swoose

I definitely first thought of Minit seeing this, one of the best indie titles in the Switch's early years. Its design was really built around the 60sec time limit, which likely took some inspiration from Majora's Mask but taken to a logical extreme. You almost don't have to be anxious about the time limit because it goes by and respawns you so quickly.

This game looks like it's a more classic Link's Awakening / Oracle approach. There's of course room for multiple monochrome top-down Zeldalikes!

I always thought these options were stupid because they’re offering the player an option to make animation in their animated medium look worse, in exchange for slightly more resolution. Terrible trade off, and to make matters worse some games have the “”quality”” mode as the default!!

Very un-Nintendo idea, very contrary to the ethos of craftsmanship, and it sure doesn’t speak well of their game if the developer doesn’t care what speed you experience their work at. Imagine a film director or editor not caring if every 2nd frame of their movie could be missing.

It’s to match the Mother 3 box art, of course.

TTYD fans have earned every right to dance on the grave of modern Paper Mario. An exceptionally charming and creative RPG tradition got gutted and replaced by 3 generations of sterile, brand-safe autopilot games.

I liked the recent Scott's Stash video "A Period of Boring Mario." The problem went well beyond Paper Mario, into the mainline New Super Mario Bros series (after the 1st one), and Mario's sports titles, even the Mario & Luigi remakes. He likened playing these games to looking at a Mario lunchbox, which I think is apt.

It's like Nintendo since the Wii were putting their character recognition above all else (perhaps building up to the Mario movie & theme parks), certainly above creativity in their games. Mario Odyssey and Wonder have corrected that, Paper Mario is hopefully to follow, and then maybe we can even get Mario sports games that don't suck.

It's of course stupid to make RPGs without any original characters. And maybe worse is that they've forgotten they're making RPGs!

The original Mario Story was meant to be a sequel to Mario RPG, Square Enix was approached to make it, it was developed for 4 years and positioned as THE Nintendo RPG on the N64. Of course Intelligent Systems went with a pretty unconventional turn based formula in the end, with almost no stats. But the badge system was there to offer players progression, and the original box art had a big fat "action RPG" on it. The paper aesthetic was chosen as a visual style, it wasn't the whole point of game world like recent titles.

10/10 for the original, maybe 8/10 for this de-make.

Here’s hoping Intelligent Systems find their way again, and I don’t mean returning to this formula with their modern “improvements”. Slow text speed and menuing?? Those would have been unthinkable for their classic games, they were the masters of snappy UI.

I always wonder if sales are a lagging indicator with a series like this. Fates had a pandering, mistranslated, widely panned story but rode the hype of Awakening to be the best selling entry on 3DS. There's a lot to praise about Three Houses, but it had awkward story compromises to support 4 routes, and there's the bland maps. Maybe that and FEWarriors: Three Hopes created some fatigue that sapped Engage's sales a bit. Then Engage had its own marketing issues, where it wasn't clear enough that it was a new main series game rather than a crossover/spinoff, plus the toothpaste protag being front and center.

Still, can't deny that initial Awakening success is owed to a lot of good word of mouth about the marriage mechanic. The only other thing it could be a lagging indicator of is Marth and Roy in Smash Bros.

I would have gladly taken a 1080p 60fps version more faithful to the original's art style, instead of making everything glossy and reflective. It's a sad state of affairs how they thought that was necessary to market the game.

If nothing else this keeps in the news how connection in these games was 99.9% not burdening Nintendo. And these gamers will hold a record for some time, or until the next major game matchmaking service gets shut down for no reason. They passed the people who stayed in that Halo lobby for weeks, which itself has become a sort of folklore.

They may be doing it for their own sentimental reasons, but personally I think it's doing a good turn for game preservation. It's incredibly stupid that companies are making these peer to peer games unplayable, and that it's falling on fans to find workarounds.

Well, that settles it then. Cancel the hall effect sticks in the Switch successor shipments, the joycons are just fine!

2nd titles on consoles typically sell worse, so there should be no surprise about TOTK. It's visually similar to BOTW, costs $70, and has had 6 fewer years to sell.

At least it's IN the top 10, I say thinking about my beloved Splatoon. If only that series was marketed here half as much as in Japan...

The fact that you can stay connected peer-to-peer almost indefinitely just highlights how unnecessary it was for Nintendo to shut down the service in the first place.

Loved Rainbow Curse, for a second I thought about how it would play with joycon gyro controls, using one like your "paintbrush". But of course you're not only drawing the ropes for Kirby, but also tapping on him precisely the whole game.

I think the resistive touch screen on the WiiU is too central to that game's charm.

@sleepinglion Eh, the Wii was compatible with GameCube disks and controllers but nobody mistook it for a slightly improved GameCube, even though that's pretty accurate to its internals.

Name and marketing do the heavy lifting for perceptions like that. It's a shame the Wii U got let down in those areas because it was such a jump in power over the Wii.

I was just thinking Pokémon’s ownership situation is too straightforward and they could do with more subsidiaries and ownership splits!

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.