Zebetite

I'm old enough that the repercussions for the planet will take place after I'm dead, so I'm just looking forward to the inevitable collapse of this money-making scheme and the delicious comeuppance the people pushing this garbage will receive.

There is no such thing as a bad Kirby game, so this will be enjoyable.

@Astral-Grain Cosmetics affect the gameplay, because players want to look cool while they're pulling off cool stunts. And games such as this are designed to entice players into spending, either with constant advertising of items for sale or using other players as walking billboards for the neat items available for real money. No developer on earth puts a cash shop into a game and expects players NOT to buy into it. Games like Fortnite wouldn't be stupidly popular and expensive if people didn't care about how they look.

But then, you're the guy who was railing on about censorship in a previous article so I can't imagine saying this will do any good.

@Astral-Grain Look up Exo Outfitters, either in-game or with Google. It doesn't matter if the cash shop is shoved in your face or not, the fact that a game you have to pay upfront to play has SO many additional purchases available is disgusting.

Really? No mention anywhere of the cash shop with over 400 dollars of cosmetics? That's one hell of a thing to gloss over!

Forget the jank, a 30 dollar game that tries to get you to spend more than the buying price in cosmetics is a dealbreaker in of itself.

Time to order more NFC tags.

Nintendo Kart won't happen, and then the fans who whipped themselves into a frenzy will get mad at Nintendo for not doing what they imagined. It's the switch pro all over again. Why do Nintendo fans do this to themselves? They're the only fanbase that I've seen consistently lie to themselves and then get angry when the lies, that they made up themselves, turn out not to be real.

All the changes I want for this sequel are under the hood. Splatoon 2 had worse netcode and a worse ranking system than Splatoon 1 did. They can add all the colorful characters and gear and settings they want, if the game isn't mechanically sound then I'm not touching it.

@AstraeaV It pretty much is. The single-player stuff makes up maybe 5% of the total playtime for someone who gets into Splatoon. It's a competitive shooter first and foremost.

@dimi Splatoon 2 WAS an expansion pack. The bulk of it's content is reused from 1.

It's all just commercials dressed up as something else. That's all any event in this industry is. Why pay someone else for advertising when you can do it yourself?

I was interested in this game until I saw that they added a cash shop with a premium currency and over 400 dollars of cosmetics. For a game that costs 30 dollars, that's inexcusable, and it'll all probably cost more on Switch with how things go.

It takes mere seconds to google a given game and download the ROM. We know these games are running on basic emulators that aren't anything special.

It's definitely not an acquisition or resource issue, so it must be a legal issue. Nintendo can coerce all these different companies to make Smash appearances, but putting company archives on NSO is less profitable and therefore it takes more convincing from Nintendo. That's definitely a factor.

...Of course, all of the above doesn't apply to Nintendo's own library. We can speculate as to why a retro game from, say, Taito isn't on there, but Nintendo has no excuse for not giving us EVERY first-party game from their archives.

So basically it's corporate executives doing their thing to the detriment of others. What else is new?

Every Pokémon game is an iteration on the last. It's kinda like an MMO with really slow and expensive patches. The best Pokémon game is the one you have the fondest memories of - for me that'd be Soul Silver with White in second.

@Astral-Grain Technically speaking Nintendolife could delete every single comment here and ban everyone involved and they would be fully within their rights to do so. If they take issue with something that's being said, they can do something about it - you may think something is harmless, they may not, and it's their platform. Bringing up censorship like I see on so many articles these days accomplishes nothing.

As a small reminder to the people crying "censorship", the right to free speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to you, and websites don't have to host your views. America's 1st amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.

This is Nintendolife's comment section, they make all the rules, and if you break those rules they are fully within their rights to silence you. That's not censorship, that's reality, and if you don't like it then your only recourse is to go elsewhere.

@Thaliard Exactly! You have the right of it. The best horror games put the players in danger and cause tension but don't make the player struggle to get through. An example that comes to mind is Corpse Party, there are situations where you have to move quickly and carefully but there's nothing in the game that's going to demand you try it a dozen times, and that game is incredibly spooky.

Who actually plays horror games for the gameplay? Being in control adds tension, sure, but if you keep failing a section due to difficulty then all horror goes out the window. Horror legends like Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil (the old ones) and Silent Hill are all delightfully spooky but not much fun to actually PLAY. I'm all for options like this.

I love all this stuff, I'm just lamenting that this wasn't here a year ago when I built my creepy island. I'm not really inclined to go back and work on it more at this point.

I'm honestly not sure what the point of this article is. Gaming has expanded to the point where there's games that market to every possible interest and combination of interests. Whether you're looking at indie games or big-name titles, for every game that doesn't interest someone there's going to be 5 that do.

There's such an enormous market of games, new and old, that everyone can enjoy what they like. We're well past the point where the games someone plays should matter to strangers, though that comment's directed more at the people in the comments here. If you don't like GTA, great, good for you, stick to what you DO like then, no skin off my nose.

I dunno, you do you, folks. I'll be over here hopping between co-op games and JRPGs and horror games and party games and ancient stuff from 30 years ago, and no one can stop me

Until they can offer a service that is superior to googling n64 emulation and downloading a couple things, they're going to have a very difficult time selling the online subscription on the virtue of those n64 games.

So how does this interact with time travel? If someone can skip all this by setting the clock ahead a year the entire article becomes moot.

This makes a good case for emulation, ironically - it's up to us to preserve gaming history because corporations have shown time and again that they will not, even when they can profit from it.

@Zag_Man That game, much like Gynoug, relies on it's graphics to sell it, though Phelios went a different route trying to entice nerds by showing skin between stages. Both are an excellent window into gaming of their time.

That aside, I'm glad to see Gynoug get a port. Is this game stellar? Nope. Is it interesting? Absolutely. So many interesting games, flawed or not, get passed over for rerelease on modern platforms, so anytime something like this gets through I consider that a victory. There's more to video game history than just the big-name titles.

This is definitely a "get on sale" type of game.

Good article, for the most part. Corporations have done a fantastic job of training video game fans to target and attack individual employees and low-level developers, instead of the executives who are responsible for the issues we find in games.

Every overworked programmer and harassed designer gets their orders from higher up. Find and target those higher ups, not these people. This is like giving hell to individual employees at McDonald's thinking that'll do something about crappy practices at that restaurant.

Not that anything will ever change. Corporate defenders like the ones seen in this comment section have either built their personality around the products they consume, or they don't care who gets hurt or what happens as long as they get their shiny toy. Both groups are the ones who need this message, both groups are willfully ignorant, and both groups are completely pathetic.

This is going to explode in their faces. The problem is the damage NFTs and these companies will do in the meantime...

It's almost like articles of the last few months have revealed how utterly vile some nintendolife regulars are. I'm not surprised at the increase in moderation.

That said, stuff like this fascinates me because this was the original "indie gaming". Before games exploded into the stupidly profitable market they are, There was mountains of hobby projects like this. Granted, there still are, but there were less Cave Stories and Hollow Knights and more of this.

I'll wait for sales figures. All too often the monkeys that play video games will scream and shout and downvote something, then buy it anyway. Let's wait and see how the service does in terms of profit, because NONE OF YOU can be trusted to accurately describe what you really want.

@Teksetter That's fair. It's actually pretty easy and safe to find ROMs if you know where to look, and I'd be happy to point you their way, but odds are good that would violate some rule here. I hope you enjoy those games all the same! Sega was on a roll in that time period.

@Teksetter Cheaper and easier just to emulate them, but you do you.

Engage in consumerism, monkeys! Dance for us and give us your money in exchange for nostalgia!

400+ dollars for a lump of plastic. Absolutely ridiculous.

@Dindunuffin Not really my point. I meant that people that have vile views on one subject tend to have similarly vile views on other subjects.

The thing is, it's never just one issue with the people raging against articles like this. The last 5 years have taught this lesson well. I've had my own run-ins with this, including a former gaming friend of mine who couldn't tolerate any sort of conversation like this and turned out to be a violent white supremacist.

Makes me wonder what skeletons lurk in the closets of the commenters here.

@BlubberWhale The only companies that "force characters" to be of a certain orientation tend to be big corporations. The orientation of characters in a small title like We Know The Devil is meaningful. Disney repeatedly going "oh by the way this character is LGBT" for tiny bit roles in Star Wars or the like isn't.

Representation is indeed very important, whether in regards to LGBTQ or race. It's mentally harder for people of color or different orientation to relate to characters when the market is dominated by straight white characters.

Straight white, coincidentally, is the group that's most likely going to have an issue with this article.

Check out the corporate defenders in here. Always sad seeing people who have been trained to defend needlessly huge businesses that will never care about them.

Giant corporations stealing ideas from indie developers will always be gross.

If ideas involving established games get turned down, why would a game that ISN'T EVEN OUT YET get it's idea approved? It's a neat lego set to be sure but let's realistic here.

@DTFaux I'm not sure what the issue here is then. People who use such a device aren't going to care what anyone else thinks, I know I wouldn't. My only issue with the "holier than thou" types that ALWAYS pop up whenever anything like this is posted who feel the need to give people guff about what they do with the product they bought. "I want this, and I don't care if you look down on me for how I get it" is kind of ridiculous for anyone to be bothered about when it does not affect them.

I'm not the demographic for this, but I can see why this would sell. It's definitely leagues ahead of other "mini" consoles by including an official method to load more games. Thumbs up.

@DTFaux The only value shinies have is what people assign to them. While it's true cosmetics do affect gameplay by increasing player enjoyment, this is cosmetic at the most basic, minimum level. Personally, I can't fathom spending potentially hundreds of hours trying to get a pokemon that has a coloration a few shades off from the norm, as is the case with many pokemon. That is a lot of effort the devs expect from players for a very minor payoff.

@CharlieGirl It also isn't hard to identify people who didn't actually read the article.

"The interesting thing here is that the device is essentially putting in the hard work for you, making the hunt for a special shiny Pokémon significantly easier, but doesn't simply generate a hacked Pokémon that can't be used in official competitions. Instead, no one would ever know that you 'cheated' to get your new shiny Snorlax – the Switch Up just played the game for you while you were off doing better things with your time."

This is just like the debates over the Game Genie. If you care about what people do with their games (and no, a palette swap does not affect others in competitive play), YOU are the problem.

I won't comment on how unsafe this is, people have already done so. What I'm wondering is who is this product for? What demographic would spend that much money on a carrying case for this system?

At least the developer kept the spirit of the game intact, hah - mediocre then, mediocre now.

@Kienda You're entitled to your opinion, but just to name a few, Nights is barely a game, PSO was janky even by the standards of online gaming at the time, and your argument falls apart with Puyo Puyo because that was made by employees at Compile, Sonic Team didn't get involved until a full decade later and LONG after the puzzle series had established itself.

I'm not saying any of these games are bad, hell I like most of them, but none of them were GREAT even in their day.

Back in the day I did things like beat Contra and Gradius on one life. These days I just do whatever feels good in games. I've got nothing to prove, I smashed my head against the wall enough for one lifetime.

@the_beaver No one's immune to nostalgia goggles it seems. I mostly remember this for being a buggy unplayable mess on some systems.

Let's be realistic, folks - Yuji Naka and other folks on the original Sonic team have been coasting for decades. They had one big success with Sonic and everything they've done since has been mediocre. You can argue for the exact quality of their various games, but not a single one of them is held up as a masterpiece by anyone who isn't blinded by nostalgia.

@Entrr_username Iuli explains this nicely, and again, many of the products are still being sold. Money is still being made off of Judy's work. If these games had been sitting untouched for decades, Judy would have a harder time making her case, but when you can go on most any gaming storefront and purchase Resident Evil 4, the lawsuit is absolutely relevant.