Zeusthecat

I don't think anyone here is saying Nintendo is a failure as a hardware company but I also wouldn't go so far as to say that they are fantastically successful on that front either. I'm not trying to pass down my opinion as some infallible truth, it's just where my mind is at right now. It seems like I struck some kind of nerve with you and I'm sorry if what I'm saying offends you. Getting back to the point, I think Nintendo could definitely still be successful if they ditched their non-handheld hardware and stuck to just making games. It would be interesting to see how much money a company like Sony might pay to get exclusive rights to Nintendo franchises. I'd say it is pretty much a given that Nintendo fans (i.e. those that typically purchase Nintendo consoles) would purchase whatever system Nintendo's games might end up on and in addition, Nintendo would probably see increased sales from people buying their games who might not have otherwise. I guess the real question is, would the money they get for licensing their games plus the additional software sales from people who wouldn't normally buy Nintendo games be greater than the profits they typically make on their own hardware.

You're missing the point. I'm saying it is their games that sell their hardware and as far as I can tell nothing you've said shows otherwise. The 3DS is only selling so well now because Nintendo put out a ton of great games on it and it is a justifiable purchase (which it wasn't for a while and sold terribly).

Alright, sure. I'll concede that the handheld side is one area where their innovative hardware has given them a leg up in the past. Although I would say that isn't the case any more considering the DS and 3DS only started selling well once they had built up a good catalog of games. But on the console side I still don't buy it. I really don't think Nintendo's innovation in hardware is what sold more Super Nintendo's than Sega Genesis's. It was their catalog of awesome games. That is what always sold their consoles, up until the Wii at least. I am just very skeptical of them continuing to find success by putting out consoles running on old specs, adding some peripheral in the hopes that it will be the next fad, and still charging over $300 for it when competitor's hardware is many times more powerful, isn't much more expensive, and has the horsepower to support games being made by people other than Nintendo. If they do find success doing that it will be because of their games, not their hardware.

I'm definitely starting to question whether it makes sense for Nintendo to continue making hardware at this point or if they should just focus on making games. The main argument against the notion that they should stop bothering with hardware seems to be that they tailor their games to take advantage of the unique things their hardware has to offer. The argument seems to imply that their hardware is just as important to their games as their games are to their hardware. I'm starting to question whether this is actually true. Before the Wii came out, I would argue that outside of putting a joystick on a controller and introducing the rumble pack, most of their innovations were on the software side of things. It seems to me that the video games they created have always been the primary thing that drew people to Nintendo and their hardware didn't really do anything that much differently than their competitors. Then, around the time the DS and Wii came out, the focus seemed to shift more to implementing various gimmicks and peripheral devices to change the way games were played while the games themselves started to stagnate (with a few exceptions obviously). Since they couldn't really compete graphically I think that made sense at the time but I feel like we've reached a point now where the mentality of "let's change the way we play games" has subsided and people generally just want to use a controller to play a game on a screen like we've been doing for decades. I imagine what people want most is to see a game do something new, not do something new to play a game. The motion controls and second screens are nice but I think it is clear that none of those extraneous things really amounted to anything significant. So I don't really see any compelling reason why they can't offer the same experience or better on a competitor's hardware. I can't think of any Nintendo games that I've played in recent memory that would somehow be lacking if they were made for Xbox or Playstation. Shaking a remote in Mario Galaxy doesn't make it any funner than pressing a button, swinging a remote in Zelda doesn't make it any funner than pressing a button, and having information on a second screen can still be done on competitor's consoles. I'm sure there is a good argument for why it is important that Nintendo keeps making hardware but I don't think I've seen one compelling enough to convince me that they can really only accomplish the things they want on their own hardware.

Wow, that was a fascinating exchange. I think it's especially funny that he thinks you should "Try to improve the world" and implies that you could do that by including enough detail to be truly objective. This is an amazing joke inside of a joke. That's like someone being offended over someone making a joke site about unicorns because they didn't include enough factual information about unicorns.

Yeah, good job to everyone involved. This is definitely one of the best things the internet has produced.

I started trying to draw a spider riding a horse but I'm too terrified to bring that nightmare to life. And thank god there is not a single image of a spider riding a horse when you type it into Google so I guess we're safe for now. Also, I'm pretty sure they are also close to evolving gills so they can survive when you flush them down the toilet and climb back out to haunt you forever. Soon fire will be the only thing that can stop them.

That's only what they want you to think. Spiders are very Machiavellian and will tell you exactly what you want to hear to gain your trust. Meanwhile, they are secretly learning how to kill birds and snakes and will soon be big enough to eat/ride horses. HORSES GODDAMMIT!!

But they are eight-legged demons. Close enough in my book.

But does the anti-venom cure PTSD? Here's a little anecdote to illustrate the damage spiders have done to my brain: When I was a teenager, my dad lived in a run-down cabin on Mt. Lemmon (one of the mountains adjacent to Tucson, Arizona). My sister and I would stay with him every other weekend since he had partial custody and... **I think dredging up these memories is going to make me vomit**... there came a time each evening where we would need to sleep. We didn't have the luxury of beds or anything like that; instead we got the privilege of (not) sleeping on the floor. Once all the lights were off and we started trying to go to sleep, the fucking daddy long legs would come out to say hello. Even though they had an entire fucking mountain to prowl around, they decided that MY FUCKING FACE was the best place to hang out. The first time I woke up to a daddy long leg on my face was pretty fucking traumatic. By the tenth time it didn't even wake me up because sleep was a thing of the past. They took those nights from me. Nights that I'll never get back. All I could do each night was lay there, swatting my face every time I thought I felt the slightest touch. So now whenever I feel any slight touch my first thought is "spider". Fuck spiders, I hate them.

Everybody: Fuck spiders.

Yeah man, I'm right there with you. Instead of killing off whales and other endangered species, humanity needs to band together to fucking destroy every spider on the planet. If these eight-legged demons are taking out birds and snakes then they've made it way too far up the food chain and are clearly going to be targeting us next.

Jesus fucking christ, someone linked this in Kotaku comments: http://www.buzzfeed.com/simoncrerar/why-arachnophobes-should-skip-australia If I ever go to Australia I plan to only walk on stilts and I will only poop in clear, ziploc bags. And I'll just skip the toilet paper part entirely.

I generally like lore in video games. Good or bad I tend to enjoy it because it makes makes me feel like there is more to the world I am in than what I see based on my interactions. Some people don't like lore and that's fine too.

I methodically go through every bold forum topic each morning when I get into work and after I've cleared it all, I stay on the main screen and check back frequently to attack any other bold topics as they come up. I've gotten a little too OCD about it.

I did read the signs a couple times while I was stuck but I don't recall exactly what they said. Hopefully I catch the reference later on.

I haven't played this too much over the last week but I did make a bit more progress the other day. When I last left off, I had just been barfed out by a snake and was stuck in some quicksand. There was a vine just out of my reach and a few other plants nearby and, luckily, I was able to grab a reed and a thorn to make a simple blowgun (I think I also picked up the reservation ticket I needed here). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to use the blowgun to knock the vine free but Guybrush did offer a hint that I would need to drop something on it from above to accomplish my goal. I was able to figure out what to do from there pretty quickly because I had previously used the paperweight with the balloon and saw that the balloon would just float next to me after doing so. So I gave it a shot and once the balloon was floating above the vine I was able to shoot it with the blowgun to cause the paperweight to fall down and knock the vine free which I was able to use to pull myself to safety. After pulling myself free from the quicksand, I finally found myself in Danjer Cove. I explored around a little bit here but there wasn't much more than a boat with a hole near the water's edge, a waterfall, some sharks, and a pirate ship out in the water. When I realized that there was nothing I could do here yet I decided to head back to the town. Now that I had the reservation slip, I decided to go back to the restaurant to see what I could find there. After giving my reservation slip to the restaurant guy and talking to him for a bit, I gleaned two key pieces of information. First, he made it clear that I would need to find something crunchy for him to eat. He seemed interested in the gum I had but wanted something crunchy first so I'm guessing after I find what he's looking for, I might be able to give him the gum which I hope his gold tooth will get stuck to and then I can give that to the third barber since he wants something made of gold. The second piece of information he divulged was that he had a membership card to the beach place that he lost when he was cooking something. So I will definitely need to find that membership card to gain access to that beach cabana area. After talking to the restaurant guy, I scoured the room and was able to find a serrated knife in that Grim Fandango guy's back. I also found a biscuit cutter, a pie tin, and a biscuit which spawned some maggots in my inventory after I tried to eat it. Up until this point I had been looking for some kind of saw in the hopes that I could use it to cut down one of the rubber trees to rig the caber toss, so I figured it was worth a shot to try using the serrated knife instead. Unfortunately it didn't work, but through a stroke of luck I also tried using it on the thing holding the rum barrel (I'm drawing a blank on what that damn thing is called) which caused the barrel to fall down and roll right up next to the rubber tree leaving a trail of rum. It was obvious what I needed to do at this point so I lit the trail with the ember I had in my inventory and exploded the tree right onto the pile of logs. Finally, I challenged the big barber again and defeated him in the caber toss which convinced him to join my crew. And that's about the extent of my progress. So now I'm basically just trying to locate that membership card and find something crunchy for the restaurant dude.

All this Nintendo news is kind of giving me indigestion. I hope they have some additional super secret awesome plans because the only thing of any substance that they announced was putting DS games on the WiiU. It's great that they are aware of the situation with the WiiU but the other steps they are taking to make it more appealing seem pretty inconsequential and pretty much sounds like the same stuff they've been saying for the last year. And the other stuff they announced just further cements the notion in my head that they are moving in a direction I have no interest in. I really want the WiiU to pull a 3DS but my skepticism is at an all time high right now.

Sad to hear. My experience is quite the opposite. I'm about 80 hours in and 95% complete. Just working on getting all the collectibles at this point and I'm finding even that part surprisingly fun.

And then tell them that we still never got flying cars and we're still using microwaves for our food. Man the future sure turned out different than I expected.

No worries man. We're just having some polite discourse.

So is plasma going away in the near future? I keep hearing things that indicate that might be the case but I refuse to believe it. Plasma for life.

Can we replace the term "thread necromancy" with "dead thread redemption"? All in favor, say "fuck you".

That is much better said than my drawn out response. Thanks.

Okay, fair points. I agree that there are some instances where you may not know you need to apologize. Those are typically honest mistakes though. This guy clearly knew what he did was wrong though, especially considering the fact that one of his responses was so graphic that they had to blur it out. As far as your other point, I think a 'why' is only appropriate if it provides direct context to what was said or done. In this case he gave a 'why' that comes across more as an attempt to justify what he said. The 'why' in this case should have been because he was drunk and horny and had no sense of self control, not because he is an alcoholic and his brother died.