JonCole

Open-world Zelda with laser octoroks and laser-tipped arrows? #zeldaskyrim? Nintendo wins, hands-down. I will almost certainly sooner buy a Wii U than either of the now-gen consoles.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/10/5796862/nintendo-gamecube-controller-bundle-coming-this-holiday-season SSB Wii U + SSB-branded GC controller + controller hub - $99 GC Controller - $29 Hub - $19 The hub is appropriately priced, but I can't help but feel the GC controller is priced a little steeply. Paying $130 to guarantee a good SSB 2-player experience is a bit wild.

Oh, I didn't even closely read the OP. Peeing in the shower while not taking a shower is much more gross. Taking a shower and doing it is what makes it acceptable and not gross, since it all just goes away.

I wish there was a way to share eShop games between multiple consoles. I used to be super jazzed about eShop, but now that my wife has her own 3DS I plan on buying all my retail 3DS games on cart so she can play them too. Might check out some of those virtual console games... is there any way to buy Wii U eShop games without a Wii U? I don't think there is, but I figured I'd ask anyways.

You make a fine point and I think that my issue with Prime would have been minimized had I played it soon after release, but I picked up a GC late in the cycle so dual-analog was further cemented as the standard and Prime felt an exception at that point. I also believe you're right about free-aiming in the motion controlled re-release, though the game wasn't really altered in any way to make the free-aim more or less useful. Really, my issue with the Wii version was not the control configuration, but more that it used motion control at all. In essence, my ideal Wii remake would have had a choice between motion controls and a remapped GC layout to the Wii Classic Controller with free aim on the right stick. I'd just like to restate that I'm not attempting to make any objective judgment on how the game controls, I'm just saying that my familiarity with dual-analog made Prime more unwieldy than it probably would have felt without that preconception. Similarly, I had a hard time getting used to Resident Evil 4 after having played Gears of War on 360, despite the fact that RE4 had the lead on it by a fair margin. Maybe RE4 is just more my kind of game, but I managed to beat it on GC nonetheless while I only got 5-6 hours into Prime before just deciding I wasn't having all the fun in the world with it.

Peeing in the shower is gross proportionate to how well your shower drains. My shower doesn't allow any water to pool around my feet, so I'm 100% okay with it in my own shower. My family has thick Asian female hair, so the practice is far less appealing in their oft-clogged showers.

SAM, I find it interesting that you define dual-analog more of a genre than a control method. It strikes me as similar to the arguments that Resident Evil better accomplishes its survival-horror goals by having an unconventional third-person shooter control scheme. I never found that argument particularly compelling, but the parallel is thought-provoking. I don't see why dual-analog as a control scheme would automatically have gameplay implications on how Prime works. Halo is actually an interesting example, because I can see the argument that Halo 4 (and to lesser extents, 3 and Reach) is very similar to modern FPS games in terms of the number of enemies, the aiming, the powers that speed up encounters, etc. But Halo 1 and 2 have a much more deliberate pace that really doesn't seem all that different from Prime, in my opinion. Most weapons don't have ADS and the number of enemies on screen at any given time except in large arenas can typically be counted on one hand.

I think I have a pretty irregular taste for FPS console games with respect to most of the Thumbs community, I eat up practically every mainstream FPS because it's just comfort food for me. I usually play every COD for 6 months post-release and prestige like 5+ times. I play every Halo on launch day. I rent 10-hour B-quality FPS games because I know I can just tear through them in a day or two. So, having an FPS with a non-standard console control scheme was weirdly stressful for me.

I really couldn't enjoy Metroid Prime too much because the controls (both the original GC and the updated Wii) were too problematic. Honestly, if you're making a FPS on console I just want dual-analog. I can theoretically appreciate being limited by the GC's controller scheme and proficient adaptation to motion controls, but I expect a degree of control comfort while playing FPS games and grappling with that stuff was just too damaging to my overall experience to love Prime. For this same reason, I had trouble enjoying Zelda on Wii because I had become accustomed to the relatively consistent control scheme on N64/GC. Games with less complex controls were much more easily enjoyable for me on Wii, like the Mario platformers. Also, I've just wanted a standard SNES/GBA 2D Metroid game for so long that any game not delivering that in recent memory has just been tainted by that desire. Both complaints are not really criticisms of Prime as much as they are personal barriers to enjoyment, but it's hard for me to fully appreciate the game in a critical sense when pervasive nagging issues are in my way.

Since the original TIME story has been pulled - http://mynintendonews.com/2014/06/10/time-leaks-three-miyamoto-projects-including-star-fox-wii-u/

Is online multiplayer something people actually want in Mario Kart? Vs COM or local multi races has always seemed the modes that I personally and my friends anecdotally ever were interested in. Are huge sales for Mario Kart not a foregone conclusion? It has been and seemingly always will be a must-own for Nintendo platforms. I own Mario Kart Wii even though I think it's bad because I know every now and then someone may want to play it. I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just don't see "first entry where the online really worked" as a particularly profound achievement.

I want all my games to come on 3+ Blu-Rays each.

Mario Kart Wii was garbage.

That felt good the first three times or so I did it. But I also live in Florida, where lawn mowing seems like purgatory.

Well, maybe I'm a closet objectivist but I enjoyed it. I guess if you're a fellow American and love Ron Paul read it in my new "Capitalism Fuck Yeah" Book Club.

What's actually funny is that I don't really care as much about the hardware as a do the software and the reversing the lack of vigor in releasing virtual console games would make me consider the Wii U a must-own gaming device. But man is that a well worn argument by now, I've been making it since the Wii came out.

It's worth noting that you are welcome to stop playing whenever you want, so there is no forced interruption "in the middle of something when the game locks you out". Adventures are capped at 200, so if you find yourself finishing up a quest with 50-something adventures leftover, you can absolutely stop playing for the day if you dread the anxiety of leaving things half-finished. There are also items that allow you to boost your adventures like food and booze, so if you find yourself needing just that little boost to finish a quest you can decide to buy a nice expensive food item in the Market and squeak through. Not only that, but the downtime when you have no adventures is the perfect time to trade and craft items. Back in the day, I'd also mess around in /games chat and play people's trivia games and whatnot to get some decent rewards. I think complaints about adventures contributing to an "energy system" that negatively affects what you can do in the game are fairly unfounded. Most quests in the early game take fairly few adventures to complete. It's not until level 10-ish that quests can take multiple days if you don't know what you're doing.

The thing that stands out most in my mind is how waiters treat you. I'm deeply introverted, so adapting to US etiquette seems to have taken my whole lifetime to get adjusted to. Here, waiters generally want to do everything for you. They refill your water if your glass is a third-empty, they check if your food tastes good two minutes after it is served, and they check every five minutes or so thereafter if you need anything. When 75% of your party is done eating their entrees, they're prepared to bring the check to the table and may ask if you want dessert before presenting it. So, I'm conditioned to expect these things and any disruption of this is sure to cause me stress. My wife tells me that generally, you have to ask for things from waiters rather than expect them to anticipate your needs or ask you incessantly if you need anything. While this might be a minor disruption to my ingrained social behavior if it was just me and my wife, having my family around makes this situation about ten times more stressful. Without delving into the history of my family, my dad is offensively assertive and my mom and sister are both want to have specific needs while eating that go unvoiced and subsequently complain when the food isn't to their liking. I hate these things, but I can only imagine hating them more with the added stress of different dining etiquette. Hell, I even hated it when my family went to Canada, where the etiquette is generally the same but in my limited experience I noticed that Canadians were slightly more lax in what would otherwise be a science of customer pestering that I've become comfortable with. This is ultimately a small issue, but I spend my life trying to avoid situations like this because I'd rather go it alone and internalize issues I have out of the view of anyone else. If I can encourage my party to go to non-seated establishments, I'll generally be a happier dude.

Honestly, I'm probably just going to buy a ton of cured meat (pitiful in the US), unpasteurized cheese (practically non-existent in the US) and bread at a grocery store and make that like 80% of my meals. My wife tells me that dining standards are fairly different in Paris than in the United States, and I'd rather avoid those situations as much as possible. So it'll be DIY food or street vendors for the most part this trip. I'm a planner, but spreadsheets of places to eat at specific times on specific days is far too much for me. My dad usually does stuff like that, and we end up going to really popular cheap places that everyone and their mother knows about so we have to wait forever or service suffers because of the wildly disproportionate number of tourists around.

My family* is paying for the trip so I have no kicking-out privileges! *parents

Picky eater in the sense that she doesn't like to try new things and McDonald's is a familiar taste.

If it's a real apology, they'll sell it at cost. If this thing is $30, I don't buy that apology.

Wizard's First Rule doesn't get into that preachy stuff at all, it isn't until maybe the fifth or sixth in the series when it delves into that stuff. The first book, like many in series like this, can be read as a complete without needing to go beyond it if you're concerned. And calling it "anti-communist" may be true, but Goodkind's message is slightly more nuanced than something so blunt as damning a socioeconomic system completely.

Sorry, but McDo is almost certainly in my future. My sister is a picky eater and we'll undoubtedly find ourselves there at least once for the sake of convenience. I had a Canada-only lobster roll at McDonalds while I was in Nova Scotia last year, I'll likely find whatever France-specific menu item exists there and give it a go so I'm at least not buying literally the same exact thing as what exists in the US. I think they have a couple of croute/baguette-style sandwiches that I could try out instead of a Big Mac. If I'm lucky my wife and I can run off a couple times and possibly skip dumb meals like that.