dsparil

The original was pretty good although the last part was a big spike in difficulty. Looking forward to this one.

I think he maybe is referring to how the asterisk quest ending weren't received well in Japan. They all had downer endings to encourage people to make the other choice (and get the other job) on the second loop. They were changed to be more ambiguous in the western version. That big criticism the Japanese version got. It's a great game though and adds so many quirky jobs.

The first is just as good too. Chapters 5 to 8 are almost entirely optional. All you actually need to do is refight the bosses guarding the crystals which takes barely any time. The other boss refights are total optional and don't even give experience only job points which aren't even all that useful by the end of them. The real problem is that you basically need a team of Ninjas by the end of them to abuse the overly effective combo of Transience and Utsusemi.

I'm okay with the flimsy tools breaking, but it's ridiculous that the iron ones do. Resources either need to be significantly more plentiful or tools need to be indestructible.

I guessing it's because of the super weird blockchain feature.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/08/cooking_mama_for_switch_will_feature_a_vegetarian_mode_and_blockchain_tech

@bluesdance I got a bidet that fell out of a tree so I'm safe from that!

In slight defense of Woodle Tree Adventures Deluxe, I'm pretty sure that's a game for small children.

The Zero games would have been so much fairer if upgrade Cyber Elves didn't permanently deduct from your ranking. It would have even nice to see something between the Casual mode which gives you every single elf with the upgrades already applied, maxed out weapon skills, full sub tanks and 9999 crystals right at the start and the standard difficulty.

@gortsi Car Quest with an R not Cat Quest with a T.

I look through every single thing on sale every week, and most of the cheap stuff is definitely shovelware but occasionally there are some gems. Car Quest comes to mind which is just so weird but actually fun and frequently on sale for $1.

@Miles_Edgeworth Torna came out 9 months after the original versus 6 months for Isle of Armor and 12 months for Crown Tundra.

Myst is an unassailable classic and is still one of the best mechanical puzzle based adventure games.

I generally think of this as the "good" Romancing SaGa game. It's a whole let less confusing than RS1 and less annoying than RS2. All the SaGa games are a bit of an acquired taste, but they're definitely worth it even if they can feel like a struggle at times.

The idea that the original design was a marketing stunt totally ignores all the marketing materials and licensed products (maybe just the Halloween costume) that went out. That's a very expensive stunt and basically a wide ranging conspiracy if partners were in the know, or an angering of them if they weren't. It's basically New Coke Redux.

The original design just reeked of movie executive meddling and those people can be dumb as rocks. I saw an article earlier today about how in the mid-90s an executive wanted Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman!

I played the first one for around 10 hours on Switch, and it was such a slog. It was kinda fun at first, but turns into a grindfest for equipment fairly quickly.

Does this come with Throne of Bhaal, the expansion for BGII? The description mentioned the BG1 expansion Tales of the Sword Coast but nothing about ToB. It'd be a little weird to leave off the end of the story.

Grid is almost a half price release, full featured, very good and suitable for literally any skill level. There's no reason to get anything else over it.

@nmanifold My experience with F2P games that got converted to regular releases is that that there's still too many vestiges of micro-transaction driven design unless the monetization was very light.

That's not really surprising. Dorothea is fairly easy to recruit and is the character most naturally suited to being the Dancer. BE was certainly the most popular house for people to start with, I went GD personally, but it's natural for highly recruited characters to start displacing the must deploy Edelgard as people start playing other routes.

@BarefootBowser This very website has a guide on dissembling the stick to clear out debris from the pads.

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/09/guide_how_to_fix_a_drifting_nintendo_switch_joy-con_analogue_stick?page=4

Interference from corrosion or debris is a common issue with potentiometers. It's not anything novel or unique to JoyCons. Fixing them mostly comes in the context of old radio and TV dials which are rotary but the general idea is the same. In this case, debris from the wear caused by the metal contact sliding over carbon contact collects over time and ends up occasionally registering as movement. Eventually the carbon will be worn through entirely and it'll cease to function at all although this is a much longer term issue.

Again, this is a perfectly common and normal occurrence with the technology being used and applies to pretty much every analog stick design. Anything less durable than ceramic/metal composite which is basically aerospace grade will eventually develop these types of issues. The main problem is how quickly they develop rather than the fact that it does at all.

Every replacement stick I've ever seen for sale is the entire mechanism so replacing the stick also replaces the carbon element since it's internal to the part. It's also quite possible for multiple different problems to have similar symptoms. Nothing I've experienced across multiple sets of JoyCons even comes close to potentially being related to the spring.

If anything an issue with the spring is something new, or you simply haven't gotten to the point that it gets extreme. It's a progressive issue. My first set went almost a year without issue and started to worsen over six months until it was nearly unusable. My second set only lasted six months total before both sticks started drifting significantly. Half the buttons also failed around the same time so that set was a bit of a lemon. My third and current set is starting to drift in the same way after six months.

@BarefootBowser The type and amount of drifting I've experienced is wholly inconsistent with there being a physical issue with the stick. They drift a significant amount and in many directions which would be easily visible if it were an issue with centering. They do it on a level surface and you can see them being detected as centered on the calibration screen before drifting around and snapping back to the center all while being completely still. I have heard of people having different clearly physical issues which this change could help with, but those are totally different than drifting.

Since the I can safely rule out the sticks as being the underlying cause having gone through this on three sets of JoyCons since launch, the pads are the only possible cause. Whether it's from graphite debris buildup which does seem likely, wear on the pads themselves or some other graphite issue, it's clear that they're the problem. The things have a useable life span that's measured in hundreds of hours which isn't acceptable regardless of the cause especially for their high price. I have never seen any other Nintendo controller have a life span this short. My 15 year old Gamecube controller still works as well as the day I got it and it's seen more use than any JoyCon I've had.

None of my drifting JoyCons had any issues recentering and they all drift a huge amount (between 50% and 100% of the calibration circle). This is a total non sequitur to the actual problem which is the graphite. They fixed a possible and normal mechanical wear issue. Drifting is not a mechanical issue.

SFII isn't even the worst offender when it comes to cheating AI. I would have like to have known what the setting were for the video though. I wouldn't really consider some of those cheats if they vary with difficulty. Reading inputs is always cheating though.

An actual play log! The version now is just full of bizarre decisions (no exact times, games take 10 days to show up) and is just awful.

@SenseiDje It's so weird that the rendering engine is there, but there's no actual browser. To my knowledge it's used for Twitter/FB login and for the eShop.

The Daggerfall comparison is apt. The playable area was huge, but there was no point in manually traversing between towns and dungeons versus using fast travel. Daggerfall did have some highlights like a real branching plot and great character creation. I'm intrigued by the historical aspect, but it looks so bland with highly abstracted combat.

I liked the original on Wii U even with the performance issues. I've actually been hoping for a Switch version pretty much since launch.

@AnnoyingFrenzy It does have voice acting mostly (entirely?) from the movies. Only the earliest Lego games don't have voice acting.

I love the original FFXII, but I'm finding that adding in a job system didn't make anything better and made things worse slightly. Mainly in that jobs are a subset of the old license board so you simply have fewer options rather than a truly new way to play it. For what's almost a full price release compared to the more budget priced VII, IX and X/X-2, I don't think it's completely unreasonable for a larger revamp over the old International Zodiac Job System version to have been made versus the few tweaks that were. It also would have been nice to have had to option for the original board instead. The only thing I thought the original needed was a Foe: Has Item to make stealing more automated which is a weirdly manual process compared to everything else.

I liked I Am Setsuna and Lost Spear although IAS is a little overly complicated. Interesting to see someone from Chrono Trigger working on Oninaki when it's the other two that crib from CT.

@Skid It's going to be an F-Zero and Star Fox crossover The G-Zero ending of Star Fox Command wasn't homage but a typo.

I love the 3DS, but it does seem like it's at the end of it's life. It got a boost from the New 2DS XL, but that only lasted until the end of year in 2017. It was a rather dramatic spike in sales, but now we're back to about where it naturally would have been a year ago otherwise.

Nintendo has their own numbers here: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/number.html

I think the main issue is using an out of 10 system or even worse an out of 100/10.0 system. I think something simple like thumbs down, mixed and thumbs up is a lot clearer maybe with an extra low option for complete catastrophes.

I'm halfway through and this is way better than a 5/10. It's very obviously a Shin Megami Tensei clone and a good one at that. It's a little irritating to see yet another review that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of SMT as this might as well be called Legally Distinct Demon Capturing Game. Every single aspect is a reflection of SMT down to the astral voices! The only missing features are demon negotiation and fusion which is pretty significant, but there's much more emphasis on leveling astrals which is contradictory to the point of fusing demons.

I also disagree that there's any grinding at all. Karma, which is used to level astrals, is given out very generously after battles. Astrals only evolve to increase their level cap and it also drops the back down to level 1. Any similarities to Pokemon are incredibly shallow.

@Akropolon The Pokemon Company only handles external licensing—GameFreak did it themselves until it got to be too much to handle—so there's lots of people that also get a cut of merchandise sales. Gross revenue was about $295 million!

The $2 billion number is an estimate of total retail sales, not their licensing take. Retail sales for this year were estimated at $3.5 billion by the same source.

Nintendo owns 80% of Monolith. The other 20% is divided between Bandai-Namco and Monolith's founders. So yeah, they're a first party studio. BN holding onto part is for business relationship reasons which you can see from Pac-Man in Smash 4 on top of BN doing some codevelopment work too.

When Nintendo originally announced online multiplayer for classic titles, I immediately thought that they're going to use streaming rather than downloads (doesn't require any work to implement online MP that way). Nvidia has plenty of experience in this area, and the bandwidth requirements would be low for non-HD games. Dropping the VC name makes me think that is more likely to be how it'll be implemented.

@BensonUii: Microsoft tried shenanigans like that.

@Octane Nintendo is still releasing new 3DS games in 2019. DQ7 and DQ8 did sell terribly but they were also ports. DQ9 sold well and managed to crack 1m outside Japan. I would think that Nintendo would try to bring it over if SE would let them.

This was the first time I didn't care all that much. Fantasy Strike was the only interesting part since I happened to hear about it last week and was hoping for a Switch version. The part of the video on it doesn't sell it well at all, so I would have been totally disinterested if I didn't already know what it is.

The presentation is a little bland, but color picross is easier to do digitally than in a book so I'm thankful for the existence of this. The only other color picross for Nintendo system is Animal Color Cross for DSi.

Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement is probably the most famous one since it directly lead to the Commander Keen series! How did the video not even manage to mention that!

I really miss the animated image you’d get when finishing a puzzle in Picross DS. I keep hoping they’ll come back, but they still haven’t. They added a lot of personality.

5

I basically stopped playing Splatoon 2 because Salmon Run is so limited. I got my fill of Turf War in the original, and Salmon Run is rarely available when I have the time and desire to play it.

@Anti-Matter
The Hamster released Neo Geo games were available on other platforms already and now they're bringing them to Switch. They're not officially VC games like Neo Geo stuff was on Wii.

Strikers 1999!

It's not just a dolphin; it's a dolphin named Spanky!

I wouldn't expect newer games, but the lack of Xevious and Pole Position is head scratching.

!!!

This was released as a Japanese mobile game in Oct. '13 and still hasn't seen release outside of it. The original version was developed by Jupiter which is the "official" Picross developer. Maybe this version will since it's presumable still developed by Jupiter and most of their other 3DS picross games — Picross e to e7, Pokemon Picross and LoZ: Twilight Princess Picross have but not the two Club Nintendo reward games — were released outside Japan.

I was only successful as Master Mummy. Got crushed with every other character.

There's no Rockman and Forte so it's a pass for me anyway.

The discount for the FE: Echoes season pass is way less than 30%. It's only $7/£6.9/€7 which is about 13%. Weird that everything is pretty much coming out all at once.

I thought Level-5 implied that there is going to be a western release, but the date is up in the air. Something about being release in Japan first.