Dcubed

Yeah, Toon Link is probably the best example of this stylistic change... It just looks SO much better! Yeah I'm sure that's what he's going for and I think it makes a world of difference to the game's overall look and feel (Playstation ASBR looks like a total mess because all the characters/stages utilise their origin styles and they all clash horribly). Still, they could at least have had the eyebrows going over the hair like in TWW... (and maybe some light celshading, even if it's only on the 3DS version...).

He looks better on 3DS, but I'm still not happy about him lacking his proper TWW look... Ah well. As long as his Down&A is still broken to all hell, I'll be happy BTW, Also just noticed that the platforms in the Wii Fit stage are elongated Balance Boards. Nice touch

Oh my God, he's STILL NOT FECKING CELSHADED!? WHY!? Ugh! That bugged the crap out of me in Brawl and it's STILL an issue here!

Next month, so theoretically it could be as early as next Tuesday (though NDs typically take place during the middle of the month, it doesn't have a set date pattern and NDs have happened in the first week of a month before...) Either way, the next one will be a "major" ND. Those (except for one time when it was late and Iwata apologized for it) always happen every two months and the last one was in August.

There must be SOMETHING we're missing here. I don't even see how it's possible!

Hmm... Longer network maintenance than usual this coming Monday? (it's usually between 12PM and 4PM Pacific time) Has the time for the "end of September-Start of October" system update finally come?

My time was about 29 seconds (Nowhere near the best out there, think the WR is around 20.something seconds!) The only real tip I can give is that you'll want to stall for a split second when you take off at the start where you activate that first set of lums - in order to let them turn to purple. If you just speed ahead, you'll only get them normal yellow form. Other than that, just don't miss the lums (IN ORDER!), let yourself fall fast and memorise the layout so that you'll fall right into place for those ones that move in from the side to fly into you.

Looks like NiSA is bringing this to Europe and Australia! Excellent! I'm really enjoying EO4, so I'm glad to see that more is on the way

Don't remember that one, but that would only be true for the 2 player VS sword fighting (THAT one would almost certainly be impossible to get working online). Everything else should work fine though.

Isn't it €20? So shouldn't it actually be cheaper in the UK? (something within £14.99-£17.99)

Bit of a shame that they didn't pre-load Wii Sports Club on that as well. Would've made the package look even better (and wouldn't have cost them anything since the base game is free)

Insane bundle! The sheer value in that pack is madness! Well! Wii U won't be seeing any sales bump till October 31st now!

18 mins of new footage from the latest demo! Looks brill! Lots of variety, great & innovative ideas and you can clearly see that they've put some real thought into the level design this time around! (in particular, they really nailed that core aspect of the level design of the MD games, where you have multiple paths to choose from that feature different levels of difficulty and different rewards of extra speed, plus red stars in this case, that all lead towards the same way) I can't see anything to fault in it. It seems that they may well have nailed it at last! The only thing I have to really note is that it's a lot slower paced than the other games (and even seems a fair bit slower than when in early demos - so I can see some people taking issue with that), but it just looks so fun! Nice and challenging too. There are some good challenging platforming moments there (and you lose ALL of your rings when you get hit again! - none of this only-lose-30ish-rings-when-hit nonsense like in the newer games). I am SO looking forward to this! I've been waiting for a great 3D Sonic game since Sonic Adventure (and the promises it held) and it seems that I'm finally gonna get it! I can hardly believe what I'm looking at!

Nintendo Direct sooner than we had expected? (but there are VC games this week...) Next week would make more sense, because of course they have the Autumn System Update and the N64/GBA VC games to announce/release...

ALTTP was fully translated into French and German, so it's gonna be the 50hz EU version and NOE are too stupid to offer people the choice of getting the US 60hz version instead

Gradius NES and Zelda 2 this week. And with that, we have officially caught up with (and surpassed, with two games in hand) the US Wii U VC lineup Next up, Japan! (yeah right...)

Good! That move hasn't been good since the N64 game!

4 years old. Never stopped playing since

You know what though? It might be disappointing, but the mainline Pokemon games have never really been graphical powerhouses anyway. I'm upset about S3D being missing from the overworld, but at least the battles have it (and that's the part of the game that benefits from it the most - not to mention that the battle visuals look surprisingly great!). More importantly though, the gameplay changes look to be very innovative and fun, that's much more important than caring about graphics! The game will still be amazing and I'll no doubt love every second of it, just like all the others

Considering that the PSP userbase at the time of MH3P's launch was still quite a bit bigger than the 3DS' current one, I'm surprised! Yeah, this game has more going for it (being the first truly new entry since 2009 and the first new mainline game ever on a handheld/first handheld online Monhun game etc), but still! BTW, Just as a reminder. The Wii U pricedrop has now come into effect in the US and EU, dunno about Japan though (has it come into effect there yet?). Here's hoping it makes a significant impact! TWW HD's Miiverse post count has already surpased TW101 (in all regions, including Europe's community) in just about a day as well, so that's a decent sign at least.

I could understand that if the environments were actually detailed... but they really aren't. Graphically its very simple by 3DS standards, maybe about on par with the DQ7 remake on 3DS... ... and that has no trouble running in S3D at all times (Artepiazza don't have a lot of experience with 3D either, more than Game Freak mind you - they did make the DQ DS remakes and Opoona for Wii). I'm not trying to say that Game Freak are lazy or crap or whatever(and you should know from first hand experience that I bloody LOVE their games ). I'm just saying that the technical issues that they've gone through with making this game probably come from their lack of experience in making full 3D games (and that's a fact - Harmoknight was made by a different team, made up of quite a few people who came from Genius Sonority, who have had plenty of experience working on 3D titles), rather than it being impossible to pull off on the 3DS hardware, because plenty of other games show us otherwise. This has been a bit of a trial by fire for GF and I said it would be long ago, back when the 3DS was first announced. Game Freak have also been public in how they struggled in getting to grips with 3DS development too; the site hosting that original interview seems to be gone, but here's Gamefreak's original quote... And they were one of the very first developers to get 3DS dev kits (IIRC they were the first ones outside of Nintendo 1st party to get them as far as public knowledge goes). All of Nintendo's internal developers have struggled to have to get to grips with modern shader hardware (which is why Capcom's games looked way better than Nintendo's games on 3DS and why up until recently almost all of their 3DS games were developed in collaboration with outside developers). Game Freak are effectively jumping two generations of hardware here and its their first time making a fully 3D game like this; it shouldn't be surprising that their game engine isn't a technical powerhouse. If Intelligent Systems is anything to go by though, their next few games are gonna look much better though, thanks to the experience they've accumulated over X&Y's development.

Yeah, it's a pale shadow of the 360 version; I would HIGHLY recommend avoiding it in favour of the 360 version if at all possible as it's a very sloppy port sadly. Alternatively, I still think there's a decent chance that we'll see a Wii U port of the first game; so maybe it might be a good idea to wait for a bit. Either way, if you must play it on PS3, I'm sure you'll still love it! (and knowing what you thought of TW101, I KNOW you'll love it )

I don't see how loading gates have anything to do with S3D rendering limitations though. The amount of assets involved is the same either way, it's just being displayed twice. The matter of loading comes down to available RAM and CPU power, not GPU grunt (and of course, S3D would be GPU limited rather than CPU limited by its very nature).

Nintendo have never co-developed a Pokemon game themselves and probably don't even have the staff spare to actually lend programming support anyway (most of EAD Kyoto's production staff are no doubt neck deep in the trenches trying to get Mario Kart 8 and A Link Between Worlds done, while EAD Tokyo are dashing to get SM3DW out of the door ASAP; so that probably wasn't an option. It sucks I agree, but it probably wouldn't be as simple a matter as getting Nintendo staff to help (and ultimately, Game Freak probably felt that the time that could've been spent on learning how to get it to work would be better spent improving the rest of the game). On the plus side, this now means that they have their first full scale 3D production under their belt (and 2 3DS engines too!), so their next production should be much better from a technical perspective. Letting Gamefreak do it by themselves gives their internal staff a chance to learn how to make full 3D worlds and games that they wouldn't really get if they just got someone outside to help. It makes them a much stronger developer for the future (and in the long run, a stronger Gamefreak is much more valuable to Nintendo than getting outsiders in to assist them all the time) Look at Intelligent Systems as a similar example. They didn't make a single fully 3D game all the way up until Fire Emblem Path of Radience on Gamecube... And look what they can now do on hardware with similar specs! (not to mention that the animations and shading is a million times better, but you can't really tell in a screenshot). Everyone's gotta start from somewhere...

Well don't forget, this is Game Freak. This IS their first ever full 3D polygon game after all (not counting Harmoknight, since it used fixed camera angles) and they've never really had the greatest programmers on staff. It's not hard to see why they might not be able to push visuals like the games you listed...