I despise it and I don't see this practice dieing off unless there is some sort of legislation against it.

Yeah, you have the exact opposite thought process as I do.

My position is that there should never ever be legislation for any of it. People should just educate themselves and vote with their money more responsibly. The government should only ever intervene in the market when there's actual harm being done. Not when people are being willing fools.

Sure, you might be responsible enough and I don't disagree but call me cynical, I don't have faith in mass population having a proper sense of reason and voting responsibly with their wallets, at least when it comes to gaming 

Haha well you've hit upon the dilemna at the heart of mine, and many people's, entire political worldviews! Which is worse? Mob stupidity or state corruption? To be honest, I'm not even sure. It seems to switch from year to year. Look at censorship nowadays. Until quite recently, that was hugely a worry about the government. Now it's a worry about whatever twitter mob happens to arise out of the scum pits.

I would say the main difference is that state legislation is very hard to remove once it's in place. Mob zeitgeist can easily change quickly. For better or worse.

That mechanic could work quite well in 2D actually. Hope they try it!

There's an apt summation!

I think the issue is not about the ad revenue, but more so that Nintendo wants to protect it's IP and be able to control how it is delivered to the consumer.

I suspect this is likely correct.

I remember my young 5 year old cousin being a huge Mario fan and wanting to watch Mario on youtube because his parents wouldn't buy him a console. I remember them then complaining that they found what seemed like a good lets play video but the commentator started swearing a few minutes in (they're the type that really irrationally care about that).

I think it's probably a similar thing as to why they're not having voice chat in Splatoon. They're aware of what the internet is like and they want to do whatever they can to keep the brand identity constant. Of course I could be wrong. They could just be idiots and think this is better for business. Which it isn't.

and I think that the fast sailing might have been a test to see how much the new hardware was capable of loading at certain speeds

Lol I'm more inclined to think that the fast sailing was because the game was a nightmare without it. Could be both of course!

Right, but you can't really compare Sony and Nintendo. Sony do a lot of other things. And their problems are largely with those other things. The PS4 is probably their single most valuable business. Whereas Nintendos is sadly their handheld (not that sad, I like both)

It's mostly indies you're talking about. Wii U is still doing pretty good with those. We've got Mighty No.9, Bloodstained and Yuka-Laylee all fairly big indie games on the way. Hugely looking forward to the latter 2, not sure about the first. Looks a bit dull so far.

It's sitting at 630,000 sales now. Add digital to that and it's probably around 750,000 (not exactly sure what percentage is digital).

I imagine that's probably considered a success for them. Compared to the sales of the original which was targeting platforms that had much larger install bases, this is pretty good.

Hopefully we'll see a 3rd.

I will definitely buy this eventually. It wasn't at the top of my last because I'm just not very good at combo-based action games

Bayonetta 2 doesn't really require you to be good at combos. Not unless you're wanting to try the highest level stuff. Your dodge-timing is far more valuable.

OoT/Mario Galaxy/Metroid Prime/Xenoblade Chronicles.

One of those. Depends on the day for me!

Yeah, this track is the headliner for me. Screw animal crossing. This is one of the best looking tracks in the whole game. They've really stepped it up for their DLC.

Yeah the comparison with NSMB is pretty fair.

And I'm fine with that. I'll probably always buy that series as long as they leave about 4 year gaps between entries. The problem with series like COD and AC is they're every year. So the fact that they're all so similar is incredibly obvious. I do own BLOPS2 on Wii U though. 

They've added another update that seems to keep the possibility open. Probably best to forget about though!

You are exactly what they are talking about. Youve played less than half the series, and think you know the latest one is the 'best'. A very rare opinion in the elder scrolls circles by the way. Very, very, very, little has changed in elderscrolls over the decades, beyond the graphics. Its simply gotten smaller, and smaller, and smaller, with less, and less, and less in it. A magic gimmick and 'shouts' dont do much to offput that.
 

I'm not who he's talking about at all because I wouldn't consider myself anything close to being a hardcore Elder Scrolls fan. I agree that if people call themselves hardcore fans, it's a bit silly to have an opinion without having played all the games. 

The only reason I'm comfortable saying that after only having played 3/5 of the series is because I've listened to a lot of people who are into the series and almost never have I heard anyone say Arena or Daggerfall are the best. It seems to usually be Morrowind.

But my larger complaint is that I don't think this narrative he's stitched together actually describes reality (a pretty typical indicator is when someone has to base their theory on a personal anecdote rather than on some data we can check). It might roughly describe how the business side tries to operate but it doesn't describe people's opinions. If you to any of the fanbases for the long running game series, you almost never find that people just all love the latest game the most. The Final Fantasy fanbases usually like 6 or 7 the most. The Zelda fanbases usually like A Link to the Past or Ocarina the most. The Mario fanbases usually like Super Mario World or Mario 64 the most. What he's called a "normative force" absolutely exists. 

The souls games really werent that difficult. 

Ha! Speak for yourself. Some bosses took me about 20 attempts.

Dude, people play dark souls blind folded, its not that hard, in fact, its gotten EASIER since the name change to the soul series. You want some seriously tough as nails souls action? Play some Kings field, instead of babys first field game. Monster hunter is considerably more challenging than dark souls, so is playing for platinum ratings in platinum games. Dark souls is simple, and predictable, pattern recognition with actual punishment for failure.

The reason people think its so hard, is because its gaining mainstream recognition, and unlike all the other mainstream games, its challenge isnt fake, its not a dramatic depiction of faux challenge, and they have been conditioned to associate these dramatic depictions of the challenge in these cutscenes and quick time events that their character faces, with actual challenge, even though the the actual challenge was removed. This is why, when faced with ACTUAL challenge, and they FAIL, they quickly claim the game is broken.

You want to talk about psychology, try looking up some pavlov, to see how incredibly conditioned the worst generation is.

You say it's pattern recognition as if there's some other way to make difficult boss fights. What other options are there? Every boss in every videogame as far as I can tell is about pattern recognition.

Unless someone writes an incredibly smart AI that can learn and create new moves as it goes, a developer is only going to be able to create so many different attacks. And to save the boss behaving incredibly weirdly, those attacks are probably going to be selected by some deterministic algorithm. Ergo pattern recognition!

Mmmm I could never get into Monster Hunter I'm afraid. It just didn't reel me in like Dark Souls. I may have to try this Kings Field though. It's on the PS1 right? Does it look hideous if you play it now then?

Speaking of the devil. Gamesradar recently redid their top 100 games of all time. Guess what came in top? Quite a shock actually: http://www.gamesrada...est-games-ever/

When did you specify this was about western games? He doesn't say that anywhere in his article. That's what I was responding to!

But either way, I accepted that it's a fairly accurate description of the business side of things. Jim Sterling pointed out in a recent video how many times Peter Molyneux had said that his previous game was crap just before his newest came out. The part I was criticising was this as a description of gamer's attitudes. When it comes to actual attitudes, it doesn't seem particularly relevant where the games are coming from (unless you're suggesting people systematically have different attitudes depending on the game's origin). I'm fairly sure you can point to the exact same phenomena with western games. I could link to any number of articles or videos that argue how much worse FPSs have got in the last decade (more or less the analogous argument you hear about JRPGs) and those are some of the most heavily hyped games in existence. Total Biscuit did a good one 

I just don't buy the idea that if people don't know everything about past games, they're defenseless idiots ripe for controlling by marketing departments. I think your knowledge of the past is largely orthogonal to such gullibility.

Lol did you write that article on gamasutra? Or can I be rude about it?

I started the Elder Scrolls at Morrowind and I still think Skyrim's the best in the series.

Pretty sure a western release is coming. If I recall, Bravely Default actually sold well in EU and NA.

Yep. The non-Japanese sales outnumbered the Japanese sales by a fair way. We'll almost definitely be getting this. Now we just need them to announce FF Explorers and DQ7.