The Nintendo news and discussion thread

[dezm0nd]

GAME in Milton Keynes shopping centre. It's a good store, with excellent staff. Went there for the new 3DS launch. Was spot on.

[dezm0nd]

A fair few Nintendo nuggets today!

The Zelda/Switch Super Bowl LI advert is up.



The extended advert for the Switch is also up!



And the Switch Online service price revealed at around £15 per year.

Not bad, not bad at all. I just hope it justifies the cost.

[Suits]

Yep. All good noises and pictures so far. Although I've not watched the vid's, as I'm avoiding as much Zelda stuff as poss, daft perhaps but I can get by without watching them I think.

Can't get too excited about the value of the online service yet, where I do agree it's cheap, I need to know more about it first. Which leads me onto ....

....the Splatoon2 party chat on the phone app, which sounds dreadful. The whole not speaking to strangers is cool and the current state of online lobbies always being silent is fair enough but just the general idea of having to have my phone on me to party up and join a game sounds crazy.

Nintendo needs to explain this and how it's going to work, otherwise it'll continue to be bad key factor of the Switch's social aspect I think.

[seansthomas]

That long advert is pretty cool. Can never, EVER see a group of attractive young cool people playing 1-2-Switch indoors, let alone in public, but the strap line of 'Anytime, anywhere, with anyone' is really powerful.

Great marketing so far.

[Stanshall]

Rejected Tinder slogan.

I'm excited by it.

Another rejected Tinder slogan.

Twenty quid a year sounds good but I've no idea how the phone thing works, sounds bollocks but I never use voice chat outside of SFV and Destiny.

[hazeredmist]

Sorry but I'll never be convinced paying for a service to use my for gaming / party chat is a good idea. It's ridiculous. Even the Wii U had proper party chat in some games.

[Alex79]

Any idea what time Fire Emblem Heroes goes live at?

On Android right now. Literally just this second went live. I've been refreshing the page haha.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

A had a little panic then reading that people's Amazon orders have fallen back to arrive on the 4th!

Just checked mine and still says dispatch on the 2nd for delivery on the 3rd. Aaaaaaaand relax....

[Flabyo]

Played a couple of hours of Fire Emblem Heroes and...

Yeah, I kinda like it. It's not doing anything surprising, if you've played Heavenstrike Rivals or Final Fantasy Explorers or any of a dozen other similar games you'll know exactly what to expect here.

Simple and short battles, lots of characters to collect, half a dozen random currencies, multiple energy bars...

This is a mobile game using the tried and tested design that has worked for a few years now in the f2p market. If you're expecting the 3ds game but on mobile... it's not that.

Worth the download just for the truly awful vocals on the version of the fire emblem theme it plays on the title screen. It makes the dragons dogma intro sound like flipping Mozart...

[Alex79]

I've played about 30 minutes, still in the tutorial really I think. The only experience I've had of Fire Emblem was the first released for GBA. Not loving the graphics style, and I don't really know what I'm doing in it, but I'll stick with it a bit longer.

[Flabyo]

I'd prefer to have taken a gamble and forked out some cash for the full game.

I see this a lot when people talk about mobile gaming and so I'm going to say something that's probably unpopular:

You're almost certainly not the target audience.

Saying that this 'isn't a full game' is doing it, and games like it, a massive disservice.

While it's true that this business model can be abused and taken to some dark extremes, by and large the vast majority of people that play games that work this way are fine with it. It's a very different audience, and one that as long time console/pc gamers we can often find ourselves not really understanding.

This is a market segment who still don't even consider themselves to *be* gamers, despite having dozens of Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and FarmVille games on their phones.

We want gaming to be bigger, be broader, be more diverse, have more mass market appeal, allow for more niche titles and so on. This has to be part of that. Ultimately if it's a business model you don't like, then don't buy into it. I can assure you that the players that play multiples of titles like this probably aren't going to GAME and dropping 50 quid on Overwatch or Call of Duty.

The existence of games of this type doesn't mean that others can no longer exist. There's plenty of 'classic' Fire Emblem games out there, and more in development. This isn't for those players, although I'm sure Nintendo hope they'll get a few people interested enough to try one.

[KSubzero1000]

I think there is a lot of truth to what Flabyo is saying. Creators should know their audience, and potential consumers should know when they're not a part of it.

With that being said, I can also understand (and even share to an extent) the frustration that comes with seeing beloved and established franchises branching out towards alternative media and/or business models like this. It's reasonable to be protective of the things you love and to prefer them staying true to their roots.

[gallo_pinto]

We want gaming to be bigger, be broader, be more diverse, have more mass market appeal, allow for more niche titles and so on. This has to be part of that. Ultimately if it's a business model you don't like, then don't buy into it. I can assure you that the players that play multiples of titles like this probably aren't going to GAME and dropping 50 quid on Overwatch or Call of Duty.

The existence of games of this type doesn't mean that others can no longer exist. There's plenty of 'classic' Fire Emblem games out there, and more in development. This isn't for those players, although I'm sure Nintendo hope they'll get a few people interested enough to try one.

Completely agree with you on all of this. There was a stretch of time where people seemed to feel threatened by certain types of indie games and would say they weren't "real" games. Looking at the last ten years or so, it seems that the game industry is much richer and deeper because of that indie game boom. I hope mobile gaming continues to expand the industry in new exciting directions.

I'd prefer to have taken a gamble and forked out some cash for the full game.

Saying that this 'isn't a full game' is doing it, and games like it, a massive disservice.

I don't want to speak for ThirdMan, but if I had to guess, I don't think he was saying that this isn't a full game, just saying how he'd prefer to access that game. I felt this way about some games (most strongly with Plants vs. Zombies 2). I could see there was a full game there that I was really interested in. I just wished that I could pay more money up front to get access to all of it and not deal with free-to-play mechanics. Super Mario Run is an example of how I prefer to play games on mobile. So I interpreted ThirdMan's comment not being directed at the "game" but at the payment structure to access that game.

But, to your point about some of us not being the target audience, that's a preference that comes from a lifetime in the console/handheld space. I get why people who first get into games via their phones don't have that preference.

[Suits]

Hmmm, good posts here regards the delivery date.

I've ordered mine through Nintendo directly.

I've just checked and all it has is the dispatch date, listed as the 3rd.

Which would mean the 4th, I suppose. Downer.

That said, I've started a new job and I'm not really keen on taking any time off just yet, so the reality would be a collection from the Post Office on the 4th anyway.

I dropped Nintendo an email for clarity, I got a genetic response but it stated that all preorders with be with me before or on the day of release.

So that's cool.

[Flabyo]

Yeah, I am perhaps being a little harsh, but it's tiring trying to fend off the 'games like this shouldn't exist' crowd 24/7 so I'm on a bit of a hair trigger sometimes when it comes to mobile.

There isn't really any way to own all the content with a game design like this in any meaningful sense though. The thing that costs money here are the orbs, and the orbs are the way you get more characters (or recharge timers if you want to play for more than about an hour at a time without waiting). If there was a one off payment to get every character... well, that wouldn't mean much as the collecting element basically *is* the game.

[Alex79]

Anyone having trouble setting up a Nintendo account? I've tried three times since yesterday, and every time the verification email just isn't coming through.

[Alex79]

I've put a fair bit of time in to Fire Emblem Heroes over the weekend, got to chapter 4, and I'm really enjoying it, despite the combat not really feeling very deep. It's the first FE game I've played for more than a few minutes, and there is something I'm not fully understanding. What's the point of summoning heroes? Without the threat of perma-death, there is never a risk your squad will diminish, and any new heroes you summon start at level 1 so it's useless trying to use them unless you go back and grind earlier levels to get them levelled up to the same as the rest of your team. Am I missing something? It's a fun game so far though.

[Craig]

Can't really get into the Fire Emblem mobile game (was never really a fan) but amazed at the lyrical version of the opening screen. I thought that style of singing (at least localised) had died in the PS2 era.

[Flabyo]

I've put a fair bit of time in to Fire Emblem Heroes over the weekend, got to chapter 4, and I'm really enjoying it, despite the combat not really feeling very deep. It's the first FE game I've played for more than a few minutes, and there is something I'm not fully understanding. What's the point of summoning heroes? Without the threat of perma-death, there is never a risk your squad will diminish, and any new heroes you summon start at level 1 so it's useless trying to use them unless you go back and grind earlier levels to get them levelled up to the same as the rest of your team. Am I missing something? It's a fun game so far though.

The heroes it starts you with are mostly 1 and 2 star ones. These have a limited number of skills they can learn compared to the 3 star and up you get from spending orbs.

A five star version of a hero will be waaaaay more powerful than the 1 star version at the same level.

If all you're doing is playing through the story you probably won't care. But if you plan to tackle it again on the Hard and Lunatic settings, or if you plan to play the duelling ladder much, you'll need much better heroes to stand a chance.

[Jusifer]

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ninten ... 0-6447600/

i find this very interesting. im so on the verge whether to get the switch on launch or not. I'm quite sure it's going to be as disappointing as the wii u launch. all I remember feeling is dissappointment at what it could have been. all the load times, launch line up, etc. and now to add to that is the threath that they will release different kinds of switch and that the early adopters will probably get burned in some way. I guess thats always a threath with new hardware and it's most likely that it'll take more than a year that they would release newer models or anything like that...

I guess i should just wait and see as the only game till the holidays I'm interested in is zelda and i have a wii u. but the feeling of being there day one, a new console in your hands. but then I remember those hands feeling a bit burned with the wii u... I can't decide -_-