RockyRan

I definitely agree with Wheats in that this all really depends on what the person is really looking for. I personally look for advancement, innovation, and deep changes and improvements to mechanics when there's a major sequel coming out. I don't really care if the story or the setting are changed, I need to feel the game being different before I consider it a good sequel. The more sequels that don't do this, the more bored I become of the franchise, which sadly has applied to nearly everything Nintendo has done the past 6 years. And replying to Atomsk's post (I'll do the number thing so we don't have quote ping pong, mmk? ) 1. Changing every single item in the inventory was pretty hyperbolic on my part, but I at least want the majority (as in, 3/4s) of the items to change from one game to the other. It'd be even better if the new items had strong tie-ins to the main game's theme. I'm not sure if Skyward Sword does this, but imagine if Twilight Princess had Twilit-themed weapons. Perhaps one of the large twists of the game was that every weapon you acquired had a Twilit-variation, a more dangerous variation implementing double-edged-sword-esque tradeoffs. (This is just off the top of my head, of course). My issue with the Zelda weapons is not only the fact that you keep finding boomerangs for instance, it's the fact that they're all practically used for the same thing across a BUNCH of games that are supposed to be set in entirely different eras. You might not think so, but to me franchises in general need complete overhauls at least once every 10 years. Most of Nintendo's franchises are well past that point, and I've simply lost interest in them. I don't think I've ever agreed with the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" stance, either. I always say "if it ain't broke, spin something new on it and make it even better" back. 2. The point that the Wii won't last 10 years is a very important one. It's dropped off completely and won't last even a few months into the Wii U's lifetime, because it was a fast burner and doesn't really have anything that would make it last longer than its "normal" lifetime. When it dies it won't have sold as much as the PS2 in total sales and that is precisely my point. It might been the fastest selling console of all time, but it's not at all the most-selling one and when all is said and done, in terms of sales the PS2 would've still come out on top despite the Wii having its crazed mania in 2006-2008. My point is that the Wii's success wasn't long lasting, and Nintendo obviously knows it because they're perceptively changing their direction to appeal to the core gamer whereas 4 years ago they would've said "fuck you all, we're swimming in money right now". Had they thought the Wii's success was sustainable, they wouldn't have tried to appeal to the core gamer in E3 like they did. 3. You're talking about names, I'm talking about branding. Look at the branding of the Xbox 1 and the branding of the Xbox 360. They're completely different products. Same goes for PS1, PS2, and PS3. Same goes for N64, GC, and Wii. The fact that the name "Xbox" and "PlayStation" is in every platform really has very little to do with the point I'm trying to make. The branding for the Wii and WiiU are practically identical. I wouldn't be surprised if they even got the same lady to do the hand modelling for the WiiU. And yes, Nintendo's handhelds did have very obvious "generations". The difference in tech and aesthetic between GameBoy Color and GameBoy Advance was gigantic. Same for the difference between the GBA Micro and original DS. The difference between DSi XL and 3DS? Very, very small. It looks very much like one of Nintendo's famed incremental upgrades to the untrained eye. Many people felt that way.

I'm not sure what you mean by "linking their next-generation consoles with the previous ones". I mean, "3DS" and "Wii U" are as indicative of a hardware successor as "Xbox 360" or "PS Vita" in my opinion. In fact, the PS Vita looks pretty similar to the PSP, as the 3DS does to the DS. Really not quite certain where you're getting that from: do you mean branding? Or something else entirely? Branding, presentation, general message being communicated. Look at the difference between the N64 and GameCube, and the difference between the GameCube and Wii. Now look at the difference between the Wii and the WiiU. Same goes for the original GameBoy to the GBA to the DS, and then from the DS to the 3DS. Same general aesthetic (white minimalism with "soft" female hands), same name, same presentation, same "simplicity" message being communicated. It feels the same. Hell, for several minutes during their E3 presser people didn't even know if WiiU meant "tablet peripheral for Wii" or an actual different console. And yet when the GameCube and Wii were first shown people knew exactly what it was supposed to be. This "blurring the lines" between generations probably sounds good on paper for some marketing exec, but it confuses the hell out of consumers. It certainly confused the hell out of people in regards to the 3DS, as shown that by one poll where a big chunk of people though it was just an upgrade to the DSi. It's sending a murky message and not at all one of "this is our NEXT generation of hardware". I look at the Wii U and it doesn't at all feel like the "next thing" from Nintendo. There's no differentiation or "rebranding" as you see from, say, the jump from the Xbox to the 360. People like you and me know that this is a completely different console, but not the average casual gamer. They're going to look at the product and see an "upgrade" in the same way Apple goes form iPhone 4 to iPhone 4s. Then a whole bunch of them will remember that they already have a Wii and barely play it and put the Wii U box back in the shelf. This will happen unless Nintendo rebrands the console to make it abundantly clear this is an all new platform.

I can't imagine anyone wanting Nintendo to "grow up". Light-hearted, child-friendly (but not child-aimed) is pretty much the only thing I want to stay constant with Nintendo forever, especially now when too many gamers/developers are infatuated with the "macho" movement of uber-gorez and shitty storylines that take themselves too seriously. With that said, though... What you're describing are superficial changes. The "feel" (setting, storyline, etc.) of the game might change, but the game itself, the core of it, remains woefully stale for years before they feel the need to to do anything new. Each and every game should be significant enough to stand on its own without the need to recycle old ideas and dress them up as "nostalgia!". I never want to "acquire" the boomerang in Zelda ever again, nor do I want to see double hookshots. Those are things that should've stayed in their respective games. Things like the Beetle Bomb in Skyward Sword is what they need to keep doing, across its entire inventory, not just a couple of items. I don't believe the audience Nintendo is going after is exactly the "casual" audience you're describing. Casual gamers don't traditionally buy hardware just to game. They play Peggle on the computers they already have and Angry Birds on the iPhones they already own. They just play games on devices they HAPPEN to own, hence the "casual" name. The fact that Nintendo convinced these kinds of gamers to buy dedicated gaming devices is an amazing feat in and of itself, but it's not a sustainable model because they haven't changed that casual gamer mindset. Attach rates are woefully low, Nintendo's apparently been very unhappy with the performance of their piece of hardware after their casual craze, and there's no real evidence that Nintendo will be able to sustain this model at all. Hell, despite the Wii craze, when all is said and done it won't have beaten the PS2's worldwide sales by the time the Wii dies (which will be pretty much the instant the Wii U is released given Nintendo's past in not supporting previous hardware very well as well as the big dip in hardware sales these past few years). Nintendo's trying to go the "market retention" route. There's absolutely no evidence that they'll actually succeed. In fact, it didn't even work at all with the 3DS because many people didn't even know that the 3DS was a "next-gen handheld" and thought it was simply yet another DS upgrade. It's very possible that people will have the same confusion with the WiiU. They'll look at the console name and presentation and think "didn't I already buy a Wii?" It doesn't show me that Nintendo's ready or willing to take the next step and up the ante. They look hesitant, with one foot out the door and the other in the comfy position they want to retain. To me, linking their next-generation consoles with the previous ones so closely looks to me like they don't know how to "do the next thing". Nintendo definitely wants to bring back the core gamer with the Wii U, but will they even be able to? After focusing so much with casual titles and presentation of their products, are they going to be able to catch up to the rest of the gaming industry to deliver a wow-inducing game that pushes the boundaries of technology like they did during the SNES days? It's hard to say and I honestly don't think they can pull if off. As much as I disliked Nintendo's direction and execution with the Wii, at least it was focused. The Wii U and 3DS don't look focused at all. It's trying to appeal to both markets at the same time (and not really succeeding at either), trying to offer new novelty tech but with big caveats (one-touch touscreen and one-tablet limit on the Wii U, low horsepower and poor online on the 3DS, etc.), trying to bring in more third party but not doing it well enough to differentiate itself from other competitors (who the hell is going to wait to buy Arkham City on the Wii U when they can play it this instant on hardware they already own?), and generally just giving very mixed messages in terms of what they're even trying to accomplish with their products. It's as if Nintendo knows their previous audience from 2006-2010 isn't sustainable, but they simply don't know in which direction to go.

The world map was incredibly barren and empty (and not in the Shadow of the Colossus way), the puzzle mechanics weren't particularly inventive and were mostly variations or a simple twist on something they had already done before, the cinematic pieces were ruined by woeful production values (MIDI music? Thank god it's orchestrated in Skyward Sword), and the wolf/twilight sections were easily the most tedious part of the game. It added marginal differences but none were particularly new and plenty were actually for the worse. I know people love TP. That's why I feel strongly about it. I still see absolutely no reason to love the game, but people just do, and it bothers me that you say "the general consensus is that it was good" because that's precisely the kind of irrational hype bandwagons that just leave me baffled. Hype trains are running rampant, reviewers overrate it to hell (95 on metacritic? Are you kidding me?), hype train derails and goes out of control, and people love the game simply because everyone around them loves the game and love love love. I don't buy into hypetrains or what other people "generally think" of the game, so when games get rated almost exclusively out of hype (the vast majority of Nintendo games, for instance), I just get turned off from that side of gaming altogether. Truth is, I don't hate TP. It was decent. Weakest of the series, but decent. It's the hype and irrational love for it that bothers me more than the quality of the game itself. But anyway, I'm raining on people's parades and veering horribly off topic. I'll stop because we've been through this plenty of times before

Yeah, I've said it plenty of times. I feel like a troll sometimes but I just feel very strongly about it Since I've played in 2006 I've struggled to come up with a single way in what it innovated. It's by far the most stale game of the entire series.

Indeed. Boggles the mind how anybody could've rated Twilight Princess any higher than a 90, but it got crazy good scores for an incredibly mediocre experience. Nintendo games are judged in a vacuum, under an "EVERYTHING'S AWESOME" preconceived notion. If there are any games whose reviews are by far the least informative, it's Nintendo games. "Stale" becomes "classic", "recycled" becomes "nostalgic throwback", "simplistic" becomes "easy to pick up", etc. I do definitely believe reviewers are deathly afraid of rating a major Nintendo release anything than a very high score (9.0/10 points, 4/5 stars, "BUY THIS NAO" verdict, etc.) Doesn't mean Skyward Sword is gonna be bad at all, it's just that gushing reviews are absolutely meaningless.

You raise an interesting point there, one that I notice people overlook but is very important to me. Most all the people (perhaps even all the people, save for the clinically insane) who are fine with the Wii always have some other platform to fall back on, being either the PC or PS3/360. Remove the option to own multiple consoles and just isolate each of them. A Wii just by itself is vastly inferior to just a PC, vastly inferior to just a 360, and vastly inferior to just a PS3. That's ultimately my point. The Wii, at best, is a "Side dish" for people. A console with one, two good games a year where you play through it, go "that was fun!" and stick it back in the closet. Neither its hardware nor its software has the lasting appeal and robust library/experience as the other platforms, which is why I consider it a very lacking console. I've come to realize I don't need a "side dish" console when I'm already inundated with very high quality software on hardware I already own.

Dex, you'd be singing a much different tune if this had happened to you personally.

Exactly. If WB can't handle this code stuff properly, they should just admit they fucked up and just give away the code anyway. It's not like it was a "super exclusive" bonus either, this was an integral part of the game ripped out to punish used game buyers. But instead of doing that they're forcing customers to jump through even more hoops to get content for their single player game. This is all kinds of wrong. Seriously, this shit should've been a Twilight Zone episode.

http://www.joystiq.c...-5-step-proces/ Absolutely appalling. Warner shows the world how publishers can have a great thing like Arkham City and still find a way to fuck that up beyond release. Basically here's the deal. Warner wants to get into the whole "NO UZED GAMES LOL" bandwagon, so they lock away single player content. So far, so bad. But apparently, nobody really told them that if they wanted to have their "NO UZED GAMES LOL" bandwagon, they actually had to work and put effort. Effort? You're crazy! Let's just half-ass the whole process and fuck up the code for a bunch of people such that a bunch of new buyers can't get their code to work right (or even at all in many cases). What does Warner proceed to do then? Now Warner wants the new purchasers to prove that they bought the game new. They want a receipt of you buying the game, your GT/PSN username, your e-mail, and a picture of your code sheet and game case. That's right, folks, the burden of proof is now on the consumer to prove that they didn't buy used, even though this is Warner's shitty ass system and Warner's own fuck-up. This. This right here is why the whole "movement" needs to die a horrible, fiery death. Anyone who continues to defend the whole practice after this pathetic display needs to realize just how much they're hurting the consumer. This is flat out hostile behavior toward the consumer and thus have reached a new low in the industry. If you would've told me 10 years ago that in the year 2011 we were going to have game content ripped out from a game we already bought, only for us to put a code back into the game so we can magically get access to it because some greedy fuck in a suit wants to eliminate used game sales, only for those codes to not work so now you have to PROVE to the publisher that you bought it new with pictures of your game box, receipt and code I would've laughed in your face and ask you how tight your fucking tinfoil hat was.

Not sure what you're getting at. When I bought the Wii I had never owned any other console not made by Nintendo, and even with that severe lack of outside experience I found the Wii to have an absolutely abysmal library, even after digging the bottom of the barrel and trying out games in desperation to find something good. I didn't buy the system expecting anything other than a great library of Nintendo games and I was incredibly disappointed. The only Nintendo console I ever sold mid-generation and the only time I went out and bought a non-Nintendo console. It was that horrible, and to this day I don't regret that decision for a single second. There's a difference between "a full hardcorez catalog" and a catalog that isn't laughably barren. When even (former) fanboys say that a Nintendo console was barren there's obviously something wrong.

Anyone who read my gigantic rant a few months ago on this forum (or read any of my Nintendo-related posts, really) should know where I stand on this Basically, yes. I stopped giving them a free pass a couple of years ago, and since then I continue to be amazed how much people judge Nintendo games in a vacuum, being irrationally excited at specific features or games that other games on other systems clearly do better. Take the crafting system in Skyward Sword, for instance. People are creaming their pants over it despite crafting systems being as old as dirt and just as overused these past 10 years. But it's in Zelda now so OMG BEST GAME EVAR I re-bought an SNES this summer and I was actually surprised just how in tune Nintendo was with everything, from the games themselves to the hardware design (especially the hardware design). They were truly the masters of pushing hardware limits and gameplay innovation at that particular point in time, whereas today it's simply about regurgitating more trite sequels with one (MAYBE two, if we're lucky) new features as the focal point in their marketing. Take Yoshi's Island on the SNES, for instance. I can list about 20 different game mechanics introduced in that game that made it incredibly different from anything Nintendo had ever done to that point. Had that game been done with today's Nintendo those 20 mecahnics would've been spread out over 20 different games, much like NSMBWii being a generic copycat of the Mario Bros formula but with the one additional mechanic of 4-player co-op as the only thing it really brings new to the table.

I just find it interesting how many journalists from far and wide come together to defend and rationalize why developers put out shitty old code for their previews. It's common knowledge that when you preview ANYTHING it's expected to be of high quality and relatively polished. Otherwise, you got a "preview" that's not at all informative of what the game will be like. Let's say there's glitches in a game (and there's glitches in EVERY game) that have been there since the "preview code" was played by journalists. A journalist catches that but can't call out the devs because it's "pre-alpha"? Then what the hell is a journalist supposed to do? Report only on the shit's that's nice and rosy? Goes to show, 95% of gaming journalism comprises of people spouting off regurgitated PR lines. Certainly seems that way when said journalists come out to defend developers giving out buggy code that's not representative of the final game. If you're handing out shit not representative of the final product, why even do a preview in the first place? Obviously to keep the hype and marketing machine going, and obviously NOT to actually report and keep people informed.

So this is weird. Apparently Russian game prices are stupid cheap, so there's kind of this underground market for CD keys that come from there. People are apparently making quite a bit of dough buying legit keys from Russia either by buying the keys themselves for dirt cheap/buying the actual retail disc for dirt cheap, upping the price a bit and making some small profit. Moar details here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=437356 I've been thinking about this. And thinking and thinking, because if there's anything in the world that yells "THIS IS A SCAM" is underground Russian markets for anything. But like I said, after some thought I actually don't think this is bad. First of all, all these keys are 100% legit. They're not from some shitty keygen. In fact, they can't be from some shitty keygen, because the keys wouldn't work. Steam/Origin/etc., have gotten more or less sophisticated to the point where they verify the legitimacy of the keys against a big ol' database that they themselves have, so simply reverse-engineering the algorithm and spitting out more (and illegitimate) keys wouldn't actually work. And these keys do work, so there's that. There's also the fact that when you buy these keys, the vast majority of the time you get a picture of the key in the game's box, not some random e-mail with the key typed in, providing further proof they're legit copies. With the fact that the actual game itself is legally bought, we now enter into a more or less moral conundrum. You'd basically be exploiting the Russian game prices for your benefit, but I don't really see it as a negative here. Game publishers have every right (and a very easy way) to region-lock these codes. In fact, many games do have region codes, in which case you'd have to use a VPN client to get the key to activate. But since a whole bunch of games (I'd say the majority, fact) are region free, these publishers really don't care where you get the key from. IMO, you're just basically taking advantage of global prices/markets. It's not really any different from sites like PlayAsia, even though PlayAsia importers are more about getting games/hardware faster or games/hardware that would never come out in the buyer's territory rather than taking advantage of cheap prices. I haven't really bought anything, but my interest was piqued when one of the last posts in that topic above said that a bunch of these keys, regardless of which website you buy it from, all come form one place called plati.ru. It's a Russian "eBay" where games are found for dirt cheap, and I mean dirt cheap. Like, RAGE for $12 cheap. But the caveat (the BIG caveat) is the fact that you need to pay using WebMoney, which is a large (and very well established) "Russian PayPal". The furthest I've gotten in this process is setting up a WebMoney account, which is fairly easy considering there's an English option on their website (gotta rely on Google Translate for plati.ru, but it's perfectly legible that way anyhow), but I can't add funds at all. You need either a prepaid WM card to top up (which can't be bought anywhere but Russia and its surrounding countries), a Russian account through which to transfer money, or go through this incredibly long process of acquiring a "passport" (not a real one AFAIK) with the laughably huge minimum transfer sum of 10,000 USD (obviously this option is for businesses). So yeah, no way to add money, no way to buy through plati.ru. Unless there's some other way I don't know about, but discussion on the NeoGAF topic just completely stopped. For now, I'm going to make a relatively low-risk "gamble" on this and buy a key for my Origin account (I got like two games on there I never play, so if it gets banned it'll be a good warning sign without me losing much) through one of the reseller sites. I'm confident it'll work given the lively discussion on the NeoGAF topic, but I just want to see for myself. Thoughts? Suggestions? Death threats?

Wait a fucking second. He won a pumpkin pie? Why aren't we talking about that? I demand an answer.

Speedrunning competition, dean. Speedrunning competition.

Dean, no offense, but that's Kotaku levels of fact twisting That was a competition for speedrunning the main quest. It's in no way an indication of the real length of the game. Besides, completing the main quest in an Elder Scrolls title is like doing 3% of everything there is to do in the game.

That's kind of always bothered me about modern war games, (MW, BF3, etc.). Fine and dandy for Americans, but probably very offensive to Russians/Muslims, etc. Of course, I'm not saying DICE/Infinity Ward have a "hidden agenda", I think they just want to make a game set in the modern era and mimic common enemies is all. But it still has this inadvertent bias that no one really seems to pick up on. The bias became extremely clear during that Medal of Honor multiplayer fiasco where the enemies were the Taliban. EA meant absolutely nothing by it, and there was absolutely nothing inherently offensive about playing as the enemy (as you often do in many video games), but many people were irrationally offended simply because the game is not pandering to US biases. EC probably should've used that example.

Went to the online dealership and bought it, so I'm set for that one. What do you guys do in terms of speccing out your cars for events? For instance, that F150 is significantly slower than other cars typically in that one event I'm talking about. Do you spec the car to match the HP of the other cars, or do you overspec everything to smoke the competition? I've been doing the latter and it's gotten pretty boring, but I don't know if speccing out to match the other cars is something people even do...

GameTrailers. For some reason. Sometimes they're wrong, then other times they're fucking wrong. Still, at the end of the day I'm more likely to pay attention to what a GT review has to say so long as the review doesn't raise any "stupid" flags (RAGE's review, for instance, raised many such flags by insisting on its RPG roots despite Carmack explicitly stating otherwise). I think it's generally a good system. For day to day news I go to Joystiq but prefer VG 24/7.