chefgon

I get what he’s saying. Year after year Nintendo makes stuff that people want to buy, and they make it look effortless. You see a new Mario game and it immediately feels inevitable even though you never could have guessed what it would be beforehand.

While PlayStation follows trends and invests a fortune in turning everything into an Uncharted clone or a live service game because those are profitable, and Xbox tries a new random strategy every few months because they have too much skin in the game to give up even though nothing ever works out, Nintendo keeps chugging along doing what they do in a relatively unbroken pattern since 1985.

Forty years is a long time to follow a business strategy. It requires a lot of intuition about what will and won’t engage people. They don’t have a 100% success rate but they haven’t really had any grand reinventions or dramatic turns in that strategy. They just keep making games the way they understand how to make them, and the public keeps buying.

@Medic_alert PS5 games are the same as key cards, aren’t they? Every single game needs to fully install on the system to play it.

@BlueBCA what’s wrong with it? I put about 200 hours into Cyberpunk with my Mario Paint plastic mouse pad in my lap and I didn’t notice any problems.

An important detail here is that even 8 years later the Switch stands alone. Nobody else has even attempted to release a true hybrid system yet, so the Switch’s original value prop is still unique and valuable.

I’d still rather have a Game Key Card than a digital download if it’s a game I’m going to buy, but the fact that it’s a Key Card is going to be a point against buying the game at all. I already pre-ordered Street Fighter 6 because I really want that game, but I decided to pass on Bravely Default because I was on the fence to start and Key Card pushed me over the line.

You can easily achieve an encounter rate of zero by not purchasing the game.

Did this ever work? When I tried sharing one digital copy of Animal Crossing across two systems it would always boot one player when the other logged in. We couldn’t even play together locally offline. I ended up buying a second copy.

@PharoneTheGnome you’re not wrong, the servers will go down some day, but for what it’s worth I don’t think any server has gone down to the extent you’re describing yet. You can still download your Wiiware games from the Wii Shop Channel. They removed the ability to buy new ones but you can still download the code that goes along with the licenses you already purchased. So if Game Key Cards had existed for 3DS they would still work today the same as they did when they came out.

The feature being described here doesn’t need a dedicated button. Maybe they’re building this feature, but it’s not what the button is for. You can already do exactly this with two Switch consoles to play Pac Man Vs.

I would love an Xbox handheld, but a Windows handheld ain’t it. I own hundreds of games on Xbox and I am absolutely not rebuying a single one of them on Windows. Microsoft can offer free Windows versions of first party games but they don’t have the authority to give you Windows licenses for third party games. What a mess.

@-wc- For what it’s worth, I’m pretty confident the Joycons exist as a cost saving measure and tabletop mode just happened to be possible by coincidence. They didn’t spend any more or compromise anything else to make tabletop mode possible (aside from whatever fraction of a cent it cost to toss in the world’s worst kickstand, I guess).

With the system, Joycons, dock, and a set of hollow plastic handles, they’re able to include literally everything required for a pretty good handheld experience and a pretty good home console experience without doubling up on controllers. That package even supports two player for docked mode in most party games without buying anything extra. It’s kind of genius in how it squeezes a lot of value in the box without costing very much to make, even after you factor out tabletop mode as an imaginary feature that nobody wants or uses.

I really loved Astro Bot but for me it never shook that feeling of being a copycat. It’s pretty common to see challenges and gags lifted directly from Galaxy or Odyssey while playing through its stages.

It was a really good copycat, but it still exists firmly in Mario’s shadow and kind of felt like that was where it wanted to be, like it intentionally didn’t want to do anything new because its purpose was to celebrate the past.

An absurd position to take when Nintendo is 1) Absolutely capable of failing, and 2) Their strategy is sitting right there in broad daylight and everybody refuses to learn from it.

Nintendo carefully manages their release schedule to publish one noteworthy game every month. This schedule dictates game scope, budgets, everything. It keeps the Switch constantly in the news and creates tons of variety in the library. PlayStation publishes like two or three games a year and they’re all the same genre.

Why say only Nintendo can do what Nintendo does when both PlayStation and Xbox are sitting on similarly valuable IP and refusing to use it to make MORE GAMES? It’s right there. Nintendo makes more games than you do. Nintendo makes 20 games with the budget they use to make one. That’s not unique to Nintendo, it’s the strategy that everyone used until ten years ago.

Does anybody know what the name means? I was expecting something that looked like a Sega Saturn game but this looks more like something from the Dreamcast or GameCube.

I always thought this was a massive downgrade from the first game, but I’ll give it another shot with an open mind.

Ys III for Turbo CD was my favorite by far. One of the precious few Zelda 2 clones from that short window before the world moved on from that genre forever.

I’ll never understand why people suggest playing Oath in Felghana instead, as it’s just a completely unrelated game. It reuses some proper nouns but nothing about the gameplay is even remotely similar. It’s like suggesting someone play Metroid Prime Pinball instead of Metroid Prime. MPP rocks all over the place, as does OiF, but technically covering a similar story in a different genre does not make it a replacement for the original in any way.

@Yoshi3 I don’t understand why people keep saying this when there’s an excellent F-Zero game that came out last year and received an update with new content a few days ago.

Everyone is saying that Wii is the first Nintendo system that was different from the competition, which is simply not true. The Super Nintendo came out years after the Genesis but had a dramatically underpowered processor in comparison, leaning on bespoke hardware accelerated background tricks and sample-based music over raw horsepower. The N64 was the most powerful system graphically, but only managed to achieve that by skipping the expensive CD-Rom drive powering every competitor’s system at the time. The GameCube had, at the time, a wildly unorthodox controller, as well as a surprising lack of interest in online features. The Game Boy had a black-and-white screen, and the DS had all kinds of bizarre (and inexpensive) hardware features in lieu of PSP-level horsepower.

Clearly, Nintendo has been defining their own priorities independent of the broader industry for a very long time. Yes, those systems did compete directly with other consoles in the market for people’s entertainment budgets, but the same is true of the Wii and Switch so that’s obviously not what they’re discussing here.

I was really hoping for GameCube button layout when I clicked the headline. Colors alone don’t really make it look much like a GameCube.

I’m sure this controller is terrible, but swapping those buttons was the right thing to do. The placement of +/- and Home/Screenshot are absolutely backwards on the Pro controller and after SEVEN YEARS of daily use I still load the Home Screen every single time I try to pause the game.

“So then, could Nintendo eke another Holiday season out of the current Switch? … It's not something many eager Nintendo fans would like”

Why would Nintendo fans not enjoy another year of support for the system they already have? I know new hardware is exciting but getting upset that you’re not being charged hundreds of dollars to access new games is a little extreme.

I mean, it’d be upsetting if Switch was finished and Switch 2 was still a year away, but as long as there’s new releases every month between now and then we’re all just getting more value out of our existing investment.

I read the whole review looking for the part that compares the experience to the first two games, and I’m forced to conclude that the reviewer has never played them before. If we loved the originals will we like this? I have no idea.

I can tell that the author hates the concept of the series and that’s perfectly fine (I’m sure plenty of people will agree, they certainly did back in 2008) but I kinda want to know how it turned out if you were a fan of the first two. Is it a regression? More of the same? Any new elements? Is it poorly executed if you’re actually looking for a sequel to the originals?

@Henchdog There are LOTS of screen replacement mods for older handhelds. They always involve a new controller board to control the screen and interpret the system’s signals and translate them to something the new screen can understand.

I wonder if that HDMI output could be paired with a jailbroken firmware to enable docked mode? There’s a lot more difference than just 720p vs 1080p; many games have significantly scaled back detail or framerate in handheld mode.

The Switch Lite has the exact same CPU and GPU hardware as the full-size Switch, with literally zero differences, it’s just missing the HDMI out and the necessary firmware to make docked mode work.

I’m unreasonably annoyed that the Rocket Knight trailer claims it’s a collection of “all games” and then they blatantly excluded one of the games.

@-wc- It is broken. The issue isn’t the way the rom handles widescreen, the issue is that the emulator steps in and applies an incorrect adjustment. If it just drew a letterbox on its 4:3 window then it would be working correctly. Even if the resulting tiny window isn’t really want anybody wants it would at least be functioning to spec.

But that isn’t what’s happening; the emulator is taking that 4:3 letterboxed display and stretching it into an aspect ratio that was never intended. This broken feature could be fixed by simply not stretching the window. Zooming in for a proper 16:9 experience would be cool, of course, but not strictly necessary to be able to call it not broken.

“Many couldn’t understand whether Wii U was even a new console”

Is this even true? I’ve heard this so many times but I’ve never seen any evidence that anyone was actually confused. Just a bunch of industry insiders theorizing that maybe people could be confused.

I had no idea y’all hated Xbox so much. Xbox has been my second console since the 360 and it’s been just fine, what’s with all the negative emotions?

I assume the dungeon in question was the Fire Temple. My brother hated that dungeon enough to stop playing the game entirely. For me, it was the highlight of the game. I haven't the slightest idea what the puzzles were in the Fire Temple, because it was so open that you could circumvent every single one in your hover bike. It was like the ultimate culmination of the promise of this game, that you could just opt out of every single puzzle in an entire dungeon by being clever and inventing your own solutions. I loved it.

The NA one is one of my favorite box arts of all time. I bought a store display from this game on eBay because I love this art so much.

Sounds like they had already cancelled everything interesting about the IP long before they cancelled the game itself.

I lost interest after a while. You train your Pikmin and level them up and then … nothing. There’s no point in leveling up because there’s nothing for them to do.

I thought it was a great game (with a terrible title) but I don’t think the lack of sequels will keep me up at night.

Dream Team was so soul-crushingly disappointing. The entire game plays like a 40 hour long tutorial that always stops you to explain the solution to every puzzle before letting you try yourself. Playing it was legitimately sad because all the elements for a great game were right there and they put extra effort into preventing it from being any fun.

Everybody knows that blowing into an NES cartridge doesn’t actually help, it’s just the action of taking it out and trying again, but also everybody knows that it does help and reinserting the cartridge over and over doesn’t ever work until you blow into the cartridge and then it works on the first try.

The pure lack of imagination on display from anyone implying that adding Scorpion means adding blood and fatalities, lol. Smash Bros is overflowing with characters who chop away at each other with swords, there’s nothing inherently more violent about Scorpion’s spear than the dozens of other weapons that appear in Nintendo’s fighter. They could add the character and have his weapon work like any other in the game and it would be appealing to MK fans while changing literally nothing about the violence representation or family-friendliness of Smash.

Original by far. The DX version’s colors are garish and off-putting, like a poorly colorized black-and-white film. The remake was charming, but the toylike vibe is very different from how I imagined the original, which in my head was a realistic and vast adventure through an untamed wilderness.

The early release of the original also contains my favorite-ever exploit, where you can warp across the screen for tons of wild sequence breaking and is worth playing with at least once to see the potential. It makes you look at every screen in a new and different way, not unlike the wall-merge ability in Link Between Worlds or Ascend in Tears of the Kingdom. You can find the exploitable version on the Zelda Game & Watch if you want to try it.

Lol, are they sure? Because they just spent a lot of time telling a bunch of government agencies that their 30% take on Call of Duty was the only thing keeping their struggling business afloat.

Same old story: executives make some bad calls about how to grow the company so they make the difficult decision to save their own jobs by firing a bunch of people who are actually valuable. Pathetic.

I thought her performance in BotW carried that game’s story. I haven’t seen all of TotK’s story yet, but the into scene where she finds the cave paintings and turns into an enthusiastic Zonai conspiracy theorist was pure joy.

“Combining elements from both the Metroid series and Koji Igarashi-produced Castlevania titles”

Lol, the Castlevania games are Metroid clones. They’re good ones, but the genre isn’t a combination of anything. The term “Metroidvania” was coined to describe games in the Castlevania series that ape the Metroid style, to distinguish them from the earlier action titles. At some point people started describing indie games with the same word, so everyone just adopted the it’s-a-combination backstory because that’s what it sounds like it’s describing, but that’s not what happened and that’s not what that word was supposed to mean.

@Axl_abe I’m sure Nintendo’s marketing department is very proud of your use of approved copyrights, but the rest of us are just talking about stuff and trying to get our point across. Microsoft of America sounds completely inoffensive to me.

Now if you don’t mind I’m going to google some stuff and play with my legos.

Wow, I really expected a landslide victory for Revali. He’s the only one who was all that memorable to me.

@Birdgas The modern font is absolutely not legible. That’s why everyone had a problem with it. If the game had shipped with the English font from the Japanese screenshot in the article then no one would have complained.

The modern font is the definition of form over function - text that you can’t read because the designer liked the way it looked.

I’m very glad they added the pixel font, but Square definitely missed the point. The problem with the standard font wasn’t that it clashed stylistically, it was just straight-up illegible. The pixel font is better not because it’s pixelated, but because it’s easier to read.

That said, the pixel font that Square chose is still not the easiest to make out. Every single pixel font mod I found for the PC version was clearer, bolder, and easier to see. How can they be so bad at this fundamental design principle?

Mystic Quest on Super Nintendo. It’s so much better than people give it credit for.

Looks nice. I’m pleased to see an indie game like this that isn’t built on procedurally generated worlds.

I don’t understand why anyone would feel compelled to find all the koroks. The game itself clearly doesn’t want you to. You stop getting rewards for them before you even reach the 50% mark, and you don’t really need the rewards anymore well before that. Why subject yourself to such a boring collectathon when the game’s designers didn’t even want you to?

Four. I had the original $250 one, then upgraded to XL, then upgraded to New XL, then finally replaced that with the regular (small) New 3DS for improved portability.

It would be more radical and interesting if someone made a racing game without open world elements at this point.