I admit it, I’m new to the whole BIT.TRIP thing. I didn’t pay much attention to the games when they first came out because I thought they were just artsy indie games with blocky graphics and chiptunes music and sound effects. That and Commander Video freaks me out. He’s faceless and disproportionate, like an Atari Slender Man. Still, after the bitterness of Star Fox 64 3D and the desire to keep my 3DS valid, I picked up BIT.TRIP SAGA in hopes of finding some arcade-style gameplay that feels rewarding and deep, despite its simplicity.
Well, jackpot. BIT.TRIP SAGA doesn’t have any extra content like BIT.TRIP Complete on the Wii, but all six BIT.TRIP games together alone justify the $40 price tag of a retail 3DS game.
After over a decade, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came to the Nintendo 3DS and it was great. It followed that another Nintendo 64 classic, Star Fox, would fit just as well on the handheld. Nintendo put out Star Fox 64 3D, and… well, it’s all in the name. This is Star Fox 64 in 3D, and that’s it. You don’t get anything else.
Star Fox 64 is still a fun game, but in terms of sheer content for a $40 game cartridge, it falls short. It was groundbreaking in the mid-90′s, but unlike Ocarina of Time, which still got its own master quest port to add to the value, it doesn’t justify itself. It’s a shame to see Nintendo succumb to the temptation to make another relatively lazy port of an old game. The graphics are slightly better, but that’s all it has.
I’ll admit I had completely missed any mention of this new Final Fantasy title before andriasang posted this trailer, and I’m a little bummed it’s not a new RPG for the 3DS. Now the invented word “theatrhythm” makes a bit more sense. The game is a rhythm/music game with scrolling dots similar to Guitar Hero/Rock Band, except it throws a track list culled from Final Fantasy’s long, long history at you.
I gotta tell ya, I’m not all that excited about a stylus-tapping game set to the ballroom scene from Final Fantasy VIII and a bunch of other cinematic and gameplay video from the series. I will concede one point, though: I got a little stoked when the boss fight music from Final Fantasy VI kicked in, and the rhythm tapping accompanied a graphically revamped battle with Ultros. That was a track that just always sounded like Go Time to me.
If you bought your Nintendo 3DS before August 12, you’re a 3DS Ambassador and will get 10 NES games now and 10 GBA games later. The NES games are ready now, but like most other things involving Nintendo and any kind of online content, it’s a convoluted pain in the ass.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tap a “Download 3DS Ambassador games” on the 3DS eStore? Well, you can’t. If you want your games, you need to go into the Settings menu, then into Your Downloads. Then you need to do it again and again for each game. On the bright side, the games are free.
The full list of NES games 3DS Ambassadors get are:
E3 went down a few weeks ago and while there were no real earth shattering announcements (thanks to the ever persistance subculture of everything getting leaked), all in all it was a pretty good show. The rest of the year is looking pretty good indeed, with some of the smaller titles like Child Of Eden, Catherine, and Shadows of the Damned (all of which you should buy, for the inevitable rarity if nothing else) coming now to avoid the epic cluster**** that is the fall launch lineup. But the future of gaming? That is an entirely different story altogether. Let’s take a look at current state of gaming, focused on the three big console manufacturers.
Andriasang reports that highly anticipated 3DS title Mega Man Legends 3 has been cancelled. This come in spite of the numerous fan contests, promotions, and the planned demo/fund-raising pitch, Mega Man Legends 3 Prototype. According to a message posted on the game’s official site, the game was cancelled due to not reaching certain conditions for continuing development, though fan speculation believes that the bigger cause was the desparture of Mega Man creator and Legends 3 project lead Keiji Inafune from Capcom some time ago.
This is quite a blow for the still floundering 3DS, as a number of people, myself included, were looking forward to the return of this franchise considering the second ended with a cliffhanger. It’s worth noting that currently, Capcom officially has no Mega Man games in development, so unless Mega Man 11 (or Mega Man X-9) are announced, the franchise might very well be dead.
Any perception of railing mercilessly on Nintendo recently is strictly coincidental (at least, until I find out what today’s 3DS downloads are). This is actually a valid argument for giving Nintendo more of our money… if it would let us. Meet Andrew Eisen, a man with a quality headset for recording videos, a taste for Japanese video games, and all the affectations of a white Billy Dee Williams. And if you can ignore his Colt 45-pitching verbal swagger for a minute, you can hear his very good point.
Nintendo is passing up on publishing a lot of great Japanese games in America. The Last Story. Xenoblade. Another Code R. Disaster: Day of Crisis. Pandora’s Tower. Fatal Frame 4. No, these aren’t system sellers, but they’re games of such appeal to hardcore gamers, especially hardcore JRPG/J-Adventure/J-Survival Horror gamers, that they would almost certainly make Nintendo a significant amount of money. Eisen ran the numbers and looked at the trends and found that tons of games released in both America and Japan, no matter how obscure or Japanese, get more sales in America than in Japan. Consider the success of games like Muramasa, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, Trauma Center, and Arc Rise Fantasia, and of extremely Japanese publishers like Atlus, XSEED, and Aksys. Japanese games aren’t just for the really, really, really dorky otaku nerds who want anything from Japan anymore. We want quality games, even if they’re weird, and especially if they’re spiritual successors to Xenogears or created by the man behind the good Final Fantasy games, or was directed by Suda 51 to be utterly terrifying.
These games are already made. Many of them are already ported to English, so they literally just need to be switched to NTSC and re-pressed. That’s it. It’s not like a major effort Nintendo would have to go through. Even if it was a series of short, limited runs, the company could easily make a big chunk of money in America by putting out these games. And, as Eisen noted, we can’t even play the European releases, already translated, because the Wii (and the 3DS, sadly) are both region locked. Even if we bought the games legitimately, as importers do, we can’t play them.
This isn’t even an understandable decision by Nintendo to ignore hardcore gamers because they’ll still give the company money for the big system seller games. Hardcore gamers will give Nintendo even more money for these titles, but Nintendo doesn’t seem to want that. 99% of the work is done getting the games to the U.S. They’ve been developed. Several have been translated. It’s just a matter of making them compatible with American Wiis and selling them here. Once again, Nintendo is just refusing to move an inch to please the hardcore crowd. And this time, they’re actually giving up money in the process.
Super Mario Bros. is a tough enough game just to beat it straight up. Enthusiasts would later create their own challenge by coming up with better and better Speed Runs, a practice which was made more competitive with the rise of YouTube and the like. Now the new thing is Low Score Runs. Think for a second about how hard it would be to beat the game without dying and avoiding jumping on any turtles, getting any 1ups, collecting super mushrooms, or even touching a single coin. You even have to wait out the clock at the end of levels so you only get 100 points per flag pull. When you play Mario like it’s golf, suddenly powerups are hazards themselves.
Once again, I find my mind boggled at the sheer dedication it must take to perfect the completion of an ad hoc challenge like this. Just watch the video and try not to let your jaw hit the floor. The record currently stands at 600 points with 0 deaths, and I don’t think it’s possible to get lower.
I’m a lifelong Nintendo fanboy. I grew up with the NES and SNES. During the first 3D console war in the mid-90′s, I sided with the Nintendo 64 despite missing out on many, many great games until years later. I was optimistic for the Wii, and the DS completely won me over. That said, I’ve realized something about Nintendo that I think always floated around in the back of my mind, but that I didn’t really accept until the WiiU was announced.
Nintendo doesn’t care about wooing hardcore gamers. Yes, jaded gamers think this is self-evident, but it’s actually worse than it seems. Nintendo doesn’t care about wooing hardcore gamers because we’ll come back to them anyway. That is the truly terrible thing about Nintendo’s current strategy. It doesn’t matter how disappointing their hardware is, how inept their handling of online services is, or how much they bother to build a platform that third party developers actually feel like using to make a decent game and not just a half-assed semi-port.
Let me be crude but concise. Nintendo is our cheating ex-girlfriend who, every six months or so, calls us up at 2:00 a.m. looking for action. And, because we are idiots and she does that one thing we like, we come over. Maybe it’s a one-night stand, maybe it’s a short rekindling of the relationship, but it always ends with her completely ignoring us and sleeping with our little brother.
One of the most anticipated games for the Nintendo 3DS has finally come out. Unfortunately, it’s a remake of a Nintendo 64 game. Make of that what you well, but either way we’re going to look at The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. This is going to be a fast review, because there’s only so much you can say about a remake that doesn’t radically change things, and, like nearly everything else that comes from Nintendo besides game controllers, there isn’t any radical change here. It’s the same great game we all played 13 years ago, but it’s also the same game we played 13 years ago.
came to the Nintendo 3DS and 
, and… well, it’s all in the name. This is Star Fox 64 in 3D, and that’s it. You don’t get anything else.
, 
, and 
(all of which you should buy, for the inevitable rarity if nothing else) coming now to avoid the epic cluster**** that is the fall launch lineup. But the future of gaming? That is an entirely different story altogether. Let’s take a look at current state of gaming, focused on the three big console manufacturers.
