NINTENDO 3DS

I loved the RPG style Mario Golf on the GBC & GBA. I would totally buy the new one if it's in that style.

I was thinking about getting that but then Everybody's Golf on Vita turned out to be one of this month's PS+ games. It's by the same people and is apparently pretty much the same game minus the nintendo skin.

i've been playing it and it's been fun so far with loads of content. basic game has 4 more normal 18 hole courses and 6 more wacky 9 hole courses, more 18 holers available via DLC. its part typical Mario Golf (GC/Wii), part kind-of-rpg mode where you use the castle clubhouse as your Mii and play against others online while buying equipment to change basic stats (e.g. you might buy a club that lengthens your range but tightens the sweetspot of the hit mechanic). you can compete with other people thru regular tournaments you either set up yourselves as a community or ones that Nintendo run (you can also just search thru a list of ones that people have set up). the Nintendo run tournaments give you equipment for entering (e.g. the one at the moment gives a full set of NES themed clothes) and are both regional and worldwide, have a set date that they finish on & leaderboards. when you play online you see the ghosts of other peoples balls flying around the place. basically the online modes are really well done.
only annoyance so far is the inability to switch off voices, hearing Mario way "wahoo" every 10 seconds drives me up the wall so i'm playing it with the sound off already :/

Sounds good, think I'll get it. Right mix of relaxing and challenging.

its the perfect game to play while sport is on the TV, gonna play it a lot during Giro!
Hotshots is a perfectly good golf game, prefer the PSP version to the Vita game and not a big fan of the overall visual aesthetic personally but they are both v solid, if you want a golf game to play around with then a free PS+ HSG works fine.

^^ sub in Everybody's Golf for HSG as per yr region :p

Did buy it and it's pretty great. Impressed with the online options.

My 3DS backlog is starting to get as bad as my other systems. Telling myself I actually gotta play/beat a game before I dip into Mario Golf.

I bought a 3DS XL two days ago. I have been glued to Fire Emblem and A Link Between Worlds. This Zelda instalment is so delightful that I actually feel like savouring it, whereas I know the FE is going to take about 50 hours so I'm willing to keep playing.

On that note, why is Fire Emblem so punishingly difficult? Anyone care to chat about this game with me in a general, spoiler-free way? I'm not really looking for strategies or anything, more just a feeling of commiseration with anyone else who has been as horrified and fascinated by this game as I am.

Can I also just mention the superb soundtrack in both games I happened to pick up for my maiden voyage into 3DS land? Fire Emblem in particular...

My fav game of 2013! I thought the difficulty was balanced just right, but then I like them on the difficult side. Are you playing with permanent death on or off?
Also worth noting that Ubisoft are having an eshop summer sale - most of their 3DS games are terrible but the diamond in the rough is Shadow Wars for $7.50. Shadow Wars is a SRPG and plays like Fire Emblem with guns - the story and characters are daft but the gameplay and map design are excellent, having been overseen by Julian Glossop of XCOM fame.

I bought a 3DS last week with those two games also, along with Animal Crossing and Mario Kart 7. Zelda is absolutely great. I whipped through it pretty fast. It was probably the most fun I've had with a Zelda game since Wind Waker.

Fire Emblem seems great, but I really don't know how to play it. It ramps up the complexity pretty quickly. I need to watch some videos and see how people play this game. I'm determined not to lose any characters.

For soundtracks, Animal Crossing is very pleasant after 11 pm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbjbGNa-7eE

@zappi: thanks for the tip re: Shadow Wars. It looks very good, but I won't use this sale because I'm a physical media holdout. But I will buy a boxed version of this because it does look good. In Fire Emblem I have turned permanent death off because the game contains no convenient way to reload from a save without quitting and relaunching (something that caused me to give up on the Wii one a few years ago).

@jmm: That Animal Crossing thing sounds great. When you said it is "pleasant after 11pm" I was assuming you were euphemistically referring to the game being well-suited to a few beers and some cannabis. On that note, I must admit I'm hesitant to purchase an Animal Crossing game as I feel slightly weird being a male in my thirties playing games that were probably intended for 11-year-old Japanese girls... Now that I'm back in the Nintendosphere I'll probably have to deal with this a fair bit. But yeah, that music is awesome.

there is a quick reload option that they don't tell you about (lol), i will have to google it though - holding L+R and Start apparently
the localization in Fire Emblem is really top notch btw, Tharja made me crack up on numerous occasions
oh and its Julian Gollop not Glossop ffs

It's an excellent localization, you're right, but thankfully it localizes rather than americanizes. There's still something awkwardly Japanese about it, which I love. And again, the soundtrack is just incredible.

Korg have made a sequel to the DS-10! so on this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGgQ4jfBEJk

i love these products cuz they enable my dream of laying down some badass dance grooves (so not gonna happen tho)

Best Buy is running this week a buy one get one free (!) promo on these games:

Pokemon X
Pokemon Y
Kirby Triple Deluxe
Yoshi's New Island
Tomodachi Life
Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Bravely Default
Mario Golf World Tour
Mario Party Island Tour
Disney Magical World

I have Pokemon X and Bravely Default. What should I get in addition to Zelda? Leaning towards Mario Golf, Yoshi or Kirby.

haven't played Kirby but most swear by it

Golf is solid, lots of online tournaments replacing the RPG parts of previous games, challenges are numerous & fun, DLC courses are worth downloading. Haven't played either of them but general feeling seems to be Yoshi is mediocre and Kirby is v good.

Son of a bitch, I should've jumped on this more quickly. All these titles are suddenly store pick-up only, and of course every store is somehow out of these games which they had dozens of copies of last week. I'll have to go in-store and hunt these down locally.

Oh never mind, looks like BB's site is just throwing up

ffff. i have no idea anymore

Currently playing Bravely Default, about ten-fifteen hours in.

Good things:

- Appreciate the difficulty, even early battles are by no means a hold-down-the-X button walk in the park
- Difficulty is largely well-calibrated as you move into new areas. I get cocky, then get my ass kicked, which is how RPGs ought to work
- Job selection mechanic recalls some of my favourite games. Allows a pleasing level of tinkering, inventory faffing and general customization—both for the game as a whole and for individual bosses or areas
- Impressively ugly and threatening monsters
- Beautiful hand-drawn towns that are worth turning on the 3D for
- Dungeon design suits the handheld scenario (individual floors are easy to clear within one session, which sidesteps Why Am I Here? syndrome)

Not as good things:

- Plot is a bit too 80s (defeat the four crystals or whatever), but with layers of tedious innuendo
- Prefer JRPG plots that are more "mature" (ie. incomprehensible political maneuvering between kingdoms)
- Plays better with the sound off (voice acting is unnecessary and overwrought, music is not varied or sophisticated enough—my benchmark for RPG soundtrack is now Fire Emblem: Awakening, which was the last game I played)
- Wailing electric guitar in battle music (big turn off where RPGs are concerned)
- Bosses have more HP than cunning
- Sexist, puerile (at best) representation of female characters. Would young Japanese males (presumably the original target for the game) really care if their video games didn't contain scantily-clad adolescents? Something tells me not much is being gained by Japanese publishers here, while this is actually hurting sales and credibility of the genre in the west more than anyone realizes.

Oh they realize it - they're actually slightly more covered up in the NA version

I read that. They toned it down, but then went and put some really embarrassing cover art on it. At least the EU release cover had the party posed in a strong and defiant way, with Agnès in the lead instead of just looking on in a servile way like some Japanese games (as recent examples, the "Tales of..." series and the "Rune Factory" series routinely have the most abysmally dopey cover art).

Actually, based on the EU cover art and the name, I didn't realize Ringabel is male—his hairstyle rather resembles La Roux's Elly Jackson—and thought maybe the Japanese are starting to get it. Also there are some strong, interesting female characters in the Fire Emblem game like the bookish ice queen Miriel and the courageous tomboy Sully. Based on what I've played of Bravely Default so far (no spoilers), I'm not holding out hope for Ringabel's amnesia to extend to some sort of, uh, gender amnesia, but that would be a pretty cool plot twist based on the overdetermination of his innuendo.

Come to think of it, based on how much I loved the Fire Emblem game, I think I finally get this whole "fanservice" thing. I adored Miriel and Sully immediately and married them off promptly to Virion and Stahl respectively—two of my sturdiest and most reliable henchmen—whereas blonde doe-eyed Lissa was eventually paired off with the Guy Fieri of Fire Emblem, the hapless and similarly blonde Vaike. If this is "fanservice" I dig it, and Fire Emblem has done ridiculously well in North America possibly in part because it hasn't grossed out North Americans.

I think the developers of the Bravely Default series should probably take note. BD succeeded in North America based on hype, mechanics, and a general starvation for JRPGs. But if they want to excel, they'll deal with some of the representational issues head-on. (They won't, I know.)

So... should I play Shin Megami Tensei IV next? Based on the video reviews I've seen, that seems like a morbidly sexless dungeon crawl that couldn't possibly offend North Americans. Right?

funny you should mention that, was just thinking the other day what would happen if the Christian Right in the US somehow stumbled upon SMT - the outrage would be pretty hilarious

Would I like SMT IV?

Have you played a SMT game before? There's a lot of fun to be had if you like seriousbusiness dungeon crawlers with minimal plot. Choices you make during the game put you on one of three endgames, two of these are heavily signposted though (I deliberately chose the Chaos ending and was not disappointed!). There is no "fan service" that I can remember. The only real complaints I would have about it were the balance felt off, the tutorial rips your head off but the game gets easier as it goes on - and it expects you to have some familiarity with how Tokyo is laid out, I found myself looking up real maps at the beginning when someone said "go to Shibuya" so I knew to head East or whatever.
The soundtrack is excellent, loved running around post apocalyptic Tokyo fighting demons while listening to synth Krautrock http://youtu.be/SG_gB4kb2oA

Great track!

Tomodachi is just doing ridiculously well, no other way to describe it after it hit the top 10 even on the monthly american npd. #1 in several European countries, some for weeks in a row. I haven't bought it yet - still feel I'll enjoy it more as a let's play on youtube than 'playing' through it, but super happy that nintendo gets added motivation to localize oddball titles

I still think it would bore me.

reviews were surprisingly tepid, i guess the marketing has worked

Word of mouth is still a big factor with stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlnt1FE9T6I

"New 3DS"; huh?

Well my xl screen has been mishandled and suffered from it so I'll prob get this next year when MH4U comes out. I mean.. I will definitely get it because that's how I am, but retiring my frankenstick for a new MH seems like a good enough reason.

The exclusive game thing is weird because obviously the audience will be vastly smaller than for regular 3ds games. With the n64 expansion pack at least you could upgrade to play Perfect Dark.

On the other hand it is probably a sound way to push the 3DS series to signficantly bigger sales in total. I'm guessing a handheld successor is a ways off, 2016 holiday maybe, and they need some action.

Exclusives like Xenoblade aside they say upcoming 3ds games may have improved graphics on the new system.

i get the idea of games running better on the iterated device, but exclusive games seems silly, will probably just be a few quick ports though. Xenoblade looked like it ran terribly, and bang goes any hope for an HD version :(
interesting that the control layout now almost exactly mirrors the WiiU gamepad, wonder if you'll be able to use the new 3DS as a WiiU controller?
would not be surprised if they start selling SNES & GBA games exclusively on the new 3DS, those coloured buttons must be there for some reason!

There were also Gameboy Color games that didn't work with the original Gameboy so there's some precedent there.

Xenoblade is early, I imagine it will run pretty smoothly as it is showcase

Quick ports is embarassingly a thimg I want, specifically gc classics like fzero and metroid prime

The gameboy was iterated on for 12 years, crazy in hindsight

sigh damn you nintendo

man, I just bought one of these things a few months ago >:-[

Me too. I hope they don't cheat us out of any good games.

I'm so looking forward to Fantasy Life coming up in a couple months. It looks like a perfect combination of everything I like.

... Except for deep gameplay mechanics

interesting that the control layout now almost exactly mirrors the WiiU gamepad, wonder if you'll be able to use the new 3DS as a WiiU controller?
― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Saturday, August 30, 2014 5:16 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're clearly moving in this direction as a company and I think it's the most interesting thing about their future.

would help explain why it got a processor spec bump too

And would also open the door for a gamepad-free low end wii u.

trailer for new Ace Attorney game, Layton's ancestor travels to London and meets Sherlock Holmes.
oh and Watson is a 10 year old girl called Alice by the looks of it lololol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4JUnUeATrk

haha not Layton, Phoenix

The second Miles Edgeworth game is much better than the first one. There is a fan translation that is worth pirating.