Comments 317

Re: Super Rare Games Changes Course On Physical-Only "Shorts", Makes Them Timed Exclusives

bluesun

@mike_intv
These days it's very common for games to be made in cross-platform engines like Unity, where it'd be simple for the dev to click a button and build a version for PC/Switch/PS/Xbox/phones/whatever the engine supports. Makes ports easier but means you have to cope with Unity's long load times and crashing issues.

If you press + on a Switch game icon, and choose 'Intellectual Property Notices', a lot of smaller games will mention being made in Unity, and it wouldn't surprise me if all these Shorts are made in Unity too.

@ChakraStomps
Only for 6 weeks, not forever.

Re: Exclusive: Super Rare Shorts On Skipping Switch eShop With Physical-Only Games

bluesun

At one point, I thought this company looked promising too... but everything they do seems to be a disappointment.

They haven't even sold out of copies of Itta, which had 5000 copies made (Note: Not 5000 for sale — They never reveal how many were offered for sale!) and released in January.

When the first one can't even sell out of however many copies they offered for sale, I don't see a shorter game by the same developer selling enough copies that they even run out of 5000 and do a second print run.

So even if they say they 'hope' this physical-only release will be more profitable than Itta (which wasn't even a Switch exclusive but on PC too), I don't see this being true.

These seem more like 'commissioned' short games and personally, I really hope the shorts devs got enough money from the initial funding to make it worth their time dealing with this scummy company, and all future possible complaints about this practice.

Re: Devolver Digital Is Publishing A Physical-Only Nintendo Switch Game

bluesun

@FlashBoomerang @Maxz
The same site Maxz mentioned with digital Ring Fit also sells Labo the same way.


If this is going to be physical-only... I've yet to be amazed by anything Devolver, I'm not about to go for what likely amounts to buying a game blindly, months before it gets printed and sent out, and so possibly months before the game is even finished. Keep that kind of stuff on Kickstarter.

Just like Darius or Soldam, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up on the eShop eventually after 1-2 years or so.

Re: Nintendo Wants To Know If You Would Fork Out $50 For A New WarioWare Game

bluesun

So how does $50 compare to previous game prices? Hard to know without any concept of NoA pricing.

Looking at the eShops, I found:
Game & Wario (WiiU) is $30 / £35
WarioWare Gold (3DS) is $40 / £35

So a potential $50 would be more than either of the ones recent enough to have eShop prices...
Either way, would like to see another game, after Gold which somehow just felt boring.

Re: Nintendo Accused Of Allowing "Pirated Software On The eShop" By GBA Emulator Developer

bluesun

It's a curious thing.
Looking at the credits in the game, development is credited to a company named "A&S", which turns out to be an agency named "Art and Strategy" in full. They seem to be some tiny web design firm connecting worldwide developers with Japanese clients. There's only one programmer credit, a name that's not even listed in Japanese, but in Russian.

So as I believe the emulator dev mentioned in an early tweet, it could be the fault of the random Russian guy the web design firm hired...

Re: Sega Will Start Selling NFTs Based On Its IPs This Summer

bluesun

@TryToBeHopeful
Mining blocks is exactly what adds to the 'block' chain.
Even just transferring something to someone else (be it bitcoins or NFTs or whatever), means paying miners a fee to make it worthwhile to post it inside their blocks.
Generating NFTs seems to take up more room than an ordinary transfer, meaning miners want higher fees ('gas'), but there'd still be fees on transferring.

Re: Sega Will Start Selling NFTs Based On Its IPs This Summer

bluesun

As for everyone questioning what exactly it is... Yep, seems like basically digital authenticity certificates.

But since they're built on a blockchain (rather than something more sensible), managing those certificates is maintained by all the miners constantly spending tons of energy trying to mine blocks (by looking for low enough answers to those math equations).

All the work/energy put into keeping the chain going is the reason the buyer knows the certificate/bitcoin/etc is authentic/valuable/etc. Can't feasibly tamper with it, as to do so would mean you'd need to re-spend the same amount of energy spent until now.

Re: A 'Pro' Switch With More Power Might Not Even Be Fully Utilised, Says Industry Veteran

bluesun

Yeah, seems like a weird statement given Nintendo's history, even with the 3DS.
There were N3DS exclusives (Xenoblade/Fire Emblem Warriors), and there were games that were obviously made for the N3DS's power and had severe issues on the O3DS (Pikmin/Hyrule Warriors).

Seeing 'DSi-exclusives' and 'N3DS-exclusives' both flop, 'SwitchPro-exclusives' are unwise but wouldn't be impossible.

Re: Random: Man Forges Popsicle Sticks To Win Pokémon Contest, Gets Arrested

bluesun

Looks like the highest sold stick price was 35555 yen ($345, £253) on mercari (which isn't auctions btw, it's more like Loot - set a price and haggle). So unless it was another site, the stick prices and card prices are pretty similar.

@AndyC_MK84
Looking through the source links, apparently the lolly boxes were hard to find, so even finding 25 x 41 boxes might have been the hard part.

Re: Random: Man Accidentally Names Nephew After A Pokémon

bluesun

@rjejr
The Japanese pronunciation is ~ ZAH-she-unn.

The 'she' is an attempt to transcribe a Dutch pronunciation of 'see-unn' into Japanese, so taking the pronunciation directly from the Dutch and saying it ~ ZAH-see-unn may be even better than copying an approximation.

The word cyan seems to have had an interesting history, in researching it I found out the Greek pronunciation resembles 'key', the Dutch 'see', the Japanese 'she', and English has 'sigh'.
Magenta doesn't appear to have such divergent pronunciations — the Japanese 'mazenta' is pronounced like English magenta.

I'd hope the English dub ends up pronouncing them as ZAH + English cyan / English magenta, but somehow I feel like they'll make up something weird and different.

Re: Pokémon Opens Interactive Winter Website For Kids, Lots Of Free Games And Activities

bluesun

@RupeeClock @Not-Geno
As someone who might be interested by an 'in-game item', had a look... and they just mean yet another lootbox-like bag of badges for the website. Like you get for playing a minigame.

Team gets...
100k berries -> Poke ball bag
150k / 750k berries -> Great ball bag
250k / 1m berries -> Ultra ball bag
500k / 1.5m / 2m / 3m berries -> Master ball bag

Why bother? Seems like one of the only way to repeatedly get the Master ball bags outside of being lucky with the gacha spins, and legendaries only come from Master ball bags.


Also, what a bad achievement system.
Achievements show as a single bar with three levels, bronze/silver/gold.
You're shown a task to go with the bar, e.g., Play every minigame once - 0/6.
You do so, it counts 1/6, 2/6, 3/6... 6/6.
Then the task changes and shows, e.g., Get 10 Ultra ball bags - 6/10.
You get one, it goes... back to 1/10.
If it's not cumulative, why show 6/10 in the first place?


Edit: Huh. Their method of updating the team scores is... Get the latest score, quickly set the score.
Surely nothing could possibly go wrong with having the client directly set the score on the server.

Re: It Looks Like Kadabra Can Finally Return To The Pokémon Trading Card Game

bluesun

Not something I expected to happen. xD
If there was going to be any Pokémon lost to Dexit, I would've expected Kadabra to be one, so was surprised to hear they were added back in with the DLC.

Though nowadays they act like it was always intended to be read as 'Hungerer' rather than 'Ungeller', back in the day before the lawsuit, the Japanese side didn't even think of hiding that Kadabra was based on Uri Geller, even publishing it together with a manga-ised picture of him.

https://i.imgur.com/X3pmldZ.jpg

(How Pokémon were named:
1: After real-life animals, for example Zenigame the kame(turtle), or Hitodeman the hitode(starfish).
2: After adjectives, for example Betobeton from bettori(sticky), or Nyoromo from nyorori(slimy).
3: After real-life people, for example Ungeller from Uri Geller, or Ebiwalar from Ebihara.)

Re: Watch Out, Europe - Importing Consoles From The U.S. Just Got A Lot More Expensive

bluesun

According to gov.uk, video game cartridges are also considered 950450, and also get this 25% tax(!!!)

So be careful importing any Switch/GB/DS/etc games from US too.

(Discs have a completely different code that's not in the EU's list, however.)
Well... guess that means not to import much from the US anytime soon.


@cleveland124
"The extra 10% would stink but it doesn't seem as egregious as this article is making it out to be."
It's normally 20%, and now + an additional 25% = total of 45%.
The 25% is a new addition, not the total.


@bluemujika
"couldn't we all just be "one people" and not bother taxing goods from other countries?"
If a customer can get Item X from a UK seller for £100+£20 tax, but the same thing from a foreign seller for just £100, then it incentivises everyone to import stuff rather than support local shops/local versions.

Re: Random: Some Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity Cases Have Gone A Bit Overboard

bluesun

I wonder what other games have had this happen...
Most games just seem to keep the English name (Breath of the Wild is still Breath of the Wild in French, German and Italian, for example.)


@Tsubasa
Most Australian Switch carts are PEGI rated EUR ones, I think there were only a few with special AUS stickers near launch.

The German text is because they're selling the same cart in Germany and Germany uses a different rating system (USK).

Re: Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch Will Ship With A Language Error

bluesun

Wonder how it happened.
Looks like every language got moved 'one space over', French into German into Italian into Spanish into French.

If someone was preparing say, a Spanish translation and there was a French song in the middle of Spanish lines, that should've been obvious, so... is this song is the only translated text in the Game & Watch?

"Language settings can only be selected for the ‘Mario Drawing’ song."
Sounds like it might be.

Re: Rune Factory 4 Online Trial Is Now Live Outside Of Japan

bluesun

@PrincessAzunyan
Unfortunately, this won't work for Rune Factory by the way. It only works when it's the exact same version.

Vesperia and Breath of the Wild are the same version worldwide, the same file supporting both Japanese and English, so you deleted and redownloaded the exact same file, which already supported English and Japanese.

But Rune Factory has different JP/US/EU/Asia versions, so you can't redownload a Japanese purchase outside of the JP eShop, and the JP version only supports Japanese.


It's not always obvious when games are the same version across regions. One way to tell is that if you have the icon, you can press + on it, and choose Nintendo eShop on that menu to see if your particular version's available in a particular shop or not.
If you do that with Rune Factory, (the trial means the JP/EU icons are easy to download) that'll just give an error message trying any out-of-region shops.

Re: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade Of Light Switch eShop File Size Revealed

bluesun

@Zoda_Fett
The DQ games were actually mobile ports totalling 837MB, but...
all of these have their own carts, from various limited publishers:
(launch sizes from SKTTR's forum thread)

100 MB Fairune Collection (Flyhigh Works)
100 MB Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Dangen Entertainment)
98 MB DOOM 64 (Bethesda)
84 MB Xeodrifter (Atooi)
68 MB Windjammers (DotEmu)
65 MB Downwell (Devolver Digital)
57 MB Kero Blaster (Active Gaming Media)
52 MB Mighty Gunvolt Burst (Inti Creates)
44 MB Mutant Mudds Collection (Atooi)
32 MB Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Inti Creates)
24 MB Retro City Rampage DX (Vblank Entertainment)

...so there are companies willing to waste a 2GB cart on a tiny amount of data.

Re: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & The Blade Of Light Switch eShop File Size Revealed

bluesun

So that's where the '30MB' size came from.
The actual eShop says 100MB, though Nintendo UK's website says "100.00 MB (estimated)" so maybe that's just an estimate.

There's bound to be a minimum amount of things included which could be several MB on its own, so a game being under 1MB on the Switch eShop is likely impossible. It looks like the smallest known game on SKTTR's list in the forums was Venture Kid's demo, at 8.9MB at launch.
Even 'unlock key'-style DLCs are now shown as 4MB in the eShop. (but install as 0.4MB - four 0.1MB files rounded up to 1MB each)

To compare it to some SNES game filesizes on Switch...
Dragon Ball Z Super Butoden = 24.1MB
Super Famista 2018 = 18.6MB
so 30MB isn't too far from similar games' sizes.

Re: Final Fantasy IX Is Getting A Physical Release On Nintendo Switch

bluesun

@Steelhead For Dragon Quest, it seems like they tried to release all the numbered Dragon Quests for 3DS, but 1-3 and 11 got delayed to the Switch outside Japan.
(Japanese 3DSes could play the whole series: 1-3(download), 4-6+9(DS), 7-8+11(3DS), 10(streaming).)

Definitely would be great to see FF1-6 on Switch though.

Re: Hey Dood, NSO Members Can Now Download A Disgaea 5 Game Trial

bluesun

@Dremp
It was priced at £49.99 digitally until yesterday, so the £34.99 price is new.
For EU the big NISA eShop sale ended last week, it was £16.66 then, so may be best waiting for another sale if you want it digitally.
For physical copies, NISA's selling it directly on their site for £24.99 + £2.49 shipping.

Re: You Only Have One More Week To Download Nintendo's Jump Rope Challenge

bluesun

@Stocksy @TheAwesomeBowser
'Archiving' something on the Switch is equivalent to 'starting a download then cancelling it', you're left with the icon and just enough data that the Switch knows where to get the game files from.

If you've purchased something (including free stuff like this), it should generally stay in your redownload list and be redownloadable even without the icon though, like @Eel said.
But that's only for 'purchases', so anything which isn't a purchase (Demos, etc), if you lose the icon you can't get it anymore if it's delisted.

Re: Talking Point: Does Nintendo Have A Refund Problem?

bluesun

'Next Up Hero' is something I wish I'd never bought and would've refunded if it was easier...
Bought it in some sale and discovered there's a bug where (iirc) if you start playing it offline, then go online, your account gets merged into someone else's account... and once that happens, even if you delete your save locally and try and start again, the server 'remembers' your old broken account and gives it back. >_>
So can't do anything unless you play it completely offline, and if you do that, most features seem to be locked out.

Re: M2 Is Bringing Aleste Collection To Nintendo Switch

bluesun

The prices are correct by what the video shows, + 10% tax added in. Japanese games are often priced surprisingly high compared to the west.

Looking at the eShop, 7480 yen is also the price of... Octopath Traveler, Deadly Premonition 2, or the Dragon Ball games, among others.

For more prices to consider, there's even higher price points like Persona 5 Scramble (9680 yen), or Xenoblade 2 or Astral Chain (both 8778 yen).

Re: Super Mario 3D All-Stars Has Reportedly Leaked Onto The Internet Already

bluesun

@abdias
There's a chance that even though the content itself might not be there, there could be hints to it. I remember there was a list of the SNES NSO app games first spotted in the NES NSO app for example.

@beazlen1
On the WiiU, Mario Galaxy 1 was 3.7GB, and Mario Galaxy 2 was 1.6GB. Mario Galaxy 2's always been a small filesize so 8GB carts shouldn't have been a limiting factor.

Re: Here Are The Switch eShop's Best-Selling Games Of August 2020 (Japan)

bluesun

"any games that were on sale during the period are appropriately labelled (thanks, Perfectly Nintendo)"
Not exactly? There's only one labeled but plenty more went on sale.

@ryancraddock
Just among the ones I know of/could find:
Obakeidoro was 30% off https://topics.nintendo.co.jp/article/6512c71b-db07-4eaa-88c4-bee78b7fdd6d
Layton was 77% off, Ni no Kuni was 75% off https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/4e4a4dee302a86889800cffc4e0e319a65887506
Splatoon was 30% off, Luigi's Mansion was 30% off https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1268900.html
Dead by Daylight was 34% off http://dlgamesale.blog.jp/archives/54933782.html
Gear Club Unlimited was 93% off http://dlgamesale.blog.jp/archives/54874977.html

But there may be even more.

Re: Here's Your First Look At The Main Menu In Super Mario 3D All-Stars

bluesun

@RazumikhinPG @Northwind
By the eShop:
"Super Mario 64 in-game text can be set to Japanese, English, French or German.
Super Mario Sunshine in-game text can be set to Japanese, English, French, German, Italian or Spanish.
Super Mario Galaxy in-game text can be set to Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Korean."

The menus have higher counts than the eShop suggests, but might be counting both US and EU versions.

Re: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Light Edition For Switch Surfaces Via German Retailer

bluesun

A version without box and extras sounds most likely, but...I've noticed several publishers swapping out physical cart editions for download-code-in-box editions in the last few months, even Bandai Namco and Rising Star have started doing it. Hope that isn't what's happening here.

Edit: 'even Bandai Namco' I post, then had another look at the picture, and... this is a version published by Bandai Namco...