Sno

I don't think you really did, at least not in the manner that i wished to.

Well then, it's been ten years since the last F-Zero, and GX remains one of my favorite games, so i'd be pretty thrilled to see more of that in Nintendo's future. I dunno, this whole bit: Feels super weird to me. Why, exactly, would the gender or orientation of the character necessarily have any impact on the gameplay at all? (Unless you're pushing gender stereotypes, which actually happened with Princess Peach's DS game.)

Speaking of Miyamoto, i just read this earlier today. It left me feeling very confused.

Was... there an actual story here? Is there a source for the statement made by the topic, ignoring the typo?

This looks really, really cool.

Mass Effect got to be just absolutely awful with the "I am on this non-combat, discussion-focused quest, but this room i just walked into has a ton of convenient waist-height cover points." I'm somewhat of the mind that these elements aren't actually always negative though, at least in the context of when they aren't spoiling plot elements. An upcoming arena battle should be obvious, it should be something you're allowed to spot and have a few minutes to prepare for.

I have played most of the Animal Crossing games, and while it's hard to make early judgements with these games, i think New Leaf shows some pretty clear signs of being probably the best game in its series. They've built in tons of weird new ways to interact with friends and expanded on the core systems and simulation in a lot of clearly beneficial ways. It's pretty good. Speaking just in general, i firmly believe that the 3DS is the most exciting platform for gaming this year. The new consoles are going to start slow, and everything else is kind of in that post-gen lull, but the 3DS is just killing it. There's too much cool stuff, it's fabulous.

In my last few days of messing around with the Club Tortimer matchmaking thing, I have been matched with one german and maybe a dozen japanese people. The game is certainly still very popular in Japan, heh. The tours are actually pretty fun if you take in full groups, and it also makes them just fly by really quickly, i've earned a ton of Club Tortimer points from this matchmaking mode. I also just got the event for the Dream Suite, so i'm building that, but fell short of funds to finish its construction. I'll try and get that finished soon though, i'll be able to upload a save state of my town for people to explore online at any time. (Each town uploaded to the Dream Suite server has a unique ID associated with it, so i'll share that when i get it set up. It's separate from the friend code system, you don't need to be friends with somebody to check out their town via the Dream Suite.)

I just opened my gate, and i'll probably leave it open for an hour or two.

Putting aside that digital media is only a wonderful convenience if you have an excellent and reliable internet connection, the matter i would find more present and concerning is one of control, in that you have virtually no power when dealing with these content providers. You are beholden to their services, their servers, their licensing deals. There are still so many digital services that do not allow you to trade or even keep your product as you may please, you essentially have no ownership of the thing you've paid for. You have access to it for only as long as they allow, with whatever further restrictions they may apply. Given how many major security issues many of these services have had over the last few years, i wouldn't actually argue that it's safer either.

Did you glance at that guide that was posted a few pages back? There are clear ways to spot the fakes.

For the museum shop, you apparently have to donate twenty items, at least one in each of the four categories. Then i think you have to wait a week, then you talk to blathers at night, then the museum upgrades are opened as a public works project. I've added you.

It sounds like he actually ends up being in the game more, though. There's supposedly a whole quest line about funding his anti-resetting operation. I don't think it's a huge issue, and i find it hilarious that Resetti was apparently making children cry, i've heard those stories too.

There is a part of this that really sucks, though. Digital games have always secretly been absolutely terrible for consumers, but the lending and resale options Microsoft was building into their system were potentially huge steps in the right direction, and now they're going to be gone, at least at launch. The digital side of the XBO is going to be worse off for these reactionary changes. (It's all back to the status quo now.)

Yeah, it's just a long-running in-joke with fans that Tom Nook is a loan shark. I remember seeing in an interview that Nintendo was explicitly trying to make him seem like less of one for this game.

The only thing out of the Wii U at E3 that looked really especially exciting to me was . That, and probably Smash, will be the things that sell me a Wii U. I thought Bayonetta 2 was looking really rough, i have a number of concerns with Pikmin 3, Wonderful 101 looks cute but does not sell me on the system, and Wind Waker HD has been confirmed to not reintegrate any of the cut content. (Allegedly those dungeons ended up in later Zelda games, probably Twilight.) Mario Kart 8 totally looks like another Mario Kart game, except when it looks like F-Zero and again surfaces the reality that i'm going to snap if they don't revisit F-Zero one of these years. Super Mario 3D World seems like a weird thing to me, it feels like Nintendo missing the point of their own game. 3D Land was a lesson in the value of the 3DS' stereoscopy. With that locked camera, you could not wiggle the perspective around to gauge distances, you had to trust the screen's sense of depth to make accurate jumps. Now they're putting the locked camera on a system without the stereoscopy and i've already heard a lot of people say that it's hard to make accurate jumps in that game. Not particularly excited about the Wii U, and now there's all this news of third parties dropping support for the thing. Rough seas ahead.

Okay, so the always-online restriction is gone, but so are the sharing/lending features? That was actually the bright spot in the XBO's online scheme, that was potentially very interesting. Do retail games still hook into player accounts? I've been talking with a bunch of people about the XBO over the last several days and we were all kind of warming up to the idea of what Microsoft was doing. Whether it was ultimately going to be a positive thing or not, they were making a go of their all-digital future that they've been working towards for years. It was certainly starting to seem like, at the very least, the more interesting console. Sony's more or less just staying the course. Either way, looking through the exclusives, i think XBO is the way i'm going. Sony's first-party stuff just never appeals to me, while the Microsoft exclusives are, as a broad matter probably less interesting for most people, but to me personally, incredibly exciting. I mean, holy shit, they had a Swery game on stage at E3, that's insane. I also definitely want to play Crimson Dragon, especially now that they're implementing gamepad support as it should always have had. Other exciting things like Quantum Break and Titanfall are likely only timed exclusives, fair enough, but it's still going to take like a year to two years for those games to come out elsewhere. (Isn't this a positive thing? That Microsoft doesn't lock up games like Sony does?) (Remedy has been doing a terrible job pitching Quantum Break, but they're basically making an X-files/Fringe-inspired game, which already sounds amazing, that's exactly the kind of subject matter they should tackle. The actual gameplay is apparently some manner of squad-based time-manipulation hijinx. It's also episodic, but not as a business model, it's apparently setup exactly like Alan Wake, just with live-action cutscenes.)

I just put a functioning gameshow wheel into my house, it's pretty awesome. One of my villagers also walked up to me in the middle of the pitch black night and offered to sell me a skeleton, so of course i accepted the offer. It's weird having a human skeleton of normal proportions sharing house space with my football-headed Animal Crossing person. You kind of just have to bully them until they leave. Accept and then ignore jobs they ask you to do, or harass them with pitfalls. (Place them in front of their home's door to avoid collateral damage.) You can also just whack them a bunch with the net. (Hold A so you start sneaking around with the net ready, that way you can bypass the contextual shift to the talk command.) No matter what, it'll take a few days. I've also just learned that the eldest of the Able sisters apparently gives you a QR reader in New Leaf, for trading designs, but you have to get her to warm up to you first. (Same process as previous games, just keep talking to her day after day until she gradually starts chatting back.) ALSO - I really just don't like Blathers in this game, which bums me out, because he was probably my favorite character in the previous games. He's always been a very verbose hurdle when you're just trying to keep on top of your museum donations, but he used to have just tons and tons of unique dialogue that at least made it an entertaining process. Now he just repeats the same few lengthy lines over and over.

I've been seeing a lot of reports of the new firmware update causing problems for people, so maybe be wary of that update until there's a clearer picture of what's going on. (The 3DS will try to pull down firmware updates automatically if it is allowed to talk with an open or authorized wi-fi point, so be careful about that if you want to hold off a bit for safety's sake.)

Some of the things Nintendo was saying about Pikmin 3 earlier on just absolutely murdered my anticipation for this game. Namely the control being modeled after the original Gamecube game with no effort to take advantage of what the new controller might allow them to do*, and the purported lack of online support for its allegedly expanded multiplayer suite. (* = Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but i think there are pretty big gaps between what the two Pikmin games allow you to do and what you actually kind of need to be able to do. I feel like a touchscreen would really help out in many regards, but Nintendo has generally seemed to express no interest in taking advantage of the tablet's features.) So somebody tell me, has their tune changed more recently? Beyond that, it just sounds so much like Pikmin 2, and i actually think the first game was a more playable, interesting game in some regards. So yeah, i think Pikmin 2 is a tiny bit overrated. Everybody probably hates me now.

That link Tanu just posted about the art pieces makes want to bang my head against a wall. That is so subtle and clever, i hate myself for not picking up on those details. Continuing on with neat, weird things: I was reading a thing about tree stumps causing mushrooms to grow around them. I believe it goes that when you cut down a tree, if the tree ring is a pattern anything other than the expected bullseye, leave the stump in place and mushrooms will eventually start growing around it. As for the mini-game challenges accessible from the island, one of the things i took away from them is that you get to keep any non-objective things you collect during them, and the randomly generated spaces are usually filled with rare stuff. Seems like you're trying to balance actually completing the objective against filling your pockets with stuff. Has anybody unlocked the club membership yet? What does it do? As for my town, i've upgraded my house twice and started work on a bridge to offer another way across the exceptionally circuitious and obstructive river winding through my village. Leif's shop also opened up on my main street, but most of the empty spaces remain empty. I need tables for my house, nobody is selling any tables.

Things like that considered, i'm finding it increasingly weird that there is no player character skin color other than white, i've personally seen a few people be quite perturbed by this.

So it turns out Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was the Citizen Kane of Video games all along.

Hang on, no. No, you don't. Stop making this horrible for yourself. Hotkeys. Left and right on the d-pad cycle through your tools, pressing down on the d-pad unequips stuff. Those are the hotkeys i'm talking about, they don't make you fumble with the inventory like that anymore. The rest of these things are pretty reasonable complaints. Also, and it's going to sound like bullshit, but you kind of really can't know what this game even is with only two hours into it, because it's designed in such a way that it will continually trickle out new locations and events over the course of months. You start out with only a tiny fraction of the total game available and with no legitimate way of wringing it out at your own pace. If it starts feeling tedious, it's time to put it away for the time being and check back in during the next day. Animal Crossing is weird though, it's pretty weird. Apparently New Leaf tracks the steps of all the players in a town, so over time the grass will start to die along trampled paths and grow denser where there are flowers. Animal Crossing is secretly that kind of weird. It's constantly surprising and strange in new and interesting ways.

As somebody who has followed the series along, i'm having a hard time being particularly angry about any of the shortcomings of New Leaf's UI. They're small issues, relative to the significant, frustrating grievances i've had with previous games in the series. (HOTKEYS! THANK GOD THERE ARE HOTKEYS.) Still, there are certainly things in New Leaf that still really bug me though, like that fruit not automatically stacking, or Porter asking me twice in a row if i REALLY want to connect to the internet. That other comment there though, that you don't see why people are jazzed about New Leaf, can you elaborate? That feels like a topic in itself, separate from the UI issues.