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I've been having a lot of fun with CrossWorlds, but it's not as good as Transformed, let alone MKW. It's a good enough Kart racer to pass the time while waiting for the content updates to MKW.

@Kazman2007 I think story-wise, it compares to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for high-schoolers. The combat compares somewhat to Live-A-Live.

@Lofoten I'm calling it...M9rio Kart. The 9/a will be spinning on its x-axis (aka vertically).

Come on...the GameCube had the controller with an unconventional layout and different face button shapes plus the first first-party wireless controller. And this controller has remained the go-to tool for Super Smash Bros. since Melee.

Judging by the title, I was thinking we were getting an Overcooked version of a Broadway musical.

Thought about getting the Nitro Deck, but I got sidetracked and discovered the Mobapad M6HD. The best joycons ever.

Combined with Nintendo's current internal efforts, the Switch 2 can now become backwards compatible with the Switch via emulation rather than having to come up with a new SoC with nVidia to make it so via hardware. With this, they will likely be able to lower manufacturing and R&D costs for the upcoming Switch 2.

I'm still waiting for Chris Avellone to have his career back after Cancel Culture wrongfully took it away.

Mike Jones of Startropics.

@Exerion76 The learning curve of X or GX is so steep compared to the original. There's a reason why the F-Zero series hasn't continued while Mario Kart has kept going on and on. When it comes to pickup and playability, the original and the GBA version are the best at that.

It's hard for AA or borderline-AAA studios to stay alive if they don't keep releasing hit after hit, and I was surprised Volition lasted as long as it did after the semi-disastrous Agents of Mayhem. Don't forget how soon Visceral shut down after Battlefield Hardline. Obsidian almost shut down until Kickstarter saved them for Pillars of Eternity. Even Larian had to release Baldur's Gate 3 a month early because they ran out of money.

@Axelay71 1. Kojima-san left. 2. Konami themselves said they are focusing mostly on pachinko machines.

I think many people would love to make 500 usd/hour for two work days, whether or not it's a voice acting job. Just more money for me to put into my cashflow assets.

The downside of unionization means that a staff reduction will likely follow, foreign outsourcing increases, and then fewer domestic people will get hired or contracted in order to offset the significant increase of wage per worker. It's the same as when minimum wage suddenly went up to some arbitrarily high number in service industries; less people were hired, and order kiosks became a common thing. Be careful what you wish for. Getting credit as a tester for a game is nothing compared to the credible stories of testing experience that you can tell about in future job interviews.

@AX-7 They have Sea of Thieves, which is now four and a half years old and still going strong.

There is no price premium on the Nintendo-themed cards. It's basically the same price as any other reliable MicroSD card of the same class and speed rating.

Most of their games sell very well, but if a permanent discount on a single game were to happen outside of giving it a Selects label, the average consumer would see it as a game that is lesser (in whatever subjective quantifier they perceive) than their other full-price games. Even back in 2004 when Sega/2K Sports released NFL 2K5 for 19.99 USD, Madden 2005 still ended up selling 1 million more copies despite costing about 30 USD more. There's definitely a perception of quality associated with price.

Looks like they're going to come out with a Genesis/Mega Drive Mini 3 as there are no 32x games on Mini 2.

Obsidian, for some reason, was commonly given fairly unreasonable deadlines for many of the sequels they developed, notably KotOR 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Fallout: New Vegas, though a lot of the efforts in their developments had to do with having to properly tie the far deeper, gray area, branching narratives, which are in sharp contrast to the typical black-and-white decision-makings of their respective predecessors. When all bugs get ironed out, the Obsidian sequels are arguably better RPGs by far. The predecessors are filthy casual kiddie RPGs by comparison.

The first one was groundbreaking (though, in retrospect, followed the typical Bioware RPG formula), while the sequel arguably had the better story. Kind of like how Fallout: New Vegas was to Fallout 3 or Neverwinter Nights 2 to Neverwinter Nights. You can tell that Obsidian — and specifically Chris Avellone — had their hands on the follow-ups.

It's better than this re-hashed sophomoric review states that it is. The controls are responsive, the animation is smooth, the music is excellent, and it plays at a faster pace than Final Fight. The enemies can be cheap a la Golden Axe 1, but otherwise, it's a solid side-scrolling beemup.

If this is as good as or better than Astro's Playroom, I'm getting it.

The handful of comments from the holier-than-thou, I’m-above-the-cult crowd on this site never ceases to amaze me.

@burninmylight Let's not take into account the other operating expenses that a typical NFL team owner is responsible for, such as the leasing of the stadium, the utilities expenses of operating the stadium, hiring and paying stadium maintenance crew, the concessions products and paying the workers selling them, the salaries of the employees that run the team, such as administrators, marketers, accounting, analysts, etc., the leasing of office space for those employees and the utilities expenses of said office space, the practice facilities that the athletes do their daily routines in, the salaries of those workers who operate those practice facilities. Not to mention all the health, vision, dental insurance and retirement fund benefits for those salaried employees. I can go on and on and on. Tell me if a 6 foot 2 inch-plus, 220+ pound athlete with a Bachelor's degree in Gender Studies would be able to take responsibility for such a large scope of expenses, workers, and employees.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, please.

Would've loved to see Secret of Evermore as an unlockable.

The gateway drug for Arduino and Raspberry Pi.

The taxes on PS4 and Xbox One (and PC) are DLC and season passes. With a few exceptions, Nintendo's games are complete on release day. The other platforms' games are only complete after you spend extra on their season passes.

My first thought was to the bullies at the Halloween party in the first Karate Kid movie.

Time and the markets will tell if not packing this in at launch or pricing it cheaper were wise moves. The truth is that Nintendo can easily adjust to this in forms of Christmas bundles and/or a price cut.

In hindsight, Nintendo probably would've made a lot more money had they not packed Wii Sports in with the Wii at launch. That Wiis were so hard to get early in its life also meant Wii Sports was equally as difficult to get, even though DVDs are obviously much easier to manufacture than gaming consoles are.

They needed to test the Game Gear, Nomad, TurboExpress, Lynx, Pocket and Pocket Color.

These are not the PAC-MANs we wanted. We want PAC-MAN Museum and especially PAC-MAN Battle Royale that came with it.

@Peach64 If the Wii U can maintain solid sales numbers for this year MK8 will very likely be an evergreen seller, much like MKWii was. It will likely not reach 35 million, but long after Watch Dog's sales flatline and Ubisoft announces Watch Dogs 2, MK8 will probably still be selling 100K a month.

The "glitch" on the left side of the screen was the result of a feature of the NES' "Picture Processing Unit" that allowed smooth real-time side scrolling for games without the use of programming tricks.

Because the video buffer of the NES allowed for the drawing of the resolution of exactly one screen (resolution 256x240), scrolling the background just one row of pixels would have required the entire background to be redrawn, which obviously would have slowed games down considerably. However, the NES' advanced-at-the-time PPU allowed the smooth scrolling of games in one direction.

Notice how I said one direction; most NES games that scrolled in real time scrolled either horizontally or vertically but never both at the same time. SMB3 was an exception at the time, because that title actually had the background scroll diagonally, like when Mario is flying in World 1-1 with the racoon tail.

The "glitch" you see is a result of the programmers having to resort to some trickery in order to allow both a row and column of pixels to be introduced to the TV screen when scrolling. The graphical glitch is the erasing of background tiles from the PPU's memory buffer to allow for the new tiles to become visible as Mario moves to the right (and down or up).

John Carmack actually discovered this trick when he ported SMB to the PC (back when even the best IBM-compatible PCs were vastly inferior to the NES and Master System). The trick, I believe, is called "Adaptive Tile Refresh".

Pretty much every other gaming network was experiencing server overload this Christmas, including Steam, Xbox Live, and PlayStation Network, so it's not just a Nintendo thing like every troll is stating in this comments section.

Family-oriented couch co-op games are a good selling point, especially since families can be somewhat detached with so many personal technologies like smartphones and tablets, so a simple marketing line would be something like "Families Wii-U-nite!"

Golden Axe: Beast Rider

Considering that Black Friday weekend consisted of only two days of November, there's really not much to analyze. Parents still had no idea the Wii U was a new console but are probably starting to figure it now by now when they're seeing very little new Wii games on the shelves. The Wii U's sales performance in December will be the main reason Nintendo execs will be either sighing in relief or clutching tightly to their 3DSes.

I, for one, will be having fun on my Wii U and won't be worrying much about sales numbers.

@MeowGravy Blizzard's too busy getting rid of RMAH than rebooting Rock N' Roll Racing.

There are a couple of isolated design missteps in this game (some decoy floor tiles and a boss in Wiley Castle that you wouldn't know how to beat without looking at a guide), but otherwise this is a masterpiece.

The day digital download prices become drastically lower than retail prices is the day retail stores say "screw this" and not sell any of your hardware either. That's a great way to sell consoles!

The problem is that a lot of people discounting Wii Fit are those who either don't change their diet or do the exercises with little effort. Losing inches (not necessarily weight) must be a combination of exercise and good eating habits.

I will say, though, that the BMI is not a great measure of overall fitness, as bodybuilders and muscular athletes will always be measured as overweight in terms of BMI.

Making the Wii U as powerful as PS4 and XBone would likely have destroyed the Wii backwards compatibility, as they maybe would've used an x86-64 CPU instead the 32-bit PowerPC one they have now. Or, they would've had to go the Sony route with the launch PS3s and include a Broadway CPU in every Wii U. Either way, BC was absolutely necessary for the Wii U in order for Nintendo to reclaim the tens of millions of casuals, who likely still have their WiiMotes, nunchucks, and balance boards, in the long run.

But, seriously, does Nintendo really need 2010-high-end-PC power? 1 GB of useable unified-architecture memory, a tri-core CPU, and a DX11-capable GPU that can also do general-purpose computing is more than enough for outputting HD-quality graphics with dynamic lighting and shadows, and it's certainly more than enough for indie developers (Unity 4 Pro is free for licensed Nintendo developers, which is great, since a dev kit costs 5000 USD).

One suggestion I'd make would be to pack Wii Fit U with an 8GB Wii U and do it as soon as the game comes out. Nothing appeals to New Year's weight-loss resolution-makers more than fitness gizmos! Nevertheless, increased customer awareness and a diminishing stock of Wii Minis is going to drive Wii U sales.

@gameboy1975 You're only talking about the console side. I still remember stuff from fans and magazine journalists about the Game Gear, Lynx, and TurboExpress (and later the Neo Geo Pocket/Pocket Color) blowing the "green-screened" Game Boy out of the water, and then hearing and reading about more Nintendo doom and gloom when the PSP and Vita came out.

@URAmk2 @FutureAlphaMale I think our personal definitions of "technical superiority" are different, which is why you're disagreeing with me.

Obviously Knack would be watered down, but would it still look better than SM3DW in its watered down state? I think not.

My argument is that Knack looks better because it's being propped up by superior hardware. Say that, in your opinion, Knack on the PS4 looks 2X better than SM3DW. However, the PS4 is roughly 8X more powerful than the Wii U, perhaps even more than that. Thus, SM3DW is technically superior to Knack, because Sony wasn't able to make Knack look at least 8X better than SM3DW.

There are reasons why developers like John Carmack and, modernly, those at Naughty Dog are propped up in the software engineering community: it's because they were able to squeeze out a lot from "limited" hardware to create graphical gaming gems through code and algorithms, not asking hardware manufacturers to add more RAM or more hardware floating point math pipelines in the graphics cards.

Granted Knack is a launch title, and SM3DW was released one year into Wii U's life, so there's still a lot of hardware squeezing to do for both consoles, but if you take my definition into consideration, SM3DW is techincally superior.

From a technical standpoint SM3DW wins over Knack, because Nintendo was able to do more with less.

The argument is similar to boxing and MMA, where fans and pundits use the term "pound-for-pound" when arguing about who the best boxer/fighter in the world is. Wladimir Klitschko could easily beat Floyd Mayweather, but Mayweather is considered to be the better boxer.

If Sony could run Knack on Wii U hardware, look as good as it does on the PS4, and play at 60 FPS, then I'd say that Knack is "technically superior".

The PSBox4One doesn't have anything that I can't already play on my PC and look better, and with PSBox4One's PC-like architecture, it's likely that more games will be ported to the PC.

The Wii U itself has and will have games can only be experienced on the Wii U. Sony was showing promise with some Nintendo-like exclusives like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Cooper, but now it seems like they're joining Microsoft in the Boobs, Blood, and Guns-only niche.

Plus, why would I bother playing any shooter with sluggish dual analog sticks when Wiimote+Nunchuck and Mouse+Keyboard do it so much more elegantly?

What does this mean for those who have the original Wii Virtual Console version of Contra III?

@Yodelman64: since when did golfers stop looking down at the ball when they're swinging?

I wonder if the GamePad's camera is capable of sensing motion, because it seems like this feature is just a gimmick, albeit an immersive one.

Still, I have a feeling this new, simple mechanic is going to get senior citizens to get a Wii U.