Salads
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Posts
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Joined
Posts posted by Salads
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They're going to run Sumo Hall again in a few months. 'Genius' my arse.
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If Nintendo would do something similar with Mario, et al. on the Wii U, they might do OK this gen.
I'm fairly sure they won't do this for the same reason they don't do microtransactions / required DLC / post-release patches / multiplayer fees etc - they prefer that when the customer forks over for a game they get the full game. Skylanders was basically Activision doing Pokemon without Nintendo's monetisation restraint.
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I've spent years looking forward to the likes of Nagata and Akiyama as wily old vets and if excursions to AJ/NOAH means Yuji can escape New Japan's prettyboy tyranny to fulfil that destiny then praise be. If Misawa's in any way displeased with Nagata as GHC champion he should spend some of that quality coffin time meditating on why NOAH don't have any of their own established veterans from that generation.
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Goering Special is a good'un.
Mein Stamp?
Welcome to Ouchwitz?
Messr's Mitt? (Brass knux)
Face Washtika?
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is back in the monkey music business!
First time I've listened to a game soundtrack in its entirety before it's even released.
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Renting WWF Warzone on the N64 is the thing that got me into wrestling. Before that I thought it was just camp fake-punching so I was impressed with all the inventive ways for throwing each other about. I ended up buying WWF Attitude and then ECW Hardcore Revolution, which was just as bad but impresses me to this day by existing. The amateurish recorded-in-the-office crowd audio which anyone would acknowledge as dodgy in the former took on a cruel Bingo Hall vibe for the follow up. No Mercy was the only N64 game I sought out for the console after its heyday because of its rep, but I never clicked with it and sold it. I wish I could sell WWF Attitude.
Timely thread for me because I've just this month picked up Here Comes the Pain. The great roster is somewhat undermined by names like Eddie and Rey given wet paper jobber status, but had great fun trying to guess the unlicensed wrestlers from their unlockable movesets alone. Chuck Palumbo having both superkick and torture rack as finishers was baffling.
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The thing is, every time I get a little better
Haven't got the game and am not going to look at the level because I don't want it spoiled, but this line is really encouraging for when I do. I've spent tens of hours on individual levels before in good arcade-style games and my only advise is don't try to push it. Don't play frustrated, don't play just to get to the end and remember this isn't the kind of game you beat by putting in hours. I usually pass them when I'm either on my first play in a while, relaxed, distracted or otherwise getting by on subconscious flow without tension making me overthink things (this also helps a ton with being able to enjoy it).
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All the press and love for Resogun and TxK is confusing after spending the last twenty years seeing STGs and their developers critically hunted to virtual extinction. Shows what being a well-timed exclusive can do.
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Literally yesterday I started a season on Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain with a Sasaki CAW as his moveset was already in the game (related lols) and was wondering what he was doing nowabouts.
Saying he has had the type of career to earn a retirement match is quite the understatement. He's on a musketeers/four corners level.
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Having been thoroughly nonplussed with Naito's forced push I'm impressed with how rapidly they've transitioned him into the guaranteed hardcore-fan-appeasing role of Losing End of an Undercard Feud with Tomohiro Ishii.
Also, Goto for New Japan Cup! I've got to be right some time. He's going to win the NJC and then the title. Then he'll win the G1, face himself at the 2015 dome show and fall back into old habits by losing.
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For those who liked this the user channel that uploaded it is 100% subbed puro videos so could be one to bookmark/subscribe to.
I'm almost certainly going to be spending more time this month watching Nakamura slowly opening trading cards than wrestle.
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Am currently playing Street Fighter III: New Generation, Alien Hominid and Wario Land: The Shake Dimension, which would make a respectable top three in the award category of games that look the most like cartoons. Damn you HD!
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But to say that not bringing a legit Pokemon game to the consoles (besides the bad ass Pokemon stadium) in the past is somehow beneficial to the company is, again, absurd. They're video game producers in a for-profit industry, not starving performers standing up for artistic integrity.
A console pokemon would devalue portable pokemon even if it were just as good, but it won't be because 'make a game like another developer's hit game only bigger and better' is never the route to greatness. They could make one, it could make money and it could be very good, but it'd have to be distinct from the main games in the same way that the very good GTA Chinatown Wars or Mario spin-offs (or Pokemon XD?) are. The second legit games in Nintendo's big franchises become merely very good the reason to spend the extra on hardware to get to their games vanishes, because it only takes one duffer to shatter the trust built up in regular consumers and people can already get imperfect versions of what Nintendo do elsewhere for cheaper.
That list is a tad misleading in that it counts Wii Sports and Super Mario Bros as the top-selling games - both were pack-in titles and really shouldn't count. Super Mario undoubtedly would have sold close to that many titles on its own but does anybody REALLY think Wii Sports is selling 83m copies as a standalone title? Uh, no.
Also Wii Play is on there. It was packed with a Wiimote, which is really the only reason people bought it.
The original argument made was that the Wii / Wii U didn't have any of the most popular titles. Back when the Wii was active only GTA4 was preventing Nintendo from having a monopoly on the top ten best selling games of the generation. So that was nonsense unless you start moving the goalposts about what 'most popular' means.
Re Wii Sports being a pack-in, a] the game sold well independently despite this, and was still fetching good prices on ebay when I sold one of mine 6 years after its release, b] in Japan where the console was sold by itself it's the second best selling console game in history and c] unless you're saying it would have sold less than half as much as it did, it's still the most popular game ever made. At least 'Wii Sports sales don't count because people only bought it to get a Wii' makes a welcome if incongruous change from 'Wii sales don't count because people only bought it to get Wii Sports'.
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Re: Nintendo
and hell, why can't they just make a PokeMon home release? people have been clamoring for it for well over a decade now.
The western gaming response to a good handheld game seems to be 'this is good, so it should appear on a console' because consoles are better than portables, but Nintendo disagreeing is why theirs dominate. Pokemon is a great example of a title playing to a handheld's strengths, and every time Game Freak are pestered about a console version they explain this. It's also a great example of a medium-sized studio resisting the lure of doubling size in pursuit of epic and sticking to what they do best. Pokemon is one of the most successful game franchises in history because it's already excellent, much like all the blockbuster console franchises that will never transition to portables.
I wonder if Nintendos problem is that the real power players are old and out of touch. The types who rather than listen to what people want are going to tell you what you want.
Being in touch often means doing what everyone else is doing. It's how we ended up with past gems like Street Fighter EX and Bomberman Zero, and is why we're now getting such treats as free-to-play Tekken. If you look back at Nintendo's history you don't see trend-chasing duds like 90s Xtreme Mario or 00s Pokemon MMO, and even when their games weren't received well at the time they age the best because they stand on their own without a 'you had to be there' crutch. Instead of telling people what they want they believe that you should produce something that people didn't know they wanted. No one asked for the Wii in the same way that no one asked for the iPad, and both were mocked when they were first revealed only to go on to have great success. The same can be said of software like Wii Fit or Animal Crossing. People are calling for Nintendo to make their own 'versions' of games like Minecraft or Call of Duty, but if you look at Nintendo's hit franchises nearly none of them followed trends when they came out. It's both their strength and weakness.
There's also the angle that the gaming community accuse Nintendo of being out of touch only because they are out of touch with the gaming community, which is not necessarily their aim. The gaming industry on the other hand is out of touch with non-gamers with developers unable to expand the number of people buying their games to cover rising development costs therefore DLC/season passes (the clamour for higher budget games being the 'in touch' option when no one but gamers care) and the press's disregard of all things 'casual'. Nintendo do not do what others do, but their portfolio is full of games that are in touch with many people other gaming companies have found they cannot reach.
a system is made by its games. the wii and wii-u don't have the most popular games. i don't see what's so hard for Nintendo to comprehend here.
Half of the top ten best selling games of all time were on the Wii. Also while I picked up every GTA and every GTA expansion pack prior to V for a fiver on a Steam sale, good luck finding discounts on first party Nintendo games.
Again, the gaming press will promote games aimed at their demographic over games that are not. So if you get your information from them you would think that the newest Halo or Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto were the biggest games (okay, so they were right with that last one) while for example before X and Y a new Pokemon game that consistently does >Halo numbers would get an unhyped review popping up the week before release and could only hope the reviewer isn't surprised they're still being made and/or confuse it with the cartoon they saw in the 90s.
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Candy Crash stuffs are extra silly when you consider how much of the apple store is filled with actual unashamed cash grab rip-offs. If anything, appstore game lawsuits need to be encouraged and don't need this negative press.
Now you're just being blindly apologetic for Nintendo. ALL shareholders want "profit and growth," that's the very nature of the capitalist system. Without writing up a synopsis of Das Kapital, Marx's equation still holds: Money --> Capital --> Money'. Capital seeks its highest return, etc. etc. Sitting on $8B of cash while you're in the red and earning zero return on the cash balance is what pisses off shareholders, not using it to bolster advertising and R&D in times of need. The 70% short number just came out this week, and the WiiU has only been out for a year. So to argue that if Nintendo thought a strategy of more advertising would've worked when the system was first released a year ago, prior to knowing the extent of the short fall, is absurd.
Nintendo only barely made a profit the previous year and for the first six months of 2013 the Wii U sold a lot closer to nothing than many would find plausible having already forced Nintendo to cut their sales expectations because of under-performance in 2012. 2012 was also the year when Iwata announced an expansion/restructuring that is soon to come to fruition judging by the new buildings popping up in Kyoto and Tokyo that would fit the description of R&D bolstering you mentioned. This has not proved in any way to be a happy substitute for profitability, and as I understand it the outlay is handcuffing them from doing more about the situation by bringing down their bottom line. Microsoft can and did loss-lead for year after year to try and get momentum behind the Xbox brand, because it didn't put the company as a whole in the red. That is not an option for Iwata and people are already calling for his head.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong, but the reason they aren't doing something straightforward which we'd think would help a lot will still be either a] it's not that straightforward, b] it won't help as much as we think or c] some another good reason we aren't aware of because we're just plebs on a message board. The reason will not be laziness.
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Nintendo has $8B in cash, that's more than ample funds for a media blitz should they go that route. They were just lazy and assumed their name would sell units. And to be fair, Sony losses incorporate several diverse business segments, not just video games.
As recent press has shown having cash in the bank doesn't mean a thing when you're a public company. Nintendo's shareholders want to see profits and growth. If Nintendo were lazy and thought they didn't need advertising then they would have changed that tactic twelve months ago when it was clear it wasn't working, but they can't because they're in the red and they're not part of a major tech company to swallow the loss. Btw that link was only referring to gaming divisions. The early years of the PS3 hit Sony HARD.
Nintendo has had basically the same marketing for years: Entry-level gaming for families and non-die-hards while also offering a nostalgia trip for people who grew up playing video games. And they've been somewhat successful doing that.Nostalgia doesn't really play a part in their marketing outside of Mario still being around and wouldn't be effective as a long term tactic if it was. I most often see the term nostalgia used in the same way 'Nintendo fan' is - an indirect knock on the credibility of people who buy Nintendo but whose opinions aren't as easy to dismiss as those of children / old people / women / the rest of Nintendo's 'everyone' demographic. Ie if you want to play games by Bioware or CD Projekt that's completely normal but if you want to play a game by Retro Studios or Intelligent Systems then you must be either be a Yoshi suit wearing member of the Princess Rosalina fan club or have been indoctrinated as a child by Nintendo's predatory use of bright colours and bad ass plumber mascot.
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Can anyone offer any insight into why the Fantastica Mania tour did so well? I'm not saying it shouldn't and I like the concept, but I didn't see it being a money maker.
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Flash > HDD, and you can upgrade capacity by attaching any drive via USB rather than having to get your screwdriver out.
Without playing it, I suspect that with multiplayer games, having only one player with the uber-controller puts a damper on the experience.
Most multiplayer games are either made for parity with the wiimote (on the assumption everyone has those hanging around), but the best games take that controller inequality and use it. The pro controller is the same as the gamepad sans screen if neither of those are ideal.
Where the system's problem is it doesn't have a target audience.
It has a target audience, but no way of reaching it. Nintendo don't have the funds to media blitz with advertising to the point where normal people will know what it is (hence not knowing it's out, thinking it's a tablet etc etc) and the enthusiast gaming press exclusively serve a demographic who aren't sympathetic with what Nintendo are trying to achieve even when console war trenches haven't already been dug. And then mainstream outlets rely on the enthusiast bubble for game news. So for example when hacks start writing about Nintendo going third party because they made a loss one year (context) that goes national and parents don't buy the Wii U because they heard Nintendo are going out of business. There's no knowledge middle ground between naive and dork.
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Even the 3DS, which I know is the gold standard for portable gaming, are selling 50% less units than they were 5 years ago.
Worth mentioning that the 3DS wasn't out five years ago, and if we're going to judge whether a system is doing well or not by comparing it to its 150 million-selling predecessor then it's doing a lot better than the PS3.
Nintendo is set on releasing underpowered consoles. That worked last generation. It was an obvious mistake this time. By going for less power than 7 year old systems, Nintendo misfired big time. Mario and Zelda can only help so much with that. EA doesn't want to release a crippled version of Battlefield. Not to mention, Nintendo screwed up by not putting a hard drive in their. Plus their total fail when it comes to online and the indie/digital market.
That said, they can fix all that with a killer system in two years.
'Mario and Zelda can only help so much with that' is the only sentence in this I fully agree with. In particular I have no idea why anyone would think EA wouldn't lop the limbs off any of their games for release on smartwatch if they thought it would make them money. They're still releasing FIFAs on Playstation 2.
If Nintendo goes the Segw route of just becoming a software developer* for Microsoft and Sony consoles, I'll be happier than a pig in shit. I wanna play Smash Bros. on X-Box Live.
I never feel qualified to explain well how Nintendo going third party wouldn't just mean the same games they're making now only released on other platforms, but 'look at how much talent bled out of Sega after they left hardware' and 'look at how much developmental oversight is involved in getting a Smash game out of Sakurai' would be good starting points.
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Eshop prices are too steep for me to stock up on Neo Geo games like I want to, but it's hard to argue with Iwata's stance that sales devalue games when I'd never buy a PC game that wasn't on sale and most of the eshop complaints come in the form 'how come I have to pay [price of a small round of drinks/tiny fraction of new game price] for [timeless masterpiece.]' I've seen people argue Super Mario Bros should be public domain just because for some other companies selling rom bundles for $1.50 is the only way to generate revenue from their old shit people don't want any more.
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People called Eurogamer hipster for giving Super Mario 3D World GOTY. I think I'm too old to understand this.
They're going to gravitate to the game that they feel like is trying to give them a new gaming experience. No matter how good GTAV is, it's exactly the game you expect it to be, the next variation on the same theme that series has been pumping out for over a decade.
Meanwhile, in a world where AAA games are getting increasingly easier to the point that they almost beat themselves, to the point that they are almost passive, rote entertainment experiences, TLOU is a game that, to some degree, actively resists your efforts to get comfortable and have fun with it.The new gaming experience bit is true and a big reason why I stopped paying attention to reviews. Street Fighter IV's metacritic is 94% compared to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition's 80%. Reviews should tell me how good the game is, not how much novelty it provided for the reviewer. 'A world where AAA games are getting increasingly easier' shouldn't come into it. What if I don't play 'AAA' games? What if similar games had been released beforehand? What if I play it years from now? Circumstances are important and can make a game more successful or memorable, but not better and I'd argue that sales should be the reward for the former with GOTY awards the avenue with which to celebrate excellence alone.
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To Salads point of NJPW's Jr. division being pretty good
Quick clarification - I don't know whether it's good or not. I was countering the idea that it was an afterthought because it looks to me like they've invested an uncharacteristic amount trying to keep things lively.
Clearly the solution is to push Taichi.
Is Taichi still going to be around NJ this year? I've seen people infer from Taka leaving that Taichi would be going with him, but I haven't seen that confirmed.
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Taking into account what rzombie mentioned about not wanting to take other company's talent (which is still true today for a variety of other reasons), instead of thinking NJ should sign talent from elsewhere to make the junior division better you should be thinking NJ must be trying to make the junior division better seeing as they've already signed so much talent from elsewhere.
The only Japanese heavyweights on their roster not of New Japan stock are job boys Honma (?) and Tomohiro Ishii, with Ishii being a Choshu guy so he's more like an adopted cousin. Compare that to their junior division - Jado, Gedo, Tiger Mask, Devitt, BUSHI, KUSHIDA, Taichi, TAKA, Ibushi. Obviously this is mainly because they haven't produced much junior talent of note in recent years, but add in the billion foreigners they regularly use and they already have an ensemble that's far more J-Cup than the default Taguchi Versus The World puro booking route. Ibushi/Devitt is getting a bit samey, but like Okada/Tanahashi they've been exchanging titles because they're shit hot, not because there's no one else.
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The IWGP Jr Heavyweight title contract. Four teams, two championship belts, one never ending sentence:
And I'm hoping TAKA/Taichi signing on the wrong lines is some advanced heel trolling.
UPCOMING VIDEO GAME RELEASES (2014 & Beyond)
in COMPUTERS & GAMES & TECH
Posted
On my shelves somewhere I have Hyper Street Fighter II, Vampire Chronicle for Matching Service and Hyper Street Fighter Alpha which are all Capcom doing the same thing with their respective series. Probably the most important thing we can take from those are that they were the final, nothing left on the table iterations. In other words I can now feel safe buying a SF4 game.