We’ve lost too many good ones this year.

Bubble wrap. STAT.

@Hawkes142 Take Prime Remastered/4’s engine and use it to run revised content of Echoes & Corruption.

It makes no sense for only half the Primes to be accessible on current hardware - and not even consecutive entries at that. Same way that the much-clamoured-for Wind Waker is at best stuck in NSO:GC in its original form. If you’re talking less popular elements of Metroid, that’s obviously Other M, and they’ll do with that what they will. The DS ones will come over when/if NSO Classics sees fit to expand.

@Hawkes142 Just putting it out there…

Prime 2/3’s content plugged into 4’s engine.

Gotta be worth a crack.

I’m with @Slideaway1983 here. Too much non-physical stuff has gone from my library due to various futz-ups outside of my control. On PC, Mac, PS3, iOS… a pile more stuff went from ‘optimising’ before the update to 27.2, and I can’t get it back because it’s no longer in the App Store.

I’ve been looking at prices for the Ocarina remake recently, and cannot for the life of me find anything physical under £55. It’s as lockstep as I’ve ever seen anything. No codes, no offers - nada; the only one I found was at The Entertainer (£10 off £60) but even that conveniently excluded Nintendo gear once you got to checkout. Anything below £50 was either a download or a code-in-a-box.

However I would still rather pay that extra fiver to have access to that permanent copy and the free space on my storage. Been stung too often.

Did they just flip one of those N’s 180°?

Makes you wonder if Nintendo let this one through, having seen it and knowing that the StarFox remake was in the pipeline, to elevate the latter - give it a bit polish in reverse.

It’s almost “we have StarFox at home.”

I mean, no harm no foul, but they’ll still do anything except give Samus any flowers for her 40th…

Might have been some movement on this. I broke out my NS2 while getting my post-London laundry, and it's now showing as having updated to version 2.5a.

I'll let a braver soul than I check it out.

It says everything about this year that I found out about this absolute legend’s passing on a phone-in on bloody ESPN RADIO. Some redneck mook on Matt & Myron just mentioned it casually and I just DUDE WHAT THE SMEG

I wasn’t around for TOS, just the movies, and the dichotomy between the two gave me a curious distance from it once I watched the series second hand, so to speak. But then TNG happened, with its sleeker lines and a less cardboard feel to the ship, and a crew that I was able to connect with - including a dignified, erudite and deeply earnest man in the Big Chair.

Same way everyone has ‘their’ Doctor, they also have their own Trek Captain. Kirk, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, Freeman, Pike… Picard was mine.

I’ve never been big on Shakespeare since my schooldays (and even then it was just the Dream), but I’m going to look his stage stuff up. The Bard is a bit crunchy though, so I might lead off on Waiting For Godot with his pal Ian. No matter how hyped I get for it, I just can’t let the last time I see him be in Avengers: Doomsday. It would be a massive disservice to such a consummate actor to just remember him solely by his geekwork.

And to think that a mind like his fell to Alzheimer’s… that just makes it worse.

Adieu, mon capitan. Godspeed.

@Eggs Little bit of progress, bud. He’s on the list for corneal transplants, but there’s a fire getting lit under it now because his sight’s degraded so much. They zoomed right in on the letter chart - two letters, 5-6 inches across - and he still couldn’t read them. All he could do was the up-close finger count.

Back there in two weeks for updates. Might be a bit precarious because any OP would be under general anaesthetic, and given he’s 89 and takes so many pills you could use him to play Samba De Amigo, it’s a bit of a tightrope walk.

Been at the eye hospital in Sunderland with the Elders - the signal in that place sucks - plus I’m still knackered off the trip back from London. I’ll have a look when I get back in.

Everything is Crab is all I recognise from the names, though Super Battle Golf sounds interesting. Had hoped for Spooker, The Loopler, Biryado and RöckBeasts to poke their heads round the door, but alas.

@solarwolf07 The Quake releases have their mods as well, so the Big N is clearly not as stringent as they used to be when it comes to content. Hell, I was surprised to see them allowing the full frontal in CP’s character creation.

[Glares 3v1l lasers at AdHoc]

EA is far too toxic to even consider anymore. They could let you have prime 1984 Marino throwing for 6000 in the far more QB-friendly NFL rules of today to the likes of Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase and handing off to a top-of-his-game Barry Sanders, and I STILL wouldn’t go anywhere near Madden. They could include the actual 1991 Monarchs and 1996 Claymores, with the old Wembley, Murrayfield and Hampden as venues, and I wouldn’t even blink.

I still remember the original Wii trailers.

Must be said, the ladies playing Wario Ware helped. 💝

I’ve taken to holding off on some games that start out digital only, in the hope they do go true physical. Often takes a while, but at least it’s starting to happen for some of them - just like this. Been stung at least three times - all big names too (Balatro, Dispatch, Blue Prince…) - all for something that one day I won’t be able to get hold of should I need to. Hell, I just lost a pile of iOS stuff today that I really enjoyed because my phone ‘optimised’ its space for an update.

Let us make our own backups.

Crossed it off. The demo did nothing for me. Just a way more awkward Bayonetta/Devil May Cry/NieR in ultra-tight hyper-glossy duds. Wasn’t fun the way those were.

I hate that this movie was the one that covered my cinema subscription this month. I’ve seen some pish recently when it comes to video game movies, but this is a whole new level down. Fragmented, disjointed, humps the canon like a horny dog on your leg, some scenes were just plain unnecessary, quotes were crowbarred in for their own sake (you know who you are), and for far the most part, it was just flat-ass-out not funny. I won’t spoil any of it, but be ready for stuff that doesn’t fit with lore - like, jarringly so.

It even had the gall to have a whiz on Raul Julia’s take on Bison - he was head and shoulders over David Dastmalchian, even when the poor bugger knew he wasn’t long for this world. Characters were often underused (one in particular), were mostly unlikeable - only Dhalsim really clicks into place - some were completely incongruous (Don Sauvage = Penn Jillette on a bad day) or totally off-target (that was NOT Dan Hibiki), and the odour gags landed like a fart on curry night. The only saving grace was the animated flashbacks - and even they effectively turned a core character into a bookend.

Overall, it makes the 1994 live action movie look like a masterpiece - sorry Callina, but Ming-na is still my Chunners ❤️‍🔥 - and the ‘94 anime movie remains the gold standard of how it should be done.

OG. Limitations notwithstanding, the N64 version was incredible for its time. Even with its less-than-stellar frame rate of 17, it gripped me from wire to wire.

Going back to Raiden Nova to unlock a few ships. I do like that purple homing laser.

Pulled the demo of Biryado on Steam as well, because pool and roguelites definitely chalk my cue.

Months after Rhythm Paradise Groove came out, and they still haven’t seen fit to put the original in there. Makes no sense.

@Zeeba look up Legends of the Ferengi. There’s a brilliant audiobook version, read by Armin (Quark) Shimerman.

Also tracks heavily with the retail world.

Rule of Acquisition 285:

No good deed goes unpunished.

Bin’s getting kinda full…

One by one the heroes fall…

@twadebarcelona Doesn’t mean they’re better than true physicals though, does it. They’re what we want to see. Anything else has an effective expiry date where they can’t be acquired anymore.

If your storage fails after the servers get shuttered, your GKC turns into a sliver of plastic with a number on it. And its resell value craters.

I go for the true physicals over digital for this exact reason. I OWN what’s on them, instead of holding a lease on a GKC or download that can end once they’re no longer viable.

They do know we’re not counting GKCs and Codes-In-Boxes in that, right?

…riiiiiiiiiiiiiight?

It’s NAV-ee. Staccato A. Like it’s MAN-ga and ANNIE-may, not MARN-ga or AHH-nee-may. Seriously, nobody over there elongated any of those particular words like that - and I went as far flung as Sendai and Ōkunoshima, covering the Kanto, Tōhoku, Chugoku & Kansai regions.

And you know something? The -san honorific is pronounced exactly as written, not with a grave accent on the A. If you pronounce Nissan as KNEE-san, that means ‘big brother’ in Japanese.

Easy. EU/JP. The American one looks like they put the back of the case on the front.

My Super Bomberman Collection true phys turned up, so I’m making a ton of ridiculous mistakes in that. Man, I’ve missed those remote detonators.

Thinking about Once Upon A Katamari, but I am properly browned off at BancoNamdai not doing an NS2 upgrade for the OG version. Hell if I’m paying full whack again - they want daft money for all the DLC as it is.

Still recording some wild flukes in Pure Pool as well to relax of a late night. Literally - they’d make a great supercut.

It’s got to be coming over now. They can’t not do it.

Otherwise, that’s probably the cruellest gaming troll in years. Like, netorare, thy name is Sandfall levels of troll.

Not exactly a level playing field though, is it.

What’s the digital-only to GKC to true physical release ratio again?

We might talk of Nintendo being the last bastion of physical releases after Son¥ & M$ ditched them, but it’s far from being that cut and dried.

@Matt93 Oh they aren’t hard to come by, but I’ll tell you now it is gonna sting your ass.

There are a couple of Prime days coming though, so Jeff the Tax Dodger might have something.

@purple_shyguy Not even that. I can plug an OTG card reader into my iPad and it reads a micro SD card like it was another drive - swap media in/out, even play direct from the card. And Apple are a dab hand at security - the odds of cracking one of their strong passwords are in the regions of sextillions to one. (That’s one hell of a lot of zeroes.)

It cannot be beyond the wit of man for Nintendo to add a secure identifier to a card that allows backups that can only be transferred back to a console with the same ID.

@Matt93 Mine’s already getting kinda full, to the point I’m shifting stuff back to my OG to make room - and that’s got a 2-tera card in it.

Going to need to make our-side backups before too long at this rate. The three FF7 reboots and this would take up almost HALF the largest currently commercially-available μSD-EX card.

And I thought I had a fleet of external drives just from my computers…

Oh dear sweet sainted Christ on actual FIRE…

We’re going to need a bigger bin [shoves down hard on EA & Ubi]

In the run-up to the new Layton (still far from a sure sell btw, because screw AI), I clocked the main story of Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy this morning. I was hella late to it, only picking a card up off eBay last week (because screw digital an’all.)

And let me tell you, the end of that last case don’t half hit different as someone with parents both sliding inexorably towards their tenth decade.

And yet we still aren’t getting the missing pieces: no R•Type LEO, no R•Type Final 3…

Oi EA - budge over a bit, we need to get Ubi in that bin as well.

I’m just wondering when saturation point is going to arrive. Out in Japan I saw an absolute megacrapton of emergent CCGs - and some have made their way further afield in short order. And that’s on top of Magic, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Weiß Schwartz, and the myriad games we already have.

Particularly ironic In Pokémon’s case that they’ll never be able to [ka-hyuk] catch them all.

@Sambuc Have you played the Mario Strikers games? It’s near as dammit the Nintendo Football League as it is. Just one game is like going up against Ndamukong Suh, Cameron Wake and Jason Taylor at once.

Remember that Black Friday footage of self-entitled 🔞🔞ers fighting over a hi-def TV (and that’s in the UK too, where Thanksgiving isn’t even a thing, never mind Black Friday)? Things are getting even worse.

Just the other day I saw footage of such 🔞🔞s sweeping entire shelves of merch into baskets - with not even all of it going in; tons of stuff winding up trampled on the floor.

I used to work retail, before it made my mental health crater. And I know I’m not the only one. There’s a new circle getting built in hell for these ***** (I hope).

For crying out loud, don’t be a 🔞🔞er. The staff don’t deserve that BS, and neither does anyone else.

@wanderer314 Not quite, Wanderer-kun. Katakana and hiragana without modifiers are all short vowels. The ー at the end doubles the previous symbol's vowel in katakana, turning the pronunciation of 'do' (pronounced as in dot) into 'dō' (as in dough).

If it had been hiragana, things are a bit more nuanced there. You'd add a 'u' う to the end, rounding off the end of the vowel and becoming にんてんどう。 Using an 'o' お symbol would result in a どお 'doo' sound, pronounced with a flat doubled vowel - as in 'door'.

(Man, it's handy having that keyboard extension installed...)

Something I tinkered up while waiting for the 49ers to dismantle Miami...

Seriously? That's it? I could have farted that out in my sleep.

Bevel on the outline.
A lesser bevel on the coloured areas.
Slight gradient overlay on the coloured areas to simulate lighting.
A soft translucent inner shadow on the coloured areas to simulate depth from the outline.

Wonder how much it cost to get done?

Rayman, 007, now this...

Instance, coincidence, pattern...

@Mommar NVM, I got distracted by some big ruckus outside and I thought you meant the controller in the article. バカバーカ。

@Mommar You sure? I'm seeing no Bluetooth connection listed, and it only hooks up physically via Type-A. Might need some female A-male C extension cable for that to play ball. Both Switches only have Type-C ports, don't they?

I'm just happy to see someone finally enabling righty sticks, even if we have to actually do so ourselves. Nice one Hori.

Europe wins. While the extraneous screenshots and text leave a lot to be desired, it does keep the framing theme of the previous game boxarts, and most importantly - it spells Spectre correctly.

Prepare yourselves for future truth bombs, fleshbags! Nyeee-hehehehehe! [Skeletor Run]

@NickOfTime90 That would explain why Animal Crossing barely had a wet fart from a flat trumpet for its 25th.

Not to labour things, but are Retro, Team Ninja & MercurySteam the reason why Metroid hasn’t had the full anniversary treatment that Mario, and Zelda had - and now Kirby is going to get?

Is it purely because they were all developed in-house, while the last home-turf outing Samus got was Fusion 24 years ago?