@FireEmblem_Man said:

@subrosian said:

@getyeryayasout: Ironically, the biggest risk Nintendo is taking with Zelda is announcing DLC and the online multiplayer subscription service. The open-world, voice-acted, traditional western RPG questing type game they're producing is making a bunch of safe bets on the mass market. I'd be far more concerned if they were attempting to pull off a 2D "real puzzle" driven Zelda, y'know the kind of game where you can't pass it to a friend and let them just run around and explore.

I know what you want, a new Oracle games with more Subrosians!

Damn right, bring back Holodrum.

To be honest, that's the most important thing for me to see - not the action and combat and other crap. No, it's about the chickens and the dancing and the creepy things the fairies say and Tingle and weird fish ladies and all the other odd crap that's hiding in the world. The best Zelda games have been weird puzzle boxes like Majora's Mask and Ages / Seasons. I do hope this latest Zelda is a puzzle box pretending to be an open world.

@getyeryayasout: Ironically, the biggest risk Nintendo is taking with Zelda is announcing DLC and the online multiplayer subscription service. The open-world, voice-acted, traditional western RPG questing type game they're producing is making a bunch of safe bets on the mass market. I'd be far more concerned if they were attempting to pull off a 2D "real puzzle" driven Zelda, y'know the kind of game where you can't pass it to a friend and let them just run around and explore.

God, I wish.

Do you remember when you put a cartridge into a system, hit the power button, and then it just played the game? Sometimes there were as many as 3 logos, and then the title screen. Blip blop blippity boom. But nowadays I have to patch my system, my game, and the shattered remains of my patience before I can find out that the servers are down - and then I can return to my regularly scheduled mental breakdown, already in progress.

The most beautiful thing about my New 3DS non-XL, which never goes online, is that I never, ever, ever have to deal with that nonsense again thanks to it actually loading games super quick. I'm not holding my breath for Switch to be nearly as polished, seeing as the 3DS wasn't until the clock speed boost of the New models.

Genuinely, I just find myself wishing Nintendo would focus on one concept and aim at the general market. Pick one and only one gimmick for your system, and make it one that doesn't require any work for the developer to use. The Switch would have been fine as a portable device that could connect to a TV. The Joy-Cons don't need to be removable, it doesn't need motion controls being maybe gyroscopes for tilt sensing, it certainly doesn't need hand-scanners or ice-cube vibration or whatnot.

It does need the hardware to allow every existing Xbox One / PS4 multiplat title to be directly ported with little effort. But Nintendo insists on adding little gimmicky features - the Switch was a good idea, the Joy-Cons were an awful idea. Breath of the Wild running on the Switch? Great idea. Breaking out the controllers for some odd reason? Why? They didn't even need to removable, no one is going to want the tiny controller, they're going to want a Pro, so just remove all that nonsense so a Pro controller can cost $50.

I mean sure, it would be interesting if Nintendo did a traditional console, but I genuinely think their deeper issue is the refusal to target the actual gaming market. They keep wanting this casual audience of Minecraft players and Clash of Clans players and so on to move back over to the next version of the Wii, no matter how many times we tell them it's not going to happen, they keep swinging for the fences.

@KungfuKitten: I'm fine with Nintendo branding the Switch as a non-console, I just think for it's non-console feature to be interesting, it actually has to have the lineup. The SEGA NOMAD was both a bad idea and ahead of its time - taking real games on the go, hooking them up to your TV, plugging in another controller? This sounds familiar. It also had the same problems of debates about battery life, releasing mid-cycle, etc...

I've always agreed with Nintendo fans that Nintendo has the most potential of any company. If you look at Microsoft, there are basically no Xbox One exclusives, at all. Sony gets its exclusives due to it success in Japan and the struggles of the Xbox in Japan. Nintendo? They have exclusives and franchises for days, if they released a system that they let other people develop games for, they would be untouchable. If you look at the market, there's really no one making that high-end tablet with a real controller that sits somewhere between gaming laptop and 3DS. They need to aim for that segment.

I'm not really frustrated because I feel like I need to have a Nintendo and nothing else, so much as it's so hard to buy into their platforms and get burned. I bought the DS Phat, the original 3DS... I mean I bought these systems at launch and watched price drops and fancy redesigns. So as someone who started working at 14 to pay for videogames, because that's how good Nintendo was back in the day, it's just strange to see them miss the mark, and their potential audience, by such a wide margin. Hearing Reggie condescendingly act like headsets are outdated reminds me of when Blizzard told their World of Warcraft players that they knew what the players wanted better than the Blizzcon audience, only for Legion to almost kill the game.

I can't keep making excuses for everything from not having NES Classics in stock to not having Neon Switch on the US Amazon store, to not having a games lineup on Day 1, to continuing to drag their feet on online, and to never really offering a satisfactory value. I'll point at Animal Crossing on the Gamecube. They put NES games in the game as arcade machines, you could play a dozen classic games. Same with Metroid Prime, and a few other Gamecube titles, it was not unheard of for a pre-order to come with a game (Master Quest) or for it to be possible to unlock a NES or SNES original.

Now? Nickle-and-dime. Waggle. Weirdness. It just hurts. I don't feel like it can continue this way indefinitely where the cost of buying into the Nintendo lifestyle is putting up with their narcissism and nonsense. The Wii really did change things forever, and if the Switch follows that path like it looks like, rather than the path of the DS / 3DS / Gameboy... we're in for a rough ride.

I actually feel bad for the translators of the Switch presentation, they're getting thrown under the bus for poor planning. It's clear every presenter that was passed to with a "Switch" was supposed to do a little hype thing at the start of their presentation, that's why Splatoon had the 2 and Suda51 did the yell, etc... but you never want to live translate something like that, an interpreter should be brought in, everything scripted, and the hype segments pre-recorded and pre-translated.

Every intro should have been the person on video doing a little pre-recorded segment before talking for 30 seconds. Nothing more. It was just a mistake in general to rely on live translation when your presentation was so odd and Japan-centric.

I use a MacBook Pro for work, it's an excellent machine if you do real graphics work, web development etc... and want something that has a Unix terminal on one-end and color-calibration and excellent Adobe support on the other.

For gaming? God no. It's not that OSX can't game, it's that you never want a PC gaming platform with a fixed GPU. I built my system in Summer 2012 with an i5-3450 and 16gb of DDR3. I upgraded my GPU to an RX 480 this Fall for Overwatch, for a cost of $200. Imagine if I had a fixed GPU, and had to spend $1800 replacing my entire PC to get a pre-built with a comparable GPU. It would be absurd. When I want a new CPU in a few months (probably going 8-core Zen if it's good) I'm not saddled with also having to throw away my GPU, power supply, case, etc...

Apple needs to get a low-cost modular system if they want to attract PC gamers, if the Mac Mini were updated to be an ITX system with a swappable GPU for around $1000, it would be a decent value in that market space, since ITX and mini systems are generally more expensive to build if you want quality components.

@KungfuKitten: Worse. Easily worse. The Nintendo presentation even managed to top Sony's $599 / giant enemy crab / RIDDDDDDDGEE RACEEERRRR - not so much because it had more terrible meme-moments, but because the entire thing was so shockingly boring, dull and self-destructive. Once the Breath of the Wild trailer fades, you're just left with developers saying they like the idea of making Switch games, the word "Switch" over-and-over, and cringe-worthy attempts at humor while they showed mini-games and motion controls.

It's just... does Nintendo not realize it's 2017? And I say that not to be "it's current year" but... the competition has been out for years at this point, have massive games libraries, and there are hundreds of games coming out for PC / PS4 / Xbox One this year. Do they get that? Because you don't do a presentation mid-cycle for your system and show TECH DEMOs for MINI-GAMES. As bad as the PS3 and Xbox One presentations were, those were pre-launch, they had plenty of time to salvage the system before it was going into competition.

Nintendo's only option for salvaging the Switch - which they're going to have to do after the first year - is to just start blowing it out with software. But we said they needed to do that in the first place, it's not like they can't win, they have the franchises - but they need to do more Metroid Prime, and less ruining Pikmen, Chibi-Robo, Star Fox, etc... in sad attempts at connecting with an an audience that only existed on the Wii by sheer accident.

@ConanTheStoner: Of course you're not the only one, that's what people were hyped for the Switch about - imagine if every AAA game in 2017 that was multiplat was on Switch. Why buy Mass Effect on Xbox One and be stuck tied to your TV, when you could Switch it up and take it on the go? Compared to a PC or PS4, the Switch is an underpowered console... but compared to a gaming laptop, the Switch is a bargain... if it had the games.

Nintendo built the entire system around a feature that none of the competition could replicate, but instead they've chosen to focus on motion controls, mini-games and being Nintendo as hard as they can Nintendo instead of securing a software lineup. I'd go so far as to say that if the Switch had the 2017 Xbox One 3rd party lineup, instead of Breath of the Wild at launch, it would still do better.

We were all sitting around looking at Nintendo say how easy the system would be to port games to and develop for for the 3rd parties, etc... and bringing out all the devs to tell us that, but here we are in January and none of the big games are coming to Switch at launch, and the Bethesda partnership is literally a Skyrim port... when we expected it would mean future games were Day 1 Switch.

@charizard1605: I've added a ton to the discussion just by my presence, which is a present. It doesn't matter if people who live in Nintendo's reality-denial bubble think the lineup looks "good". In fact, the people who keep making excuses for Nintendo's terrible games lineup, or pretending there's so much to play month-after-month while listing games that are awful musuo games (which on any other system go straight to the bargain bin) are a blight on the gaming world - I said when Wii was around that its success would destroy Nintendo's console business, and this kind of continued insistence on pursuing the wrong direction with their systems just proves me right.

Just stop it, people like the "Willys" of the Nintendo world who keep making excuse after excuse for terrible software lineups are what's allowing Nintendo to continue plugging their ears. It's not okay to not have the 2017 AAA lineup on the Switch from 3rd parties. Every 3rd party game in 2017 should have been on Switch, period. Why did they show all these developers and act like they were going to have games, only to bring them out and have them say maybe games are coming. How many of those 80 games are tech demos, indie games, mini-games, etc... how many actual AAA games that aren't musuos or ports of 5-year old titles are they going to have?

Splatoon 2 is even as low-effort as possible, it looks like a damn expansion with a map pack, not a real sequel. I'll withhold full judgment until Summer, I'm sure they can add more, but you get what I'm saying - what they've shown at this point, what is actually 100% certain and not just speculation or hopes, is incredibly weak. Not for Nintendo fans - but for the general audience they need to attract to the system. I would say the entire appeal of the Switch is that if you buy a game like Mass Effect, Call of Duty, etc... you would be able to keep playing if you had to go somewhere. Especially good for kids who won't want to turn their game off - okay, just take it with us!

But no, those games aren't there, because Nintendo is too poorly run, egotistical, and completely living within their bubble and the reality-denial of the people who were born after 1983 who think they're Nintendo fans because they pretend to be excited about things that aren't exciting. Fire Emblem Warriors? The only people who think that's a lineup-definer are people who would bend over for Reggie if he asked.