Comments 385

Re: Microsoft Given All-Clear In The US To Acquire Activision Blizzard

nintendoknife

@sixrings PlayStation's market dominance was 'earned', not bought. Even when Microsoft pays developers to make their games timed exclusives for Xbox, the PlayStation version still ends up doing better. Sony may have bought several studios in recent years, but most of them only made PlayStation games anyway. If Microsoft can buy Activision Blizzard, they aren't balancing the scales, they're taking the scales home. I really don't understand why people refuse to see that Microsoft is still the same company as it was under Steve Ballmer. Stop letting tech companies get away with market monopolisation - only the companies benefit from it, and the customer is screwed!

Re: Call Of Duty On Switch Is Back On After Microsoft Wins FTC Court Case

nintendoknife

Please conveniently ignore that Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world with a monopoly across all sorts of electronics. Please conveniently ignore that across its entire history, Microsoft has always employed the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy - which they themselves even minted - and is going to do exactly the same thing to video games by (literally) buying themselves into the number one spot and eliminating all competition.

It's good that they further increase the span of their monopoly because PlayStation sucks, ew.

Re: Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Version 1.2.0 Launching "Late February", Here Are The Full Patch Notes

nintendoknife

@Ashreon "This is not a cause for a memory leak, a memory leak is when objects are not purged from the RAM appropriately and thus lingers which continues to build up RAM usage which cause slowdown and potentially a crash."
Which is exactly why "we're making fewer things show up so it'll take longer for the game to crash" sounds like a typical GameFreak solution to the very real memory leak. (Play the game for a few hours and the fps will get noticeably lower as time passes, until the game finally crashes - this is the memory leak I'm referring to.)

"Nor is this the complete list as is highlighted in the very post itself."
If they'd fixed any other important things, they would've explicitly mentioned them.

Re: Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Version 1.2.0 Launching "Late February", Here Are The Full Patch Notes

nintendoknife

"We will address an issue that can cause the game to forcibly close at certain locations. As a result of this fix, there may be a reduction of Pokémon and people displayed in certain towns or in the wild."

This sounds like saying your bike has flat tyres, but instead of inflating them (or putting on new ones), you remove the saddle to lighten the load. Perhaps they've actually fixed the problem (which is a memory leak), but it doesn't really sound like it. At least they're doing something, which I didn't expect, but just 'something' is not good enough for a company that could easily hire ten times as many talented developers.

Re: Gulikit's 'Hall Joystick' Promises To Eliminate Drifing For Your Switch Joy-Con

nintendoknife

@jsty3105 That's true, but the difference in price is really only fractions of a cent per stick. I know that adds up when you have to buy tens of millions of them, but surely at some point they should realise that the extra cost of essentially failproof joysticks outweighs the cost of constantly having to replace faulty sticks under warranty - and even outside of warranty in regions with strong customer protection - and the eternal bad rap associated with said faulty sticks?

Re: Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Version 1.1.0 Now Available, Nintendo Apologises For Performance Issues & Bugs

nintendoknife

@Quarth Just a prominent example: Serebii's Joe Merrick has (as always) been posting a lot of "works on my machine™", though phrased in a way that makes it sound like only some people's games/consoles might have problems, as if the issues aren't universal. Some people truly do not understand that you can criticise something even when you like it, and in fact those criticisms are the strongest, because longtime fans are the ones who've been able to witness the steady decline in quality firsthand.

Re: Feature: 30 Changes We'd Like To See In The Next Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Update

nintendoknife

Most of the points in this article have been recurring problems for many years now. It's good that there's finally starting to be a bit of 'mainstream' pushback, but this is exactly what everyone was warning you about when Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl released, as well as when Sword and Shield released, as well as when Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon released, as well as when Sun and Moon released, as well as when Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire released, as well as when X and Y released, but you didn't listen. If you'd pushed back earlier and harder, we wouldn't have had to endure continuously deteriorating performance, features, etc. The fact that, in Scarlet and Violet, there's flavour text on every little thing in your house and then no more flavour text ever again almost feels like a cry for help from the developers, saying "hey, we want to add flavour text to everything, but they aren't giving us the time".

Not all is bad - each new game brings some very welcome quality of life improvements (like in this case the small pop-ups telling you your prize money, Pokémon at last being true to scale, etc), but as long as they keep being paired with regressions like features that were watered down or removed, they never truly make you feel like the series is taking a step forward.

Re: Nintendo Says To Stop Using Its Wi-Fi USB Connector Due To Security Concerns

nintendoknife

The Japanese WiFi Network Adapter is actually pretty brilliant if you ever need to get some old wireless devices (that don't support WPA2) online for some reason. Just connect the Network Adapter to one of the LAN ports on your modern router, plug it in and switch it on when you need it. It's very compact, with a nice minimalist design that doesn't even look out of place in a modern home. Japan really got a much better deal with that adapter than we westerners did with the USB Connector, which, as others have already mentioned, was awful and couldn't even be used with devices other than the DS and Wii (at least not without some advanced messing around with drivers - and regardless I was never able to get alternative drivers to work).

Re: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion To Get A New Menu-Based Battle System

nintendoknife

@TopazLink Why'd you call it clunky? The only thing I found a bit weird was that you had to time your button presses and couldn't just mash like you do in any other action RPG, but once I got used to that I found it quite nice, even with the semi-randomness of the DMW. I had more trouble adapting to Type-0's control scheme, even though it's better on paper.

@wazlon On a PSP Go, you can use a DualShock 3, though you're still limited to the imprecise inputs of the nub, which becomes apparent when you have to move the analog stick quite far before you change directions in-game.

Re: Square Enix's SNES JRPG 'Live A Live' Is Coming To The West After Almost 30 Years

nintendoknife

The only time I'd heard (of) this game before was thanks to the inclusion of its track 'Megalomania' in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call, which is an incredible piece of music. I was miffed to learn it was a Japanese-exclusive game, so it's really nice to hear it's coming over at last. I wonder how they'll redo the music score...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rf8Dj7PRAI

Re: Random: It's The 10th Anniversary Of Resident Evil: Revelaitons

nintendoknife

RE: Revelations remains visually impressive to this day. I don't think anything before or after it ever topped it, which is a real feat when you take into account that the majority of the 3DS's library was released after RE: Revelations. Even ignoring the graphics, it was a great game. I agree with @Broosh that this is the one you should play for the campaign mode, and RE: Revelations 2 is the one you should play for its raid mode. The first one's raid mode is not that good, and the second one's campaign is not that fun. Also 100% agreed that the Circle Pad Pro is much better than the C-stick, but I don't think that's an unpopular opinion.

By the way, I don't think the game's title had a typo anywhere outside of North America. My EUR copy's title is spelled correctly on the cardboard box, the game box and the extra holo game box. It's always weird when this site, European in origins, references American stuff like everyone's meant to know that. Same thing when there was an article mentioning the track skip exploit in one of Mario Kart 7's tracks, and it used the North American name for the track, which is not used or even known anywhere outside of North America. The article was also written by a European writer, if I remember correctly.

Re: Pokémon Legends: Arceus Has Already Sold Over 6.5 Million Copies Worldwide

nintendoknife

I will say it deserves to sell well. It has its flaws, but in general it's a very good game that clearly had a lot more thought put into it than any of the earlier mainline 3DS or Switch titles. Improvements like being able to evolve your Pokémon at any time, change out their moves at any time, use faster and less powerful or slower and more powerful attacks, and many more are such a breath of fresh air. It's clear that they took a lot of inspiration from Breath of the Wild, from the large open areas to the music, the jingles, the artstyle, the sound effects like the rain on tents in the base camp, being able to run straight into much more powerful Pokémon (and actually being able to battle and/or catch them), smooth switching between different rides, and so on, and they didn't mess it up.

Some improvements I'd like to see in the next Pokémon Legends would be

  • change up the button mapping a bit so it doesn't feel as fiddly (I'm mostly thinking of how you need to press X to swap between items and Pokémon)
  • give the main character a jump button
  • more interactions between Pokémon in the overworld (right now they move around quite naturally, but it would be great to see Pokémon play with each other, or see rival Pokémon fight each other)
  • drop the stamina for the main character or at least give a visual indication of it, with ways to increase it as well
  • some other nitpicks

I really hope these improvements will also make it to the normal mainline games. I didn't expect this game to be great but I'm happy it is.

Re: Video: Pokémon Legends: Arceus Has Us Excited (And Scared)

nintendoknife

@Tarolusa "in Pokemon's case literally everytime they've done that it's because the game has so little to offer that they sort of HAVE to hide information before the game launches because otherwise they'll spoil the entire game."

For most (recent, since the fifth generation or so) mainline Pokémon games, if you compile all of the information they released before the game was out, you can ditch GameFAQS because you've already got an in-depth walkthrough of the entire game. All of the important locations, all of the key characters, all of the new Pokémon, all of the new moves, all of the new mechanics, ...

Re: Talking Point: Should The Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack Library Expand Faster?

nintendoknife

The entirety of Switch Online and everything to do with it deserves only an endlessly looping Tidus laugh track. It did when they started and it still does years later. The 'expansion pack' has added a second, somewhat higher pitched laugh track into the mix. Perhaps in 2035, when they release the expansion to the expansion pack with a whopping two full Game Boy (not Color) games and a free Mario hat in Fortnite (*) for the low price of €50 (on top of the existing fees), we might get some Tidus drum tracks as well. Ha ha ha!
(*) Luigi hat sold separately.

Re: Talking Point: Mario Kart 7 And Its Infamous Course Skip Are Now 10 Years Old

nintendoknife

Still mighty proud of my 1:17:203 time for Wuhu Mountain Loop. (Also not sure why the video and the article refer to it with its US name.) There were two ways to execute that glitch, though, the one shown in the video is the easier version but was discovered last and is, as far as I know, not the one most people used back in the day. The more difficult version required you to use a mushroom to jump into the water, otherwise it wouldn't register and you'd just get dropped back on the track.

Re: Feature: 10 Pokémon That Deserve A Hisuian Evolution In Pokémon Legends: Arceus

nintendoknife

I feel like Dunsparce was (and still is) a perfect candidate for a mega evolution. It's an iconic design and I think any evolution would end up being a disappointment, whereas mega evolutions just build upon the existing design and aren't permanent. Then again, the benefit of getting a real evolution would be that Dunsparce itself could then use Eviolite.

But actually, Dunsparce already got an evolution in the form of Zygarde, they just forgot to link the two together.

Re: Hands On: Switch Online's Sega 6-Button Pad Is An Eldritch Horror That Shouldn't Exist, But We're Glad It Does

nintendoknife

It's a shame more people aren't aware that Sega actually made a much better 6-button wireless (!) controller for the Mega Drive, with the shape and size similar to the 3-button pad, late in the console's life. It is honestly one of the best controllers of all time, on par with and in fact pretty similar to the Saturn's standard controller. If only they'd use that design instead of the tiny banana.

https://consolevariations.com/variation/controller/remote-arcade-pad

Re: Pokémon's Diamond & Pearl Remakes Become The Second Biggest Switch Game Launch In Japan

nintendoknife

@burninmylight The comparison with SMT doesn't really go far. In Pokémon, collecting every Pokémon is the 'end' goal (obviously not including competitive gameplay afterwards), but in SMT, the only reason you collect demons is to quickly get rid of them by fusing them so you can get more powerful demons, and SMT are single-player standalone games so there's no trading or bringing in demons from older games. You can also only take a handful of demons with you and there's no storage system to store extras: you have to use them, fuse them or lose them. Having all demons available in one game therefore wouldn't change anything.

Re: Pokémon's Diamond & Pearl Remakes Become The Second Biggest Switch Game Launch In Japan

nintendoknife

@Haruki_NLI On most platforms, the initial asking price is misleading, because it quickly (often within a month of being released) gets a significant, permanent price cut. If you don't need to play it on the day it releases and wait a month, you can usually get two PlayStation or Xbox games for the price you'd have paid for one, and probably about ten PC games. Nintendo also increased their prices, but the difference is that they never, ever lower them.