"Nintendo steadfastly refuses to consider that Wii U is not interesting to consumers"

December 4th, 2013, 00:42 Posted By: wraggster

Wii U will fail to sell the 9m units Nintendo has predicted for the current financial year, analysts have said.
After sales of just 460k units in the six months ending September and a global install base of below 4m units, this is looking increasingly unlikely.
That Xbox One beat Wii U’s total UK lifetime sales in under two weeks and PS4 in around 24 hours has simply added to the pressure already on Nintendo’s machine.
Bloomberg reports that analysts’ average Wii u sales estimate for the current fiscal year is around 6.2m units.
“They steadfastly refuse to consider that the product is not interesting to consumers,” Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter stated. “They will fail to hit 9m, and they will likely miss their profit goals.”
Pachter told an audience at the London Games Conference last month that the Wii U was “toast”.
SMBC Nikko Securities analyst Eiji Maeda added: “Wii U has become a game console only for Nintendo fans. Wii U needs ground breaking software to draw casual and hardcore gamers.
“It’s going to be difficult for Nintendo to sell 9 million Wii U consoles this fiscal year. Iwata needs to plan what to do next year if the performance this year isn’t good.”
As if things weren’t bad enough for Nintendo, hopes that the release of key IP for the machine would reverse its fortunes also appear to be fading.
Super triple-A critical hit Super Mario 3D World last week debuted to the lowest sales ever for a 3D Mario game in Japan and was yesterday beaten by PS4 launch title and critical flop Knack in the UK charts.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ninte...sumers/0125227

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How Zelda’s Lost Woods inspired a forest of puzzling mazes

December 4th, 2013, 00:17 Posted By: wraggster

A Link To The Past codifies a maze that had once been abstract. But it presents another puzzle: to find the Master Sword in a swirling miasma of mist and from among its flimsy decoys.

You could date the underpinnings of the concept back to text-based adventures (“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”) or to the randomly generated environments of ASCII roguelikes, but the definitive impossible maze appears in the original Legend Of Zelda. Link finds himself contemplating two perpendicular paths that intersect amid impenetrable ranks of brown trees. If he has paid an elderly woman for advice, he’ll know that following the paths north, then west, then south, then west again will deliver him out of the forest and into the graveyard beyond. If he has not, there’s no telling how long he might wander, returning again and again to the same eerily familiar screen. This hellish Groundhog Day scenario was especially daunting in 1986, before the solution lay but a few keystrokes away.The graveyard, where ghosts will harass Link if he bumps into their headstones, is candidly supernatural. But the abutting Lost Woods – as the Forest Of Maze from the shakily translated original Zelda came to be known throughout the series – sit at a threshold between the mundane and the magical, the symbolic and the figurative. Are they a metaphor, a clever way for programmers with limited resources to capture the feeling of being lost in a vast forest without having to render all that vastness? Or are they to be taken literally, implying that the woods are under a space-warping enchantment? Such rich narrative and imaginative roots would inspire several imitations, becoming a staple of fantasy adventure games of the time.As games grew more spatially and narratively complex, the Lost Woods followed suit. In A Link To The Past, they’re more like a straightforward maze, with green tress shrouded in a disorienting fog. Ocarina Of Time’s version returned to something closer to the original puzzle, although this time around they were seeded with hints to aid orienteers. Each screen has some distinguishing feature, and subtle lights inside the tree-trunk tunnels indicate whether a path leads farther into or out of the Woods. The task also started getting papered over by a more robust fiction: anyone who wanders for too long in the Lost Woods turns into a Skull Kid, a Stalfos or, according to Four Swords Adventures, a Deku Scrub. Any ambiguity over whether the Lost Woods were mirror or magic was gradually dispelled, but the goal – to find the true path through confusingly similar terrain – stayed intact.The idea of game space as an Escherian construct that moves in impossible circuits has also played a role in the Mario series, Zelda’s august foil, since its very first game. Several levels in Super Mario Bros force you to guess the correct path branch or warp pipe in order to proceed. And all of the obvious exits in Super Mario World’s Forest Of Illusion are as substantial as its name suggests. Variations on the theme appear in Paper Mario 64’s Forever Forest and Super Mario RPG’s Forest Maze, too. In the latter, you can abandon chasing Geno to follow a series of arcane cardinal directions to find a secret area. Rather than confined spaces, these takes on the Lost Woods are entwined with regular gameplay, and can verge on the point where a fun challenge tilts into a frustrating ordeal.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...uzzling-mazes/

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Review of the PSP Lookalike KO G6000 MP5 Console

December 3rd, 2013, 15:39 Posted By: wraggster

Today i had the chance to review the KO G6000 Ultrathin 4.3" Touch Screen MP5 Game Console from the gadget specialists at DealExtreme.com.



This Console is Cheap at £23/$35 and it was a surprise to me, it plays Gameboy, GBA, GBC, Nes, Megadrive and Snes Roms.

Check out the full review over at the DCEmu Blog Here --> http://blog.dcemu.co.uk/ko-g6000-ult...ew-736423.html

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Review of the PSP Lookalike KO G6000 MP5 Console

December 3rd, 2013, 15:39 Posted By: wraggster

Today i had the chance to review the KO G6000 Ultrathin 4.3" Touch Screen MP5 Game Console from the gadget specialists at DealExtreme.com.



This Console is Cheap at £23/$35 and it was a surprise to me, it plays Gameboy, GBA, GBC, Nes, Megadrive and Snes Roms.

Check out the full review over at the DCEmu Blog Here --> http://blog.dcemu.co.uk/ko-g6000-ult...ew-736423.html

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YouTube finally arrives on Nintendo 3DS with ironic lack of 3D playback

December 2nd, 2013, 22:33 Posted By: wraggster

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EU Nintendo eShop update: Bravely Default, Scribblenauts

December 2nd, 2013, 22:14 Posted By: wraggster

Nintendo has released a list of this week's new European eShop content.
The main addition is Bravely Default, the long-awaited Square Enix RPG developed by Final Fantasy alumni.
Joining it is Scribblenauts Unlimited, the Wii U and 3DS game delayed for almost a year for unannounced reasons.
Also notable are the next two games in the Sega 3D Classics collection, with Sonic The Hedgehog and Altered Beast getting the 3D treatment.
Here's the full list of releases:

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Pokemon Blue Becomes An IDE

December 2nd, 2013, 22:05 Posted By: wraggster


With WiFi, Wonder Trade, and new Pokemon that are freakin’ keys, you’d think the latest generation of everyone’s reason to own a Nintendo portable is where all the action is, right? Apparently not, because Pokemon Blue just became a development tool for the Game Boy.
Despite all notions of sanity, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone program a Game Boy from inside a first generation Pokemon game. Around this time last year, [bortreb]posted a tool assisted run that deposited and threw away in-game items to write to the Game Boy’s RAM. Using this method, [bortreb] was able to craft a chiptune version of the My Little Pony theme inside Pokemon Yellow.
A year later, [TheZZAZZGlitch] has gone above and beyond what [bortreb] did. Instead of a tool assisted run, [ZZAZZ]‘s hack can be done manually on a real Game Boy. This trick works by using an underflow glitch to obtain item ’8F’ in the player’s inventory. . With this 8F item, a few items can be tossed and a ‘programming’ mode is activated where code can be written to RAM by walking to an X Y position on the map, using the 8F item, and writing a program byte by byte.
The maximum amount of code that can be written to the Game Boy RAM is 254 bytes, just large enough for [TheZZAZZGlitch] to write a very, very simple version of Akranoid, Breakout, or one-player Pong. Not much, but very, very impressive.
Video of [ZZAZZ] ‘jailbreaking’ his copy of Pokemon Blue available below.

http://hackaday.com/2013/12/02/pokem...ecomes-an-ide/

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Prison or penthouse? The cruelty/kindness of Poké Balls

December 2nd, 2013, 21:49 Posted By: wraggster

The old concern is that Pokémon, the cutesy kids game that has become nothing short of a global phenomenon, has a dark heart. Yes, its bevy of monsters have doe eyes and quivering smiles, but strip away the cartoon aesthetic and the fact remains that your character is charged with wounding animals until they are sufficiently weakened to be captured in a tiny ball. Then, having trapped the critter, you send them out to fight other pocket monsters in what must be the world’s most socially acceptable contemporary take on cockfighting (Pokémon X/Y sold four million units in just two days). In this way, Game Freak is teaching postmodern generations how to hunt, trap and battle in a world where the children affluent enough to own a handheld device have little apparent need for such skills.It’s a selective take on Pokémon’s seemingly inexhaustible appeal and yet there’s something to it. Sure, apologists will argue that captured Pokémon fight for you willingly, and that a complicated bond of trust and cooperation is formed through the trainer/monster relationship. But you could read this another way: as a digital introduction to Stockholm Syndrome. After all, no matter how big or small they are – and even the original Pokémon range in height from a mere 30cm (Pidgey) to 8.8m (Onix) and in weight from less than a pound (Ghastly) to nearly a ton (Snorlax) – each monster is kept in a one-size-fits-all cage: a tiny Poké Ball.Pikachu may be Pokémon’s headline monster, but it’s the Poké Ball, a red-and-white sphere about the size of a baseball, which unclasps in the middle and sucks Pokémon into its TARDIS-like interior, that is the visual shorthand for the series. The in-game origins of the Poké Ball are linked to the Johto region, where Apricorns grow. The fruit was hollowed out and then used to catch Pokémon. These antiquated designs (still used in the game by some trainers) were modernised by the still-mysterious Silph Corporation, a company based in the Kanto region, which manufactures and markets essential tools for Pokémon trainers. But outside of the fiction, the Poké Ball has its origin in the simpler tools of childhood bug-catching.As a child, Pokémon’s inventor Satoshi Tajiri (who lends his first name to the lead character we know as Ash in the Japanese versions of the game) was infatuated with collecting insects. In the summer holidays, he would head out from his family home on the outskirts of Tokyo to search the surrounding undergrowth in search of beetles and other insects, carefully studying each one he caught before cataloguing it in a notepad bought for him by his parents. Clearly, Tajiri wouldn’t go so far as to name, train and battle his captured beasts – even if a few did eat each other – but in whatever Perspex prison was used to house the creatures, the Poké Ball was born.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...of-poke-balls/

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Jason Rubin calls Nintendo 'irrelevant'

December 2nd, 2013, 21:42 Posted By: wraggster

Jak and Daxter co-creator also criticises Nintendo’s ‘criminal’ approach to third-party hardware
Naughty Dog co-founder and THQ chief Jason Rubin has called Nintendo “irrelevant” in the games hardware market.

Rubin was commenting on the lacklustre performance of the Wii U in an interview with GameTrailers.

“Nintendo is irrelevant as a hardware manufacturer in the console business right now,” he said, adding the PS4 and Xbox One will do well this generation because “Nintendo has stumbled”.

His main criticism of the Japanese manufacturer was what he saw as a failure to release its celebrated games on third-party platforms, such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Rubin labelled this a crime.

However, he did praise the company as a “worldwide treasure” for its legacy of consistently fun titles.

Frequently outspoken, at the dawn of the last console race back in 2006 and another interview with GameTrailers, Rubin favoured Nintendo, when Wii mania was just about to break, while he predicted a fall for Sony with its costly PlayStation 3.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/j...levant/0186714

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Mario and Luigi 3DS XL bundle out now for $200

December 2nd, 2013, 21:24 Posted By: wraggster

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DeSmuME 0.9.10

December 2nd, 2013, 00:07 Posted By: wraggster

via http://www.aep-emu.de/

Version 0.9.10 of the Nintendo DS emulator DeSmuME has been released. The new JIT core is intended to improve the performance significantly.

Quote:
0.9.9 -> 0.9.10 (r4623-r4908)

In this version, we have focused on trying to clean up some complexities in the user experience and emulator internals. Pretty unglamorous stuff, but some games are newly compatible.

General/Core:

• enh: break savestate back-compatibility
• bug: improve save size autodetection for some games
• bug: cpu: fix many basic jit cpu bugs
• bug: 3d: tweak softrasterizer edge marking
• bug: 3d: fix stale 4x4 texture palettes
• bug: fix some GPU sprite blending scenarios
• bug: fix bios HLE BitUnPack, UnCompHuffman
• enh: modular slot-1 device system, emulate GC bus more faithfully
• enh: support NAND slot-1 device
• enh: auto-detect appropriate slot-1 and slot-2 device
• enh: many revisions to firmware boot process for more authenticity. iQue and FlashME versions function, .dfc rewritten.
• enh: support streaming NDS file from disk (like an ISO, to avoid long initial load time)
• enh: run .dsv directly on disk, to save long flushing times. should speed backup operations.
• enh: spu synch mode and method on commandline

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nemulator v3.2

December 2nd, 2013, 00:05 Posted By: wraggster

via http://www.aep-emu.de/

An update of the NES emulator nemulator has been released.

Quote:

• Controller reading fixes for Paperboy and other Mindscape games
• Added support for the following mappers:
  • 64 (RAMBO-1) - Klax, Skull & Crossbones, Rolling Thunder
  • MC-ACC - The Incredible Crash Test Dummies
  
  
  
• Option to stretch game to fit widescreen display (app.stretch_to_fit in nemulator.ini)
• Option to suspend computer from quit menu (show_suspend in nemulator.ini)
• Unofficial opcode support - fixes Streemerz (and other games using the MUSE sound engine) and Double Action Blaster Guys
• New, higher quality, audio resampler
• More accurate color palette
• Note: requires updated libraries from Microsoft

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Dolphin v4.0.2

December 2nd, 2013, 00:04 Posted By: wraggster

via http://www.aep-emu.de/

A new version of the Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo Wii and Triforce emulator Dolphin has been been released.

Quote:



One month after the 4.0.1 release we´re releasing the maintenance release 4.0.2. It turned out that some critical regressions had slipped into the 4.0 release due to the major changes linked to the wii-network branch and the global user directory changes.

In particular, one of the fixed issues was related to incorrect usage of wxWidgets and caused various problems with general Dolphin usage on Windows systems with Unicode characters in their user name (e.g. "François" or "あいうえお").

Some rather technical issues caused multiple games to stop booting or to freeze randomly. We´ve had multipleissuereports on this bug, so it´s great to see that we were able to fix this properly.

As for the binary release packages, we unfortunately can only provide Windows builds at the moment. As usual, OS X and Linux users can compile the source themselves by checking out the source from the 4.0.2 git tag. The Windows installers can be found on our downloads page, https://dolphin-emu.org/download/. We hope to be able to provide binaries for other systems in the future, though.

If you´re a Windows user and still were using Dolphin 4.0.0, you should uninstall Dolphin before installing the update due to some changes to the installer which happened in the 4.0.1 release. All future Dolphin versions will be installed into "Program Files/Dolphin", whereas the 4.0.0 release still used "Program Files/Dolphin 4.0". Your settings and game saves will survive a deinstallation, so you don´t need to worry about having to back them up. If your currently installed Dolphin version is already 4.0.1, you can safely ignore this notice.

Of course, if you want to test the most recent improvements which are happening in Dolphin, you can also use the development versions. They are distributed as plain .7z archives, so you test them safely without damaging an existing installation of a stable release. Keep in mind that they´re less simple to install and might have little flaws every now and then. However, we will do our best to make the Dolphin experience for the next stable release even more awesome than it is currently, of course!


You can continue the discussion in the forum thread of this article.

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Walmart Cyber Monday 2013 Deals LIVE!

December 1st, 2013, 23:32 Posted By: wraggster

Walmart has kicked off their Cyber Monday Deals today!
Highlights include:

• 3DS XL Holiday Bundle with 2 Games - $219
• 3DS Starter Bundle with Game/Accessorie - $179
• HDTV deals
• PLUS MORE...

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Walmart CyberMonday $99 2DS Deal

December 1st, 2013, 23:21 Posted By: wraggster

Walmart Black Friday 2013 Deals!Grab the Nintendo 2DS for only $99 at Walmart.com!This will not last!Check it out:

• Walmart - Nintendo 2DS (Electric Blue)
• Walmart - 2DS (Crimson Red)

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YouTube, dancing cats now available on 3DS

December 1st, 2013, 22:42 Posted By: wraggster

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Sega to continue 3D Classics series on 3DS, US release depends on sales

December 1st, 2013, 22:34 Posted By: wraggster

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LEGO Marvel Super Heroes for $29.99 (Xbox 360/PS3/Wii U) or $39.99 (Xbox One/PS4)!

November 30th, 2013, 02:39 Posted By: wraggster

Grab LEGO Marvel Super Heroes for $29.99 (Xbox 360/PS3/Wii U) or $39.99 (Xbox One/PS4) at Amazon!

Check it out: Amazon - LEGO Marvel Super Heroes

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3DS, Wii U and Vita games better than anything on PS4 or Xbox One, say critics

November 29th, 2013, 23:25 Posted By: wraggster

The PS4 and Xbox One launch line-up has been overshadowed by games for Wii U, Vita and 3DS.
Critics heaped praise on Nintendo’s new Zelda and Mario games. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on 3DS (this week No.9 in the charts) has a Metacritic score of 90, while Super Mario 3D World for Wii U performs even better with a score of 94.
Meanwhile, Sony’s big Vita title Tearaway, from British developers Media Molecule, has a score of 87.
All three games arrived at the same time as Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen machines. And all three have achieved higher scores than the big Xbox One and PlayStation 4 launch games.
“The latest adventures in two of our most loved franchises, Mario and The Legend of Zelda, have achieved 10/10 review scores in mainstream and specialist media and have been credited as ‘must-have titles’ as well as reasons to purchase hardware,” said Nintendo UK marketing boss Shelly Pearce. (pictured, right) “We look forward to hearing more from the fans.”
David Wilson, head of PR at Sony, added: “It was always going to be a challenge to get (paper) cut through for Tearaway in the midst of the massive PlayStation 4 excitement bandwagon – but we are so delighted by the reviews which are highlighting what a fabulous little Vita title this is. It is full of charm and exactly the sort of innovative and beautifully (paper) crafted experience you’d expect from the hugely talented guys at Media Molecule.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/3ds-w...ritics/0125114

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New Nintendo eShop releases: Sega 3D Classics, Mario games sale, SMT4 for $30

November 29th, 2013, 21:03 Posted By: wraggster

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