Dcubed

Huh, so it's not just me then? I wonder if the delay had something to do with the special Mario/Peach/Toad 3DS'? The Toad ones only started arriving yesterday, while the others hit end of last week! Perhaps they came as part of the same shipment? (the contest was held at roughly the same time wasn't it?)

HOLY CRAP MY AR CARDS FINALLY CAME FROM CLUB NINTENDO!!! Only like 3 months later!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-06-20-david-yarnton-quits-nintendo Wow! That was really sudden! He's been there for almost 20 years! Satoru Shibata (AKA, the Euro Iwata) is taking over direct control of Nintendo's UK branch until a replacement is found. Wonder what made him jump ship? Maybe his collapse during that bike race was simply too much for him and he wanted to take it easy?

Why couldn't we have both? They're two completely different games! (not just different versions) Why must it be one or the other? Of course it's much too late for a DS release now, but why couldn't they have pulled their finger out and got the DS game out earlier? Such a shame because the whole touch screen Rune drawing/real-life book thing with the DS game is really interesting, while the PS3 game is your typical turn based RPG (although of course that's a rarity in of itself these days!)

Will wait to see if the port job gets fucked up like most HD re-releases first...

BAM! There it is FUCK YEAH! Now, where are my Kid Icarus AR Cards!?

Because that game came from Rockstar Leeds, not Rockstar North (the real GTA studio) The Housers may have supervised the story, but they knew that nobody wanted top down GTA and they were quick to use it as an example of how "mature" games couldn't sell on a Nintendo console (conviniently ignoring the game's faliure on PSP that followed soon afterwards as well) They took Nintendo's money and used it against them; that's exactly what these guys are like. They're known for having egos the size of a mountain and a real life "rockstar" attitude (hence the company name) - as well as being happy to treat employees like shit and throw partners under the bus (Hi Team Bondi!)

GTA V was never going to come to Wii U. Even if Take Two wanted it to happen, the Houser brothers would never allow it to come to a Nintendo console due to their longstanding grudge against Nintendo (see Body Harvest) Hopefully there's still time for Bioshock Infinite (even if it turns out to be a late port ALA Bioshock PS3)

This game has come at the perfect time for me. I'm hungry for a new single player 3DS game (that's not a puzzle game) and Theathythm is still 2 weeks away! Bring on Thursday!

Nice to see proof that Nintendo lived up to their promise regarding controller streaming lag. Of course I had no doubt that they solved the problem. They simply wouldn't have released the controller if it didn't live up to their ridiculous wireless latency standards (The Wiimote camera operates at 240 FPS, if you want an idea of how seriously they take this issue!) The DS and 3DS also use a custom Wireless protocol that features much lower latency than typical Adhoc WiFi (Ni-Fi has less than 1 frame of lag) for the same reason. Something like Four Swords Anniversary (which relies on single frame timing in certain circumstances) wouldn't work as well over the standard local WiFi that you get on PSP or Vita; so naturally, I expected the same standards to be applied here with the Wii U. The only real question mark in place is how far the range is on the wireless, before you start getting connection drop-outs and lost frames (DS/3DS games can go ape shit if you even drop a single bar of connection - I'm looking at you Four Swords Anniversary and Mario Tennis Open!) I'm hoping for games to be playable from at least a room away from where the console is. I don't expect it, but it would be sweet

It happened, but this sort of thing happens with most new successor consoles. Some people thought that the GBA was just a widescreen GBC (I saw this in person myself) Some people thought that the DS was just a GBAsp with a second screen. Some people thought that you could play PS2 games on a PS1 (Yes I've seen this happen, really!) Didn't stop them from becoming huge successes. It's the kind of thing that happens early on in a console's life (usually with retailers lumping the new console games in with the predecessor's ones) and then passes over, with everyone forgetting that the confusion ever happened.

DING DING DING!!! WE HAVE A WINNER!!! By all accounts the game is actually meant to be pretty good, according to people who played the arcade original. An arcade port looks like the arcade game? Shocker!

The problem is not so much in the marching forth of technology, because (as you rightfully said) it can be used to make good quality (GCN/Wii or even higher) graphics with nice image quality, a smooth framerate and no nasty technical issues like pop-in, much more easily (and more cheaply!) than even on Wii. Sadly that's not the way the "core" market works. Rather the big publishers like EA, Activision, Ubisoft and Take Two have a vested interest in raising consumer expectations and the minimum bar for budgets across the board, in order to snuff out the little guys (Hi THQ!) and the marching forth of greater graphics tech is enabling them to do just this. Their goal is to turn the VG industry into Hollywood, leaving the main industry as a wasteland where only 2 or 3 "safe" types of games can be made that appeal to the typical 12-24 year old Dudebro audience, where $100 million budgets are the norm and only 1 or 2 publishers can survive (giving them total market dominance) This is very close to happening with the PS360 already (where everything is basically turning into either COD, or a Gears of War/Uncharted clone). You saw it yourself at E3! All the big major games are basically a brown, violent, Dudebro, quasi-interactive movie now - and it's only gonna get worse next generation. And even on the download services like PSN & XBLA, they're suffering the same fate too. The mid-tier of games that would've been sold at retail otherwise (Like Lara Croft The Guardian of Light or Hydrophobia) are being pushed to these services (killing off the lower budget games like Geometry Wars or Marble Blast Ultra in the process). That's why XBIG was created in the first place, to relegate lower budget games to the shit tier that nobody checks out and give more breathing room to the higher budget titles. Once the consoles go DD only, the mid-tier titles currently on there will also get squeezed out - forced to go iOS only or die out completely. That's why I don't want to see graphics go any further. I want to see the industry saved from these tyrants and to see mid-range games (like Journey and Sly Cooper) thrive! This is also something that Iwata has constantly gone on about how he wants to create a market with Wii U and 3DS, where all ranges of budgets can thrive (at full or budget price) So far I think he's succeeding with 3DS, at least in Japan (where games like Dragon Quest Monsters and Inazuma Eleven Go can outsell Kingdom Hearts DDD and Resident Evil Revelations) and the Wii U lineup is wildly varied as far as budgets go. I hope that this can fully spread throughout the west and continue on the Wii U as it's more or less the only hope left for the ending of this trend! (lest everything become either a $100 million "safe" AAA blockbuster or a £0.69 iPhone game)

Metal Mario is a QR character!?!? AWESOME! Maybe there's hope for Shy Guy yet!

Ya know what, ignore my posts above. I don't want to shit up a nice happy positive thread, with my grumpy old-guy attitude. This is a nice thread, not a place to vent my negativity (and I'm generally down on the industry as a whole, not just the Wii 3rd party situation) Sorry. To make up for my crap earlier, how about a nice video retrospective going over all the quality 1st and 3rd party titles that came to the Wii over it's lifetime? (it's missing Trauma Center Second Opinion and the Wii Ware games, but is otherwise awesome )

Man, shit like this really wants me to see Nintendo not push graphics any further than they already are... http://www.computerandvideogames.com/353788/ea-we-dont-want-to-pss-off-our-fans-with-dead-space-3/ All greater graphics do is increase risk and kill creativity! If Pikmin 3 turned out to be the peak of Nintendo's games visually speaking, I'd be very happy

Has anyone in the UK received a Toad 3DS yet? My sis is still waiting on hers... Give it to me!

Spot on. It's an amazing game, turned even better, that is somewhat bittersweet for me though in that it also serves as a reminder of what could've been regarding multiplatform titles... Just think how much better it would be if we had gotten an exclusive RE mainline title that was designed around the Wiimote & Chuck, instead of the Chronicles light gun games

Edit: Not the place for this crap. Please carry on. I could use some positivity!

Yeah, it's looking to be an odd ball alright. PS4 has a similar setup as with Wii U, but with a CPU of different architecture (Wii U = Power PC, PS4 = x86), while the Xbox 3 is going in a very different direction. I bet MS are planning to run a variant of Windows 8 on their system (hence the absurd amount of RAM - and the slow type of RAM used), with the Xbox 3 being basically a glorified set-top box that just happens to play games. It's not just hardware, but in terms of philosophy, we may well be looking at 3 very different systems again It'll be nice to see heterogeneous hardware again, I'm so sick of this PS360 generation with two basically interchangeable consoles...

Current rumour mill states that Wii U and PS4 (Codename: Orbis) have GPGPUs (Basically a GPU that can take on CPU functions), 2GB of GDDR5 RAM each and relatively weak CPUs, while the Xbox 3 (Codename: Durango) has a conventional architecture with a relatively weak GPU, but a stronger CPU and 8GB (yes 8! ) of slower DDR3 RAM. Edit: Like clockwork, seems another leak has just come out that puts it at 4GB of DDR4 RAM now! http://www.scribd.com/doc/92821757/XBox-720-9-24-Checkpoint-Draft-1 Maybe the old rumours were referring to 8GB of RAM for the Debug Kit then? (Debug units usually have twice the RAM of final retail consoles) - because the rest of the leak matches up with what we already knew! That actually makes a lot of sense when you look at what we've seen. The Wii U's CPU was supposedly kinda weak in comparison to its GPU; if it featured a GPGPU, that would explain the discrepancy (since the system would be designed in such a way that the overpowered GPU would compensate for the CPU) Since all the 3rd party stuff is made up of quickie PS360 ports, they wouldn't have been optimised for the Wii U's new architectural features (nor its GPU's Shader Model 5 featureset), so devs aren't getting much greater performance out of it right now (like what was suggested before in the Wii U speculation thread) If this is all true, then Wii U may actually be in a pretty good position overall... assuming that Xbox 3/Durango doesn't win the 3rd party battle. It's easy enough to get Xbox 360 + levels of performance out of those quickie ports and it should be able to handle PS4 downports fairly easily (similar architecture, same RAM - with the PS4's GPU being about 2-3 times as capable as Wii U's - kinda similar to the PS2/Xbox situation) In regards to getting 3rd party support, I don't think hardware is going to be much of a barrier (it should even be able to handle UE4, going by what we know). No, the big problem is one of developer mindset and that's one that Nintendo have never been able to tackle properly since the SNES. Those draconian methods used back then still haunt them to this day and while they've mostly recovered in Japan (only a few devs are still holding back out of personal grudge reasons - Q Entertainment and Hideo Kojima spring to mind instantly), in the west they are still struggling to shake off the "Kiddy" (AKA "Casual") label that scares off devs who grew up playing/modding/working on PC/XBOX games. I expect plenty of excuses for not releasing Wii U versions, that make no sense and have nothing to do with hardware capability, across the Wii U's lifetime (hell we're already getting them! - I'm looking at you Kojima/Crystal Dynamics...)

The US version is going to be the angriest box ever made...

PN06? (Platinum's 6th game, though make that 7th if MGRevengence comes out first, and a nice reference to boot )

Nooooooo way will it be £199.99 and no way will Amazon give a proper price promise on that hardware. I'm expecting $349.99/£299.99 with Nintendoland packed in (along with a Wiimote Plus & Nunchuck) I'd go with Shopto's one. They actually will honour their price promise!

OMG! I just realised something! I totally called Miiverse back in May in the Wii U Speculation Thread! Fuck yeah! (All my other points still stand!)