Comment by nerdjon

I can't tell you how much respect I have for this mindset. Like them burning a heap of money on Metroid Prime 4, for years, and then coming out with an announcement along the lines of "sorry guys, this sucks, so we've chucked it out and started again because we only do things right, see you in another 3-4 years when it's ready."

It pays dividends, because they just don't ship junk, so everything they DO ship sells extremely well.

GMTK is popular, but he's mostly talking out of his ass. He's got zero industry experience and most gamedevs I know personally clown on his takes constantly. Unless he references specific Nintendo interviews where they talk about their design process, I have doubts about this video containing an accurate description of how Nintendo does things.

This always made sense to me. Think of Super Mario Bros. No way you come up with something like that from a top-down design document. Probably slapped Mario on a screen, played with the physics a bunch, and threw a lot of different stuff at the wall to see what stuck before they came up with the final product.

It's interesting how many people see the Switch as being in its own category rather than acknowledging it as the winner of this console generation (which I completely agree it is).

Most people think the “console” battle is between PlayStation and Xbox, and that PlayStation is the winner.

This is probably a big win for PlayStation’s marketing team.

Competition isn’t the secret sauce we pretend it is. There is power in non-competing and doing your own thing as well. You just have to know when to use either strategy.

This is such a trite take. Whenever I hear it, what comes to my mind is: "bro, do you even play games?".

The gaming industry is huge and gamers are varied. What is fun and play to one person is boring and vapid to another. I think Nintendo's first party titles are generally excellent, but I recognize that they're not for everyone. It's not like the rest of the industry is shuffling around going "boy, if only we could figure out how to make fun games".

It seems that you want to exclude Nintendo from AAA gaming, which is also weird. Their first party titles are developed by large teams with big budgets. They're not some scrappy startup making indie titles.

FWIW, the game that won Game of the Year at the most recent game awards is Astro Bot - an amazingly fun and playful (some would say Nintendo-esque) game that is a PlayStation 5 exclusive.

Money happened. The gaming industry produces more revenue than the movie industry and the music industry combined. Making a AAA is a $50-$100 million endeavor. At that scale, doing weird stuff because maybe it'll pay off is almost unconscionably risky. It's the same problem movies have, and it's the reason why indy films and indy games are so much more interesting.

Fun doesn't map 1:1 into a trailer or a screenshot. Graphics do, voice acting, cutscenes, and big set pieces do.

Singleplayer AAA gaming on top of all that feels like work, the older I got the less those games kept me playing because I don't want to spend 3 hours running errands to be rewarded with an item/spell/skill.

The melodramatic storylines are also pretty grating, there are a few games with good storytelling but most are some rehash of "this world has been destroyed/is in the process of being destroyed, in the aftermath a hero is about to rise and save it" so if the mechanics don't feel fun right from the get-go I lose interest completely.

The most fun I have with games are the ones with a very iterative game loop (roguelikes for example), or social/multiplayer games, anything with a lot of replayability, and the constant feeling of improvement is like crack to me.

A surprising example I re-discovered last year after only playing it for a while some 15 years ago is Trackmania, got even some friends hooked on it to play hot seating trying to beat each others time. The game loop is short and intense (about 1-2 minutes max), has a high skill ceiling, and you feel yourself getting better at a track each time you play it, nailing some very tricky part that felt impossible 30 min before is absurdly satisfying.

> and this other 2D game with a platformer vibe whose name I forget that has procedurally generated maps.

Terraria?

Perhaps it was this, which I saw recently:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics...

I have a younger kid that's in Roblox a lot as well, and something I noticed the peer group do is have a facetime/voice call in the background so they can talk while they play. I like it better than watching them type chats.

Also NES appeared before the US as a VCR design because well, American's loved VCRs

Indeed I forgot Stack-Up!

Microsoft is somewhat to blame for new controller features being underutilized because they're extremely reluctant to add anything to the Xbox controller. Motion control in particular stands out, the hardware isn't expensive and it's proven to be very useful in some types of game, but the lowest common denominator Xbox controller still doesn't have it so multi-platform games can't be designed around it. Especially multiplayer games with crossplay since you can't let some players have more precise inputs than others.

It’s used very heavily for system functionality, such as with the onscreen keyboard. Not so often with the games.

It’s an expensive component and they brought it back for free he second gen so they must think it’s worth it

Likewise for the PS Vita's features such as the rear touchpad.

WiiU also had the back compat hardware of the Wii, just couldn't take a gamecube disc in it's drive.

Similarly, a lot of the SNES internally looks like it was at least initially designed for back compat with the NES.

I was always amazed the Wii with its full size discs could play the GameCube mini discs.

I heard that it was a forced response to Sega aggressively cutting the price of the Megadrive/Genesis to the point that it made it very difficult for Nintendo to sensibly price the SNES bill of materials.

Something had to go and it was backwards compatibility.

Yeah, the SNES uses a 65816, which is pretty much a backwards-compatible and 16-bit extension of the 6502, used in the NES. The SPC is likewise capable of nearly perfectly reproducing the NES's audio capabilities, and the PPU has the same background and sprite layering as the NES as a foundation.

Sega actually did what Nintendidn't. The Sega Genesis had a Z80 coprocessor, a video chip that was yet another extension of the TMS9918A design, and a PSG sound chip -- all just more advanced, or supplemented by other hardware, versions of components the Master System had. With an adapter add-on called the Power Base Converter, Master System games could be played on the Genesis.

Fair. A shame, still, especially for GC compat on WiiU.

Back when they were first coming out, a lot of us also considered GameBoy Pocket to be a new "generation". I think it might have supported a few more shades of grey from the original? And better battery life. And lots of case colors.

Although funnily enough, in most regions Pokemon Gold and Silver were not actually GBC exclusive and would run on the original Game Boy, despite arguably being the game the GBC was most promoted for and having colour (which didn't work on the DMG, obviously) as their major features.

The Korean release of Gold and Silver, along with Crystal, did actually require a GBC.

Yes, hardware limitations of the Wii U, not the Switch

That's not true. There's a couple of forests that are as dense as gameplay can reasonably allow.

> what the rest of the industry calls graphics (polygon count basically)

IMO the focus of cutting edge triple-A graphics is physically based rendering.

Scarlet/Violet look atrocious even next to other Switch Pokemon games. The art direction wasn't great, and it was a really poor game technically.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-pokemon-scarle...

Can't find it right now, but someone did some side by side comparisons of Scarlet/Violet next to similar Breath of the Wild scenes, and it's night and day.

My main issue with the art style is that it's very flat, with large areas of a single, solid color, when more shading would add a sense of nuance and depth. A character's face, body, or hair will have a single light color, and a single dark color. This isn't about 4k, 120Hz, or huge polygon count, it's about basic shading to convey that things are 3d.

I've played mostly 20+ year old games for years, and don't own a gaming machine or high-end console. I'm into Doom from the 90s, OpenTTD, and Morrowind. But TotK should have been better, in my opinion. The art style just isn't my cup of tea.

Is sharing an island possible to do across multiple Switches?

As soon as you said Mafia I felt that loading in my bones…

Kind of by definition indies don’t have the resources to optimize their games as much as a major studio.

Witcher 3 was an amazing port.

"Beautiful art style" and "cutting-edge graphics" are nowhere near synonymous. They are orthogonally related at best (and many people would even argue that they are opposing goals).

Me too, I usually upgrade to the latest and greatest with Nintendo systems (specifically if it's an improvement, the "new 3DS" but not like the 2DS for example)

But I never bought an OLED because I couldn't justify it for the amount I play my Switch handheld (almost never)

Honestly, it's a milquetoast take. The only advantages of the Switch at this point are Nintendo exclusives and better support.

There are some rough edges with the Steam Deck, but it's a bit odd to frame the Switch as "ready for mass consumption" when it lacks access to Steam, something every other handheld has, and consumers expect in 2025.

I have docked my Steam Deck to a TV. I have also used physical media with a Steam Deck. The USB port lets you do both of these things. I also just plug it into my laptop dock to play more desktop-oriented games.

The Deck works for me since I rarely play for more than a couple of hours in a stretch (so I don't need 5 hours of battery life), and I don't need to stick it in a pocket. It's "just a PC", so you can still play non-Steam games on it if you need to avoid the Steam ecosystem for some reason. Its direct competitors (Asus/ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion and others) show there's a market for this type of device.

The Switch satisfies the needs for a lot of people people; great! Good ideas will cross-feed with those in the handheld PC gaming device realm.

> Have you ever tried to dock a Steam deck to a TV?

Yep, works great with non-proprietary docks vs even using a 3rd party dock on Switch has led to bricked units.

> Have you ever tried to use physical media with a Steam deck?

I haven't tried, but I'd be surprised if plugging in a USB optical drive wouldn't work. That'd be pretty silly though, but so are some of the Switch physical releases when the bulk of some games isn't actually on the cartridge.

I think the better thing to look at is DRM instead of specific transmission format. Steam itself is a grey area for DRM (some games are DRM-free IIRC), but you can also use things like Lutris... or generally whatever you'd like. Takes a bit of tinkering, sure, but a whole lot less tinkering than getting anything unofficial to run on a Switch.

> Have you ever tried to get 5 hours of battery life with a Steam deck?

Yep, works great. I'll still give the point to Nintendo because they prioritize battery life so much more, but if you aren't running the SD at full tilt with a large 3D game, it can get decent battery life.

> Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket? (I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.)

I would love a Steam Deck Lite or something. That's probably the biggest reason I keep my Switch Lite: it's easy to just toss in a bag on a whim while the SD (and other Switches) require planning to actually use them.

> Nintendo will be just fine.

Yup. They're probably still sitting on piles of cash from the DS and now Switch. People were saying Nintendo was doomed when the Wii U did poorly, but others at the time rightly pointed out that they've probably got enough runway to have a few more total flops of consoles.

> I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

Losing Newell is a valid concern (again, for Steam as a platform), but Nintendo is certainly an interesting choice to say they won't kick you out on a whim, given their track record of bans, lawsuits, and just being particularly litigious.

The Steam Deck is just a PC - nothing is locked down. You could install whatever OS you'd want to replace SteamOS, or you could buy your games somewhere other than Steam and just use SteamOS as a launcher.

> I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

This is a very strange take for someone arguing for locking into Nintendo's most-recent ecosystem (where you're generously allowed to re-buy some of the games you already own from previous generations) over an open, linux-based hardware platform that connects to steam.

> I do have big pockets, but at least with the Switch Lite, it's possible.

Can you dock a Switch Lite with a TV?

>I personally will never use a platform that can kick me out on a whim, or could screw me the moment Gabe Newell gets hit by a bus.

Dude, you have to rebuy all the games you've already bought and already own every odd generation. Imagine paying for NES and SNES games, Wii and Wii U games and other old garbage you already own? That's Nintendo.

On steam you have absolutely massive library dating back almost 20 years by this point, and it comes with you every time you buy a new device, whatever it might be a PC, laptop or SteamDeck.

Yes, steamdeck is pretty large and bulky, but you can get 5 hours battery life on non-demanding indie titles (ie. Hades on the updated deck OLED models)

Yes, you can dock a Steamdeck to a TV easily.

It's all around better, completely open device, minus the size (and battery life in demanding AAA titles switch can't dream of running anyway)

I didn't mean that Nintendo was in trouble, I just meant what I said: the best way to play Nintendo's games isn't on Nintendo platforms. For me, I'm not going to be playing games away from the ability to plug in or dock for 5 hours. I don't put expensive electronics in my pocket, and yeah I've docked my Deck to a TV... it's great. As for physical media, why would I want to use that?

But sure, if you hate Steam on principle then obviously it isn't for you. In my 19 years of using steam I've never had any problems though, and I suspect that's true for most people.

> Have you ever put a Steam deck in your pocket?

I mean, there's no fucking way you could fit a regular Switch into your pocket. I don't care how big your pockets are. So that doesn't really seem like a fair criticism.

One of the things I find sad about the Switch is in fact that Nintendo seems to think it fulfills the same niche that their portable systems did, but it doesn't even come close. I can fit my 3DS (XL or not) into a pocket very comfortably, not so with my Switch.