Sno

Come on, Nintendo very clearly worries a lot about its public image and has consistently tried as hard as possible to appear family friendly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLuHvi_WvZ8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p45gdP2OKmU More Xenoblade, because dammit, i really like that game, and it's got like a five hour soundtrack.

It seems like it was a move that was more about Nintendo securing a strong relationship with a good developer. Bayonetta 2 had already been in development with Sega and was perilously close to being cancelled as a result of some deep financial woes Sega was experiencing at the time, so Nintendo stepped in and actually saved the game. Since then, Platinum has also created Wonderful 101 for the Wii U. (Which, unfortunately, seems to have not done very well at all, despite by most accounts being quite excellent, if obtuse.) Yes though, it is so weird. Bayonetta 2 is the kind of game i would have never, ever expected to see Nintendo publish. The sexual and crass tone is so very contrary to the Nintendo ethos. I'm glad the game is happening though, that first game is second only to DMC3 in my personal estimation, as far as that genre is concerned. Bayonetta was an amazingly fluid and technical brawler.

I was told that the nude character models in this game get a visible erection during killstreaks. Some friends tried to get me to play it, and i'm normally all for dumb bullshit, but i find the tone and aesthetic of this game just utterly repellent.

He sounds like he's narrating a trailer for an awful summer comedy, the dissonance with the nerd lore coming out of his mouth is incredible.

Apparently TxK, Jeff Minter's new Vita-exclusive thing, came out a couple days ago? Another thing that almost makes me wish i had a Vita.

For example, tanks are designed to have as low a profile as possible. A towering war machine out in the middle of a battlefield is precisely what you don't want.

None controllable by the player, no.

I can find stories with information and quotes telling the story both ways, it definitely seems like Nintendo never really made up its mind on the matter.

Oh my god, that trailer narration is hilarious.

That's kind of my worry, that the monster will just be one really, really, really bullet-spongy enemy that you have to grind down. It feels like there's a lot of ways this game could go wrong in the details of game balance. It'd be cool if it took a few cues from Monster Hunter, like if there would be ways to wound the monster and force the person playing it to adopt different strategies, thus changing up the dynamic of the fight as it drags on. (As opposed to a simple progression of bad to worse, with the monster leveling up as it apparently does.)

I didn't think the UI was that bad. Not exactly elegant, but it seems to be very contextual, fading in and out as needed, and is actually quite a bit less obtrusive than the UI in Xenoblade. The most obfuscative thing in there, really, is the hit numbers. Which... I guess you could probably do in a more discreet way, but "beating the numbers out of something" has kind of become a visual motif a lot of people sorta dig. Though the map and the player health bars should probably be in the bottom right and bottom left corners, with that camera perspective. As for the character barks, yeeaaah. It just kind of comes with the territory, you know.

It is definitely very strange, after promising GBA games on the 3DS VC for so long, that they're going to do it on the Wii U's VC instead. I guess those ambassador games are just going to stay as weird, random exclusives. As for downloads of DS games, that's also a good question, since the 3DS is hardware compatible with DS releases and the 3DS eShop already sells downloadable games from the DSi's own store. Instead, Nintendo has been talking about selling DS games, again, on Wii U's VC. So yeah, Nintendo does a lot of things that don't make a lot of sense. You'd almost think that Nintendo has deluded themselves into thinking that those will be huge selling points for the Wii U. Hell, and i'm kind of terrified by how much Nintendo's diving into digital business before any of their patently obvious infrastructure problems are sorted. I mean, the new account infrastructure is largely cosmetic. Underneath it, nothing has changed, your purchases still tie into hardware exclusively. So if you don't, yourself, run that license transfer app, don't expect to keep anything. Don't even expect to keep your account, apparently, because i've been told multiple stories stating that it can't be untethered and affixed to a new system outside of the aformentioned transfer process. Even if you replace your hardware through the manufacturer warranty! This is a terrifying prospect for anybody who ends up buying a lot of stuff digitally on Nintendo platforms. (Nintendo's support solution seems to be create a facsimile of your old account and purchase library for you, or to refund your purchases. So even in that best case scenario, your save games are still fucked.) Nevermind that Virtual Console also completely needs to become a more unified service if Nintendo wants it to continue to exist. Even if there was some weird subscription i could pay to just have unlimited access to everything in there? Like a netflix? That would be incredible. Failing that, how about the things i paid for just work in the different emulation packages Nintendo has for each platform? How about they also stop being so weirdly stingy with releases? Nobody wants Urban Champion Nintendo, stop trying to slowly force feed your early catalogue, you're only hurting your own business.

From the Nintendo Direct today, more footage of Monolith's tentatively named "X". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_wnLmYn5IE (Huge Succeeded!) The battle system is definitely Xenoblade's, but with multiplayer and giant robots. All of those things sound good to me. I think it looks fantastic, but i can't help but expect that it will be doomed to obscurity with the way the Wii U is going, and Monolith already got kinda screwed over how Xenoblade was released. (In that it was just barely so and two years late.)

I am sad now.

I guess i don't know all what was in there, but i thought looked totally amazing.

That boss fight looked very dull, but everything else looked pretty alright. Looks way better than Capcom's Deep Down, another one of the imitative Dark Souls clones on the way.

I totally played C&C: Renegade online way back when. The solo game was trash, it really was, but the multiplayer was colossally underappreciated. It was great having a team working together to grease the operations of a C&C base. You had people running around keeping the power and the defenses up and running, making sure the harvester does its runs without being harassed or destroyed, and then spending their partition of the team's currency pool on vehicles and player classes. I've been following this fan remake with a curious eye for a while. I don't know if it's a game i want to go back and play more of, but i think it's cool that they're doing it.

IS Hawken good? How did it turn out? All i've heard about it, really, is that it's now coming to Steam. Apparently trying to build their own user base out in the wilds of the internet didn't work out.

That was also in Morrowind, they just didn't fix it. There's also that whole thing in those two games about how focusing on your selected major skills was actually a detriment to your character's growth. Skyrim didn't dumb down its mechanics, it pulled out a system that never worked right.

Skyrim's nothing compared to Morrowind, where you could brew a potion to fortify your intelligence, and then make a stronger fortify intelligence potion while under the effect of the first. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and then make whatever brokenly overpowered potions you can think of. (That would potentially last for hours!)

I'm still back and forth on whether this game is brilliant or kind of bullshit. (I'm leaning towards the former.) Either way, it has an awesome soundtrack. One of my favorite RPG's of the last decade, absolutely loved it.

I've definitely seen people do the same thing for western RPG's. Seen a lot of conversations about min-maxing TES games and stuff, that always makes me cringe. That's a set of systems that can crumble in a stiff breeze. It could definitely be argued that most RPG's require players to be in the right mindset.

Pfft, there's plenty of reasons you'd want dextrous manipulators and easily interchangeable weapons on your highly impractical giant bipedal robot.

"Normal Dad Simulator" is a suggested genre for me right now. Oh, Octodad.