Sno

That might create some sadness, since Super Mario 3D World is going to be a Wii U game.

"Super Mario 3DS World" You made a mistake in the title of the topic. Edit: Sure, you can go and fix it, but it's still immortalized for all time in this reply.

That unified account thing sounds super sketchy, expect bullshit. At most, it's a unified wallet, not unified licenses. Nintendo's taking those baby steps. Also, ALBW and Bravely Default both continue to look awesome.

I've been watching the kickstarter take pretty much daily, and i've been real on edge about its progress. It seems like it might come down to a real, real narrow finish. I'm confident it'll make it, but oh my god, for a kickstarter i want to see succeed so badly, it's scary how close it's coming. Maybe it'll pull a MN9 and make half a million in the last twelve hours.

The thing about being able to save sets of crew positions so you can restore your guys to their stations with a single hotkey is a detail i find far more thrilling than i probably should.

Awesome!

Props to Tegan for the amusing logo. So i guess we're doing this, huh? The first Idle Forums Game Club came crashing down screaming and on fire, so having learned nothing about our failure, let's try again! I guess we're doing Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico and Fumito Ueda's famed Ico sequel. (prequel?) Shadow of the Colossus is another game that defies easy explanation, trying to pin it down with an existing genre label can be highly misleading. Superficially it shares a lot of common traits with action adventure games such as The Legend of Zelda, but the focus is entirely different. The open-ended world is just context for a series of enormous boss battles that incorporate the kind of climbing mechanics normally reserved for traversing a dungeon. The dynamic is an incredibly interesting one, scrambling across an immense monster that wants very much to shake you off, seeing horizontal paths suitable for running across shift into sheer walls to climb as the beast underfoot struggles against you. It's a thrilling and original game with phenomenal art direction, a wonderful soundtrack, and a memorably ambiguous narrative. Beyond that, I suspect there are probably a few people here who are more familiar with Team Ico and their games than i am, so maybe i'll just leave the trivia bombs up to them? There are two versions of the game, the PS3's HD re-release and the PS2 original. The HD re-release is by all accounts the way to play the game, offering a smooth framerate and a widescreen perspective. For the PS2 version, there are apparently some slight differences between the North American release and the European release, but they sounded fairly inconsequential. Myself, i do not own a PS3, so i will be playing the North American PS2 version. (I kept telling myself that i would buy a PS3 for Last Guardian...) I don't know if i still have my saves, but if i do, i'll probably play through on hard. As for the schedule, the plan apparently is to try and conquer one colossi every two weeks. With sixteen of them in the game, that would make this a pretty lax eight month endeavor. Interested individuals should make a post here and we'll talk about a start date. As an aside - Killer 7 is still a pretty rad thing you should totally play. Most of the conversation that happened in there was gameplay centric since we lost momentum just before the game goes off the rails in the best possible way, so i would encourage people to check that game out and keep the thread going. There is discussion yet to be mined concerning that game. It's on! Be careful with spoilers, try not to get ahead, and read the latest posts to see which colossi we're on. Old plan was too slow, new plan is to do one a week.

I mean, Recca went up on the 3DS VC with virtually no explanation when it's an incredibly rare piece of famicom history, a small technical marvel with tons of hidden secrets and a totally fascinating story behind it. That kind of thing was repeated over and over on the Wii VC. Hardcore types might know what's up, but casual eShop browsers are sure to just glaze over such an unfamiliar thing.

I kind of wish they'd provide a little context for the games they're selling on Virtual Console. At the bare minimum, a simple history of the product and its impact would be nice, and at the extreme, Nintendo's probably in a position to obtain a lot of new information about these things from long-standing industry contacts. I mean, yeah, it would be kind of self-serving for Nintendo to tell you about how important a game was while trying to sell it to you, but why should that stop them from doing it? I mean, it's exactly why they should do it.

Old-school Sim City definitely pushed a very green worldview, it's like a systemized lesson in protecting the environment from your growing city. Now Sim City pushes a worldview of consumption = happiness.

You can transfer VC purchases from a Wii to a Wii U. (Where they'll run in the backwards compatible mode of the Wii U, and if you want to upgrade, you'll apparently also be offered a steeply discounted price whenever/if an updated Wii U-native emulation package becomes available for that VC game.) The hardware-tied purchases is an incredibly obnoxious detail to navigate around, but Nintendo has given you paths for transferring content between systems. As for things being removed from the store, and about whether or not that stuff will still "belong" to you in ten years, i don't know. That's the big question for all of these digital services, we just don't know.

The 3DS VC is in a real weird place right now. It seemed like the plan was to focus on emulating old handhelds, but along the way they appeared to realize that nobody was buying those, and so they're doing NES stuff too now. On the Wii, the additions to the library started getting really interesting after the first couple years of its existence, they started getting into much rarer and less well known games, things that really deserved the attention. The emulation is rock solid too, though fairly featureless, but the former is more important than the latter.

Or more dynamic, mutable environments. I'd really like to see game design get past the kind of "look, but don't touch" thing.

If the control is an issue, DR2 controls much better, i just find its environments and quests to be a little less interesting. (Quests is the right term here, i think, because Dead Rising is really an RPG in disguise.) Also, DR1 had the camera.

I will argue that there is an incredible wealth of amazing games on Virtual Console. It was a slow drip feed, but it got there, and it's now offering up a huge chunk of gaming history. It's terrible at a service level though, unquestionably.

I'd consider myself a pretty big fan of the first two Dead Rising games, i think the first one is probably actually one of my favorite games of the entire last console generation, but DR3 being rid of the Groundhog Day-like structure and the clock has made me far, far less interested in it. They've somehow omitted the most defining attributes of the previous games. I loved the way the clock could force you to make choices about abandoning a line of questing or even people in tow because pursuing those objectives was putting other things at stake by eating up too much of your time, or the way the ticking clock compelled you to wade through those hordes of zombies instead of carefully and slowly skirting around them, and also the way it played into this loop of... Just flailing horribly the first time you play, everybody's getting killed, you're missing all the deadlines, you get a horrible ending. You start over, your character progression is intact and you've learned a lot about the quest flow and the environments, you try again and do a little better and get a different ending. You keep doing this until you can save everybody and get the true ending. It feels like they don't understand what Dead RIsing was, because when they're trying to quell concerns about 3, they just keep going on about how you can still dress the protagonist up in stupid outfits. I understand there's still going to be a clock in some manner of ultra-difficult hardcore mode, but relegating it to the status of an unlockable ensures that it won't be as refined as the implementation in the first two games, and supposedly tying it up to the game's highest difficulty mode isn't right either.

Count me among the people who started listening to Idle Thumbs after GFW ended, heh.

Watch this move confuse the market even more about what the Wii U actually is.

I'm almost positive there was always a text log.

Dead Space does not have tank controls. You are not a rotating turret with no strafing capability, you have a free range of movement. It practically feels like playing Gears of War, it's more responsive even. (If you were playing the PC version, i suppose you were probably trying to play with mouse and keyboard, which i've heard was very sluggish and badly implemented.) Also, in my opinion, the bit with the unkillable enemy is completely one of the best parts of the game, it's the only part that's genuinely scary. You're presented with an enemy that you have to slow down by taking advantage of the game's unique mechanics, repeatedly removing its regenerating limbs to slow it down and buy yourself time, trying to manage your ammo against how much time you think you need. You're hunting for exits to flee through, solving problems that stand in your way, and ultimately trying and find a way to kill it, all while it's pursuing you relentlessly. It is a very Resident Evil-esque moment, but it was awesome. I also feel a non-pausing inventory is a completely valid design choice, and it's something many games do. More than contributing to tension, it enforces the player remaining conscious of their surroundings, and disallows broad and exploitative supply management in the middle of a fight.

So this is clearly a think-of-the-children move, but if kids are exchanging inappropriate material over the internet with inappropriate recipients/senders, they already had to have been in contact with them on the internet or in person to exchange friend codes in the first place. (Given that friend codes have to be a mutual exchange, this doesn't allow for a scenario where people are being harassed out of the blue.) So i don't know what this move accomplishes other than inconveniencing people who had a lot of fun sharing stupid sketches over swapnote. Well, no, it's obvious what it accomplishes. It lets Nintendo save face in the event that some local or major news outlet decides to run with the "PEDOPHILES ARE PREYING ON YOUR CHILDREN USING NINTENDO" headline. That's what this is about.

I cannot express in words the exasperated sigh this elicits from me.

The eShop store sometimes locks up on me after viewing my wishlist, but that's the only issue i've ever had with any of the 3DS's core OS functionality.

I think the first Dead Space is a phenomenal action game, it's pretty to look at and has some really solid, interesting game mechanics. So i do love it quite a lot, but i definitely don't think it's a very effective horror game. (Its enemies are very predictable, your weapons are incredibly powerful, but it expects you to be afraid because jump scares and gore.) I'm not as big a fan of 2, it's much more scripted and linear and does far fewer interesting things with its mechanics. (Also, for the record, 3 is a pile of wretched garbage.) Well, the thing is, i think it's the Riddick games that i would compare the feel of Condemned's combat to, so you might find that aspect of the game somewhat disappointing. I really love Condemned though, i would still recommend it, even with that noted concern.