Serebii

This week in Europe 3DS Super Black Bass 3D €19.99 (£17.99) I Love My Pets €29.99 (£24.99) 3DS Virtual Console Street Gangs €4.99 (£4.49) DSiWare Petit Computer €7.99 (£7.19) 800 Points

This week in Europe Wii U Pikmin 3 €49.99 (£39.99) Special Offer: Panoramic View €1.99 (£1.79) If you buy or own any three out of these four Wii U Panorama View video tours, you can download the fourth one for free! Only from 25/7/13 until 08/8/13. Wii U Virtual Console Kirby's Dream Land™ 3 €7.99 (£5.49) - US Version Wii Virtual Console SENGOKU 900 Points

Kirby's Dream Land™ 3 is our Virtual Console release this week

The thing is that Nintendo focus their handheld and console games differently. Their handheld games are ones that can be picked up and played for a few minutes, then stop. There may be an overarching narrative to them, but they're much more condensed and focused. This can be seen with Luigi's Mansion 2 a bit, too. Rather than a huge game where you explore a mansion, you have missions. The play at home bit is part of the angle of Off-TV Play, which was the initial idea for the Wii U. When people play portables at home, it's typically as other people are watching TV and other similar situations. Nintendo's idea was to bring this to people with home console capabilities and games

Todays picture

Try taking that into Bournemouth with you to play a game and see if it works :p These are the portable features to which I was referring

No, not similar in power, but similar in build. I'm not saying all games would be on both consoles. I'm saying that the development structure would be the same for both, just with weaker hardware on the handheld. This means software engineers only have to use say one engine and so forth. Think of power similar in comparison of i3 and i7 Intel processors. Same architecture, different power. Plus the whole Virtual Console thing

True enough, but I see two devices, one console one handheld, with similar base architecture to be far more likely than a hybrid anyway.

Most fans know that it's a bad idea Pokémon is designed to be on a handheld console. To move it to the home console would be to gimp the experience to little benefits. Nowadays, handhelds can do most of what a home console can, but home consoles don't have the portable abilities of the handhelds

Thing is, Nintendo quickly clarified and said that they're still doing two devices. The merging is just so that the two consoles have similar architecture to allow for cross play of say Virtual Console games, ports of games across both consoles etc. perhaps with a unified account system

Great news, too The Wii U has had a turnaround. We have no idea how long it'll last, but it's a turnaround It's great to see some positive press for Nintendo for once

I dunno, Nintendo buying it would mean that people will actually play Persona :p I kid, I kid. Nintendo is the most likely really, though as you say, the best case scenario is a third party to buy (one which isn't EA) or for Atlus to secede from Index and be completely its own company

I laughed :p Seriously though, this is something I can truly see Nintendo do. They wouldn't risk Sony doing it

I agree. Nintendo buying Atlus in the case of bankruptcy is the most logical course of action. The only games they don't make on the 3DS are the Persona series. It stands to reason

Based on them saying so?

Nintendo would never release home console games on other devices while sticking on handhelds. They'd just shift everything to the handheld.

They're doing terribly with the Wii U right now, yes. However, things turn around (as I noted in the sales thread, there are actually queues for the Wii U in Japan right now) and they're still getting third party games on it as see with this autumn's lineup of games such as Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, Watch_Dogs, Scribblenauts, Sonic, Batman etc. The Wii U will not do amazingly, no. I concede that. However, overall over its life, it will turn a profit and be a healthy system for Nintendo. People said similar of the 3DS, if you recall. Now, that's doing well everywhere, brilliantly in Japan, and it has a moderately healthy third party presence, especially in Japan.

A friend is in Japan and went to a huge shopping mall today. Apparently there were huge queues there and people were either getting Mario & Luigi or a Wii U. Fairly anecdotal, but interesting. He did note that it's the first weekend of the summer holidays there, so I think a boost is possible

Just reminded of this, though it's bad quality

The fact is, in the unlikely event that Nintendo quits the home console business, they would not go third party, they'd just shift their entire focus to their handheld platform. If they were to go third party, as I said before, they wouldn't be getting royalties from consoles, third party licenses etc. As such, they'd have to downsize. If you think that nothing would change, then you are severely mistaken.

Natsume claim not

Courtesy of Comic Con. You'll need to spoof your IP to make it think you're American though http://www.cbs.com/shows/how_i_met_your_mother/video/3061A7E6-E7A7-5861-665E-F93CBD0DFEB2/how-i-met-your-mother-ted-s-kids-like-you-ve-never-seen-them/

Keeping it in this thread, but they've just announced that The Simpsons and Futurama are to crossover as well

This is either going to be really awesome, or it'll fail

That's a whole different issue. The fact is that a lot of the money Nintendo gets are from console sales and third party royalties. If those avenues suddenly dropped, it'd be solely on software so they'd just go on the games that they know sell. You think Mario is oversaturated now, wait until it and Pokémon are the only games Nintendo provide, with a periodic Zelda. Their other franchises sell barely 1m units per game which just wouldn't be seen as a viable business decision. Sega remained profitable after killing off a lot of their assets and merging with another company. They also had some really bad years after dropping the console business