence because I already know I’m right!”

@Gamergirl4 We got Bowser Jr on the GameCube, Rosalina on the Wii, and Pauline was revived in Odyssey. So a new or revived recurring Mario character is entirely possible.

@johnedwin I didn't mean to say nothing good came out this year. But when half of the 19 90+ skus for 2022 are older games being re-released, I think it's notable.

As for the PS5's sales, they're fine, but are tracking a bit behind PS4 sales at this point. See the following article:

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/455749/ps5-vs-ps4-sales-comparison-november-2022/

IMO, the big theme of the year was the lack of forward momentum or change, for the better and for the worse.

1) The biggest thing to note is that the PS4 and Xbox One are STILL getting a fair amount of support. The big AAA games of 2022, even those released toward the end of the year, were largely released on consoles launched back in 2013 (Elden Ring, Horizon 2, God of War Ragnarok, Call of Duty, etc). Back in 2015, the PS360 duo wasn't getting this much support, and neither was the PS2 back in 2008, despite being the best selling console of all time.

2) The Switch is almost six years old now, and there is no announced successor as of yet. That is not a bad thing, and the system and games are still selling reasonably well, but this is a long time for a Nintendo console to be supported to such a degree. For context, support for the Wii, even from Nintendo, declined after about four years and was basically dead except for stuff like Just Dance by 2013.

3) NFT's, the Metaverse, and Blockchains have all been concepts that businessmen and speculators have been talking about for a while now, but little progress was made in 2022 to convince consumers that these were a good, or even tolerable, idea.

4) Looking at the best-rated games of 2022 on websites like Metacritic, it is shocking how many of these games are iterations on prior existing titles. Examples include Persona 5 Royal, The Witcher 3's next-gen port, the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress, the Stanley Parable anniversary version, the PC port of God of War 2018, Cuphead DLC... and these are only the games with 90+ Metascores.

5) It's hard to get my hands on sales data, but it seems that the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are not selling particularly well. They aren't doing badly, but it's worth noting that even though their supply issues were supposedly lessened this year, this has not led to a significant Year-over-Year increase in sales. Furthermore, I'm not sure if they're going to reach the level of sales the PS4/X1 did in 2015, an equivalent point in their lifespans.

A pessimist could call all of this signs of stagnation, but I've personally not been lacking things to play this year.

@ChromaticDracula I thought ZX was a Metroid-like?

@SwitchForce "Look at me, I'm in charge of deciding how people are allowed to enjoy a single player video game!"

Younger versions of the biggest mascots? It really is like Mario Kart!

Unironically one of the more exciting bits of news today for me.

@Chocobo_Shepherd I don't think Metal and Big were widely believed to be in the next film, so if that's true it's notable.

One potential flaw of this article is that Wolfe Glicke plays VGC. Most people who play Pokemon competitively do so in a 1v1 format with teams of 6, either using the actual games or a sim like Smogon does.

In THAT scene, even the less powerful Mega forms mostly had a solid niche in at least one tier or another.

The least obsessive F-Zero fan.

Even ignoring the lag (despite the minimalism existing to avoid that problem), there aren't as many ways to search for games as I'd like. No tags like Steam, no Ratings like on previous versions of the eShop, no way to make the icons smaller and thus easier to sort through, etc.

@beazlen1 Keeping in mind that this is "Best-Selling" rather than simply the best...

Pikmin 3 Deluxe is that series's #1, selling 2.04 million units as of about a year ago.

Wave Race 64 sold about 2.94 million, and nothing else even came close.

Excitebike sold 4.16 million on NES/Famicom.

F-Zero sold 2.85 million sales on the SNES, more than the 2 and #3 entries in the series combined (which is likely why we haven't seen much of it lately).

Rhythm Heaven DS sold 3.04 million, whereas across the other entries in the series, only the Wii version is a confirmed million-seller.

@Peterchu 5.19 million or so, based on various different sources that apparently all originally exist in print.

@chapu2006 It could be a matter of refining data compression methods. For example, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is only half the file size of the original, yet has a similar amount of content.

@NotSoCryptic That was officially abandoned in 2016. However, some of the work they did was implemented in Akuma’s inclusion in Tekken 7.

@Spoony_Tech In terms of retail sales, the 3DS Monster Hunter games ranged from about 2.5 million to 3.5 million. Since the Switch numbers don’t include digital sales, which are likely higher than on 3DS, I doubt there has been any real decline.

“Leadership says we don’t want to articulate our strategy because they don’t want it to be stolen.”

Ah yes, the drunken boxing business strategy.