KirbyMeister

@vidguy I have a question though: Why does copyright still apply after 10 years? Yes I know that's how the law is written, but I don't think that's a good idea to have copyright last that long. If only because ten years from now you won't be able to buy or download any of the stupid DLC packs and downloadable games for consoles no longer being supported.

@HighFiveJesus Go to the cafe when there's a little "!" over the icon and the guy will offer to skip the level for you.

@Spaceghost The rental cost of an STB is somewhat offset by the cost of an Xbox Live gold subscription for each Xbox.

Seriously, Microsoft, why do I need to pay you $60/yr to use the media features of my own damn box?!

@pluupy They aren't even the first of these Discovery channel reality TV shows to make a videogame related vehicle. *hipster sunglasses* PJD did it first. With a Gears 3 bike.

That being said, I generally don't watch these kinds of shows unless my parents are, mostly because they use the TV right next to my computer.

@Greyfoxtypezero The CT PS1 port was hampered in translation. The original Japanese version fit SNES emulator and ROM into the PS1 RAM with little room to spare. The only load times existed at startup.

During translation they decided to implement the English translation by way of a binary patch applied at runtime to the ROM. This pushed the game over the limit of the system's RAM. So long loading periods were necessary to periodically swap, reload, and repatch banks of the ROM as the emulated game requested them.

This is completely stupid and shows that the localization team for this port had been seriously rushed for time.

@Jennacide You should try playing MOTHER 3 then. It does to Earthbound what Earthbound (and it's predecessor) did to most other JRPGs. Granted you'll have to find a ROM and install the translation patch. But it is worth it.

Here's the problem: Innovation has moved to smartphones and PCs. This is because smartphones have relatively little certification requirements and PCs have none. So your average small indie dev will target PC first and whatever OS their phone runs next.

Nintendo, your consoles are designed to be as unfriendly to indie devs as possible because you want to enforce massive amounts of certification requirements. You need to stop this. You need to make it easy to obtain development hardware and APIs. Preferably, it should be a simple matter of purchasing a low-cost development license and downloading a firmware update to give you development access - like iOS. Or, better yet, just let all the hardware run user code - like Android.

The fact is, the entire console market is going to crash because all the innovation has moved on. You can prevent this by making consoles an easy target for innovators. This requires changing a lot of your core business practices, but in all honesty, you are on a burning platform and I think it's time to jump. Sony isn't going to adopt homebrew at all and Microsoft has only made half-steps which are meaningless.

Nintendo, you have the ability to bring smartphone games onto your platform if you're willing to try. But you have to open up your API, you have to release technical documents, and you have to make it easy or free to develop on real hardware. You also need to make the software approval process as easy as possible, and you have to give them a place to sell their games. You should not just add an eShop section for indie devs and then neglect it. It didn't work for Microsoft.

If you're worried about piracy there's an easy solution - make the openly available development tools only applicable to downloadable games. Your devs pumping out $40-60 games can still buy devkits and make discs and cards. But an indie dev needs to be able to just download a toolkit, get something cool running in an emulator, polish it up on real hardware, and publish the game.

Finally, you need to open up your online system so that users can find their friends without having to use codes. You don't even need to abandon friend codes. Just make the system so that users can make searchable profiles with a gamertag and trade codes that way. If you're worried about angry parents and cyberstalking then add a Parental Controls option that disables gamertags and requires trading codes by entering digits.

I'm mentioning this because indie developers are most certainly going to want to experiment with online gameplay and the current system makes online gameplay an exercise in frustration. Indie devs are gamers too and they aren't going to want to shoehorn their game designs to fit your overly protective views on how gamers should interact online.

Because they designed a game first and -then- added the F2P stuff when it made sense. If you design a game to be F2P first then you will wind up creating a glorified slot machine and forget about the gameplay.

@eilegz It's a badly scaled image and I'm not sure if it's because Joystiq mishandled the screenshots or if that's just the way it comes in the presskit.

I see 3DS/DSi softmods being more viable than flashcards; now that the handhelds have viable built-in or removable storage. Plus, the softmods generally tend to separate piracy and homebrew, so the softmod people can open the door for just homebrew and the piracy people have to do extra work. And so far that seems to have kept the lawyers away from softmod hackers since they don't actually enable any piracy.