crispy4000

The only things they've done lately to piss the average consumer off are the online paywall subscription (which PSN and XBL should also be chastised for) and the lack of price drops. And really, I don't think many people are all that pissed about any of that. Smash, Zelda, 3d Mario, etc, are selling much better than they did in the Wii era, which was already gamgbusters for them. Animal Crossing is the biggest it’s ever been as well, its audience got much bigger with COVID. There's drama with the Smash community and Youtube, but that's all par for the course for them and is nothing new. If you're outraged about it, you've always been outraged about it. People were much more pissed about loot boxes, or Sony's hesitancy toward cross-play, than anything Nintendo's done with the Switch. I'm just not seeing outrage that’s going to break their back again. They'd have to fuck up their next hardware release in ways we don't yet know about to get to another Wii U-like flop.

Probably more of a Kinect 2.0 that couldn't be unbundled, given the circumstance of a new console releasing with it.

He absolutely is. The Wii U is not akin to the Pro/X1X. There's a hard generational divide between it and the Wii. It's still Nintendo's biggest leap in specs in nearly 2 decades. Infamously their development teams weren't ready for the jump, causing delays of games like Mario Kart 8 and Pikmin 3. Bad marketing doesn't change what the Wii U physically was. Nintendo thought Wii to Wii U would be interpreted the same way as NES to Super NES.

Either you never paid enough attention to what the Wii U was or this is a joke post.

Black Friday and off-Steam sales included: Final Fantasy X/X-2 remaster Sunset Overdrive Recore Humble Choice December Hades (Switch) Mirrors Edge Catalyst + DLC KOTOR 1 & 2 For about $50 total. I'm probably good with that for now. Also got Ghosts of Tsushima as a gift.

Everyone should have waited for AMD to get their shit together with their "super resolution," IMO. Either that, or for Sony or Microsoft to develop/finish improved AI upscale algorithms. The hardware was never going to feel like enough so soon after the mid-cycle consoles. But it's a way to cheat that a bit. I don't think 120fps will be a large focus for TV's going forward though. Gaming is the main medium driving its adoption. I doubt it'll be a major push of the current gen outside of indies and F2P stuff, but who knows.

I don’t want to blame you for forgetting all about the Wii U... but I kind of do. I mean, it’s a lot more recent than the Virtual Boy. Or even the 3DS’s struggles out if the gate (and Nintendo’s response to it). Real true gamers love their Nintendo hyperbole I suppose.

Fair enough. But it really wouldn’t need to be anything close to that if reconstructed-to 1080p was the handheld target.

Yup, that's what I've done. That Amazon deal was stellar recently. But I keep the credit for good deals that never come.

If you remember from that gen, 3rd party developers didn't think their games would sell on Gamecube unless they had exclusive modes, or struck a bargain with Nintendo to force Mario & co into it. It was much more than just the controller interface.

Their game pricing model is total shit these days. And I'll never touch Nintendo Online unless I absolutely need the cloud saves. But frankly, their output has been pretty consistent to what the Gamecube's was in the years since. There's still so many Switch games I'd be all over if they dropped in price like Sony's stuff.

If there was enough money to be made on ports, it wouldn't have been a problem. Much simpler than porting a game to the Wii, Wii U or Switch.

Too reductive, IMO. It wasn't its DVD player that killed the Dreamcast.

Nintendo may just stumble into it to some degree with DLSS 2.0. Producing a handheld as capable as a 2060 could work well enough, especially at handheld resolutions. Nvidia was a great partner choice for them.

Almost no 3rd party developer came out and said that was the reason for not supporting the Gamecube. There were 2-disc games pretty early on always. Also, Gamecube supposedly had more future-looking texture compression than the other consoles that gen. The big reason for less support was that sales weren't there. Not for the console, and certainly not 3rd party games on it. A bit of a chicken and the egg scenario left over from the N64 days. That bias still exists today somewhat among AAA publishers, so it's cathartic in a way for indies to be doing so well on Switch. Switch tends to get many indies first (alongside PC) before the other consoles. On paper, the Gamecube should have won. More powerful than the PS2, almost as powerful as the Xbox, for 2/3's the price of either. Spec wise, I don't think there's ever been a console that launched at a better value for its time. You just get a few less liscenced music tracks or shorter FMV in some games. That's the biggest difference in ports.

Runs great, occasional slowdown but hardly a dealbreaker. It’s only on PC and Switch at the moment but is cross save.

I’ll never be tempted to cancel so long as I can keep pausing with the classic plan. The occasional good month is worth it.

Humble Choice is pretty meh this month. So buy on Steam/Epic without fear. https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription/january-2021

Was Forza Horizon 4 poorly optimized on Series S? Sea of Thieves? There’s Microsoft and non-Microsoft games both that are lacking 1440p modes in their patches. Those signs point to the hardware not being totally up to snuff for AAA stuff at that level, especially as the gen goes on. It’s not the devs fault. There are some supremely well optimized last-gen games like Gears 5 that buck the trend, but I wouldn’t call the games that don’t live up to that lazy. It’s too early for Series S to hold anything back. Even later on, developers likely won’t build to its spec. They’ll probably try salvaging what they can in late stages of development. The issue is the headroom they’ll have left to do that. It’s not so simple as saying all is fine on a HDTV display. Performance woes and sub-1080p resolutions with reconstruction artifacts are pretty much inevitable. Ask yourself how a worse GPU than the Xbox One’s has held up in AAA releases over the past few years.

I thought the PS4 Pro version of the first game hid it well. Is it any worse than that?

They’d be crazy not to pick the 60fps RT performance mode instead.

Series X/PS5 games are hitting 4K more often than the One X and Pro did. It’s not quite so rare. I think that’s a win, even if reconstruction, a 30fps cap, or performance modes are involved. At least it’s ballpark to the target for now. Can’t say the same for Series S in many games. IMO, it’s because they’re tied together. There could be more of a case for the Series S if it was delivering more on its stated 1440p performance goals now. There’d be more headroom later on to scale down.

Most Series X/PS5 games at this point do hit 4k in some manner. You really aren’t seeing many games that tap out at 1440p at tops. Series S is a currently crapshoot whether or not a game goes higher than 1080p or not. With last gen ports even. There’s deceptive marketing in things like “true 4K” or “up to 120fps” too. It’s just not quite as egregious.

I don’t think calling out the Series S’ shortcomings thus far is console warring. It says nothing about the Series X vs PS5 at all. Unless Nintendo comes around with something similar, there is no competing console taking its approach.

120fps has always been talked about as a possibility rather than a norm. MS and Sony have both been on record to say Series X/PS5 target 4k60 (in performance modes). They might not hit it all the time, and there’s reconstruction in many cases, but it’s ballpark. No one is thinking these are actually 1440p machines. Not at this point in the gen anyways. Series S meanwhile isn’t making the grade. If it wanted to be as close to its target as the others are to theirs, it needed a few more teraflops and a bit more RAM possibly. Which is why DF called its marketing deceptive.