SpinEnDash

I have no strong feelings about this one way or the other, but Pyoro's and some commenters' reactions leave me uncertain about one thing: isn't the protocol when talking to journalists that until you have their explicit agreement that you're off the record, everything you say to them is ON the record? Have I had that wrong?

I generally prefer 3D to 2D Zelda, but I was immediately way more stoked by this than by the Tears of the Kingdom reveal; I'm genuinely excited for this.

Thinking over past consoles, I'm looking forward to the creative weird stuff that the Nintendo higher-ups only greenlight because the Switch is on the way out.

Coming off Splatoon 2, I was really disappointed with Splatoon 3's sountrack (there were a few great songs, don't get me wrong, but most of it was just whatever), but they keep winning me over with the new tracks in each update.

I found TotK to be a 7/10 overall, but that's absolutely in the top 3 Zelda final bosses, maybe even #1.

This makes me wish game rentals were still common*: this game sounds dull from the review, but I can't really be certain whether it's the kind of dullness I'd actually find enjoyably relaxing when I'm in the right mood or the kind of dullness where there truly is very little actually there. I'm curious to find out, but not $50 worth of curious.

*I know Gamefly exists, but I don't want to rent often enough to be worth a subscription.

Mr. Ambassador!

I picked up on the joke of the video right away, but it was still early in the morning and I didn't put together that it was for April Fools' Day: even after the video ended I thought there was some kind of tournament event in Pokémon Sleep and wondered how that was going to work. To be fair, it is the kind of thing the Pokémon Company would do, isn't it?

@Overzeal I thought about it for a minute looking back on how they've named the last few consoles, and I came up with Nintendo Join. The more I think of it, the more sense it makes, especially if the hypothesized attachable second screen turns out to be true.

I don't expect to be right, but I figured I should write it here just in case I am.

[Dejectedly sighs in bass] Guitar it is.

I was about to write how a drawback to the Switch taking up both Nintendo's home and handheld games is that games that made sense at a handheld price are going for the higher home price, but then I pulled up an inflation calculator. It turns out that $50 in 2024 equals $30.62 in 2004, roughly GBA games' retail price. With that perspective, I'm leaning a little more towards getting it than I was a few minutes ago, but I'm still not sure. I liked the original, but it was just something I played a few minutes at a time waiting for classes to start.

I love the Robotnik fight, but beyond that, the only good thing I have to say about Marble Garden Zone is that I don't have anything bad to say about it.

I've got to kick in another vote for Ice Cap Zone.

Given Ubisoft's practice of enabling sexual harassment, no.

It might be an excellent game—I really enjoyed Sands of Time back in the day—but I just ignore all coverage of Ubisoft's games because I'm not going to give them any money.

My knee-jerk reaction was to say, as others before me have, "Ubisoft needs to become comfortable with not getting my money," but I quickly remembered that there's another reason why Ubisoft already hasn't gotten my money in several years:

Ubisoft needs to become comfortable with neither allowing nor covering up sexual harassment within its company.

A chief reason I buy physical is for the option to sell and cut my losses if the game doesn't turn out to be so good, but at this point I've got a strong sense of what I will and won't like, so I haven't traded in since years before the Switch (why oh why did I not heed the warnings about Marc Ecko's Getting Up?).

I spend every holiday with my parents, but my friend who also plays Splatoon is going Friends and said she won't bother playing if we're not on the same team. So I've gone through the mental gymnastics (honest though they may be) that I actually like my parents, in fact many of my friends including Splatoon friend have made plans to visit my parents without me because they're genuinely likable, so I guess I spend my holidays with friends, but just the two that I'm related to.

Has anyone actually complained about the lack of linearity? My knocks against these games have been that the dungeons were just "get to these five points" and the abilities you get from them are just increasing what you could already do (glide farther, do more damage, etc.). The Hyrule of these games is undeniably spectacular: I replayed Twilight Princess in the lead-up to TotK, and though it remains my favorite, I did think throughout that I wished it had BotW's Hyrule. I'm good without linearity, but if they don't think they can do interesting dungeons and actually new capabilities without it, then linearity is a very small price to pay. If Aonuma disagrees with the criticism, it's fine for him to say so (he's the one doing the work after all), but saying that it's just nostalgia is just needlessly dismissive.

The Forest Temple: it's the first dungeon that was built rather than being of natural origin. I don't ordinarily go deep into speculation about Zelda lore, but every time I play, I wonder, "What was this built for?" And unlike other locations I could say that about, I'm confident the answer isn't horrifying.

Speaking from personal experience, I traded in my Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance to get the GBA SP because it was backwards compatible with all of those along with a rechargeable battery and light up screen. A couple years later, I sold my GameCube because the Wii was backwards compatible and I was a broke college student. Approximately two decades later, I regret both moves. They're low on my list of regrets and I'm aware money was a bigger issue for me back then than it is now, but if nothing else, needing fresh batteries in the Wii remote just to turn on a GameCube game is enough to make me want a do-over. So I'll hang on to my Switch just for whatever issues I may not foresee.

My position on this may seem a bit contradictory, but as big of a Nintendork as I am (particularly for Zelda), and as okay with adaptations of preexisting IP like comic books as I am, I'm a bit hesitant about Nintendo getting into movies. I'm not naive enough to think that even the best comic-book movies weren't made with profit in mind, but those comics already had interesting stories that could be fleshed out into a movie. The lore of Zelda does have a great story buried in there, but given how Nintendo (or Miyamoto at the very least) has had a stated policy of "Who cares about story?" and Link has purposefully been given little personality beyond "generically heroic," the drive for this seems far less of "This would be a great movie" and far more of "This would be a profitable movie" than I'd like to think.

Again, not naive: I know that movies are a business, and the makers of Iron Man didn't think "This story must be told for the betterment of society," but I didn't need to be sold on that as a movie, whereas with Zelda, which I'm a much bigger fan of, I just think, "Okay, why? What will this movie have to offer other than the Zelda label?"

Though to be fair, I haven't seen Barbie, but I hear from all corners that it's an amazing movie, so I'm prepared (and hopeful) to be wrong.

Honestly, "basically just the original games but on Switch" is all I'm looking for: I didn't play the previous releases but have since become curious, and secondhand prices have proved exorbitant whenever I look. So while I'm on board with skipping this if you have earlier copies, this is just perfect for me.

But yeah, it's messed up that the physical game still requires so much to be downloaded.

I'd say Cremia & Romani are the best of those whose relationship as siblings is shown more than just telling us that they're siblings but who are distinct characters whose personalities can't simply be summed up as "Romani's sister" and "Cremia's sister."

I'd also have included Ryota & Akari Hayami from Wave Race and 1080 respectively, though I concede their only interaction is competing in Blue Storm (but if we're going to include the Twin Jugglers...).

Hop & Leon from Pokémon Sword and Shield might also be worth a mention.

I'm curious to see whether there's a correlation between answers and age. I selected "Absolutely not!" and wonder what portion of the currently 54% that did as well also remember when the NES was Nintendo's only console as I do and thus might just be used to physical media.

Conversely, several of my friends even older than me have gone fully digital on nearly everything, so I could just be imagining the connection.

I would've been happy to buy these back in January or even wait patiently if they'd been announced back then (after all, I only just beat P5 last week), but after months of silence and the digital bundle going on sale with a heavy markdown, I can't justify buying copies of the same games for the same system.

Multiple times, but only because "multiple times" includes "twice." My average is somewhere around 40th place, not including my many crashes.

I probably would have liked it more if I hadn't watched the previous Direct, but most of this was stuff I already knew about, so I felt it was kind of whatever. None of the new reveals blew me away, but even though I'd never heard of Another Code before, that piqued my interest. I'm okay with all the remakes: there are now college graduates who were only babies in the GameCube era, and they deserve a chance to play those games without paying three figures (plus I was broke for a lot of that time and would like a second chance as well).

Of course, I'd have declared it the greatest Direct ever if it announced a new Wave Race and nothing was different otherwise.

I'm in the camp that finds TOTK to be a very mixed bag, but that final boss is unquestionably one of the highlights for me: I can't be certain whether or not it's my favorite Zelda final boss, but it's certainly in the top three. My only criticism of the ending is Link getting his arm back: I imagine it's at least partly so that if they decide to make a third game with this Link, they won't need to either keep the Ultrahand abilities or come up with a reason why he doesn't have them anymore, but in a series where the player character goes through several reincarnations, this Link continuing life with a prosthesis of equal if not greater functionality to his original arm doesn't strike me as a tremendous downer (conversely, Zelda's restoration was probably the right move for a number of reasons).

As generic as the NA/EU cover is, the Japanese cover looks like I'm supposed to be afraid of the biker, which would work for some games, but Excitebike isn't one of them.

I wish people would stop using "boycott" to refer to not buying a thing they don't want: a boycott is when you refrain for ethical reasons from buying something that you otherwise would buy. For example, I really enjoyed the original RDR and would've bought RDR2 but chose not to because of all the stories I read of crunch happening at Rockstar: that was a boycott. Not buying a game because you think it's not a good enough value is entirely fair, but calling it a boycott is overly dramatic and dilutes a perfectly useful word. For what it's worth, I've read that Rockstar has since rectified their crunch policy, so I'm open to getting this pending performance reviews, as I originally played my then-roommate's copy.

Oh please more Wave Race. I replayed Blue Storm so very much during quarantine (as well as Pikmin), and so my cabin fever manifested as an obsession as to why we haven't gotten a new Wave Race: thankfully harmless as quarantine obsessions go, but it hasn't quite left. Each Direct I remind myself that it's almost definitely not going to happen, but like Charlie Brown with the football I can't quite let go of that hope. Still, there are now adults, even college graduates, who were born after the last one came out, so I'd say it's well past due.

Honestly, I'd be more stoked by a new Star Fox if it were among the best of the series, but the series has a very wide range of quality. I'm by no means a game designer, but my recommendation would be to have several different paths like 64; include some on-foot levels like Assault; refine the controls, for on foot especially; and stop telling the same story over and over (the one time Nintendo doesn't change for change's sake...).

And of course Golden Sun, DKC, 1080, F-Zero, and so many others.

While typing this, @Nitwit13's comment popped up about Ice Climber, and while that's not terribly near or dear to my heart, I have occasionally wondered what a 2020s take on that would look like.

I'm enjoying it: I'm 10 sparklium away from the limit, so I'm leaving stuff everywhere to explore more. It was already a given that I'm getting this on day one, though I do have a couple (VERY MINOR) criticisms:
As has been said above, a chance to say "I've played Pikmin before and only need to learn the new stuff" would be nice, but I recognize that an overly thorough tutorial is better than no tutorial at all for the fourth mainline game in over twenty years.
Perhaps I'm mistaken and the full game will have co-op like Pikmin 3's, but it's disappointing that co-op appears to only be something akin to Mario Galaxy's. When quarantine ended, I played Pikmin 3 co-op with a friend who hadn't heard of Pikmin before, and she loved it: I was looking forward to doing that again (it seems particularly odd to create a character if you don't get to interact with anyone else's).