nintendoknife

@Incarna A homebrew developer actually already made just that: https://github.com/tallbl0nde/NX-Activity-Log
The only problem is that Nintendo bans you for using it because you are not allowed to make your system better.

@BenAV In typical Game Freak fashion, the one time they added difficulty settings (in the most ridiculous way imagineable), they took the feature out again in the following games.

@RareGames I agree with everything BenAV wrote, and I'd like to add that the game runs embarrassingly poorly - the performance is worse than any other game in the series (it even runs worse than Let's Go!), other than some nice lighting effects the game genuinely looks like it belongs on the Wii, it can't even run at a native 1080p/720p, the battle animations are worse than those in Pokémon Stadium 1, trainer and Pokémon models pop in all over the place, random houses are still identical copies of each other, and so on. There's also barely any flavour text anymore. Ultra Sun/Moon were really bad games, but Sword and Shield dial it up to 11. It's as if ever since Game Freak saw how many copies they could still sell of Ultra Sun/Moon, a game that was 99% identical to the previous game, they've been trying to see how many more things they can keep getting away with. Sword and Shield objectively speaking have far fewer things to do than any other game in the series and yet people bought it in droves. At this rate, one of the next games will just be Pikachu and Charizard doing the Hau animations and it still won't be able to run at 1080p nor at 30fps.
I played Sword until I'd completed the Pokédex and collected all of the Dynamax Pokémon, as well as all of the items, and I think I ended up at about 80 hours of playtime (which is apparently already on the higher end). In the other games in the series I usually have about twice that amount, and there I imported all of the Pokémon from the previous games, whereas with Sword I did everything from scratch.

By the way, this Temtem stuff is just the umpteenth Pokémon ripoff, this time with some viral marketing thrown in the mix. People who complain about Pokémon generally just want better Pokémon games because they like the creatures and have usually been following the series in some form for a long time, they don't want ripoffs or other monster collecting games. Recommending Temtem to people who want to play Pokémon but are disappointed by the newer games is like recommending NBA to someone who's disappointed in the newer FIFA games - yeah, it's also a sports game where you play against other teams and you 'collect' players out of a large roster, but I think you may be missing the point.

Club Nintendo got me a LOT of cool Nintendo related tat back in the day, and I was just a little kid buying about two discounted handheld games (worth fewer points than console games) a year. There were some crazy expensive (well, virtual money expensive) items like statues and super limited edition consoles and controllers that you'd only be able to get if you were an adult who bought a new game every couple of weeks, but most stuff you could already get after entering a couple of codes. It also had wallpapers, by the way.

The coin system has given me nothing and doesn't offer anything valuable.

I wonder which of the two was a better system!

@GoblinKing86 @Kirgo Metroid Samus Returns on the 3DS locked a whole bunch of stuff behind limited edition Amiibo, like the hardest difficulty mode. Breath of the Wild locked a whole bunch of useful items behind limited edition Amiibo, and even a special Wolf Link that follows you around everywhere. Even when they only unlock some costumes, I still don't like it, because there's usually no other way to unlock those items. I'd be fine with Amiibos unlocking some items as long as you could still get those items in some other way that doesn't require you to spend an enormous amount of money on figurines. To take Metroid as an example, it would have been fine if they'd used Amiibo to unlock the hardest difficulty mode, as long as you could still unlock it by just playing the game.

@UmbreonsPapa If you already have Wii Sports, you don't really need Wii Sports Club. It's the same five sports (this time in HD and with Miiverse functionality all over the place that no longer works), but it's actually more difficult to get into than Wii Sports, especially with regards to tennis. In Wii Sports, all you have to do is waggle the Wiimote when the ball is close to your character, but in Wii Sports Club, you need to make sure you're using backhand or forehand and you need to twist your Wiimote the right way to make the ball go the right way. The game doesn't ever explain this, either. I've also noticed many, many instances of unexplained stuttering and slowdown in Wii Sports Club (I'm talking about offline matches here, not online where lag is to be expected), whereas Wii Sports runs fine.

@meeto_1 Thanks, yeah "luckily" most of us are stuck at home now. I don't have Nintendo Online though, so I can't play with others. I'll buy some more Nook Tickets to hopefully get some cherry blossom recipes in a bottle that way.

@Sakura Yeah, I agree, I've been trying to get more of those cherry blossom recipes for hours upon hours, and so far I've only found two by chance and got one from Isabelle during the day's announcements. Considering you only have ten days in total to get fourteen different recipes with an apparently pretty low spawn rate (you don't get additional cherry balloons like you do with the eggs, and your character doesn't come up with any recipes after collecting x amount of petals either), there really isn't enough time to collect them all if you aren't really lucky. According to some guides I've read they do appear in bottles, but the only bottles I've found ever since the eggs started appearing were either normal recipes or egg recipes so there probably aren't any special cherry blossom bottles either. I'll be pretty bummed out if I can't collect them all before Saturday.

Great, now you have to pay to enjoy things other people created and shared for free. Thanks, Nintendo! Your online paywall is the best!

@scully1888 I don't know what's edgy about what I wrote, but anyway, let me just install that Metroid: Samus Returns update that unlocks everything now that the Amiibo are no longer for sale... Or that DSi/Wii/3DS/Wii U update that removes the region lock... Or the Breath of the Wild update that adds sufficient inventory slots to let you actually own every piece of clothing (including the ones locked behind Amiibo you can also no longer buy)... Most of Nintendo's games are fun, but that doesn't make them exempt from any criticism. If, a couple of years from now, they do actually release an update to unlock everything forever, feel free to send me a message and I'll eat my hat.
Edit: or the Link's Awakening update that fixes the atrocious performance issues, or the updates for any of the Pokémon games that either unlock online exclusive functionality or seal it away entirely, or ..., or ...

@scully1888 Have fun revisiting New Horizons in a couple of years, when there will never be any events ever again because Nintendo no longer provides them. All of the previous games can be revisited (AC's gameplay is evergreen) even 100 years from now with everything intact, this one not so much. You can hope that the final update Nintendo releases will permanently unlock all events, but it's Nintendo, so that won't happen.

I thought Enchanted Folk was pretty well known back when it came out, especially because it was such an obvious Animal Crossing clone. Given that fact, it doesn't make a lot of sense that the reviewer here only played for a couple of hours and gave his thoughts on the game based on that alone, because just like Animal Crossing, not a lot of things happen during those first couple of hours. It's been a long time since I've played it, but I recall thinking there was a lot more to do in it than in Wild World, although Wild World felt more 'polished' and there was more to the dialogue. Wild World didn't let you cast fart spells, though. I'm sure the game still holds up considering even the original Animal Crossing is still very playable today.

Well, 60fps would have been nicer than 30fps so I wouldn't call it flawless, but then again I'd rather have a stable 30fps at native resolution than an unstable 60fps with a dynamic resolution. The game looks extremely fun, though, and somehow it's coming out at just the right time.

This kind of thing would have been nifty to have with a Switch Lite. It's unbelievable Nintendo didn't think of making the Lite compatible with either the old or a new dock, so people could 'upgrade' their Lite if they wanted to.

@personauser93 Well, I think the reason FF12's auto mode is so great is that it doesn't play the game for you, it only does what you've explicitly told it to by setting up all of your gambits. It doesn't remove any decision making, it just attacks when you would have attacked, heals when you would have healed, etc. You're always still in charge.

Xenoblade had one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time, and it was graphically very impressive. Getting to Gaur Plains for the first time, hearing the music, seeing the colossal structures in the background and realising they weren't just a 2D backdrop but actual places you could walk to was exhilarating, but sadly it turned out the single-player MMO-style gameplay wasn't for me. It felt too slow to be an action game, yet required too much busywork under stress to be a turn-based game. Also: way too many (missable!) sidequests in between story missions. You could be busy with sidequests for ten whole hours and still haven't seen the next bit of the story, which basically forced you to do only a handful of quests and then continue the story, because if you did too many quests it felt like it just dragged on and on, and if you did too few quests you were underlevelled. I did still play it for a good 50-odd hours, but ultimately decided it was best to put it away. At least I got a sweet red Pro Controller out of it.

@Sunanootoko The DSi had a sizeable amount of DSiWare. It could also use its additional horsepower to run DS games better if they were 'DSi enhanced'. With recent hacks, it can even use the additional horsepower to improve performance in all DS games, even if they weren't 'DSi enhanced'. Same thing for the New 3DS, it drastically improved performance in many games, and again if you hack it you can force this improved performance on every game (although a handful will crash if you do so, because they were built very specifically around the old 3DS's limitations).

@MysticX It was actually quite touching when they added that feature in ORAS where you could get some sort of picture or certificate of everlasting friendship if you'd transferred a Pokémon all the way from the original RSE. It's just a couple of perfectly replaceable bytes, but those bytes are really good at making you care. I even cloned it using the box glitch in Emerald, but I still kept transferring it along up until USUM. People who intentionally don't move over their old Pokémon to the newest game are to me like the maniacs who, whenever they move to a new place, don't take any of their old furniture or even their cutlery along, and start completely anew.

@roadrunner343 I don't think it's nonsensical to enjoy watching people be really good at something, whether it's throwing a discus really far in real life or 360 noscoping their opponents in a shooter, I just dislike when the focus for the participants is no longer on the game but on the prize money. The value of watching people play a game is not the same as the value of playing the game, though. Most people enjoy eating hotdogs, but the enjoyment people get out of watching a hotdog eating competition probably doesn't stem from them liking hotdogs.

@roadrunner343 Perhaps there should be games like FIFA but instead of watching two teams of footballers play a match of football, you watch teams of video gamers play a video game.

@DockEllisD People still talk about it so this site reports on the fact that people are still talking about it. I don't see the problem here.

I remember back when Wii Sports was all the rage, there was often a kind of Wii Sports tournament whenever there was some event related to video games. People didn't participate in those to get as much money as they could, they participated because it was fun seeing who was best at waggling the Wiimote to demolish their opponents.

Nintendo honestly has a point here, by playing for money it's no longer about having fun but about earning as much money as possible. These Smash Bros competitions are like athletics competitions, the people who participate do so because they really enjoy it and because they happen to be really good at it, the best of the best can earn a bit of prize money but a participant usually pays more to go there than they can win by ranking high. Compare that to Fortnite competitions, which are like football competitions, the people who participate do so mostly because they can earn an enormous amount of money with it, whether they truly enjoy it is another matter. Pro football players clearly enjoy playing football so much that they'll play for a couple of years and then never come near a football again because they've earned more money than everyone in the city they grew up in combined. There are actual schools in places like South Korea where people go to become really good at games like Fortnite, this is not because they necessarily think Fortnite is a really good game but because they want to earn big money. This completely devalues the game's inherent worth.

@PorllM I can't believe people don't read all comments before wondering whether their reply will add anything to the discussion.

By the way, the phrase leading some fans to brandish the advertisement behind the Safari Zone tickets as "illegal" in the article is ridiculously apologetic and has no place in an article about illegal business practices. It's like saying "A man intentionally ran over a cyclist. In the UK, running over cyclists is not allowed, leading some cyclists to brandish the driver as a murderer." They don't just 'brandish' it as being X, it is X! Then again, looking at who wrote this article, it should be of no surprise that because Pokémon's involved, "big company good little man bad lawful practice bad" is the message it intends to give to the readers. It's especially dumb now that the authorities have confirmed that what Niantic were trying to get away with is indeed very much illegal.

Looks certainly deceive! Based on the artwork and the name, I thought this was just another bad 3D platformer with wonky controls, slow gameplay, etc, but I just completed this game and I have to say this is actually one of the best 3D platformers in years. It's lots of fun, and your character controls very smoothly. Running, digging, jumping, digging, etc feels really good, and the worlds are exactly the right size not to feel cramped or stretched-out. Outside of the final levels that test your skills, it isn't very hard, but it doesn't have to be. Performance-wise I've noticed some stutters here and there, but I do believe it was only ever in cutscenes, so I don't think it's fair to put this as one of the main cons, because it makes it seem like it's much more of a problem than it actually is. New Super Lucky's Tale is an outstanding game and I hope the developers are here to stay.

Half of the Dept. Heaven series was never even translated in the first place, so it seems unlikely even for this port to see a localisation. All of them are great games, though, very unique gameplay. Outside of Yggdra Unison, which was a reimagining of Yggdra Union only released on the DS in Japan, they're all available on the PSP (and Vita) if you want to give them a go. That being said, Knights in the Nightmare definitely plays better on the DS because it's much easier to control with a stylus.

@Stuffgamer1 Haha, okay, you do have a point there.

Meanwhile, hackers have already added in all of the deleted Pokémon ages ago.

@Darknyht Pokémon has always been successful simply because the core concept of it (catch monsters, fight other monsters to make them stronger, catch stronger monsters, make them even stronger, etc) is just really fun. The GameCube games and especially Pokémon Go aren't representative of 'real' Pokémon games so they don't really show off why so many people buy the 'real' games. If the next Pokémon game could be finished in a matter of hours, cost 120 dollars up front and required you to have an always-on paid online connection, it would still sell like hotcakes because at its core the game would still be fun. This is why the games suddenly cost 50% more but had 50% less to do. This is why they still sell the exact same game with a handful of exclusive bytes twice. This is why Game Freak can get away with anything. They're some of the richest developers in the world, but also some of the most incompetent. If in another timeline we'd have had FIFAmon instead of Pokémon, developed by EA, people would be furious about the drop in quality over time (that being said, despite EA's awful business practices, they actually hire developers who know how to program and their graphically intensive games run better than the graphically simple Pokémon), but alas we have Pokémon, which is fun and therefore Game Freak is holy.

The real question is, did Nintendo reimburse the artist for this?

@Stuffgamer1 There isn't much to quality test, though. Flawless NES and SNES emulation has been a thing for years, and they have a lot of experience making emulators run well considering they've already sold emulated games on the Wii, Wii U, 3DS and New 3DS. Once you have an emulator that works properly, all you have to do is add ROMs. In fact, that's exactly what they're doing, because when they add new NES and SNES games to their subscription fee, the emulator inside the package isn't updated (it doesn't have to be because it already works), only the ROMs are added, which, for Nintendo, is quite literally copying over the ROM files from their "All of our ROMs" folder to the "ROMs included with the NES/SNES emulators" folder.

@RyanCraddock: your sneer towards anyone who thinks Sword and Shield are in any way disappointing is nothing short of pathetic. "Ha, now I'll get lots of comments that call me an idiot, gottem!" All attention is good attention, right?

For what it's worth, the game does seem to have about double the draw distance of Pokémon.

@Agramonte Who exactly are you aiming your comment at?

Nothing, because shopping holidays (that aren't actually holidays anywhere but the US) imported from other countries and taken completely out of their cultural context are stupid. Soon every day of the year will be a shopping holiday because some obscure country somewhere has a tradition of sales on that day. It's only been three weeks since 'Singles Day', the Chinese shopping holiday, and three weeks from now it's Christmas, then a week later it's New Year's, then a couple of weeks later it's X, and then Y, and then ... How are shops even supposed to turn a profit when they're expected to have sales year-round?

Apparently the previous update fixed an incredible bug in StreetPass where one 3DS could take over another just through the StreetPass connection. Apparently Nintendo borked something minor when fixing it, which is what this update is for.

@Eel Most of Pokémon can be controlled with just the A and B buttons, and they could use A, B, A+B and even a shake as four different buttons. You're right, of course, just saying they could technically do it. A would do everything it normally does, B would do everything it normally does as well as open the menu, the bike could be toggled by selecting it in the bag old-school style, etc. Exotic functionality like whistling could just be dropped altogether. I guess some hacker will make this possible at some point.

I really don't understand why it doesn't work with Pokémon Sword and Shield. They explicitly created a new 'casual controls' option which uses fewer buttons, surely they could have also supported the Poké Ball Plus as another 'casual controls' method?

@Kalmaro The box doesn't heal your Pokémon anymore, otherwise it'd be completely broken. Of course, you can still swap out fainted Pokémon from your team for healthy Pokémon from your box, but you could do the same thing by catching a new Pokémon with a Quick Ball and adding it to your team, it's just less tedious this way. I think it's one of the better changes they've made because it does away with a lot of unnecessary backtracking. Otherwise you have a point, but the (nearly) always-accessible box is just not something you can use as an argument for it.

I like nearly all of the new Pokémon designs, but these legendaries are worse than the genies of Black and White. They're literally just dogs carrying a sword and a shield respectively. They look supremely dumb.

Speaking of the music, is it just me or is there almost no bass? In portable mode this isn't much of an issue because the speakers can't produce much bass anyway, but when I played it docked, I genuinely thought my tv's subwoofer had blown and had to go back and forth between the Switch and a TV channel to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem. Other games, including Let's Go, don't sound virtually bassless either, the issue is restricted to Sword and Shield. It sounds so odd!

I read/heard (can't remember) someone who phrased the problem with the new Pokémon games in a nice way: basically, Pokémon will always be fun. The core concept of catching cool-looking creatures and going on a journey with them is and will always be appealing and enjoyable for everyone. The problem is that this allows Game Freak to phone it in, and it seems they figured this out sometime during the 3DS era. All they need to do is design some new creatures (and not even necessarily that, given the many remakes) and write a short story, and a new Pokémon game is ready to ship.

"Note: To enjoy the above feature, you’ll need to connect to the internet."

Oh, great, Gigantamax Pokémon are locked behind the online subscription. Basically, they're paid DLC.

@nannybuckles If you've never explicitly formatted it as FAT32 yourself, it's formatted as exFAT.

@link3710 It's not that homebrew applications made mistakes that led to corruption, it's that Nintendo's exfat driver is unbelievably bad that it causes corruption on the tiniest error, and they haven't bothered fixing it yet because until now there hadn't been any official incidents of it causing problems:
https://github.com/switchbrew/libnx/issues/161#issuecomment-419854684

@Euler The main problem is that Dynamax and Gigantamax are gimmicks of Galar just like Z-moves were a gimmick of Alola, whereas Mega Evolution has been in several games so far and seemed like it would be a mechanic of the games going forward, but now they've completely deleted it. Several Pokémon were really weak before Mega Evolution, then suddenly became really good, and now they're weak again. Also, the Dynamax stuff all plays out incredibly slowly, which is boring.

Having played the game for 8-odd hours, I'll say this review is largely on the mark, and I thank @AlexOlney for mentioning the performance problems. I'd give it a score of 6-7, but that's on a scale where 5 is an average score. I think it's essentially the same as an 8 in this site's scoring system.

Graphically, obviously all of the models and animations for old Pokémon (and even characters: Hop does Sun and Moon's Hau's 'squat and wave my arms in excitement to explain something' animation all the time) are reused, but the lighting effects they added this time around make the game look really stylish. It really makes the game's colours 'pop', and now I wonder what it would have looked like if the Switch had had an OLED screen. It's a shame that it doesn't run at native resolution all the time. I know it's Game Freak we're talking about, but although it's been a year, I don't recall Pokémon Let's Go running below 720p in portable mode. Sword and Shield, though, at times looks about as blurry as The Witcher 3 or Doom, but without all of the graphical feats those games are pulling off.

I really like the designs for nearly all of the new Pokémon (strongly excluding the "literally just a dog" cover legendaries), and I'm glad they've decided to continue with the regional themed older Pokémon (this time even with exclusive evolutions).

Overall it's a good game and I'm pleasantly surprised, but it could have been much better. It also costs 50% more than any previous Pokémon game (not taking Let's Go into account) but doesn't offer 50% more content. Not that the price matters, Pokémon prints money anyway.

@Richnj Good points, although your last remark is not necessarily correct. It's perfectly possible that if RE4/5/6 had been survival horror, they wouldn't have sold well if at all, and the series could have died. In fact, I would say one of the main reasons for the large amount of survival horror games being released the past couple of years lies precisely in the fact that survival horror had been out of the picture for long enough to make it feel fresh again. Consider an alternate universe in which Resident Evil is the brand name for a collection of bell-bottom trousers, that at some point became a regular jeans collection. It's hard to imagine the alternate universe Resident Evils would have sold well if they always stayed bell-bottoms.

I'm curious as to why so many people still give RE5 and 6 flak for not being 'real' Resident Evil games. In fact, it seems like this is a trend for a lot of horror series where some of the games were shooters instead of survival oriented. I can't think of any other genre or series where people complained it changed direction (the obvious example being Breath of the Wild, which is a completely different kind of game compared to the rest of the series yet received unanimous praise). Is it simply because there aren't that many survival horror games compared to other genres and shooters are already overrepresented, so when a game that could've hypothetically been survival horror ended up being a shooter, it's disappointing?

@Dman10 Good thing the trailer's only 1m26s, then!

One thing I must commend Game Freak for is that seemingly for the first time in many years, they haven't already shown off literally everything and everyone in the new games months before the games are released. In previous years, there have been endless trailers and articles full of "hey, here are all the new Pokémon", but this time they've barely shown off anything. That, at least, is a change for the better.