swoose

Imagine Evangelion got re-released but with the framerate cut from 24 to 12fps. You'd see a lot fewer fans saying "but look, it's higher res now! Look at the new reflections!"

I don't understand this blindspot where people look past how animations look in a videogame. Playing Paper Mario 64 on NSO right now, it's 60fps, the character animations are simple and beautiful, Mario's hammer attack is like 3 frames with a smear even. I can't imagine sacrificing half those frames for "enhancements" the game never needed.

Optimistic about the suction joycons if this is true. This gets around the problem of needing magnets strong enough to take off a child's finger to keep them attached. The magnets would trigger electronically when the joycon actually connect to the unit, and there would likely be a physical component like a socket as well. We may finally get handheld controls that aren't wobbly.

As per preview footage, it's confirmed the game doesn't even maintain 30fps. It stutters when there are lots of characters on the screen, such as when Mario gets jumped by the X-Nauts.

Everything about this screams Link's Awakening (Switch) to me. A remake the game didn't really need that just makes it run worse.

The current joycon are already too wobbly for my taste, so hopefully they can get it rock-solid if they go with this setup.

The real magnet confirmation we need is magnetic aka hall-effect analog sticks, which have been rumored. I replaced my Pro controller less than a year ago because it was finally drifting too much, at least I'll get use out of the new one's lifetime if this rumor is true.

Half the visual information being sent to your eyes than the original THREE console cycles ago. So tired of hearing it’s the Switch’s fault for being underpowered, they did not prioritize the right things in this game engine from the start.

One of my favorite games of all time, I own the original, and just can’t justify supporting this at full price. Intelligent Systems have fallen off so far this generation.

@PikminMarioKirby If you saw 30fps and 60fps Paper Mario side by side, you would absolutely be able to tell which was which. One would look smoother and more fluid.

Getting half the frames of animation a second matters. It would matter for any motion medium- movies, anime. If they're making that sacrifice to squeeze in a few more shaders and particle effects in a game with 2D characters, that's prioritizing the wrong things IMO.

That is wild, that more time has passed from Wind Waker HD to now than from the original Wind Waker to HD.

Clearly that means they need to remake it again, this time with photorealism, gritty visuals, and ray tracing all in Unreal Engine.

I was online in Splatoon past midnight EDT before I finally had to tuck in. I got pretty lucky, but also missed on that sense of finality because they didn't even have to kick me!

I'm surprised to see Mario Kart players got booted mid-race, that's harsh.

Seems like difficulty in a rougelike game is an extremely delicate balance, since so much changes from run to run.

Besides Splatoon Side Order, the most recent one I've tried is Cursed to Golf, and I put that down after 1 run because I progressed so easily, there wasn't much to learn. So I empathize with the concern that buffs could make Balatro "too easy", even if it's off the mark here.

One in a million run!! The player being out of breath and speechless after unmuting on the original video is very wholesome. You can tell how much this means.

The vocal track is rubbish too. Why would a creative work with the constraints of pixel art have hi-def human vocals? It's complete anachronism, like an audio uncanny valley every time.

Don’t we know that Intelligent Systems is handling the Paper Mario TTYD remake internally?

I could see this still being a case-by-case basis for marketing reasons. MercurySteam was known for the pretty well-received Return of Samus on 3DS, so Dread seemed like a natural continuation of that work. Meanwhile ArtePiazza is an unknown, and Good-Feel is mostly known for mediocre Yoshi games.

At this point I’m just hoping there will even BE physical games next generation. I’ll shop at whatever brick and mortar place I have to. Otherwise you’re owning nothing, reselling nothing, and paying a Sandisk tax to have a games library.

I’ll also say I’ve had no issue with Gamestop, formerly EB Games here in Canada. They seem to compare pretty favorably to the operation in the States, as here I get upwards of $30 in trade for some Switch games, not $5-10. The employees will mention the protection plans and whatnot, but they take a simple “no, thank you” as an answer. If anything I get worse vibes from Best Buy, and Target left the entire country.

Always wished I could get into the PMD games, as everything from their artwork, music, and storytelling looks top-notch. And then you get to the gameplay and the 50 floors of generic step-by-step dungeon crawl. It felt like little morsels of story as a reward for slogging through the exact opposite of game design. I wish the Chunsoft Mystery Dungeon formula had been left in the dustbin of the 90s, and the charm and heart of PMD applied to literally any other genre.

Conquest, on the other hand, is #1 on my list.

Nothing to complain about with this splatfest, we finally got a popularity vote so close that all 3 teams were above 30%. That's pretty remarkable, really. I didn't get a single same-team match all weekend, except a few in Tricolor battle.

Getting credit for 2nd place in a category might keep the final tallies closer as well. And it's more encouraging to keep playing because you know each category isn't all-or-nothing.

@mlt 3rd Strike parries actually had an input window of 7 to 10 frames, depending on the state of your character. So a tenth or sixth of a second is what Daigo had to hit. A frame-perfect Mario Maker jump means you’re hitting a 1/60th of a second window. It’s ten times shorter and not feasible for a human to get 18 straight times.

That’s not to take anything away from Daigo, who did those parries in the clutch in a tournament.

I see some parallel with fighting games, which used to drop a new edition for every balance update or set of new characters. Hence the half dozen versions of Street Fighter 4, where nowadays they’re a single supported release.

Radical idea, but Pokémon is so exceptionally profitable I don’t see why they need DLC cycles to begin with. Just make a good full game and nobody will complain, look at Tears of the Kingdom.

I guess my rating for Pokemon Trading Card Game (GBC) will also roll in my thoughts on Pokemon Card GB2 (GBC), the direct sequel that expanded on it in many ways. I guess I understand why it's not on the poll since it never left Japan, but fan translations are easily available and it should always be recommended.

@Keman "What do people even play on their Playstation" is an evergreen question for me, thanks for voicing it.

GameFreak clearly plans their future games out well in advance. It's a shame they don't plan to give each one the development time it needs.

I sometimes see comments upset at Nintendo for abandoning the WiiU so quickly. But I think the biggest crime was shutting down things like Miiverse and Mario Maker levels. That was really driven home for me watching John at GVG's recent video on the Pretendo fan servers. Games like Splatoon and Mario 3D World used to feel so alive with community, being greeted by people's weird drawings and messages. Not to mention unlockable stamps in so many games that are already pointless now.

Miiverse posts were always meant to be ephemeral I guess, but when you give people a platform to make genuine artwork, or genuine game designs with Mario Maker, you really owe it to them to leave those things up. For a company with Nintendo's warchest, it would be so trivial. I'll be playing Splatoon's final week in April, but it will be bittersweet because Inkopolis will be a ghost town already.

Only a passing fan of Dragonball and DQ, and still gutted by this news. Feels several decades too soon.

We live at a time when so many creators of landmark anime, games, and the like are still alive and kicking. Appreciate them while we can, because it won't always be so.

@InJeffable I'd say story is really critical for a classic RPG, but for a strategy or tactics game the focus is more on the game systems and map designs. It sounds like that's what kept this reviewer up late thinking about this game, as they said, even though the story was basic.

What also comes to mind for me is Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, which has one of the dumbest, most pandering stories I've ever played, but is still beloved by the community for how good its maps and gameplay are.

Thank you for also linking that concert, it's incredible! Full symphony and they play the whole OST??

We see so much ingenuity going into making substitute retro hardware, and new physical games for old hardware as good as these. My only hope is someone is figuring out how to make new CRT screens affordably. Or some kind of zero-latency alternative. That's the one thing that's been abandoned by all modern screens.

Games that were designed this well deserved to be played with no lag.

This will be perfect for when they fully reboot the TCG to get rid of the horrendous power creep.

Wow, I assumed this would be a global theme. How many "which flavor of ___ do you prefer" Splatfests can Japan have in a row?

Employees always seem to be the first to go. They'll be replaced with cheaper contractors and temps who have less expertise in making games.

I remember when all the puzzles and mechanics were getting praised in Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Wonder, some were crediting how long-term all Nintendo's designers are. They build up a lot of experience and company culture and heck, even guys as old as Tezuka are still working. Well, the industry's other owners are speaking loud and clear what they think of that approach.

A number of comments are saying "if they can ensure it will always be downloadable / playable", but no company can actually ensure this. Because they go out of business all the time, platforms become defunct, etc.

This is why the actual solution is easy, user-end access to the game files. You should be able to plug a generic external drive into a Switch and back up your roms. Without that, a download will be simply inferior to a cartridge.

Very happy they skipped my favorite regions of Johto and Unova, so they won't ruin them with mediocre 3D games.

Scaling back to the single city of Lumiose makes me cautiously optimistic that they can make a more dense world again. Maybe with city building stuff, they can make a more interesting gameplay loop than "bonk 25 of this pokemon on the head with heavy balls". Maybe revamp the battle system and feature more trainers? And we can expect some new evolutions. This is another chance to make certain pokemon's evos permanent like they should have been, Mawile and Absol come to mind.

There’s no “unfairly” lost races on 3DS. Solitaire is a game of chance, and so you’ll sometimes have to play through a bad hand. That’s central to the moment-to-moment tension AND the overarching gameplay, that some horses will have luckier careers than others. The last thing I want to hear is that the game now skews it so all horses above a certain stat threshold will win.

Add that to the downgrade from 2D to 3D visuals, and from 2 screens to 1, and from a nice handheld to a clunky drifting one… I see no point to this port of you can play it on 3DS.

Haven't minded the repeating bosses as much as I thought. For a $20 add on, 3 (+1) bosses seems pretty inline with the rest of the series. You encounter only 2 of the 3 on each run if you make it that far, and your approach to fighting them can differ a bit depending on build.

@Porky This time around it can't be simps or Japan, since the splatfest was region locked and Frye's team got 66% of the vote. The fact is, which team comes away with the best win% is mostly down to dumb luck and maybe some 333x battles.

I would say the rate of mirror matches is a problem though especially with a lopsided poll like this. The game tries to matchmake a 66% popular team with a 10% popular one for every tricolor battle, AND make the 10% team the squad of 4 about a third of the time. And you get zero Clout for playing a mirror match, so yeah, I wouldn't spend long trying to get real ones for Team Saturday either.

I'm starting to think the game should just lie to us and display all the matches as vs. opposing teams.

@HeadPirate I agree, the topics haven't been quite as good this game. It may be hard to think of good 3-option questions, but I also think there's just too many Splatfests, especially relative to Big Runs. Only 4 Big Runs a year is too few.

What a quote by Tuulik, really sums up the direction of the economy. Thank you for featuring it.

I'll echo that I haven't had an issue with the maps in this game, aside from them being a bit plain and lacking moving parts. The Mahi rework adding so much space made it feel MORE sniper-friendly to me, funny enough. But I've really liked the more recent stage additions in the game, so I'm excited to see what they try with Mincemeat.

Another game that will be here today, gone tomorrow because it fails to create its own identity. Not worth getting up in arms about.

Putting aside how tasteless the concept of "Pokemon with guns" is in the first place, and the default Unreal assets and shady business model, I do agree that this game has managed to make an overworld that looks more like what people want from their 3D games. Pokemon's delivery on that front has been a big failure this gen. However one thing Pokemon has always maintained is appealing creature designs, that are consistent with its tone and world building. It's stupid to justify Palworld on the grounds of Game Freak being creatively bankrupt; the creative side is literally their one clear strength, it's the technical side where they're shamefully cheap.

To promote its backwards compatibility, it will be called the Switch Back

I'll be the first to say I think Miyamoto actually squandered some of the potential of some Nintendo series, especially what was done to Paper Mario.

But it does sound like his days of micromanaging and upending the tea table are behind him. That quote about not feeling ownership since his games have been cultivated by so many people, is a pretty mature view of things.

I always wondered why this guy looked exactly like the owner of the Oakland Athletics in Moneyball (2011). Turns out that was him, in an uncredited acting role!

Anyway good riddance, he should have stuck to acting.

I'll contradict some comments here and say please keep reporting on fan projects such as these, they are relevant to my interests.

If a free project uses 30 year old game assets and gets copyright claimed, that's nobody's fault but Nintendo's.

Miyamoto should have looked at the design, I think it's great. In later eras where Miyamoto had a more hands-off role, I think they could have got her in a game and she'd be a recurring character now.

Pretty huge change to Salmon Run and Big Runs!

I’m skeptical about the X Battle changes, I’d say its biggest issue is long matchmaking times or not finding enough players at all. Sometimes I spend more time waiting for matches than actually playing them. It should look to match you with more players, not fewer…

@gizmo998 The 2 stages played on in the trailer are new, there's a new special weapon (the Splattercolor Screen), all the weapons shown will have new kits (the Painbrush, Reef-lux, Splatana Stamper, Splat Dualies, Blaster, S-Blast, Undercover Brella, and Squeezer), the music is new, there's new clothing options, and a glimpse of a new Big Run stage (Barnacle & Dime) and a new king salmonid.

Can't blame you for asking though as there was not much of a write-up here.

Posing questions like these to voice actors just invites unfair comparisons between how voice actors and live action ones are valued.

Obviously a huge commercial movie is going to use huge commercial on-screen talent.

Can't wait for this film that will look worse than the animated Link's Awakening cutscenes that keep being used for thumbnails.

Clearly the pop-out bubble blower in the left Joy-Con will be used extensively in 1-2-Switch 2!, and then never used by software again.

I'm with @HalBailman that 150cc is far too easy, and 200cc is more of a special mode. The CPUs in 200cc aren't even any more difficult - they drive off the track and into walls just as an unpracticed player might. Mostly the mode answers the question "what if Mario Karts went really fast?" which opens up funny interactions such as taking shroom shortcuts by simply... hopping over them, or outrunning blue shells. That's right - if you drive without hitting walls, you basically go at the same speed the blue shells travel at, and can outrun them for a whole race. Hard mode!! Even the competitive multiplayer scene defaults to 150cc.

I never played Tour and had limited access to MKWii, so I went into half this wave having not played the tracks. I took poor lines and routes, drove out of bounds, got blue shelled repeatedly... and still cruised to 1st on every track in 150cc. You don't even need to utilize drifting or items, because the CPUs drive so slow, you pass them just by driving forward. The single player in this game plays like it's for babies, which makes me wonder what on earth 100cc and 50cc are for.

And to make matters worse, ALL the online multiplayer relies on the roulette system, so there isn't even a way to reliably pull the new tracks. The only way to see the new cups in order, is to populate your races with bots driving so bad that it's pretty much Time Trial With Blue Shells.

On the one hand I wanted more Double Dash tracks, but on the other, seeing how DK Mountain was absolutely butchered, maybe it's for the best that they stayed away from it. That game deserves its own re-release or feature on a Switch Online type service, there's no replicating its physics and chaos in MK8.

Thinking about the DYKG report on Retro's early years where they spent a ton on office space and furniture, then layoffs hit and most of it went empty and filled with literal crickets. Meanwhile here's the parent company waiting until their 139th year to open a 2nd development building.