Ronnie

Also I loved the confirmation that... became...

Finished Jedi Fallen Order and 1000'd it on Xbox. It's made me glad Nintendo seem to be staying well away from an achievement system. I think it's absolutely the right decision, especially if they're meaningless like on PS4/XBO and just a bunch of tick boxes beside your name. I just think it turns every game into a slog if you feel compelled to 100% it. Jedi had a good trophy list overall but I certainly wouldn't say I was having much fun collecting those last few force echoes. Hopefully next gen can come up with some interesting spin on achievements that make them worth the time and effort.

Finally finished this last night, and 1000/1000'd it. Not had as much time to play games these past couple of months so it took me an age to get round to it. Overall brilliant fun. As a Star Wars story it was absolutely fantastic, as a game it was pretty great. The former was surprising though, Respawn obviously worked VERY closely with the Lucasfilm story group. Obviously not without its flaws and technically it was very rough but I had a great time overall. Loved collecting bits of lore, loved the combat, traversal, story-telling, cutscenes, characters, force powers. Good mix of planets. Great story-telling with flashbacks, performances etc. Loved the second sister especially, she was great. But yeah, great job Respawn.

Nintendo Labo Console Toy-Con http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/01/random_nintendos_selling_empty_boxes_of_the_animal_crossing_edition_switch

If that’s the case then it definitely makes sense to wait. It’ll smooth over the next gen transition for them a tad.

I think it'd be a mistake to release an incremental upgrade the same year as next gen anyway. Next year though, four years after release, absolutely.

Those colours are even more stunning at a second glance! I'll buy the whole Switch and sell the console/dock on ebay if need be. I NEED them.

Wow lovely colours! Really hope they sell those joy-con separately or I'll have to go the eBay route

Wow

The game didn't stick with me obviously but I thought the visual presentation of it was fantastic. Sure it was ultra cheesy but I thought the style was really polished

Of course, I just find it funny given the difference in development work

It seems strange that they can make a cheap as chips party game like Mario Party and it'll sell 9 million, but Fire Emblem with its 100+ hour fully voice acted campaigns can sell "only" a quarter of that.

Also...

These hardware numbers really caught me off guard. It's now surpassed the SNES! Last year was brilliant for software so I guess it shouldn't have been that big a surprise. Wow. That's insane statistic. What an incredible turnaround from the Wii U. Sure the revenue stream is cut in half but so are their costs. R&D, manufacturing, marketing. It's not as simple as saying The Switch needs to sell what their console and handheld sell combined. Their mobile initiative is to make up for the loss in profit, as @Hero-of-Time suggests.

I absolutely adored 3D World, so would love to play through it again on the Switch. The whole game was polished to perfection, especially the visuals. Nintendo always add something to their ports, to varying degrees of decency, new levels might be a stretch but hopefully it'll be something good. I still think Odyssey 2 is coming at the end of this year so it'd be a strange move to release them so close together but then again we had NSMBUDX and SMM2 released within 6 months of each other last year so who knows.

Beautiful!

Urgh, Red Letter Media. Someone tell them to just watch OT Star Wars in a room with a box of Kleenex, nothing else will do. Anyway, LOVED episode 1, fantastic. And look at that, real, relatable, LIKEABLE, characters! Better than literally anything Discovery dished up. Fantastically paced, beautifully shot. Love the world they've set up. I just hope this show doesn't devolve into Discovery's dumb writing and senseless pew pew action.

If people stopped buying the same game over and over, year after year they might be forced to evolve the franchise but sadly (?) each instalment sells like crazy, so why should they bother

Thought this was interesting http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/01/reggie_encouraged_nintendo_to_embrace_what_the_brand_stood_for_by_sticking_with_its_iconic_logo

Aonuma sharing a bit of Monolith Soft's development on BOTW

While we're wishing for things, I'll take Media Molecule partnering with Nintendo too please! Tearaway is still one of my favourite games, criminal how badly it sold.

Feel free, just some random thoughts of mine. They're very different games but they came out within a week of each other and are both bow-wielding openworld action adventures where your goal is to tame the wild. Comparisons were always going to be made. But yeah obviously one emphasises combat and narrative, the other is more about exploration, sandbox systems and puzzle solving. I personally think one added a lot more to the industry as a whole, and that's why BOTW is so widely praised, but Horizon definitely presents a polished "traditional" openworld game. I can't wait for the sequel.

It's one of those games that I really enjoyed at the time, maybe even loved, but it just hasn't stuck with me long-term. Once the storyline finally got going it was pretty interesting though and the combat was fantastic. I just didn't really care about exploring the openworld much for whatever reason, it all felt a bit devoid of personality and flavour. The big difference between the two games for me is Horizon felt like the culmination and refinement of the usual openworld formula we'd all seen, a "Best of" what's come before, whereas Breath of the Wild felt like a ground-breaking evolution of it. In twenty or thirty years people will still be talking about Breath of the Wild the way they talk about Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time, whereas I'm not sure the same will be true of Horizon. I'm looking forward to the sequel though, if Sony are smart/able they'll make it a PS5 launch title.

I love the guys at Kinda Funny, give me their insight into the games industry over most others tbh. Tim especially has improved 10 fold these past few years, he speaks really well now. Getting Imraan from Game Informer was a big win for them too, the guy seriously knows his stuff, even if it's only a temporary hire. Also it was (another new hire) Blessing who requested they restart their Playstation podcast. If they were just coasting and chasing numbers they wouldn't keep getting new people in. They've also bought a new studio space that's like 10x the size of their current one, so as a production it's definitely on the up. And frankly, I just like that they prefer to celebrate games, not destroy them with endless negative click-chasing, ad revenue led rants every couple of weeks like certain other big gaming YouTubers.