MudMan

This doesn’t look great for 3DS, frankly. You probably would have better luck with an ultrawide display on landscape mode.

Besides vertically oriented arcade games, as someone else points out, this seems to be an Android thing, so there will be a bunch of games meant for this orientation. How many need physical controls to the sides is a different question. And… well, the DS is a huge library. If people are out there doing GB-only FPGA devices this must also make sense.

But the thing for me is that this seems like it’d be a less versatile version of just finding a phone controller that can hold a vertical phone. Which is fine. It’s a good way to play DS stuff. I just don’t know that it mimics the clamshell comfort of the DS so much better that I’d go with a dedicated device for it. If I’m going for a dedicated thing I want a clamshell and I want a precise stylus that I can use with no fear of scratches. That’s what modern emulation doesn’t get me.

“Pioneer” is a bit of a stretch, DS emulation is pretty mature and has solid touchscreen support on a range of devices. I’m all for messing with tate mode for a bit, though.

Hah. Well, I may be less confident there. That’s something that spent a long time doing the rounds across the industry as a reassurance for people in high cost locations, and particulary in North America. I guess it took them a bit too long to realize that Western devs didn’t have a mystical, nature-given skill to make games, just a generation or two of funding to do the thing on an industrial scale so people could gain the right experience.

I think after The Witcher 3, Wukong, Marvel Rivals and the like they may be starting to notice, though.

In any case, that’s neither here nor there. the point is if you’re boycotting you’re presumably trying to harm somebody financially in retaliation for something in a way you normaly wouldn’t. I’m saying in gaming specifically every part of that is pretty hard to trace. I’m not doing an audit every time I want to play a game, and I don’t think people should be expected to.

Yeah, EU prices seem nuts. A glance at Romania’s biggest retailer shows them at the equivalent of 750 to 900 across the 9070 and XT variants. Unlike the prices you report in Spain that’s still less than the 5070 Ti on the same outlet (somehow), but it still fundamentally changes the value proposition here.

I haven’t checked France and Germany, but I expect it’ll be a similar story.

Alright, I’m on record saying that “vote with your wallet” grassroots boycotts are ineffectual and policy action is often more workable, but this one is especially weird because who worked on a game and who sees the profit don’t match.

Ubisoft is French but it’s a public company. Epic is American and private, but has a lot of Chinese investment. EA is American, but it doesn’t develop there very much. If you buy FIFA, is that an American game? It’s made in Canada and Europe. Battlefield is made in Sweden, but also maybe LA? I guess it depends on the year. Is Baldur’s Gate Belgian? Well, sure. And also Malaysian, Canadian, British, Polish and Spanish. Is Subnautica American? It’s made there, but the company is a subsidiary of Krafton over in Korea.

I’m not saying don’t favor local product if that’s how the current political landscape makes you feel, but games are super global and it gets complicated quickly once you go past a small truly independent studio working locally, self-publishing and I suppose releasing on GOG.

Did you… want to?

There are some gaps in a collection that serve as a show of sanity, not shame.

I mean, fuck antisemitism in any form, obviously…

…but I’m going to say “allow fascists to eliminate freedom of protest” has a spotty track record improving that particular issue.

This guy is in power in no small part due to whatever definition for not-fascist Americans you want to use not showing up because they feel compromise is beneath them. Maybe it’s time to learn that lesson.

Well, no, the time to learn that lesson was November. I guess it’s finding out time. For people too rightfully indignant about the genocide in Gaza to look past their own noses and to people in your situation alike, I’m afraid.

See, I draw the same line at Tactics.

The year one was born may have some influence here.

I will choose to believe my eyeballs on that count, but thanks for your contribution, I suppose?

This is a real issue with stereoscopy, in that it’s hard to talk about and there isn’t a guarantee that people’s perception of it is identical. Here, for example, I don’t know what you mean by “blurry”.

Potentially you could be talking about the ghosting effect you see when the lenses aren’t properly lined up with your eyes. I find that is entirely resolved by the eye tracking unless you’re moving the console around on the what, three different New 3DSs I have used for any length of time. I can’t guarantee something about your eyes or your 3DS isn’t different, though. I can only tell you I have a 3DS in front of me right now and I’m tilting it every which way and I see no ghosting as long as the camera gets line of sight to my face.

Or you could be talking about resolution. Because the way 3DS stereoscopy works is by angling alternate lines of pixels to each eye there is a horizontal resolution change on the display between 2D and 3D, although your brain should sort most of it out when overlapping the two images. I’m sitting here with a 3DS in front of me typing this and flipping the slider on and off and the image doesn’t lose any resolution to my eyes, it just goes deep. Can I promise that your brain is parsing the half-res-per-eye the same way mine does? I guess not.

All I can tell you is the effect is rock solid for me and I would take it on a tablet or laptop any day with no improvements (although I’d like to see how much further it can be pushed with modern tech). This is non-negotiable and the results of real life testing in real time right the heck now. Unfortunately for the same reason I can also not sit here and tell you that you aren’t seeing what you’re seeing. I can only report on what I see.

They abandoned many things when transitioning to the Switch. Most notably home consoles. I wouldn’t extract too many conclusions from that train of thought.

But yeah, I’m not saying the 3DS stereo display was hugely popular, even if the console itself did pretty well. Clearly a bunch of people were very hostile to it (and to every other variant of 3D display) right off the bat and never looked back. If the meme of “I switched the 3D slider down and never touched it again” popular at the time didn’t show that this thread seems to be good proof.

I’m saying people were extremely wrong about that and I’m surprised that the massive improvement in the New 3DS flew under the radar enough for some people to not even be aware that it happened. The tech absolutely works, and the two iterations Nintendo did absolutely show that it can be implemented very effectively for cheap.

I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.

The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.

What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.

Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.

Sure, I’m not saying you specifically, but you sure sound plugged into the franchise enough to remember that frustration existing. If not in the more hardcore fanbase, such as it is, definitely in the larger gaming space.

This made me go back to check press reviews of the time and, man, they are funny. There are open requests for everything from “a nice long epic that makes the GameBoy series wish it could compete” to this one guy outright claiming they want it turned into an MMO (so of the time), a bunch of requests for voice acting and lots and lots of “fans will enjoy it, everyone else stay away”. I miss the 2000s.

In any case, I’m sure a bunch of those reviewers are firmly in “no, not like that” territory today.

Yeah, that’s a very reasonable stance right now. I don’t even particularly disagree, although I’m not a huge Pokemon fan in the first place.

But at the time? When they just kept pumping marginally better looking top down handheld games in a market that didn’t give a crap about handhelds and Nintendo home consoles kept not getting mainline AAA Pokemon games? People were pissed.

Careful what you wish for, I suppose.

Myeeeeeh, I don’t know about that. Pokemon is deceptively late, given how rudimentary it looks due to being a GB exclusive. Blue and Red are 1996 games originally. Shin Megami Tensei had been doing monster capture and collection dungeon crawlers for a decade and six games by that point. Final Fantasy VII was less than a year away. Dragon Quest V and VI had done monster capturing and VI had “trainer battles” in an arena.

Pokemon was first to break big in the West and the idea of monster capturing as deck building is executed in a very particular way, but it was definitely pulling very directly from existing sources.

Pokémon has always been weirdly behind the curve in terms of presentation. People were frustrated by how late they went full 3D and how long they were reusing sprites and sounds, and rightfully so.

I think some of why the GBA games are more fondly remembered is because the one time their visual ambitions and their underlying hardware lined up at all, short of the original games.

I’ve never heard a reasonable explanation for this, honestly. I’m hesitant to say it’s just greed or laziness. I bet the answers are way more interesting.

2014. It had a bigger screen, eye tracking for the stereo 3D, a built-in second stick nub thingy and a bit more performance. It came in two sizes, to match the OG and XL versions of the base model.

Kinda nuts that this fell through the cracks for some people. The improvements to the stereo tracking were dramatic.

Eh, I get it. Someone recently said “twenty year old” games, presumably meaning something like the N64 and when I checked it turns out that twenty year old games are Shadow of the Colossus and GTA San Andreas.

Personally I have a hard time getting past the PS3/360 cutoff. Part of it is personal lived experience, part of it is you still get stuff like Crysis 3 and Red Dead Redemption show up in benchmarks. I think with Hitman since it’s been a bit stale after Hitman 3 I have more of a sense of waiting for another full sequel or reboot separate from the World of Assassination trilogy.

The 3D display on the 3DS was absolutely treated way more harshly than it deserved because it landed smack in the middle of the hipstery meme of claiming 3D cinemas were a scam and 3D TVs sucked. Both of those things had different degrees of grains of truth at the core, but none of them really applied to the 3DS.

If that’s your hangup, I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree, because I WILL hold to that. It happened and it was absolutely the children who were wrong. You know because they weren’t even done being unreasonably mad at 3D displays for sheer mob dopamine when they started getting hyped about putting the same 3D displays on their face, which had most of the same issues plus made everybody puke in the crappy early iterations. I’ve kept a mental naughty list of all the games journalists that were super snarky about 3D monitors and the 3DS but immediately fawned over Palmer Luckey because, man, did that bit of flip-flopping not age well.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, because the point I’ve been making all along is that I am surprised at people not realizing that the New 3DS fixed the shortcomings of the original when it came to stability and viewing angles. For the umpteenth time.

I also sniped your googling, but hey, the count you found gives it a few extra million over the one I found, so that’s neat. Again, that puts it ahead of the Dreamcast, the Game Gear and the Saturn and just behind the PS Vita in terms of units moved. I think you’d be surprised if somebody showed up not realizing that one of those existed. That seems reasonable. More relevantly to the point, you don’t need to have owned one to be aware of this. Not only were these on display kiosks all over the planet (because 3D was and remains hard to market otherwise), but this was the big selling point. It was all over reviews of the new models.

And again, I’m not saying people do remember and are lying, I’m surprised at the fact that they don’t remember. Or at least that they don’t remember so hard they’re willing to be confidently wrong about it online. Which seems both reasonable and entirely up to me, to be honest.

Was it?

Look, you seem very keen on having an argument about this, but this conversation so far boils down to:

-3DS did this well. -No, it didn’t. -Oh, I meant the New 3DS that made it better. I didn’t realize people didn’t know about that one. -People probably didn’t know about that one.

While we’re at it, the 3DS sold 75 million units. There are probably way more people out there who tested a New 3DS than a Dreamcast.

EDIT: Made me check. 10 million units, as per Wikipedia. I would have guessed higher, but hey, I was still right, it’s more than the Dreamcast.

Man, yeah. Mario 3D World, the Sega M2 3D conversions of retro games…

I don’t think the native PC software support would be there for something like this, but at least having a viable way to properly emulate the 3DS without having to rig something with a VR headset would be great.