Slime Salad

You see, here's my problem, why do people hate the wii u so much? Because it's not AS HD as other HD consoles? It's honestly and truly the only modern gen home console I actually care about because of the games on it, and games coming to it too (sonic boom, anyone?). Developers hate on the wii u so much, the modern day general gamers I hear about for some reason hate it just because their precious ps4/xbox1 is more powerful.
Blah, whatevs. At least I can get Strider on steam.

XB1 and PS4 have essentially identical control schemes. Releasing on multiple consoles used to be a hassle because you would have to reprogram large portions of the game, but now that most games run Unity, which cross-compiles, the only additional cost in releasing to XB1 or PS4 if you're already releasing to the other is licensing fees. For WiiU, you've got to adapt your controls, work in tablet support, scale back for the lower-end processor, and so forth.

On the other side of the equation, WiiU owners come in two flavors:
- Those who own another platform and are likely to buy a cross-released game on that platform because of the higher specs
- Those who don't own another platform and are likely to be Nintendo fanboys with reduced interest in third party releases

Add to that the fact that the WiiU has a much lower adoption rate to begin with.

Meowskivich wrote:You see, here's my problem, why do people hate the wii u so much? Because it's not AS HD as other HD consoles? It's honestly and truly the only modern gen home console I actually care about because of the games on it, and games coming to it too (sonic boom, anyone?). Developers hate on the wii u so much, the modern day general gamers I hear about for some reason hate it just because their precious ps4/xbox1 is more powerful.
Blah, whatevs. At least I can get Strider on steam.

It's over priced, under powered, and has almost no games worth playing. There hasn't been a single game that's proven the viability of the tablet; the Wii launched with Wii Sports and it blew people away. There's no equivalently high quality game that sells people on the tablet. Without the tablet, the system could be priced $150 cheaper. I would have no issue with it being "not as HD" if it didn't cost just as much as a PS4 by the time you add a hard drive, which is 100% necessary if you're interested in digital games since Nintendo's on board storage is nearly uselessly small when they're selling games that are 12 GB in size (Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze). It would have cost pennies more to include a more viable, but slower, hard drive. Buying your own drive means having an external USB monster dangling out instead of being able to replace an existing internal drive cleanly and neatly. If it was selling at $150 no one would be complaining about its power. They'd still complain about its software.

There's still no unified account system. You're still required to rebuy Virtual Console games you already paid for on the 3DS to play them on the WiiU. Sony allows you to buy a single game and play it on three different systems, generally for less money than Nintendo charges for bad SNES games. The WiiU Virtual Console has almost no games available, and they're charging people to upgrade their Wii VC purchases because they can. They announced N64 and GBA games for the WiiU VC a year and a half ago. As of today, there are exactly zero available. As of April, there will be a whopping three. The system natively plays Wii (and therefore Gamecube too) games, but there's no way to digitally buy these games. They're throwing away free money by not dumping every old first party title they've got on the Virtual Console.

There are literally months that go by with no games released. This is true for every system at launch. It's generally not true anymore a year and a half after launch, but here we are. 3D World looks awesome, Tropical Freeze is probably fun if you like the older DKC games. NES Remix looks perfect. That's seriously it. That's all I see for compelling games. They're charging $50 for a port of Wind Waker while their competition is selling HD collections of 3-8 games for less money. Every aspect of the system's pricing is terrible. There's no Metroid, Star Fox, F-Zero, or any of their other second string franchise titles in development. On the 3DS, they're pushing new franchises like Pushmo, Dillon's Rolling Western, etc. On the WiiU they've done practically nothing as far as small, cheap new releases go. The first real Zelda game won't be out for, at absolute best, another year. Mario Kart will be great. Smash will too, and it doesn't have a release date. The system needed both of those games close to launch.

Developers hate the system because it's harder to program for and guarantees no returns. Third party developers, outside of Just Dance, a couple of Sonics, and some shovelware, couldn't get games to sell on the Wii, with its enormous userbase. Third party games traditionally haven't sold well on a Nintendo system since the SNES, and the WiiU has a hell of a lot less going for it. The third party titles that have been released on the U so far have all bombed.

Nintendo saw the massive success of the Wii and assumed it would automatically translate into massive adoption of the U. They were arrogant and released a grossly overpriced system without nearly enough support. Sony did the exact same thing with the PS3, coming off of the success of the PS2. It took them two to three years to really get things in order, and it worked out fine after that, but it took massive price drops and significant outreach to third parties, along with expanding internal game development and a restructuring of their corporate sector. Nintendo isn't on track to do any of those things.

They need to slash the price massively, dump the tablet (Donkey Kong doesn't use it at all, Mario Kart uses it as a horn, not worth bumping the price up $150), allow more independent management at both Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, "promote" Iwata to a place in the company where he's not calling the shots, outsource their net services to a company that knows what it's doing, use their warchest to acquire more second-party companies so that they can actually have more than one game released every three months, completely restructure their Virtual Console pricing model, and include a viable amount of internal storage in their next revision.

People aren't just blindly hating this thing. Nintendo made an unprecedented amount of boneheaded decisions in designing the system. It's still fixable, but it requires more radical moves than Nintendo typically takes. I'd love it if the system were worth buying, but if I want good Nintendo games that actually come out at a reasonable pace I've already got a 3DS.

"WiiU" is a confusing name that makes no marketing sense. The casual market that helped make the Wii a massive success doesn't care about buying a new console, they've already got their Wii Fit and Wii Sports machine and that's fine for them. This audience has moved on to smartphones and Nintendo hasn't tried to win them back aside from saying, "well, release Wii Sports HD (for $50) and Wii Fit HD!" Neither sold very well.

Sony spent a lot of time and money investing in indie games with simple 3D or hand drawn 2D graphics. Nintendo should have been the one courting weird games like Octodad, but they're not interested in Western development.

This isn't complicated when looked at as a series of business decisions. Developers and gamers want Nintendo to make good business choices and sell lots of products so that more products are made. Many people who complain about the U love the 3DS, which is significantly less powerful than its competition. So no, "because it's not AS HD as other HD consoles" is not the reason. That is, to sum it up, pretty stupid.

Mogri wrote:XB1 and PS4 have essentially identical control schemes. Releasing on multiple consoles used to be a hassle because you would have to reprogram large portions of the game, but now that most games run Unity, which cross-compiles, the only additional cost in releasing to XB1 or PS4 if you're already releasing to the other is licensing fees. For WiiU, you've got to adapt your controls, work in tablet support, scale back for the lower-end processor, and so forth.

On the other side of the equation, WiiU owners come in two flavors:
- Those who own another platform and are likely to buy a cross-released game on that platform because of the higher specs
- Those who don't own another platform and are likely to be Nintendo fanboys with reduced interest in third party releases

Add to that the fact that the WiiU has a much lower adoption rate to begin with.

Sounds logical enough.

That will teach me not to write that kind of detailed response here next time, whoops!

---

A collection of good and weird games presented pretty poorly. The Wii U and 3DS versions got cancelled due to Namco running out of development time, but they still managed to release a half-baked collection for PS3, 360, and PC owners!



Pac-Man Museum

I took a look at the demo, which only lets you play 3 minutes of a 5 minute run of championship edition (why not just let the whole 5 minutes run out?). I'd be more willing to get the game it was, like, 10 bucks. Mostly because I have Namco Museum on the N64 and the GBA pac-man collection, with Pac-Man Arrangement that originally came out on it!...only,apparently, the psp version of Arrangement is an entirely different game (why name two game the same thing? it's even more annoying than Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic06 sharing the same name).
The worst part is, though, that Championship DX is on steam too, along with a demo respectively, which I played soon after, and it lets you play a different maze than that one, and with all sorts of new bits, and even two different maze and character styles respectively. It lets you play 2:30 of a 5 minute game, so...eh? I still don't get why a short-term timed bit isn't just left as is to go "oh hey, liked what you saw, get the rest of the content for 10 bucks".

I hate timed demos anyway, Rocket Knight and Ys Origins have better demos, letting you play a level or two before ending. Just how I feel demos should be.

Yeah, there's two totally separate Pac-Man Arrangement games, the older one is more well known I think. The PSP one is pretty bad.

It's definitely dumb that the demos don't let you play out a whole game of CE. The whole point of the game is high scores/leaderboard competition, so just let someone play the whole thing but don't save their score instead.

CE DX is well worth its price. The Museum sadly isn't, especially for people who already have older Namco collections.

Oh, I'm totally waiting for a steam sale to get Champion DX. I liked what I've played of the demo, and it apparently has original Champion's stuff in it too. The 10 buck price is already tempting enough, but I'm pinching me pennys since I want the most bang for my buck.

DX includes the original version's stages, but they're easier than in the original due to new options added. DX really has a ton of content, there's like a dozen mazes and each has at least ten variations/time trials/missions. The Best Game.

Bros in da hood



Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

The Wobbler wrote:

Meowskivich wrote:You see, here's my problem, why do people hate the wii u so much? Because it's not AS HD as other HD consoles? It's honestly and truly the only modern gen home console I actually care about because of the games on it, and games coming to it too (sonic boom, anyone?). Developers hate on the wii u so much, the modern day general gamers I hear about for some reason hate it just because their precious ps4/xbox1 is more powerful.
Blah, whatevs. At least I can get Strider on steam.

It's over priced, under powered, and has almost no games worth playing. There hasn't been a single game that's proven the viability of the tablet; the Wii launched with Wii Sports and it blew people away. There's no equivalently high quality game that sells people on the tablet. Without the tablet, the system could be priced $150 cheaper. I would have no issue with it being "not as HD" if it didn't cost just as much as a PS4 by the time you add a hard drive, which is 100% necessary if you're interested in digital games since Nintendo's on board storage is nearly uselessly small when they're selling games that are 12 GB in size (Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze). It would have cost pennies more to include a more viable, but slower, hard drive. Buying your own drive means having an external USB monster dangling out instead of being able to replace an existing internal drive cleanly and neatly. If it was selling at $150 no one would be complaining about its power. They'd still complain about its software.

There's still no unified account system. You're still required to rebuy Virtual Console games you already paid for on the 3DS to play them on the WiiU. Sony allows you to buy a single game and play it on three different systems, generally for less money than Nintendo charges for bad SNES games. The WiiU Virtual Console has almost no games available, and they're charging people to upgrade their Wii VC purchases because they can. They announced N64 and GBA games for the WiiU VC a year and a half ago. As of today, there are exactly zero available. As of April, there will be a whopping three. The system natively plays Wii (and therefore Gamecube too) games, but there's no way to digitally buy these games. They're throwing away free money by not dumping every old first party title they've got on the Virtual Console.

There are literally months that go by with no games released. This is true for every system at launch. It's generally not true anymore a year and a half after launch, but here we are. 3D World looks awesome, Tropical Freeze is probably fun if you like the older DKC games. NES Remix looks perfect. That's seriously it. That's all I see for compelling games. They're charging $50 for a port of Wind Waker while their competition is selling HD collections of 3-8 games for less money. Every aspect of the system's pricing is terrible. There's no Metroid, Star Fox, F-Zero, or any of their other second string franchise titles in development. On the 3DS, they're pushing new franchises like Pushmo, Dillon's Rolling Western, etc. On the WiiU they've done practically nothing as far as small, cheap new releases go. The first real Zelda game won't be out for, at absolute best, another year. Mario Kart will be great. Smash will too, and it doesn't have a release date. The system needed both of those games close to launch.

Developers hate the system because it's harder to program for and guarantees no returns. Third party developers, outside of Just Dance, a couple of Sonics, and some shovelware, couldn't get games to sell on the Wii, with its enormous userbase. Third party games traditionally haven't sold well on a Nintendo system since the SNES, and the WiiU has a hell of a lot less going for it. The third party titles that have been released on the U so far have all bombed.

Nintendo saw the massive success of the Wii and assumed it would automatically translate into massive adoption of the U. They were arrogant and released a grossly overpriced system without nearly enough support. Sony did the exact same thing with the PS3, coming off of the success of the PS2. It took them two to three years to really get things in order, and it worked out fine after that, but it took massive price drops and significant outreach to third parties, along with expanding internal game development and a restructuring of their corporate sector. Nintendo isn't on track to do any of those things.

They need to slash the price massively, dump the tablet (Donkey Kong doesn't use it at all, Mario Kart uses it as a horn, not worth bumping the price up $150), allow more independent management at both Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, "promote" Iwata to a place in the company where he's not calling the shots, outsource their net services to a company that knows what it's doing, use their warchest to acquire more second-party companies so that they can actually have more than one game released every three months, completely restructure their Virtual Console pricing model, and include a viable amount of internal storage in their next revision.

People aren't just blindly hating this thing. Nintendo made an unprecedented amount of boneheaded decisions in designing the system. It's still fixable, but it requires more radical moves than Nintendo typically takes. I'd love it if the system were worth buying, but if I want good Nintendo games that actually come out at a reasonable pace I've already got a 3DS.

"WiiU" is a confusing name that makes no marketing sense. The casual market that helped make the Wii a massive success doesn't care about buying a new console, they've already got their Wii Fit and Wii Sports machine and that's fine for them. This audience has moved on to smartphones and Nintendo hasn't tried to win them back aside from saying, "well, release Wii Sports HD (for $50) and Wii Fit HD!" Neither sold very well.

Sony spent a lot of time and money investing in indie games with simple 3D or hand drawn 2D graphics. Nintendo should have been the one courting weird games like Octodad, but they're not interested in Western development.

This isn't complicated when looked at as a series of business decisions. Developers and gamers want Nintendo to make good business choices and sell lots of products so that more products are made. Many people who complain about the U love the 3DS, which is significantly less powerful than its competition. So no, "because it's not AS HD as other HD consoles" is not the reason. That is, to sum it up, pretty stupid.

This pretty much sums up why I had a Wii U for about two months and then sold it. That was a year ago too! It's sad knowing that they are in pretty much the same situation now as they were then.

Nothing's changed since then except there's a new Donkey Kong game out and nearly almost a Mario Kart game out. I think it will be a worthwhile system once it hits $100 and Kart and Smash are out.

Also I'm glad someone actually read that instead of farting.

Dark Souls II

I enjoyed the review man. I've been considering picking this up on PC but I heard that the control scheme in DS1 was atrocious on the computer. I'm hoping that DS2 might be a bit better, because everything I hear about this game leads me to believe that I would love it.

By the way, just noticed that you have a link to my website on your blog. You are a gentleman, sir.

Meatballsub wrote:I enjoyed the review man. I've been considering picking this up on PC but I heard that the control scheme in DS1 was atrocious on the computer. I'm hoping that DS2 might be a bit better, because everything I hear about this game leads me to believe that I would love it.

By the way, just noticed that you have a link to my website on your blog. You are a gentleman, sir.

The mouse control for DS1 is completely borked, but if you have a controller it's exactly like on consoles. There are some other video based issues, but they're easily fixed with a third-party patch. They never really planned on releasing DS1 for computer, as they don't actually have much experience with it, hence the bugs. DS2, however, has been planned for PC from the beginning, and I think they built their new engine with that in mind.