The Surlaw Reviews - 1/8/21 - 2020 Movies and Games Recap

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.

Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Sounds logical enough.

dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

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.

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.