Emasher

I've been using Netflix less and less recently, so I don't see this as such a big deal. Most of the stuff I still find worth watching on Netflix is made by Netflix, which isn't region restricted anyway. I'm actually more curious about the technology they're planning on rolling out to detect the user's location than anything else, although, I can't really see details being made public, for obvious reasons.

About a week ago, I started talking to this girl on Okcupid. She was basically everything I'm looking for in a woman. Similar values, some shared interests, and she's pretty damn cute as well. I honestly haven't ever met a woman who was as good a match, and she seemed to feel similarly. But then there was the catch. Depending on which grad school she gets accepted to, there's a 50% chance she'll be moving to the other side of the country later this year (which is a pretty big deal in Canada). We kept talking anyway, every night this whole week, in-fact, which was probably a mistake. Tonight we decided to stop talking, to lessen the pain if things don't work out, since it could be over a month until she knows. I've got to stop getting myself into these situations.

Name: Something a bit too Japanese to sound dignified in English. Graphical capability: Console: Slightly more powerful than the PS4. Handheld: Slightly more powerful than the Vita. Controller style: Up to contemporary standards (d-pad, two analog sticks with buttons, 3 "pause" buttons (one being a home button), 4 face buttons, two shoulder buttons, two hybrid triggers (like the GameCube Controller). It will work with communicate with the console with Bluetooth or a USB cable, have a built in battery, and all that good stuff. It will have both a microphone and a speaker, but no headset ports. It will feature an accelerometer and gyroscope, as well as NFC capability and a cheap camera. The Handheld will have the same capabilities, as well as a touch screen for backwards compatibility with DS and 3DS games, but the screen will be a high enough resolution to accommodate both 3DS screens on just the one screen. Wii remotes will still be able to work with the console and will be part of the NX API, but will mostly just be used for backwards compatibility. The gimmick: Something involving synchronization between the handheld and console. It will be used in a few first party games, but nobody else will care. Hard drive size: Instead of a hard drive, it will have 128GB EMMC at launch and a 512GB SKU will release a year later. It will support external hard drives the same way the Wii U does. The handheld will have the Launch lineup: A new 3D Mario game will be the focus. There will also be a few 3rd party titles, mostly multiplatform games being released the same year. Many of these will not run very well on the handheld and will be considered the worst versions of the game. One the console they'll run decently, but not as well as the PS4, PC, and XBox One versions as the port will have been rushed. The new Zelda will be released for it if the console launches in 2016. If it launches in 2017, Retro's new game will either be a launch title or come out late Q1 the following year. There's a possibility it will be a new Zelda game using the same engine as the Wii U Zelda title, but upgraded for the new console. The tone of the game will feel very different from Zelda Wii U. No. of Bundles available at launch: Just the console and handheld possibly bundled with a simple game. Price: 349 USD For the console. 249 USD for the handheld. Release date: Q4 2016 or more likely Q4 2017.

I kind of wonder now if the d-pad and C stick on the GameCube controller were afterthoughts and not originally included in the design. Both are terrible for what they are, especially relative to the rest of the controller.

Well yes, you're obviously not going to get games that were designed to take advantage of more powerful hardware ported over. As long as Nintendo releases consoles that are sub-par in terms of processing power, their consoles are never going to see releases of most of the big multiplatform games, unless they were designed to run on consoles from the previous generation. But despite the difference in power between the Wii and the other consoles of it's generation, there was quite a bit more third party support for it. We certainly didn't see titles like Battlefield or Assassin's Creed. It just wasn't possible to port these games over. But you did see quite a few of the games that were possible to get ported over get ported, and there were still a reasonable amount of exclusive games released for the Wii relative to the Wii U. The Wii U, despite being a "generation" out of date in the same way that the Wii was, saw a decent amount of 3rd party support back when it was first launched, but once it became clear that the console had a relatively small user base, this dropped off pretty quickly. Take the Assassin's Creed series for example. Assassin's Creed III was a launch title, and Black Flag got a port. The Wii U was never going to get a port of Unity for obvious reasons, but Assassin's Creed rouge, a game that ran on pretty much the same engine as Black Flag, and was designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 didn't get a port. Considering it would have been a relatively easy port, the low sales are a fairly likely culprit. Ubisoft actually made a pretty good effort to support the Wii U, but after a certain point, clearly even they couldn't justify it anymore. There are loads of other titles that the Wii U could have handled but never got ported. Despite Nintendo's spat with EA, I'm sure they would have ported Battlefield 4 and Hardline over if there were enough potential users to justify it. Yes, Nintendo does need to get better at supporting third parties in other ways, but the number of customers is a pretty big deal.

EA and the other third party developers will come on board when there's a reason to do so. It's currently more profitable for them to develop for the PS4, Xbox One, PC, and mobile platforms because there are far more users on these platforms. If Nintendo is able to shift a decent number of NX units early in it's lifespan, you'll see all of the third party developers support the platform.

Not directly, but Wii remotes are just Bluetooth devices, and you can get USB Bluetooth adapters for about half the price of that. Although, considering how annoying the drivers are to set up, you're definitely better off with that if it's seen as an xinput device.

The "soft" version of the driver in the link I posted will supposedly work with one. It's just a pain to install everything. Nowhere near as simple as DS4Windows.

That "clicky" bit the non-analog part of those triggers. Nintendo actually has a patent for the hybrid analog (digital and analog) triggers featured on the GameCube Controller and Wii Classic Controllers, so you don't see the digital bit on other controllers. Same goes for those octagon shaped analog stick sockets. The main use for analog triggers is games that have a lot of driving, since you want to be able to control the rate at which you're accelerating or breaking. Using the analog sticks isn't always an option because they're often mapped to other functions like steering and camera control. Also, it's obviously not official, but if you want to use recent Nintendo controllers with a PC, you might want to check this out: http://www.wiinupro.com/home. You'll also need to install this though: http://vjoystick.sourceforge.net/site/.

That's nothing. I had a huge battle break out just on the title screen.

Regarding the patent, sometimes a patent is just a patent. Nintendo applies for patents all the time. Using a completely separate device as a co-processor would likely complicate things immensely for developers, and because of the time it takes to move the data between devices, it will almost certainly end up being slower. Using the handheld as a controller or extra display? Well, they've been doing that since the GameCube. As far as the other rumor goes, the "I work at/know someone who works at Nintendo" thing has been around as long as the internet. I wouldn't give it a second thought as it's almost certainly just someone seeking attention.

Regarding the whole gunner facing backwards in the tie fighters, keep in mind, this is the view the gunner has in an Apache Attack Helicopter: This is an aircraft primarily designed to attack ground targets, so the gunner obviously isn't going to be looking out the window much during combat.

Regarding the use of Nintendo Optical Disks vs Nintendo Game Cards. The cards do cost more, but they're also not about to put an optical drive in a handheld. If we do see the rumored console and handheld that play the same games, selling the games on optical media alone probably won't work. However, let's not forget that the handheld will likely be less powerful than the console, and therefore will be using smaller textures, models with fewer polygons, etc. There's no reason that the higher quality assets that bump the size of some games to upwards of 60GB would need to be downloaded to the handheld, as they'd never be used, so it may actually be feasible for Nintendo to go to download only for handheld games. They could do something like selling a physical package that has a Nintendo Optical Disk with the game for the home console, and a download code for the handheld. Switching exclusively to Nintendo Game Cards for physical copies for both handheld on console is probably still acceptable too though. You might even just see disks for the home console and cards for the handheld without any way of transferring between the two, as we are talking about a company that makes you buy even a NES game multiple times if you want it on different devices. What's even more impressive is that it isn't virtualization, but emulation since the Xbox 360 used the Power architecture while the Xbox One uses x86. Getting that sort of thing to work is a pretty significant undertaking though, so I kind of doubt Nintendo would create such an emulator at this point. But let's not forget that such an emulator already exists, although, I'm not sure I can talk about it without breaking forum rule number 5. Considering the cost of HDDs vs SSDs (a 1TB HDD is about 60 USD, whereas a 1TB SSD is about 250 USD (minimum, but obviously Nintendo would be able to get either a bit cheaper), and even smaller SSDs are still prohibitively expensive for a games console at this point), I think it's much more likely that they'll do the same thing they did for the Wii U. Small internal flash memory that can store a few games (probably 64GB or 128GB), and then the option of plugging in external USB storage devices (probably even USB 3 compatible). This will allow them to keep the unit cost cheaper. I don't think HDDs are too slow for games at all though. I still use them to store games in my PC due to the high cost of SSDs. Mind you, I do have higher speed server HDDs. Also, I'm not doubting it, but do you have a source for Iwata saying that? I'd be interested in reading about the context.

There's been a bit of a discussion about backwards compatibility in the NX thread recently, which has lead to talking about emulation and how it might relate to future backwards compatibility in Nintendo consoles. Would talking about specific emulators--provided I avoided discussing how to actually run pirated games using them--be acceptable with respect to forum rule number 5?

When talking about internet connections, it's always going to be measured in bits per second. My comment about small amounts of data was only for completeness. It's not really relevant when it comes to internet connections.

I guess it's time to update my predictions. First of all I was previously predicting a 2016 launch, but I think 2017 is a bit more likely now considering we have almost no information at all at this point. I'm not ruling out a 2016 launch though as I think Nintendo are aware that information travels a lot more quickly these days, so leaving a huge window to get the word out--as they've done in the past--probably isn't as necessary as it used to be. The first big question to start is Power vs x86 architecture. The pros of Power is that it makes for relatively easy backwards compatibility with GameCube, Wii, and Wii U games. If they went x86, such backwards compatibility would be fairly unlikely at all, and it's likely that the existing virtual console emulators would need to be re-written.

I'm just glad I can use whatever controller I want for PC gaming (in the case that keyboard a mouse don't work very well). I'm in the awkward position of having different sized hands, so it's difficult to find a controller that feels perfect.

They're recommending you have at least a 970 or R9 290.

The Wii Remote and Pro Controller both just use standard Bluetooth for connectivity, so it would be fairly easy to support them. The only issue is sensor bar support, but it would be fairly easy to just release a battery operated one to avoid having to put a power port on the console itself. The Gamepad wouldn't be that difficult to support either, since the protocol it uses to communicate with the console is very similar to 802.11n. While I don't think we'll see Gamecube controller support out of the box, I'm pretty sure the console will have USB ports, so making use of the existing adapter will be fairly easy when it's time to put out a new Smash Bros. As far as the new controller goes, the pro controller is missing one key thing, which is analog triggers. Although I'd prefer they changed the layout to be more like a dualshock, with the analog sticks on the bottom, I think the main thing is to just add analog triggers. If they're planning on adding GameCube games to the Virtual Console, that could be a pretty important addition as well.

A 975 is actually pretty comparable to the 4590. It even beats it in some areas, so I doubt you'll need to replace that. And USB 3.0 cards are pretty cheap these days.

Over $800 in Canada. I think I'll wait.

A lower case b means bits (a bit is an atomic unit of digital data, which has two possible states, off or on, sometimes written as 0 or 1, or false or true). An upper case B means bytes, which is a string of eight bits, which has 256 possible states. Generally, when describing an amount of data, we use bytes, so you might see a file being 100MB. Often when talking about small amounts of data, such as the size of a variable in a computer program, we'll still use bits, but we usually actually say "bits" or "n-bit" rather than just simply putting "b". When talking about the speed of data transfer, we use bits per second b/s or for faster speeds, obviously you get into Kb/s, Mb/s, etc.

For online gaming, your bandwidth (the amount of information that can be transmitted at once, usually measured in MB/s or KB/s) doesn't really matter all that much. What you really need to be concerned about is latency (sometimes referred to as ping). This is the time it takes for the first packet (think of a packet as a shipping container for digital data) to go from your computer to whatever other computer you're trying to communicate with. Normally for online gaming, you want under 200ms, and ideally around or under 100ms. Bandwidth becomes much more important when you're talking about downloading games or streaming video, especially if more than one person is going to be doing it at once. For downloading games, 6Mb/s isn't all that bad. It's not great, but it'll work. But it will take a good few hours to download these 50GB games that are becoming very common today. For such large files, you're probably going to be getting into the territory of having to leave them overnight and while you're at work. For streaming, you'll be able to do 720p with a 6Mb/s connection, but probably not 1080p or multiple people streaming HD videos at once. One thing you need to keep in mind with the advertised bandwidth though is that this is not the actual rate at which files are going to be transferred. You would think that with a 6Mb/s connection, it would take about 18.5 hours to download a 50GB game, but this isn't going to be the case. The server that you download the game from isn't necessarily able to send the files at that speed, which will create a bottleneck. The other cause of this is that all the routers between you and the server (and I'm not talking about those little things everyone has in the home, but huge ones that ISPs own which all the data for an entire town might pass through), can only handle so many packets going through them at once. They store a queue of packets, and once these get full, they start discarding other incoming packets. Since data is transferred (usually) using a protocol called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which sends back acknowledgements to the sending computer when data is received, so the sender will know when some packets have been dropped and it will re-send them. This in and of itself will cause a decrease in speed when travelling down an unreliable path in the network, since you have to wait for previous packets to be re-sent. When frequent packet loss is seen however, the TCP protocol running on the sending computer will assume that the frequent packet loss is due to a router somewhere on the path being congested (its queue getting filled up to quickly), and it will back off for a while in terms of the amount of data it's sending at once, and slowly begin increasing the speed again. This is why when downloading something through Steam, you'll see your download speeds go up and down periodically on that chart Steam displays. I have spent time on 6Mb/s connections before, and I usually get only about 800Kb/s downloading games using Steam.

I was just about to make the purchases I had been throwing into my cart for the last few days and then noticed the store was down. I'm glad I only ever make purchases through Paypal, and never save my information though.