themblan's blog

I lost (or never recorded) all my footage of the Inkbrush Nouveau. Octo Josh was kind enough to join me in a few matches and we won most of the games we played together. I've got to admit that following NX is driving me a little crazy. I want to just enjoy the moment more, and not stress so much about the future. This is a call to all Nintendo-fans. Nintendo will reveal the NX when they're ready. Until they are, let's stop worrying and stressing over something we have no power over and enjoy the great games we do have on Wii U, 3DS, and even all the other systems Nintendo has released. There's no crime in replaying older games; in fact, I love doing it. Recently, I beat Luigi's Mansion for the second time. It's a great game, and I got stuck in a few places, but despite the temptation to, I never looked up information on the internet. It's crafted well so that you don't have to, which brings me to another point I have. Luigi's Mansion was critic...

Michael Pachter once said that if NX released during the holiday-season on 2016, it would get slaughtered by VR. I'm not saying he's right, but he could be. Maybe Nintendo is listening to analysts like him. I've read reports by "leakers," fake or real, that even if NX launched in holiday 2016, we shouldn't expect third-party games until Q1 2017. If this is true, then delaying the launch until the end of Q1 2017 makes a lot of sense. I don't know if I believe Nintendo is delaying Zelda for "quality" reasons, but there is a lot riding on Zelda U, and if they are not lying, then the delay of Zelda would necessarily delay NX as well. A theory I read about on Neogaf is that the delay would allow for a simultaneous launch of both the home-console and handheld variants of NX. This doesn't make sense; however, another variant of this theory has the handheld coming out first in March, and the home-console coming out in holiday 2017. I don't ...

The Active Time Battle system, or ATB, was a staple of RPGs back in the '90s. Where did it go? Why have games regressed to a pure turn-based battle-system paradigm? The ATB was the perfect middle-ground between tacticalness, and action. I do not like strict turn-based action, nor a pure action-based system. I actually find the ATB-system to be the most fun, because I do not have to worry about moving around like a bunny-rabbit and just worry about the tactics I will employ during a battle; and the element of time and turn-orders getting jumbled up and/or overlapping adds tension and randomness. I also liked controlling a whole party of characters, not just one and have the others on auto-pilot. This is why I'm not really interested in FFXV, and I found FFXIII disappointing. When I think about the games that most greatly utilized ATB, I immediately think of FFVI and FFVII. Especially in FFVII, you could manipulate time and be really creative with the way you played the gam...

In this fast-paced world of information, we are constantly looking forward to the next big thing. It's exciting, like waiting for Christmas-morning, but we should also remember to be in the moment and enjoy the games we already have. The Wii U is not even four years old. There are a lot of great games out for it. I see a game like Xenoblade X, and although I completed the story, there is so much more "game" left for me to see and do; it's a massive game. I still play Splatoon every day because they keep track of stats like Turf Inked per weapon, and you still can earn money so you can gamble over at Spyke's (up to 9,999,999). As a hardcore Splatoon-lover, I am looking to max out all the stats. With fighting-games like Smash 4 and Pokkén Tournament, you could play endlessly as well; there is no limit to how far your skills can go, and what kind of opponents you will encounter. Enjoy what we have, love it hard, because we have much to be thankful for; and wh...

15 years ago at E3 2001, Satoru Iwata revealed to us what he believed were the "four legs" of Nintendo, calling it "The Nintendo Difference." They were Innovation Quality Characters Heritage Has their company-motto or philosophy changed since that time? I believe it may have detoured a little bit. With Wii, they leaned heavily on innovation. One can argue that quality is a subjective thing, but Nintendo opted not to jump to HD, which many may think of as a component of quality during that era. The characters of Nintendo were not as prominently instrumental during the Wii-era; it was more about the experience and putting oneself into the game with Miis and immersive controls. Heritage was something they used in a bold way by introducing the Virtual Console and including Gamecube backwards-compatibility. Overall, the Wii-era heavily relied upon innovation and heritage. 15 years later, we are bracing ourselves for information on Nintendo's seventh home-c...

Emily Rogers makes it abundantly clear that she adores the Wii and the Gamecube, but not the Wii U as much. She cites the games and compares each generation's equivalents, and it makes sense, but from a personal standpoint, I gotta say I like the Wii U a whole lot more than the Wii? Why? Join me on an epic journey through time and space. It's the holiday-season in the year 2006, and the hype for Wii is at a fever-pitch. At the time, I thought I could go into a store and purchase one whenever I wanted to. I had done so for the Gamecube the day after Christmas at Toys "R" Us, and that was only one generation (five years) earlier. Nope. Everywhere it was sold out, in B&M stores and online. When Super Paper Mario was moved from the Gamecube to the Wii, I was pissed. During late April or May of 2007, I had had enough. I needed to jump into the next generation, so what did I buy? An Xbox 360. Yeah. Had I been able to find a Wii, I might never have bought one. Maybe it...

I just beat Xenoblade Chronicles X...and it was glorious. How would I describe it to someone that has never seen nor played this game before? It's a MSORPG (Massively Single-player Offline Role-Playing Game). It has a unique combination of scripted events with voice-acting, as well as a vast open world for one to explore. It's not a game for binary people - people who only like extremes. It won't satisfy those who only like fully open-world games, and those that only want a linear role-playing game from the traditions of Japan won't like it either. This is why I implore potential players to open their minds and take their time to learn the game. This game is very overwhelming and esoteric; it creates new gameplay-systems and reinvents the wheel more than is necessary, a trend among Japanese RPG-developers, but it's worth learning it. Take each day at a time. Use the internet, read the digital manual, and go to the official NeoGAF thread about this game, and ther...

Wow. We are seeing the first fruits of the new initiative to extend the reach of Nintendo's IP beyond just games. Stuff like this will do wonders for Nintendo overall. This is how they operated during the NES-era. The NES was a cultural phenomenon that extended beyond videogames into television, film, and merchandise, including cereal, apparel, and McDonald's Happy Meal toys. Somewhere along the line, Nintendo lost that. Perhaps they thought their groundwork was enough to ride on, or perhaps they couldn't afford to. I really like the direction Nintendo is going in, from Miitomo providing them a steady income, to anime like this. I think NX will do just fine.

First of all, the term "PC Master Race" should not be used outside of a humorous or sardonic tone. When people use it in a serious manner, it's just wrong on so many levels because 1) it's blatantly racist, and 2) it's inaccurate. When I think about people who call themselves a PC-gamer nowadays, I think about casual gamers with $1000+ rigs that play non-hardware-intensive games like Hearthstone and League of Legends. They only play games with good graphics when they want to benchmark their brand-spanking-new hardware. This is another reason why I do not believe people who feel the need to tell others that they are PC-gamers are actually gamers; they are PC hardware-enthusiasts, or people who like to build PCs for fun. This leads to the distinction between these people and actual, real, true PC-gamers who do not necessarily feel the need to call themselves that. These "real" PC-gamers play thousands of hours on games like World of Warcraft, Counter...