Sno

Failed again!

That imploded rather quickly. I haven't done that mode before, i think i understand it now though. Clear rooms for extra time as you work towards the exit.

SO THAT'S THAT. Do we want to try one of the other modes as well? I think the polterpup mode is fun.

Just in case it's not immediately evident: Pay attention to the map. There's a lot of information you need displayed there. Black doors are fake, green doors are open, red doors need a key. Dark rooms having something hidden in them.

I'm available right now too, so let's go.

5-8 eastern would be... 2-5 pacific, and that would work out great for me. So yeah, i can do tomorrow. I've also added Toblix, and see that Mike hasn't confirmed me yet.

Sometime this weekend fine? I'll leave greater specificity to others, i think i'll probably be good for whenever.

Yeah, there is. The scarescraper option on the menu. Randomized levels, four player co-op, and different modes with different objectives. It is surprisingly well put together, quite a lot of fun.

I'd be up for it. Edit: I just added Mike and Teg, my own code is... this.

Rather conveniently, Nano Assault EX just went on sale. (Alongside a few other things like Pushmo and Tokyo Crash Mobs.) The Guild 01 stuff will also apparently remain on sale for another week. Edit: Just confirmed it myself. The list of deals hasn't been updated yet, but the things that should be on it do have a reduced price. (NA:EX is 10 bucks instead of 15.)

Fair enough, i can't really argue against what you're saying. (In fact, i ended up predominantly as a 360 gamer this generation with your argued point as one of the reasons for it. My PC is a piece of shit.) I feel the second part of the quoted response, the paragraph you didn't include, is still valid.

Well, it obviously wasn't selling at 300 dollars when it was available in stores. It shipped in stupidly small quantities while simultaneously being a critical darling, and so things kind of spun out of control on the resale market. It actually makes me a bit crazy, because i wish it was a game i could reasonably tell people to go check out. (Looking into it again, it looks like things have settled down, but people are still asking pretty crazy prices for US copies.) The point i was making is just that Nintendo is, and always has been, doing a lot of cool and unexpected things off on the side. You just kind of have to be paying attention to notice it, because those games tend to come and go via pretty limited production runs without much notice. Yeah, it kind of sucks. At least with Nintendo embracing a digital business, there isn't going to be this crazy scarcity anymore. (FE:A also shipped in really limited quantities, but because it was on the eShop same day as its retail release, people still got to play it.) Definitely heard and understood, i was just trying to make my point in that prior post. What you're saying, it's a totally fair place to be coming from, and honestly, if you are limited by budget to choosing one platform? I wouldn't go with one of Nintendo's platforms. My feeling is that their consoles and handhelds are good secondary systems. You want them because Nintendo's games are awesome and because there's always going to be the random neat exclusive thing, but the inevitably slow drip-feed of new stuff is always going to be an insane bummer if it's all you're looking to. As to Nintendo "insulting" its audience, Nintendo definitely has some major message problems to work out. A lot of the things i see happening around the Wii U, the games they're announcing, the begrudging acceptance of an online ecosystem, their responsiveness to criticisms regarding the Wii U OS, the indie support they're trying to foster, these are mostly good moves. I think i see a company that is trying really hard to rebuild its relationship with core gamers. The marketing message is wildly inconsistent with that, it depicts a Nintendo that is hopelessly out of touch and fruitlessly trying to hang onto a broader audience that they've already lost because they weren't responsive to the disruption posed by smart devices. Combined with a cursory glance of their sales figures, it can seem real dire. Even so, allow them that shitty first year, i say. I think we'll have a clear picture of the Wii U's future after these holidays. I have no idea if it will be a successful system, i'm probably going to lean towards no on that question, but i do believe it will probably end up being a worthwhile system. On that front, i'm pretty hopeful. The 3DS kicks ass though, they're golden with that thing, i'm amazed that it's doing as well as it is.

I definitely actually have a pre-recall copy of Sim Copter that has this hidden nugget of absurdity. It's super weird.

Well, i could point out that PC versions of cross-platform games have pretty consistently been vastly superior to their console counterparts, but that doesn't stop 360 versions from just as consistently being the best selling versions of those games. (It is my understanding that even something like Battlefield 3 actually sold best on the 360, and there is a shocking discrepancy between the console and PC versions of that game.) I mean, and this whole argument only matters if Nintendo has third party support to begin with, which they probably don't. That new CoD game that was just announced? It's looking like it's probably not going to come out on the Wii U. (That's probably really bad for Nintendo, that might be as big as EA bailing on the Dreamcast, to further those parallels. I mean, it's not like people weren't playing CoD games on Nintendo consoles, allegedly those horrible Wii ports of CoD games were big business.) As for Stalkinghead's comments, I don't really want to get too into this angle on the conversation, because i'm afraid it's going to end up being me doing a lot of "YOUR OPINION IS WROOOOONG" like an asshole fanboy. To keep it short though, i'll disagree primarily about how "hardcore" is being used in this discussion. I don't think Nintendo sets out to make "casual" games or "hardcore" games, they deal primarily in games that have something to offer to players of all ages and skill levels, and they've always been that way. I'd also just advise just giving up on Nintendo's big franchises if you don't think they're doing anything interesting. (Agh! It kills me!) Mario is a big part of what Nintendo does, but that doesn't mean there's nothing else to look to in its absence. They're always doing a lot of cool things that tend to end up barely getting any attention outside of their most dedicated fans. They're kind of terrible at throwing support behind anything that hasn't already proven itself, it's a horrible bit of self-sabotage. I think people should play Fire Emblem: Awakening, it's the best thing i've played this year. I think people should have played Xenoblade, it was the best thing i played last year. (US copies are selling for like three hundred fucking dollars now, it's insane.)

How about i talk a bit about how i actually really don't like temporary power-up mechanics? As somebody who still plays 2D shooters, i've seen elaborate power-up systems create a huge disparity between the player's base abilities and the average difficulty the stages are balanced for, and it can make some of those games fucking impossible. Gradius is a series where dying once can completely ruin a good playthrough, you just have no reasonable chance at recovering quickly enough to escape the horrible death loop that follows. (In that series, only the Treasure-developed Gradius V averts this, and it does so by letting you reclaim your multiples/options after you die. It also happens to be one of my favorite shmups.)

I would totally play Geist 2.

As for how the tablet pertains to local same-system multiplayer, it's not really that interesting to me personally, i simply don't play games in that way anymore. (I strongly suspect I'm in the majority on this.) Beyond that, it's kind of a DS-like setup, it's not wildly unfamiliar ground. I don't doubt that there will be some really creative, interesting uses of it, but you're probably also going to see a whole lot of inventory and map screens. The gestures Nintendo has been making towards supporting indies that want to develop for the Wii U are potentially a much more interesting story to tell, but i don't think we've seen that bear any fruit yet, if it ever will.

Yeah, i already assumed you were referring to the in-game clock, that's still a very impressive time.

UNDOUBTEDLY. If you want to talk about broader public perception, Nintendo has a goddamned mountain to climb. For the N64 comparison, that thing was Nintendo entering into the modern Video game era with their first polygonal game console, riding a high from the SNES and what are still some of the best games ever seen on a Nintendo platform. The Wii U gets to follow in the wake of broken promises and the apathy that it fostered, never mind the fumbled marketing that had people thinking, for months, that there was no new console and that its tablet was just another Wii peripheral. The Wii U is in a pretty scary place, and i think we'll probably find out by the end of the year how much of a future it has. Given Nintendo's history, I'm pretty sure the Wii U is going to hang around for the duration, it's just a question of how much it will matter. With Nintendo's reoriented core-gamer focus, it's going to be in a tough spot against the new systems. I also don't think the 3DS would have turned around as dramatically as it has if the Vita had been a viable competitor, but Sony has fumbled that ball in a lot of pretty profound ways.

Whenever Factor 5's Kid Icarus game happens.

In Super? That's goddamned impressive if true, i hope you have a video of this.

I think there's actually some pretty exciting things on the horizon for the Wii U. I mean, what are some of the upcoming games Nintendo has for the system? Wonderful 101? Bayonetta 2? " "? Surely we're not going to go and claim that Pikmin has been done to death already.Don't get me wrong, you want Mario? Nintendo's got you fucking covered. You are going to see all of those old Nintendo franchises again. Just, on the broader view, i'm actually fairly optimistic about what the Wii U's output will eventually become, i just hope its potential market space doesn't vanish during the upcoming holidays. That whole blue ocean thing has collapsed, they got complacent and smartphones swooped in and ate that lunch. Nintendo is back to fighting for gamer dollars, whether they like it or not, and they're going to be in the unenviable position of being the Dreamcast of the upcoming console cycle. By many accounts, the GC was a beastly little thing, it was just scarcely ever really put to work, but things like RE4 were significantly downgraded in their PS2 ports. (I've seen some people argue that none of the subsequent versions look as good as the GC version, since they had to pull out and replace the original lighting model which had been coded specifically for the GC's hardware.)

It is if you sequence break.

I believe this is accurate, yeah. Significantly more powerful than the PS2, but just shy of the original X-box. The Gamecube ended up being in this really weird place where it was a terrifically powerful little piece of hardware, and nobody really knew or cared. It was really only Nintendo's own games that were pushing the hardware, things like Metroid Prime and Wind Waker and F-Zero GX. (Personally, i feel the GC saw some of Nintendo's very best games.) There were things happening on the GC that were arguably more advanced and more impressive than things happening on the X-box, but with no real support from any of the 3rd parties, they were really off in their own little pocket. It didn't make sense to continue trying to compete in that space. (Why exactly Nintendo gradually lost in the cross-platform arena and lost the support of so many 3rd parties is an entire topic of its own with many elements to consider, but it was a gradual decline that started as far back as the SNES.) It's then easy to see why Nintendo embraced that aforementioned "lateral thinking with withered technology" philosophy, something that served them very well for many years in the handheld space, for their declining home console business. For that first little while, at least, it sure seemed to be working out for the Wii. Nintendo didn't really seem to know what to do with its surprise success though, they became seemingly very indecisive. A lot of weird decisions and general inaction were shown during that thing's life. (There's also just the matter of the the Wii's motion control being kind of fundamentally broken. It was an experiment that didn't work out, but one whose results they had to live with. It's hard to ignore that many of the Wii's best games do not use the features the console was sold on.) Nintendo seems to be taking on a much more proactive stance lately, however. It's certainly working out on the 3DS front, but it's too early to pass any judgement on what the Wii U will become. (Really, every new console sucks for about a year. If that time passes and things haven't improved, then it's a lemon.)

Crackdown and Borderlands are both very incremental about their upgrade paths, which he specifically said he wasn't looking for. Assassin's Creed is just really subdued about it, it's not a very pronounced part of the game.