Spiders

@wuntyme8 Unless I’m crazy they definitely touched up the visuals since the first release. More detail and color on the portraits and the vehicles look less clean and plastic.

But yeah, Japanese VO or a mute option or I’m out.

Please Lord let me turn those voices off.

Maybe it’s a generational thing? After Metal Gear Solid, everything has had voice acting and on balance I think it has ruined more experiences than it has added to. I always change the language if possible. — then at least it becomes “music” rather than bad acting.

Whatever happened to reading?

Wayforward has been pretty hit and miss for me, but when they hit, they’re fantastic devs.

Contra 5 please.

Well deserved. One of my favorites of the gen and the series.

@RubyDevilNine But when she did talk, she spoke Chozo

Eh, I like the name. I think it's actually becomes less generic than what... "Norzelia Chronicles"? "Fantasy Tactics"?

It's awkwardness makes it stand out, and to me it makes me think of a gameplay first conception, and I'm hoping that bears out.

Unless you've got the Tactics Ogre/FFT writers on board, SPOILER ALERT: the good guys are going to hit the bad guys until they stop doing bad things. Not here for the story.

@Astral-Grain At this point, you have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe it wasn’t a lab leak. After all the NIH emails that got FOIA’d? Dead to rights US funded gain-of-function research through EcoHealth Alliance in Wuhan lab? Pull your head out of the sand friend.

And no, I don’t like reddit haha.

@EVIL-C Well if there were predictions that we were “due” for a pandemic, how does that work when it’s leaked from a lab? Were they right then?

I’m glad Miyamoto is “on the right side of history” with this one, and you can see the roots of the better compromise — the Super Guide — in his thinking about Navi.

Personally I preferred when tutorials were called “instruction manuals”, but even still they should be smarter, more contextual, and able to read the player’s skill level. The mantra should be to be as unobtrusive as possible.

Nothing is more obnoxious than (for example) going to jump over the first obstacle and have the game screech to a halt and pop menus that say ‘press B to jump’, or having tutorials pop well into the late game.

Just today playing Ring Fit it plastered a third of the screen with tutorials for the basic movements on the courses... minutes after congratulating me for a 7-day streak! How obnoxious!

Navi was a mistake.

@Teksetter It is! I’m determined to clear with every squad before moving ok to the next one. Cleared with Rift Walkers, Rusting Hulks, and Zenith Guards and working on Blitzkreig right now.
First “play through” was about 60 hours and I’m at about 30 on this go-around. I’m having a blast and I don’t think a more “substantial” game is going to take me away any time soon.

@Teksetter Me too! (see above post)

It looks like a lot of wallet-hurt for me this year so I'm replaying games I love. Started a clean file of Into The Breach and falling in love with it all over again.

@icomma It’s not my idea! It does exist now circumstantially, and the game has been continually rigged in that direction, but, we’ve always enjoyed ownership as a hedge against that, for those lucky enough to be able to do so.

The “Great Reset” is, among many things a desire to dissolve citizen private ownership and make everything — EVERYTHING — rent. There’s more to it, and suffice to say it’s not a “reset” if it’s what already happening;)

It’s easy to look into: “World Economic Forum” It’s not a conspiracy or even hidden, but you can find a lot of conspiracy theory around it so “safe Googling” and godspeed.

This looks so sick. Might be my first Pokémon purchase since Red!

@MegaMari0 They can’t force a buy because of Japanese law. Nintendo has to want to sell, and this scenario already happened.

SPOILER: Microsoft was laughed out of the room.

@Pat_trick I like your “Great Reset” angle a lot. It really give some something to think about.
I definitely see the appeal in that gaming context as I can afford less and less of the experiences I want to play. Kirby for $60 is a tough pill to swallow in my current economy, where that’s literally half of the cost of Gamepass for PC for 1 year.

The hobby is itself moving towards a “for the elites”. Who the hell has the time and money to afford a PS5 and $70 games!? 15 years ago I could afford every system and a healthy hobby with a modest job at 40 hours a week. Even 10 years ago. Now? Not a chance.

In “IRL”, the “Great Reset” makes me suspicious — that I’ll own nothing and be happy, that we’ll all be eating insect protein while we raise, cook, and distribute cattle for the elites, etc.

Maybe my IRL paranoia can inform my feelings about this, but maybe the vice versa is true too.
If Microsoft is the dark future of gaming, I’m glad they’re securing top games for the poor masses and we’re not just eating bugs from the Free to Play/ Play to Earn trough.

Zuckerberg’s vision of gaming and all this blockchain/NFT stuff is the darkest timeline I believe, where we’re building content for elite players to earn “play” credits. That’s Black Mirror horror.

@Rinyuu For me Gamepass on PC “subsidizes” my Nintendo Switch. I had Gamepass for months and it was awesome, cancelled it when Metroid and SMTV came out, and now I’m playing some older games againsaving up scratch for Kirby and Elden Ring. I can either keep digging in the back catalog or throw MS $10 and play Death’s Door, and who knows what else that’ll catch my eye for a month.

I think on PC is where you see the strategy and the value clearest, here in console land it’s still an expensive plastic box and that keeps us in a Console Warz posture.

@JaxonH Read post above yours I totally agree with you:)

@Stocksy What damage has Microsoft done in gaming so far? It’s been 20 years now:

-Hard drives standard
-Xbox Live Arcade
-LAN, online play and DLC
-the Adaptive Controller
-multi-platform publishing
-GamePass

They’ve been great players in the industry, and have made the competition and gaming on the whole better beyond a doubt.

In this blog post’s context, compared to Apple, Google and Amazon, they’ve been waaaaay better stewards of the hobby from a gamer perspective.

I think people are blowing this acquisition way out of proportion. Both Nintendo and Sony have had stronger strangleholds on the industry and it’s always bred innovation, competition, and better gaming overall.

The only monopoly Microsoft has is on “bro-shooters” (COD, Halo, Gears). So now casuals buy XBox over Playstation? Maybe? Who cares!?

@NotoriousWhiz Haha thank you! To be fair, Windows has had a near monopoly on PC for many years, but it so happens PCs no longer have the monopoly on computing.

I’m not sure if this MS buyout can be looked at in a similar way. From our enthusiast perspective, it looks like they have all these cards in hand, but if you look at gaming as a whole across platforms and devices, I think it’s a much smaller piece of the pie relative to the mindshare we’re giving it.

@DTFaux That’s a much more understandable position and truly I blame the internet and the way conversations tend to go on us being so confrontational.
I think we agree on a lot of core principles, but I think rather than blaming some group of people that we can’t all pull in the same direction, we should be more critical of the strategy itself.

Also, I’m not a big “conspiracy” person. I started March 2020 as an essential worker, and I was in a position to drag my own store’s lockdown well into July and way passed what the higher-ups wanted.
I believed in “flatten the curve”, I believed in “stay at home stop the spread”, I prayed the vaccines would work. I still believe in masking and social distance, even if they’ve been proven to be 10-15% effective, because there is a common sense to it, and all the social behaviors it guides in one’s personal space.

Vaccination has failed to end the pandemic, and maybe your right that we had a chance and missed it. Maybe if we had a strict two month lockdown and the government subsidized a real “pause”, we could have eradicated. We don’t know. I think I agree with you that could have worked.

I have little patience for conspiracy thinking too, but what happens when the conspiracies come true? The fact is these vaccines are not what we were sold, and we have a public health system that is more interested in fighting vaccine hesitancy than preventing the deleterious effects of COVID-19. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, it’s just what happens when capitalism is the best tool to solve big problems. It’s a “when you have a hammer...” problem, and vaccines are the hammer, and post-Omicron we’re just not in the world of nails anymore.

At this point in time, I don’t blame anybody for how they feel about anything. We’re all trapped in these filter bubbles and are getting our information from political sources. It’s really bad.

For example, the strongest case for vaccinations is the hospitals being overloaded. What would you think if you knew, at least in the US, that that problem has been on record since the 2018 flu season? It has nothing to do with COVID, and everything to do with the unprofitability of ICU beds. At least in the US. So vaccines are the solution for that and not more ICU beds and staff!? That is where we are going to pull in different directions because we have different solutions to the same problem — but we’re both concerned about the same things and shouldn’t be against each other, but for each other.

I hope you’re not to put off to read this. I appreciate your POV, and @InsideOutsideUpside ‘s, and I hope you can appreciate mine.

@NotoriousWhiz How much did you want to bet?
https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet

You owe me a coke.

@DTFaux It's an article about 'Pandemic', not sure what you expected;)
Kidding aside, that's a bunch of really nasty things to say to @InsideOutsideUpside!

1a) IOU has natural immunity from infection. That should be the end of the conversation. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1

1b) Vaccines did not stop the spread, and it's dubious as to how they could have slowed them.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-similar-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people

2) 1-in100? Not even close. In the UK right now it's 18-in-1,000,000
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths

3) It doesn't give you an excuse to be skeptical? What has changed sinced Tuskeegee?

4) SARS-CoV-2 is the least egalitarian virus since the chicken pox/shingles! It affects men and women differently, old and young differently, it affects different body types differently, some people are asymptomatic, some people get "long covid" (which is still debatable as a diagnosis and not a triggering of an already known and classified ailment... the only thing we know for sure is 'long covid' is a medical billing code.)

You still think this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated? You're being ignorant, lacking empathy, and need to update your software. It's not January 2021.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/international

I think you're making the right decisions for you and your family by the sound of it... I'm not anti-vaccination by a long shot, but you're reasoning and lashing out doesn't sound like a compassionate and well-informed person to me. It sounds like a vaccine fanboy who wants everyone to agree their system of choice is the best.

God bless you @InsideOutsideUpside, your story his heart-breaking and I'm sorry for what you've gone through. You shouldn't have to be attacked for sharing and making up your own mind about you and your family's health and circumstances.

@nocdaes Whats’s utter nonsense? I’m not saying this game was “cancelled” or censored... it’s pretty clear it’s a licensing issue (thanks to the comment detectives!).

I’m saying that the default assumption of some, that it was “woke” chicanery is defensible (if lamentable), and that Nintendolife should have done their homework if they strive to be more than a clickbait blog.

@NotoriousWhiz Totally... except for Apple iOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android SteamOS and countless embedded systems.

@UltimateOtaku91 MS has been pretty open to publishing on other platforms. They can probably get enough ROI by timing exclusivity and whatever other perks they want on XBox.

@FragRed How is this a monopoly?

@SuperZeldaFun I don’t see any originating in China, save the SARS-CoV-1 and, let’s face it the cat is out of the bag, SARS-CoV-2.

Either way, I agree it’s not racist, though I found the “wet market theory” to be incredibly racist and offensive.

@Crono1973 Yes, yes it is.

@riChchestM I’m more surprised it’s not in the “article”.

@DTFaux I totally agree, and it’s a problem that we knee-jerk label and categorize everything into inappropriate categories.
For example, it’s very strange here in the US that the media paints the “anti-vax” (which covers people who are vaccinated but against mandates to bolster my point) as Trump supporting anti-science racists, yet Black Lives Matter correctly points out that vaccine mandates are problematic as the unvaccinated are disproportionately Black Americans and the mandates disproportionately affect minorities. Labeling and categorizing is supposed to be a crude way to make quick sense of things, and it’s been weaponized against us by the media and the public who trade in those terms.

But all that said, there is a “boy who cried wolf” quality to all of this as well. Unfortunately cancel culture is a “paid by the bullet” model and there’s no consequence for missing the target, so it makes sense that there are countless ridiculous attempts being made to find problems where there aren’t all the time, so it also makes sense to suspect, or at least be open to the idea that every censor or cancel is the result of some viral tweet or Tik Tok until it’s clearly otherwise. It’s an exhausting way to think, but it’s not irrational and certainly not mock-worthy.

“...some companies are intent on monopolising on this new trend.“

Do you mean capitalising? Who edits these?

@KoopaTheGamer I think this is a nascent form of NFTs, like blockchain it will be everywhere just not necessarily in cryptocurrency. I don’t know exactly what NFTs will be used for, but there is something powerful about being able to uniquely identify digital files and treat them as property - for better or for worse.

@Drb The way the coronavirus was politicized in the US was along the left-right axis, and the left supports/suffers woke culture.

Now there is a lot of confusion and conflation around cancel culture and censorship so it’s pretty much guilty by association. Better to say there is an energy in Western culture that wants to control information and discussion. It exists on the left and the right, among the woke and the anti-woke.

I don’t blame anyone who assumes any “cancel” or censorship is rooted in some woke nonsense, because that’s been the trend for the last 6-7 years. If there is a coherent woke culture and they want to distance themselves from wholesale “Ministry of Information” type accusations, they’ve made strange allies in corporate media and government propaganda.

That said, “woke” being a catch-all for any and all media shenanigans is a problem.

@ATaco Disinformation? Good grief. People are speculating because 1) Nintendolife did zero diligence to provide a reason or explanation and 2) we are conditioned for things to be cancelled and censored, sometimes under the label “misinformation” — though I think I preferred when it was called “fake news” — people talking and speculating is neither.

Thankfully the comment section put forth reasonable explanations that had to do with licensing issues, but it wouldn’t have been an interesting thing to look into if not for the fact it could have gone another way.

@DrDaisy https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/01/random-pandemic-shooters-eshop-page-makes-you-wonder-if-anyone-at-nintendo-checks-these-things

@johnvboy They’re referencing the fact that in 2020 it was considered racist to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab in China, and pretty much was until the mountain of evidence for the “hypothesis” came out.

@nocdaes We just had an article calling for Nintendo to not allow a game on their platform for referencing an internet meme. It’s not the worst rationale to think ‘Pandemic’ might contain something offensive like “a virus that leaked from a lab” or “promote vaccine hesitancy” or something.

That “worst rationale ever” is in effect in so many facets of media right now, why doubt the doubters?

That said, this is not the case as the comment section did actual journalistic work and got to the bottom of it.

@Munchlax It’s not a matter of treating everything like it’s a conspiracy, it’s a matter of lies, censorship, and obfuscation being absolute par for course today. It’s not conspiracy thinking to ask appropriate questions or to speculate when answers are not forthcoming.

It’s likely nothing, but it’s not definitely nothing.

EDIT: @HeadPirate lays out what it likely all is in the comment above, and to my point, why isn’t NintendoLife doing the diligence? Don’t blame people for asking obvious questions and malign they when NL is the one stirring the pot and in the appropriate position to give answers.

@UglyCasanova Why does 9 seem high? Not only is it a strong port of a classic but a high watermark in a genre that has never been more popular. I’d give Pokémon TCG high marks as well.

For every “point for nostalgia“, there are also points for recency bias. The whole media enterprise is predisposed to wanting new things to be better than old things.

Article doesn’t say but it’s $7.99 USD so whatever that is in funny money.

@Solomon_Rambling People get canceled for things they’ve done in other decades. There are people that get cancelled posthumously. All it takes is the wrong person to be exposed to the content and make a fuss.

That said, it could also be a coincidence, but without any diligence we’ll likely never know.

I would love to hear the real reason. Could be censorship or could be coincidence.

Any journalists around?

[crickets]

@Wexter It’s already overreach for Microsoft or any company to be sharing any of my data without my permission to third parties, even if it’s “just” email, which is a de facto online ID currently. Why would I opt-in? Second, why should Microsoft’s guidelines determine Nintendo’s policy? Nintendo has their own guidelines and reporting systems.

As far as your second point — shoplifting is a crime, and that changes what is reasonable in regards to a person’s privacy. It’s not a crime to hurt people’s feelings (however debatable that is in certain Western countries unfortunately). What your asking for is not akin to shoplifting but akin to a restraining order for what you consider some kind of violence. That is going to be the biggest difference we have and I do not think we’ll overcome it. It’s kind of astonishing to think that heard language is the violence in a murder simulator like Call of Duty.

Ultimately, the biggest issue for me — outside of the consequences of any implementation being way too much of a solution for a not very serious problem with the tools we have currently — is that we can see today in real-time that what is called harassment, slurs, and clean language is constantly changing and rarely in the favor of intention, but in reception. For example there are common gaming terms like ‘lame’ and ‘gimped’ that could easily be deemed slurs or offensive.

I think there is a reasonable expectation to not be harassed or threatened in a way that feels personal, but I also feel that many gaming spaces are competitive and there needs to be allowances for rough talk. Can I expect those different spaces to be policed differently?

You can block people. You can mute people. You can take responsibility for yourself. This, at the very least, seems overly punitive, and at worst is a terrible precedence for how people are to interact and resolve differences with other people digitally.

@Gauchorino Don’t know if you got to see my comment before it got struck from the record, but you make a great point, and I wanted to let you know someone appreciates it, even if the intended audience has no intent on listening.

@Wexter
1) How is Nintendo going to know how to block UserX on your behalf if they don’t know who UserX is?

2) Your privacy is your privacy, not who you decide to interact with in public. Blocking people online is not in the purview of your privacy.

3) It is a “real” comparison. You’re taking metrics from one arena to predict behavior in another. That’s a credit check. Maybe somebody wiles out on XBOX and adopts a sweet persona on Nintendo as a refuge. Maybe the environment itself, be it the platform or the game itself has a lot to do with the way people behave.

I’m not saying it’s not an interesting problem to try and solve if there are better ways to do it than what we‘re doing now, but this is not that. I’m not being critical of the people this kind of authoritative overreach appeals to, though I think the problem is ultimately a problem with people and should be worked on at the human, not technological level.

Creating an industry-wide blacklist is just a bad idea, no matter what problems it purports to solve.

Just when I thought I had enough retro and metroidvania, a pitch perfect title gets announced.

@Wexter What is the difference? It’s a violation of privacy. It’s bad enough that banks and healthcare do this opaque data tracking. We want our data from one platform available on others and open to “credit checks”?

This is again something that has that nugget of a good principle that nobody wants to examine the consequences.

Private companies with shareholders and profit motive dictating the bounds of good and bad behavior; quantizing social behavior; making personal data available to other companies; cleansing communities of undesirables.

What about a path to redemption? There’s no mention of appeal or how to get our of gaming jail?

This may seem innocuous on the surface but this is the part of Orwellian thinking that is comfortably in the Overton Window right now. We should be pushing it back out and, if these ideas are worth pursuing, finding bottom-up community based solutions, not top-down tech command and control solutions.

Why stop at multiple gaming platforms? What about social media and SaaS platforms? Should abusive players be allowed to open bank accounts and get loans?

Western culture is getting way too comfortable overreaching and ostracizing people. Too much appeal to pseudo-morality and zero thought about the consequences.

“ It's not yet clear whether a theoretical 'Street Fighter VI' is in development...”

They’ve said it is multiple times, plus it’s in the leaked documents.

Does anyone check these articles before they get posted!?!?

@Cosmo_Joe Thanks brother!