Dcubed

Oh! Speaking of Sony... That reminds me of another little product placement gem regarding the Uncharted series... I hope you like Subway! How did he even manage to find a Subway in the middle of a desert anyway!? There are plenty of other embarrasing little Uncharted product placement examples we can choose from, but this one is my favourite

Oh yeah, no doubt; Resident Evil 6 is a very good choice for that series' lowpoint. It is, by far, the most critically panned game in the entire series; it was so bad in fact, that it spurred Capcom to completely reboot the series with RE7 as a result. It was also far from the commercial success that its total sales would suggest... as almost all of those sales came from bargain basement discounts many many years after it came out. It had a budget that was around 3x bigger than RE5 and didn't even come close to selling as much at full RRP; it price-collapsed very quickly! Make no mistake, RE6 was a huge failure and RE7 was a direct response to that failure for a damn good reason. Is it THE biggest lowpoint for the series? I'm not so sure when there are seven shitastic RE movies to choose from, as well as nine horrible mobile titles to choose from and four depressing and horrendous F2P multiplayer spinoffs that all equally besmirch the series' name... If I have to pick just one true series lowpoint though? I'd probably have to give it to Resident Evil Retribution (the 5th RE movie) however, purely for how much pathetic Sony product placement (& other products) is absolutely littered throughout... I honestly would've believed this to be a Sony infomercial if it didn't have the Resident Evil logo on it Oh boy! I can't wait for Resident Evil Portable! Any day now...

The crazy thing is that this is far from the worst Xbox console special edition design I've ever seen... It can get a LOT worse...

A smart move isn't necessarily a good or respectful one; but thanks for digging up the past anyway. Always fun to see what things were like way back then compared to now and seeing a very different world! I did think that Dragalia Lost was going to be a big success for both Cygames and Nintendo; shame it didn't end up panning out, but I'm glad to see Nintendo move away from the mobile sector either way.

Tour is not a spinoff. When Nintendo put up their Mario 35th Anniversary website, they included a timeline of every mainline Super Mario game and every mainline Mario Kart game. Tour was included as the latest game in the Mario Kart timeline (and Mario Kart Live was indeed absent). Sadly the site is gone now, and nobody had the foresight to take screenshots of the timeline page unfortunately, but you can see evidence online corroberating what I am saying if you want further proof. Mario Kart Tour IS Mario Kart 9, whether you like it or not. And it absolutely did come at the expense of a brand new Mario Kart game for Switch. This is absolutely true though. Dragalia Lost was an external IP being developed by Cygames that was focused entierly on the Japanese market alone. Nintendo simply decided to jump in to take over and assist with development & localisation as an opportunistic mobile IP grab, because they desperately needed some sort of safety net in place if the Switch was to fail. It's also worth noting that Dragalia Lost, in particular, completely spat on the late Iwata's stated plans for Nintendo's mobile division. The entire point of Nintendo first entering the mobile market was to try and use these games as a "bridge" of sorts in order to court players over from mobile and onto Nintendo's own platforms; through the use of existing Nintendo IP that ties into adjacent console games. Dragalia Lost is NOT an existing Nintendo IP, and has no relation to Nintendo's home consoles whatsoever. It was purely a means to support the company while they were floundering with the dead Wii U and the dying 3DS, when the Switch was anything but a sure thing. It was also late and overbudget by the time of its release; as was Mario Kart Tour and pretty much every Nintendo mobile project not called Super Mario Run. How quickly everyone forgets just how bad a position Nintendo was in just a scant 5 or so years ago. It was so bad that even the head of The Pokemon Company thought that Switch was doomed to fail, and TPC were already making arrangements for the Pokemon series to move entierly over to mobile platforms. Dragalia Lost and Mario Kart Tour are our insight into that dreadful timeline where Switch was a failure and Nintendo gave up entierly on the dedicated hardware/software business. The death of these mobile efforts are something that we should be celebrating! Oh, and before anyone brings up Pikmin Bloom? That is all Niantic, Nintendo have absolutely nothing to do with that game whatsoever other than licensing out the IP (most likely as a grandfathered contract following the success of Pokemon Go).

This is all completely wrong, I don’t even know where to begin. I’ll just leave a couple of bombshells here and just leave it at that. First off, MKT is a mainline Mario Kart title that was developed internally at EPD; with Hideki Konami himself at the helm. It was NOT outsourced, but it did have Bandai Namco contributing art assets just like how they did for MK8. Hundreds of people worked on this game! It contains almost 100 tracks (when counting all the different variations included) and dozens of characters! It literally came at the expense of a brand new Mario Kart title for Switch!! Secondly, $200 million in revenue is the equivalent of around 3.3 million sales of a $60 game. That is a pathetic total for a Mario Kart title! Even Mario Kart Live (which IS a cheap outsourced spin-off) will probably end up pulling in more revenue than that! And thus the opportunity cost was absolutely gigantic with MKT. This was supposed to be a Pokémon Go style mega seller. It was Nintendo’s trump card in case the Switch failed to take off; and it was a spectacular failure.

What gives you that idea? Mario Kart world tour generated $200M revenue as of last April. No way they're going to leave this kind of money on the table by dropping mobile altogether. That's peanuts for a Mario Kart game; and those are lifetime sales, following a very frontloaded launch. The game is basically not generating any significant amounts of money anymore. Now with it being harvested for MK8 DLC, there is no point in wasting money and valuable staff on it anymore. I give it 6-12 months until it gets shut down.

Mario Kart Tour is next... Hopefully this spells the end for Nintendo's mobile initiative. No more will we have valuable Nintendo staff wasted on this junk!

Ahh... Catharsis!

I really wish you could leave blank spaces inside each folder like you can on 3DS and Wii U... Ruddy annoying that you can't do that in order to help seperate things... But still! FOLDERS!!!!!!!!!! It only took 3,000 years, but we finally got there!

BLOODY FINALLY!

I still have this awful feeling that releases are gonna dry up as soon as Mario Golf gets released…

Not tonight I'm afriad, I'm working this evening.

So... after playing in tonight's N-E League, I've now played each of the 8 new tracks. And here are my following first impressions of them... General overall impressions I'm really impressed with their representation in MK8DX. They don't feel as budget as they looked in MKT, and they generally fit in with the look and feel of the base MK8DX courses really nicely. The music is absolutely tops! Great stuff! And overall, there are some interesting ideas here... I LOVE the whole Waverace 64 thing of having the tracks change paths on each lap! I've always wanted to see Mario Kart do more of this kind of thing (I mean, we have seen some things like this before; such as Grumble Volcano and Lakeside Parkway, but this is much more extensive!). Having the different Track Variants from Tour be implemented in this manner is very clever; and I really hope that the next proper mainline Mario Kart on Switch 2 really runs with this idea. I want to see stuff like Sonic Allstars Racing Transformed, where the tracks explode and blow apart on each lap! Some of the tracks have had some pretty extensive overhauls from their original counterparts, while others? Not so much... It's a bit inconsistent in that regard. But I'll go more into detail in talking about each individual track... Oh! Speaking of which... Very strong start to this new DLC pack. This is a really interesting course which makes great use of the Waverace 64 changing track lap concept! Now I know that the original MKT had different Variant Track versions of Paris Promenade; which they seem to have combined together into one track by having the pathway switch on each lap. This was a great idea and it pans out really well! I love how sprawling the track feels, with all sorts of different possible paths that all feel tangibly different; not just slight variants on the same thing that don't really matter. While I'm sure that there will probably be one "ideal" path to follow in the end, once I've had time to practice it and really figure it out, right now I love the sense of discovery that comes with this track. It feels really open, with a nice mix of open areas and tight corridors. This is top shelf stuff! Coming off of Paris Promenade? This one is pretty disappointing. The original 3DS version of Toad Circuit was pretty much the blandest and most forgettable "starter track" in the series, and this one does literally nothing new to change that. They've not added any new mechanics or any real changes at all. This is just the 3DS track with a shiny new coat of paint; and that's really disappointing, especially in the context of the main game's base content, where all the previous retro tracks got really wild overhauls. This one stands out as not only bland, but pretty low effort overall, without the wild shakeups that past retro MK8 tracks got. Woah! What the hell happened here!? This is some real whiplash coming off of Toad Circuit, because while that course's remake is super conservative? This one is anything but! Right off the bat, there's an interesting section where you can get knocked right off the track! We're off to a great start already! But then we get to the cave... and it's completely different from the original! Now there's a whole underground cave section with some minor shortcut potential using shrooms; then we have a big chunk of track missing and a large jump! This is nothing like the original at all! Until we finally get to the last section where things get a bit more familiar with the classic spiral and falling rocks. This is a really interesting re-imagining of the classic N64 track that feels very different from the original. I did always wonder what they'd do with this one, because the original N64 version is only fun because of that game's unique gameplay mechanics and jank (with the ability to send players flying upwards on and off the track); it would've been super bland and boring if played straight in MK8, so I'm really glad that they gave it a significant overhaul here Now we're back in more familiar territory. This one follows the original track much more closely than Choco Mountain, but there's a lot of nice incidental detail that has been added; like the SMB underground murial in the spiral section, or the different shops now available (I wanna go to Kamek's Book Store dammit!). There's some minor tweaks and changes, but it doesn't really stray all that far from the original; outside of the gliding section towards the end... though I do have to wonder, why did they make the cars stationary at the end? That section is nowhere near as hectic as the original now! Necro Edit: Well, well, well... it seems that Nintendo agreed with me. Because they actually went back and fixed this in Wave 2! Makes you wonder how much this first wave was rushed out of the door, because the original release (which is still used in Time Trials, due to having to maintain compatiblity with existing time trial records) feels outright unfinished now by comparison. Ahh Tokyo, my favourite part of the Mushroom Kingdom! This follows the same concept as with Paris Promenade; take all the different Variant Track versions of the track from Mario Kart Tour and combine them into one course that changes paths on each lap. I still like how it's handled here, but I think that the source material just isn't as strong as with Paris Promande. Tokyo Blur is... fine, there isn't anything wrong with it per-say, it's just a bit bland overall. There aren't any real crazy alternative paths or massive shortcut opportunities I've seen, at least not at first glance. Perhaps with time, as I learn the ins and outs of this track it'll reveal more depth to me? But my initial impression is one of a somewhat bland track that isn't nearly as good as Paris Promenade. This was always a really underrated track in Mario Kart DS and I'm really glad to see it back here. Mario Kart 8 DX, for all that's great about it, doesn't have a lot of "Traffic-based Tracks", so this fills that hole really nicely. While they haven't made massive sweeping changes with this one, they've made some smart tweaks and changes to widen it up for 12 players and the traffic density is just right here; nice and chaotic without being completely overwhelming. There's plenty of opportunities to cut corners with smart shroom use and I also really like the way that they've taken an old shortcut & turned it into a gliding section; great stuff! The new music arrangement is also top-tier! They did this track justice. Sky Garden continues the grand Mario Kart 8 tradition of taking GBA tracks and turning them into something completely and utterly new! This track shows barely any resemblance to the original GBA track at all! Ironically, they've taken one of the flattest tracks in the entirety of Super Circuit and have made it very much vertical! I think the most interesting thing about this one is the fact that the clouds actually have accurate collision in place... this feels... very abusable! I guarantee you that somebody is going to find an Ultra Shortcut on this track and very soon! (Edit: Looks like it's already starting... ). I really like what they've done with this one, and I think there's a lot of potential for some advanced tactics and play here. Definitely one I need to practice, learn and watch out for! This track is bonkers! I didn't even know what to make of it when I played it tonight with you guys! It's like three different tracks slammed into one! Now, this track doesn't do the whole multiple paths per lap thing that Paris and Tokyo did (probably because it didn't get the different Variant Track versions in MKT that Paris and Tokyo did), but instead it shifts and moves all throughout to give you multiple paths to choose from at almost every turn! It's almost like a Mario Kart dungeon! It's wild, crazy and I absolutely LOVE it! I really need to take some time to learn it and figure out what's going on, but there's just so much packed into this course that I'm absolutely blown away by the design! I'm not sure if there's really one ideal path through this track, but some paths seem to lead to coins while others lead to items; so I'm guessing that some paths are faster than others... but then again, the whole thing seems to be running on a global timer, so I'm not even sure how to plan out a particular route. This one is gonna take some real time to truly learn and master the ways of the Ninja Hideaway! Right! With that all said? Here's my track rankings based on my first, initial impressions...

Wow! These new tracks are really interesting! Ninja Hideaway is nutso! It's like 3 tracks in one! I can see why you were raving about it in MKT @RedShell! Great games guys! Was really great to shake the rust off again

Everyone choose Choco Mountain for the first track in GP3!

Yup! I just updated that old Excel file for him the other day!

That functionality isn't live yet. You can't play the new tracks with randoms who don't own the DLC until March 22nd.

While technically this should be in the Nintendo forum, since it's also coming to Switch? I'm happy to let this game languish here. JK Rowling is a cunt who is actively contributing to the death of Trans people (including children ironically enough), and this game does not deserve to have any meaningful discorse surrounding it. There's a good reason why nobody previously made a thread about this game @Ronnie, and out of solidarity? I'd recommend that this thread just be closed (I'm sure you meant no harm Ronnie, but I really don't think that we should be discussing this game here). Normally I'm all for seperating art from artist, but Death of the Author doesn't really apply in the case where the author is very much alive and actively & gleefully causing significant harm to society; while still producing directly relevent and adjacent works.

Well, I mean, Mario Kart Tour has exactly 48 tracks when you strip away the Remix tracks, the multiple variations of the same track (of which MK8DX apparantly incorporates into the one track from what I hear), and the tracks that are already included in MK8DX as standard... so you were always guaranteed to see DS Shroom Ridge again in this DLC at some point

Yeah, there's a definite shift going on at the moment towards trying to squeeze more out of an existing audience... and I think it is partly to do with the sluggish PS5 hardware sales (in the face of ongoing shortages). Sony have already stated that they're looking to shift their overarching strategy with Playstation, with them now expanding to the PC platform and with them now moving towards producing more multiplayer focused GAAS titles & less traditional single player experiences. However, I think it's more a matter of Sony realising that their traditional console market (primarily single player focused) now has very limited growth potential in the future. The total market for traditional console games is only going to continue shrinking, as it continues to fail to reach new audiences beyond the traditional 10-25 year old male demographic, and bring in new children (who are now growing up with mobiles, Minecraft and Twitch/Youtube instead). And coupled with incessent hardware shortages that aren't letting up any time soon, that will continue to limit the sales of PS5 hardware? And further increasing costs of game development? Sony need to find other sources of growth and revenue; hence the switch to supporting the PC platform, the increase in standard PS5 game RRPs and the switch towards squeezing more out of their existing audience with game design (see, GAAS and incessent MTX). I think that you're only going to see more of this MTX abuse going forward, not less. Especially as Sony struggles to compete in the subscription space and in the face of The Great Industry Consolidation happening right now.

So it's a F2P game being sold at retail for £70, with its horrendous microtransactions purposly hidden from reviewers and racheted upwards after people got their first hit; and with always-online DRM that is now preventing people from even playing the game that they spent £70 for. Welcome to the future! At this point though? Quite frankly, this is the future you deserve if you're happily buying this game at this point in full knowledge of what a disgrace this game is. Looking forward to this Monday's inevitable Jimquisition video about this game!

Right! Let's start kicking things off! First off, we have a fancy shmancy new logo to celebrate the new League! Special thanks goes to @RedShell for the original design that inspired this year's logo Secondly, our GP Template has now been updated with all the new DLC stuff, including all the new icons; and you'll be glad to know that since I could be arsed this time around, all of the old course icons now have their British names! No more "Neo Bowser City" and "Toad Harbor", we have our u's where they belong! Yank names be gone! Finally, our first GP graphic is ready to go and has been sent to @Glen-i to be uploaded, since... well... you know... he's the host. He'll be posting tomorrow night's GP details shortly. Right! That's it. I'll see you all on the race track tomorrow night at 20:00!

I'm all for you taking cheap potshots at me, but take it to another thread mate. Not here, this is a happy place; let's keep it that way