glennthefrog

@PinderSchloss Too good to be true, but that is one of the quickest ways S-E could make me interested in that franchise again.

XVI was not bad but it wasn't what I was looking for, I already have plenty of other quality fantasy action games.

FFXVII with Sakaguchi in the captain's chair would get my pre-order without hesitation.

@Banjo64 Because you can never miss a chance to signal your virtue to the internet.

I think the new DK design looks hideous.

I really dislike the DK redesign, it's a major step back imo. The Rare design made him look cunning and cool. He just looks like a dumb goon with those eyes and facial expression in the pic above. Seems like we're going back to the 'DK is just a stupid lumbering ape' era rather than the modernized DK we've enjoyed since DKC.

You just focus on staying afloat until Switch 2 arrives, Ubi.

I think westerners don't realize a lot of this is due to extreme Japanese fan behavior. People defending the honor of their waifus or favorite 'ships.

Most of the things on this list are already illegal (direct threats of violence, stalking) while others are Japan specific (don't show up at HQ and cause a stir by demanding apologies on behalf of Aerith).

For the most part I think both sides of the culture war are flogging this more than it deserves. This isn't S-E trying to protect itself from all criticism by attacking the speech of streamers. It also isn't them taking a novel stand against the far right or bigotry.

The part where they mention acting 'upon consulting police and/or lawyers' is key. A lot of what terminally online people want (like taking down Asmongold or whoever) is not something that can be legally done because reasonable criticism of consumer products and art is protected speech even in the EU. Bringing criminal charges will be strictly for stuff that can be fought and won in court, which is a much narrower range of behaviors than most people realize.

Banning people from an online shop or FFXIV would be easier, or would at least force a change in profile, but again, it doesn't seem like much of a change in policy to me. You already get banned for threats, sexual harassment, etc.

@Jack_Goetz Sometimes the simple solution is the best solution. Putting a '2' next to the original logo may seem lazy but it clearly communicates to casual buyers that this is a true successor, not a Switch Pro or whatever, while still leveraging the brand recognition that's been built up since 2017. It's money well spent even if it was just a guy recommending they not overthink it.

If that does turn out to be the logo I think they made a great choice. Just like Sony going from PS1 to PS2.

@earthinheritor Except that this is the Biden administration making this decision.

There's plenty of stupidity, corruption and malice in DC that doesn't originate from Trump, I can assure you.

-Lovingly remaster Final Fantasy IX.
-Make Final Fantasy XVII turn-based again.

That is all I ask.

@-wc- The first question on SEGA's CEO application is probably 'Do you want to make money?' and if you mark 'Yes' your resume goes straight in the shredder.

That's all I can figure based on the past 30 years.

If this means their lineup of Sega CD/32X/Saturn/Dreamcast games will FINALLY be released, in many cases for only the second time ever, this is huge news.

If it just means 50 Genesis games for $14.99 a month it's worthless.

I am hopeful, but cautiously so. Obviously physical collections would be more ideal, but I'll take Panzer Dragoon Saga by hook or by crook at this point.

New podcast just dropped. Sony updated their lifetime sales for NA by 5 million units.

A fairly safe prediction, if current trends hold.

The western AAA gaming market is already in the opening stages of a crash, which is going to severely hurt Sony and Microsoft. Might even be a 1983-style collapse in the worst case scenario. Nintendo is somewhat insulated from this threat because their development costs are so low, they'll come out of it okay so long as the crash doesn't kill interest in gaming altogether.

The west is too soft for Kamiya's schtick. It's kayfabe.

Even the 'apology' is in line with his public persona, an eccentric guy whose reactions and answers are all over the place.

I personally don't mind the visual style, they could keep using it indefinitely and I'd be fine with that.

But I do agree with the concerns about cost and development time. If we can get one HD2D Chrono Trigger or a slick port of Trigger plus a few other hard to access gems (Xenogears, Vagrant Story) for the same development time/cost I'd choose the latter.

Letting the art team do whatever they want to an IP is how you get something like Bomberman: Act Zero. Nintendo is smart to keep a tight hold on the leash to prevent that.

@Thomystic No danger of that happening unless Marcus Horn (the guy who makes these) lays himself off.

Toree is pretty much the polar opposite of the western AAA method of game production. No staff bloat, no big budget, no need to sell 20 million units at close to full price to stay solvent.

I'd like to echo those who are informing everyone that Shenmue 3 is actually very mediocre, with little to no advancement of the story. Switch owners are missing out on absolutely nothing.

Shenmue 1 and 2 on the other hand were very fun and so charming, and that's coming from someone who never played them until they were released on PS4. I couldn't have been more disappointed with 3, I will never understand why Yu Suzuki totally squandered his chance to continue his masterpiece like that.

@Migoshuro Well, that's the self righteous 'logic' of the cancel mob for you.

But I agree. Aside from the most heinous acts there has to be a path back. Particularly when the claim is as poorly sourced, and light on evidence, as the accusations against Ancel were.

@Yoshi3 It's true they released games on a consistent basis, but that was mostly because they would develop 4-5 games at the same time.

By the N64 era they rarely managed to hit their originally announced release dates. Banjo, DK64 and Goldeneye all got delayed. And the projects they worked on most recently at the time of the sale, Conker and Dinosaur Planet, had the longest delays of all. Nintendo allowing Rare to work on a 3D platformer like Conker for 4 years was incredibly generous compared to normal development times for that era. Miyamoto had to crack the whip on Dinosaur Planet and force the team to throw something together asap just to complete Starfox Adventures.

I love Rare and I actually doubt delays were the reason they got sold because Nintendo is notorious for doing the same thing with their games, but they were definitely one of the slower developers of that era.

Obviously Namco was translating Mother 3 for maximum secrecy. Unfortunately Reggie still found out somehow and flew over to Japan to give them all wedgies until they canceled it.

Spark the Electric Jester 3.

Really good 3D Sonic clone, well worth checking out imo.

And yeah, obviously Hogwarts Legacy. No reason not to review one of the best-selling games in recent years now that it finally hit the console most aimed at families, which is obviously Harry Potter's target audience. Ideologically motivated journalists are still sour that they couldn't make a boycott stick is all I can figure. Time to accept the L and pretend like the failed smear campaign never happened.

@angrybeef That's good to know. The games sound interesting, and I love platformers, but I hate the masochist bent of the Kaizo sub-genre.

@dew12333 It's about as similar to Galaxy/Odyssey as Sonic 1 was to Mario 1 and 3.

People don't have an issue with it because it's well done and it's understood that developers iterate on each other, especially within the same genre.

@Dr_Lugae Even the PS1 launch had Wipeout, which is just a reskin of F-Zero.

Some sections are pretty obviously copied ideas, like the one where you stand on top of a ball and roll it over spikes and around bumpers which is ripped straight from Mario Galaxy. There are a few others that are too point-for-point alike to be waved off as coincidence.

With that being said, I have zero problem with that. They SHOULD be copying the Galaxy/Odyssey team's homework to some extent because that team is the preeminent developer for 3D platformers. And Astro does plenty of stuff that is unique and original, so it's not just plagiarism across the board.

This is a case where the accusations are partly true, but bar-for-bar is exaggerating things.

Nintendo would be foolish to shoot themselves in the foot by announcing Switch 2 right before Switch's final holiday season kicks off. Unless that news arrives alongside a steep price drop for the Switch I just can't see it happening.

I'll pay whatever because I'm a hardcore fan that's been there at every launch since SNES.

But realistically for the mainstream consumer, parents buying for children, etc. it needs to be no more than $400, and it would be better at $350 or less.

Nintendo hopefully learned their lesson with the 3DS, the successor to another money-printing machine, that was too high priced out of the gate and forced them to do an embarrassing price drop soon after launch. Switch is a mainstream brand, it can't assume consumers will pay PS5 prices because that's an entirely different segment of the market.

The statue looks really cool, but it would probably have to be a working Dreamcast (or at least one that just plays Sonic Adventure 2) for me to justify plunking down that amount of money.

I always felt Braid was overrated, and the hype for Blow as a creator was cringe. It was a cool indie game at a time when indie console games were almost unheard of and Blow could get journalists attention by being the fart-sniffing artist in an industry that desperately wanted to be seen as legitimate art. With that being said the actual game never matched the praise it received imo.

In 2024 it's a mediocre indie in a sea of indies and Blow's celebrity is all but evaporated.

I think we will, but it will be a few years after Switch 2 hits the market. I don't think they're hurried by the end of Switch's life cycle since Switch 2 will almost certainly be a continuation with backwards-compatibility.

The 10yr anniversary of BOTW and Mario Odyssey sounds like a good time to drop them to $30.

@Mz3player If you turn the volume all the way up you can hear Toree spraying a string of profanities under his breath.

@Narrator1 In the twitter link I posted just a few comments above yours it confirms a toggle for symphonic and synthesized music. So you should be good to go

@Sonicka I had the same reaction 'Yes, SA2 on Sw-...oh, well that's kinda neat too I guess.'

According to early impressions it appears the iconic 'puff-puff' has been removed from this remake

Not a deal-breaker, but unfortunate sanitizing nonetheless.

https://x.com/DragonQuestFax/status/1811414168701940115

Some other nice details at the above link.

The art style of Mutant Mayhem is just awful, it's so incredibly ugly imo and makes it tough to be interested. Maybe I'll give it a shot on sale if it gets killer reviews.

I'm going to go against the grain on this one, I actually think the Switch 2 has a decent to good chance of reaching or exceeding its predecessor's numbers.

Everyone is citing the NES and Wii, but I'd argue the better comparison might be the PS1/PS2 transition. The Switch has absolutely dominated its competition and if Nintendo is smart enough to make all controllers/games backwards compatible a ton of people will eventually upgrade to stay within the ecosystem, just like happened between PS1 and PS2.

I don't think people have a hard time wrapping their heads around hardware transitions either, that isn't why Wii U failed. Wii U failed because the Wii earned most of its sales early when it was a casual phenomenon but by the end of its life it was dragging badly. Wii U also had no killer apps at launch of anything close to it.

So long as Nintendo embraces backwards compatibility, especially with eshop, and gives Switch 2 the biggest games from Christmas 2025 onward owners of the original will almost certainly choose it over the competition when eventually upgrading their consoles.

I'll also throw in a bonus prediction for why I feel especially confident about this: AAA gaming is headed for a crash in the not-to-distant future. It simply isn't sustainable at this point and costs are still increasing. Nintendo is going to be unaffected and in fact thrive as a result of the misfortune of the AAA segment of the market.

Missed opportunity to turn it into an actual purple lunchbox, a favored insult back in the old console war days.

@Kilroy You could potentially kill a person with many everyday items. If you add to that lists things that could be sharpened to deadly effect it's even more. If something wasn't designed to be a weapon, as a replica clearly isn't, than it is not a weapon unless it can be proven it was modified.

I don't much care for the 'well, you could've, hypothetically, been doing bad stuff' argument from the authorities here. The individual in this case clearly was a threat to no one and was not trying to fake as if he could hurt them either.

There's no need for reasonable people to make excuses for clearly wrong headed decisions. The law was created to stop knife crime, this isn't knife crime or leading to it by any reasonable definition. A fine would be petty, but whatever. A prison term is a massive injustice imo.

After looking into this a bit more it appears to be totally inexcusable.

Even if it were a sharpened blade, which it's clearly not, does an automatic four month prison term for essentially a letter opener seem reasonable? I know knife crime is an issue but that is not a sane solution. Start with a warning or a fine if it's not being brandished as a threat, then work up to prison. Is the current law popular with the British public? It seems absurd to an outsider.

In the specific case of this novelty toy this is the state cracking skulls to look as if they're doing something useful. A clear miscarriage of justice.

That is absolutely ridiculous, unless it is a real blade. The UK needs to sort itself out.

@SilverM Monkey Ball has never been a heavy hitter but the games do tend to have a long tail and sell for many months/years. I'm not surprised it didn't do gangbusters right out of the gate, but I'm sure it will keep steaming along through the holiday season.

I'll definitely pick it up, I had a lot of fun with it on PSP. I've played all the Ys games, or at least those translated by either fans or officially, and it's in the top tier.

@larryisaman You're right on the money with your description of the last iteration we saw. It was another game wearing the BG&E brand to gain attention.

If they did reboot it a second time (or is it 3rd, 4th, 5th by now?) and actually continued from the ending of the original I'd be all for it.

It's not even a real BG&E2 anymore anyway, so I don't really care.

(For those that don't know, the original ends on a cliffhanger with various revelations about the Jade's past/destiny. The BG&E2 that was most recently in development is a prequel that appears to have little to do with the original at all in gameplay or plot)

@LadyCharlie

Nintendo: (Scribbles) 'Ubi Soft leave money on the table. Amateurs.'

@Bucky Honestly I see Rare Replay as inevitable. I'd be surprised if it's not on Switch or Switch 2 by holiday 2026. Milking the nostalgia of Nintendo fans is an easy win for Microsoft as they transition into being more of a multiplatform publisher. With the Switch/2 install base being well over 150m by then I could see it achieving double-digit millions in sales.

I wonder if they'd agree to split the profit with Nintendo to get the DKC trilogy/64/Diddy Kong Racing on there as the definitive Rare Replay experience. I somehow doubt Nintendo would go for it, but it'd be nice.

@Purgatorium Indeed. This semantic problem was discussed quite a bit back in the early 00s when 'Nintendo is kiddy, PS/Xbox are for adults' was a talking point. If a game isn't rated M it's immature, right?

Obviously a game like Tetris is far more mature than Conker. It would've been better to give the rating a different name, or just 17+ as Nintendo does now, but it's too ingrained at this point for the ESRB to change.