Burny

Compromises? Despite the overly popular assumption that the developers at Nintendo are lazy as can be, twiddling their thumbs all day instead of giving people on the internet the new hook they're crowing for, has it ever occured to you that they might be already pressed for time making launch? And that sales in excess of 20 million copies of NSMBW, which was already being lamented for not having online coop, haven't driven home the point "online or bust" (despite what hypothetical market research says)? Concerning the effects of lag: I believe it's far easier to tolerate twitching around a bit on a mostly static level and possibly missing a target or getting shot, than having to restart a level, because the game determined your position from your last known movement vector placing you in a lava pit a handful of pixels from where you wanted to jump. For no other reason than to infuriate you, of course. Weighing up the benefits (read: expected additional sales because of online) vs the cost (read: longer dev time due to a lot of added complexity) can't possibly have anything to do with it.

You people make it out to be a major set back. Sales certainly weren't set back. That's probably the influential measure for Nintendo, like it or not. Depends? If they invested additional resources into developing an online mode, what would be the reward? They would invariably end up with something imperfect, as there is no guarantee for latencies over the internet. So the reward is more whining from those people, who experienced issues due to lag, which is really not in Nintendo's power to eliminate. In return, they might not make launch, which is something Nintendo probably considers far more detrimental to their business than the whining, mockery and contempt they've been experiencing for some 20+ years now over various issues (Ctrl + F: "right wing garbage").

Not much of a shame in terms of exposition. As much as you people keep whining about the NSMB series, the game would almost certainly suffer from launching alongside Mario. Not to mention that they might not be ready come launch.

I've played some more Rayman Origins and watched a couple of ingame videos of Legends again. The musical levels aren't on rails, as I had assumed before. They are more or less the spiritial successor to the , just with even less wiggle room for free player movements and far better synchronized to the music. These levels are very "linear", as the screen scrolls fast and you mostly have to hold the run button and go one direction at top speed while timing the jumps right. As the margin for error on jumps is incredibly small though, they become really tricky. While it's hard to watch at times, this off screen footage from gamescom shows that the player is still fully in control during the levels (he goes into the wrong direction at 6m44s). It seems like the game also adjusts the running speed at points and takes swiftly care of players who fall behind even slightly. Also noticed that there is a (yellow) line running across the screen at all times. That seems to be the position at which the player has to be in order to run synchronously to the music.

And there you have it: Their most important Mario games last generation were NSMB(W) whose whole hook was the "back to the basics" design.

This is what I'm hoping for most out of this ND actually. Not that I expect retailers to really drop the prices of Mario Kart & co. compared to the physical copies, but it's an interesting concept and I want to see how it plays out.

And here I thought you had at least put the "Wii" on it yourself.

Understandable. These things just have more impact when they aggregate news for a month or so. When you start doing one every week because you want to announce 3 extra coin rush maps for NSMB2, they lose some of that impact. Although I guess, they're still better than reading the wall of text you get with the usual press release.

Nintendo will certainly not modify any Wii software retroactively, as they'd have to do QA for it again afterwards. It probably has more to to with downclocking the hardware and entering some kind of "hardware emulation" mode for the Wii. Kind of like the 3DS enters a DS mode when playing DS games and seems to boot its own OS again when you shut down the game. They've already said that there will be no resolution modification when playing Wii games. That's what VC software is in the end. Why would they care for upscaling Wii software then, when they've left the task to the TV so far?

Also great to see that older titles (MK7! ) are finally announced for the Japanese eShop. Can't take that long for them to appear over here then. Edit: Oh, there is even a bit about save data transfer for Mario Kart (physical 2 digital copy) at the end of this Nintendo Direct. Nice touch.

Nice dry brushing.

The bolded part is what I've been trying to argue about: variety does not equal content. I'm sure the next time you walk into the canteen and tell them you "don't think" their menu is "worth full price", as you've already had it several times before, they're going to be enchanted with the way you perceive value.

No they haven't. They have left the universe well alone and instead made a subset of the levels into these incredibly tightly scripted on-rails music levels. There is no other way to play them and they're not there on top of the standard levels, as they're part of the levels. Looking at the on-rails section in shooters is a more than apt analogy. At the core of the shooter mechanics is moving and shooting. The on-rails sections are removing the running aspect in favor of the shooting. The core of Jump'n'Runs is jumping and running. They're removing the running aspect in favor of the jumping and synchronize it to the music. In both cases one of the core mechanics remains intact. I'd say you'd have a point with your different genre argument, if what we've seen so far actually looked like it took elements of rhythm games and offered a musical challenge. E.g. having to remember rhythm or melodies. What we've seen so far however would work just as well without any music, even if that would greatly diminish the show effect. And if you absolutely want to look at it from the "extend the game" perspective, the challenge/rush mode in NSMBU is actually the addition that offers more content in comparison. That's because it adds content on top of the 80+/- levels you can expect from NSMBW, instead of taking out one level per world and changing the core mechanics invariably. And yes, I think the musical levels in Rayman:L are far more exciting, but building your value argument on them simply doesn't work.

Not at all actually. Although It may not be China and the core concept and design is still done internally. According to Spector in this 1UP interview they already outsourced asset creation for the first game. The core concept may be done by Disney's studio, but the actual "dirty" work of creating the final level geometry and various assets is then handed over to some outside company. In that case they mention Bulgaria, which is bound to be cheaper than doing everything in the states. And then there is this gameindustry.biz interview with spector, where he states they've got about 700 people "around the world" working on the second title. You can bet that they haven't outsourced to countries with the highest average wages. I wouldn't be surprised at all, if this was common procedure for most or all big "AAA" titles nowadays. Although I don't know about another developer who has been this open about it.

That's like saying the obligatory on-rails turret sections in modern day shooters are a complete sub-genre. In Rayman:L it seems like they're having the characters on auto run (would be impossible to synchronize with the music otherwise) while you have to hit jump and attack at the right times. It's nice variation on the core mechanic and a great idea, but little else.