Kolzig

Nintendo 3DS

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Technically, we didn't have to pay for them, but they are meant to act as a balm for customers who otherwise would have felt really cheated by the incredible price plummet.

Nintendo said "pay us $250 and we'll give you a 3DS," and they held up their end of that bargain. Where does the cheating enter in? If you pay full price and then the price drops, sure it sucks, but you're not entitled to be compensated for every change that they make after you've already made your transaction. Otherwise I'm owed a lot of money from Steam sales.

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Exactly. 3 days after I bought the latest New Vegas DLC, Steam had it at half price. Did I feel dumb? Sure! Did I blame Steam? I'd kind of have to be crazy to do that.

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You are technically correct, but that is just not how consumer relations work, and Nintendo have acknowledged that by deliberately saying: you have been kind to us and here is a reward for being 'ambassadors'. Under these specific circumstances, it is not strange to assume/expect that there will be quality. That's not about entitlement.

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I wonder what in the world are they going to announce in the 3DS conference in a little over a week from now. It can't be anything hardware related, that doesn't make any sense so I refuse to believe the rumours.

Maybe some big games announcements, Dragon Quest etc.?

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I would love for them to announce a new DQ for the 3DS.

Also Rodi, I suppose you're right in that the games weren't technically "Free", however I was willing to pay that price for the 3DS, yes it really sucked they lowered the price a few weeks after I got mine, but at least they were nice enough to give us some games for having bought the device early. The GBA list seems pretty sweet though :)

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Yeah, as I've said, the GBA games are the real "reward." The NES ones are the same "classic" games they've re-released 7 million times by now, the GBA ones (the announced ones, anyway) are uniformly fucking amazing games that I can't wait to load onto my 3DS and play the shit out of. If you've never played Mario Kart Super Circuit, you've never played the best Mario Kart game, and now you're going to get it for free.

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Have they released a full list of the GBA games? I've only heard 5 of the ten games and I already have them...

Buying a game on Steam and then having the price drop isn't the same as buying a console DAY ONE and dropping the price a few months later, that's unheard of!

Frankly, I don't know what to think of Nintendo anymore... It's kinda scary, but I wouldn't be surprised if the rumor of the new "3D-less 3DS" was true, this is the Nintendo that thinks we want Urban Champhion is 3D, that thinks that the U.S. doesn't want cool RPGs for the Wii, released the 3DS without an eShop and then made the eShop terrible by giving it almost no games...

Not to mention that the few games that are coming out for it are remakes and the rest have been delayed or cancelled.

Yikes, when you put everything together, it does sound a bit disastrous. ;(

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It still feels like entitled bullshit to me, regardless of where you think Nintendo is going right now. If you don't like their direction, don't buy their product. If you buy their product, then accept that the decision you made to put your money down is yours alone. At this point, it's starting to feel like Nintendo would have had fewer people complaining if they hadn't made a goodwill gesture at all. Sure, dropping the price after 5 months is unheard of, but you know what else is? Giving early adopters 20 free games just for being early adopters. The quality of the games doesn't even matter at that point, but that at least half of them are really good (between the NES ones that are worth playing and the announced 5 GBA games) and the others are at least worth a look is fantastic.

Long story short, the internet is whiny and irritating.

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Didn't the PSPGo give 10 free PSP downloads to early adopters in Europe?

Most retro consoles came with at least one free game, even at their release and the DSi came with a few free points to buy a few games if memory serves me well.

And I'm afraid you're right, remember how everybody whined about the free games we got for the PSN outage because we already had them?

Frankly, I think it's a nice touch that Nintendo is giving us free games, even though I have most of them, and I'm grateful because they really didn't have to, but could they have at least give them with full features? Why release them in this sorry state and then say they'll "patch it up later"? Why make it so burdensome to access them?

Yes, the internet is whiny, but sometimes there are things "worth" whining about and should be called out for, even though it's hard to tell when a complaint is legitimate.

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Since you bring up Sony, here's the way I see events since April:

Sony horribly compromises the security of my identity through lacklustre security measures. I have to go everywhere across the internet changing my passwords, get a new credit card, and carefully watch every transaction through my bank's website for a long time. They say "Our bad, have a second copy of LittleBigPlanet and some zombie game you'll play for 20 minutes and forget about."

I agree to give Nintendo $250 for a 3DS. A couple of months later, they decide that more people would buy the machine if they asked other people $80 less than I agreed to give them. I feel like maybe I should have waited, but have already enjoyed the time I had with the system so don't worry about it too much. They say "Thanks for supporting us out the gate, here's 20 pieces of software for your machine that we will probably get away with charging more than $100 for later down the line. Not everything is there yet, but it will be fairly soon."

Do you really feel like Nintendo is the one that should be taken to task here?

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Again, this is not about entitlement, this is about 'if you're going to do something, do it right instead of half-assed'. If someone gives you a present, and it turns out to be a turd in a box*, then you should most definitely be quite cross with them.

(* NES games are not a turd in a box. This is an exaggeration.)

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Again, this is not about entitlement, this is about 'if you're going to do something, do it right instead of half-assed'. If someone gives you a present, and it turns out to be a turd in a box*, then you should most definitely be quite cross with them.

(* NES games are not a turd in a box. This is an exaggeration.)

A gross exaggeration. Balloon Fight and Donkey Kong Jr are great little arcade games. Zelda 1 & 2, Metroid, and Super Mario Brothers are fantastic games, albeit ones I already own. Wrecking Crew, Yoshi, and Ice Climber are games that I have nostalgia for but, on replaying them for the first time in a long time last week, turn out to not hold up too well. Golf is golf, but hey maybe if you like golf games you'll like it. The only one that I probably wouldn't have dropped money on to at least try would have been Golf, so I feel pretty good about getting these games for free. And as I have said a few times, the main event here is the GBA games, which will be out soon enough. I do kind of wish that the games had restore point functionality, but that's all that they're lacking and that will be patched in. The games from this set that I have purchased on Wii's VC don't have restore points, so I don't see why there is any reason to expect that they'll be in there at all. When Nintendo said they were adding them, I was happy enough that it was happening at any time, so I don't feel bad about them taking an extra month or so to do it.

Still feels like they're doing it right to me.

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Two points:

1- a price cut this early is not completely unheard of. The iPhone launched at $599, and cut the price by a whopping $200 just two months after release. Early adopters were eventually rewarded with a $100 of store credit.

It may seem like a crummy thing to do, but it makes sense in the long run. Hardware needs to sell to succeed. Would you rather the 3DS maintain its $250 price but have no game support, or deal with the pricecut and (hopefully) have many more games to play?

2- shameless pimping time... I wrote an article on what Nintendo needs to do for the 3DS to succeed.

The TL;DR version is that there's no way a 3DS could replace a smartphone, but if the hardware is convenient to take around people will carry them both. That to me means smaller, thinner, lighter, better battery life. That ultimately means the 3D screen going away. I think it's going to happen, and I honestly won't miss it, given all the benefits. The other thing is that they need an appstore that can rival Apple's in terms of usability, and Xbox Live in terms of quality and price-point.

Cheers,

Mo

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To continue with Rodi's exaggeration, it's not only that they are giving us a "turd in a box", it's that they are giving us a gift that isn't even ready yet and they are hiding at the end a giant dusty cobweb filled closet where you have to crawl in to get at it and you can only carry one at a time...

This is the part I'm legitimally annoyed with, not only are they "unfinished", they are very unaccessible, if I hadn't heard about how to get to them on the internet I wouldn't even have them now, can we at least agree that people can be annoyed at that part? Imagine the poor "casual" gamer not used to access a consoles "innards" having to do all those steps 10 times! Nintendo is supposed to make things easy! It's what they are known for!

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I still think it comes back to the point that Nintendo doesn't really owe you anything for cutting the price, and instead they're giving you a fairly significant gift.

I also think calling these NES emulations "unfinished" is a tad exaggerating. They're perfectly emulated, there is Wii Virtual Console-style save stating, and the games they've chosen are all hotseat multiplayer games. (So the fact that their 3DS Virtual Console emulation package currently lacks some kind of wi-fi multiplayer scheme is irrelevant.)

Lets turn this around, at what point do you feel Nintendo would have done enough?

Edited by Sno

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For the price drop? I think they have done more than enough, it's how inconvenient they've made everything I'm a bit angry about.

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I'll concede that getting to the games by going into your "previously downloaded" section on the eShop is a pain in the ass and I wish they'd do something about their store's front end in general, but that's the only point in all of this where I feel Nintendo has actually dropped any kind of ball. Even that is minor. The emulation is fine, and adding save states later isn't by any means something they're required to do, so it's awesome they're doing it at all. I can't see getting angry over any of this being worth the effort though.

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The emulation isn't perfect, they forgot to add the "save" and "load" feature in Wrecking Crew, which is included in Wii Virtual Console and a certain password for Metroid will crash your 3DS so badly you'll have to wait for the batteries to die to make it usable again.

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[...] A certain password for Metroid will crash your 3DS so badly you'll have to wait for the batteries to die to make it usable again.

Now that's not entirely fair, as it's a password you wouldn't normally enter anyway, and caused the *original NES Metroid* to crash.

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You guys do realize that you can save state these versions of the game, right? It's like the Wii VC stuff, it does it automatically when you quit out to the home menu. Maybe it's not as much as you'd want, but it's exactly as much as they've been doing all along.

Though I guess there was some talk of them possibly further expanding that functionality?

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Yes, but it proves they didn't even bother to test this password on the 3DS.

Who knows, maybe the -1 World in Super Mario Bros glitch will make the 3DS explode, I'm positive Nintendo never bothered to try it... :shifty:

Suspend saves delete themselves after being loaded, I'd rather have a more permanent save states like the Game Boy games have, but you're right they will have normal save states later, which is why I'm wondering why did they release them like this instead of releasing them with the save state feature.

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Yeah, the permanent save states (or the "mulligan button" as I've been calling it) are what are allowing me to get through Gargoyle's Quest without ripping my hair out. I'm holding off playing Metroid until those have been added to it, as I believe they will make the game a hell of a lot more enjoyable to play. That said, I still don't hold it against Nintendo for not having them there at release.

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Now that's not entirely fair, as it's a password you wouldn't normally enter anyway, and caused the *original NES Metroid* to crash.

The GSW article makes it sound like this is weird password censorship along the lines of Animal Crossing townsfolk rejecting the word "chump" as a catchphrase, but surely the NES version didn't have any kind of sophisticated Cuss Detector. Is there just something about how this password is interpreted qua password that crashes the game?

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So...

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/07/gaze-upon-the-3ds-circle-pad-attachment/

I really didn't think the rumors would pan out, but there it is.

Now this is certainly just a precursor to a 3DS hardware iteration with two sticks built in. I'm sort of glad they're doing this half-step before they do that, at least. I really didn't want to have to feel compelled to buy new hardware so soon into this thing's life span, now i just need to... buy... a... bizarre add-on.

Seriously, that is a phenomenally ugly thing.

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