Nintendo Switch (Currently Plagued) - Here we shit post about the new Nintendo console, The Switch

[whatever I feel like]

With word of a new Mario kart, that's probably going to be a launch game for whatever new system because 8 took around 2 years to make. The Original version of 8 came out on the wii-u in 2014.

But I'm not sure how much of their One Literation per generation thing is going to remain when series like Zelda have competition who have multiple titles in development. Horizon already has 4 games in the works with one set to be released this year and that series already went head to head with Zelda before which is what greenlit the sequels due to it's performance.

I haven't played Horizon but I think the Zelda comparison was only really made because its release date lined up. Sony's been going in the Nintendo direction, not the other way around. TLOU, Horizon, GoW, Uncharted, they all got only one PS4 premiere.

Anyways, on Zelda. Zelda already is one of the few franchises that Nintendo really will just pump out titles for. Zelda games have released in gaps of one, four, seven, two, two, four (done in three but delayed to be a Wii launch title), five and six years (but this one was also probably held back from 2016 to 2017 to be a Switch dual launch since the Wii U was already dead at that point.) We're currently five years in and hoping we'll get the next game this year. Nintendo has a development team, EPD 3, that just does Zelda. Not even Mario gets that (team also does smaller releases like Capt. Toad and NES Remix,) nor does Mario Kart (team also does Nintendogs and Arms, fwiw,) EPD 3 is the only internal team that only does one game series. The deceptive part of that, though, is that "pumping" out a AAA game with only a single team (no Ubisoft multiple studios around the world here) and no corners cut really does take four or five years these days.

But I was internally slating in Mario Kart, or a port of it, as a Switch 2 launch title even before this recent round of rumors, anyway. Nintendo should have an EPD 4 controller gimmick game out as well. So Zelda this year, and Mario Kart two years from now. But where would that leave an Odyssey sequel? Hopefully in 2023...

 

[Marissa Moira]

I haven't played Horizon but I think the Zelda comparison was only really made because its release date lined up. Sony's been going in the Nintendo direction, not the other way around. TLOU, Horizon, GoW, Uncharted, they all got only one PS4 premiere.

Anyways, on Zelda. Zelda already is one of the few franchises that Nintendo really will just pump out titles for. Zelda games have released in gaps of one, four, seven, two, two, four (done in three but delayed to be a Wii launch title), five and six years (but this one was also probably held back from 2016 to 2017 to be a Switch dual launch since the Wii U was already dead at that point.) We're currently five years in and hoping we'll get the next game this year. Nintendo has a development team, EPD 3, that just does Zelda. Not even Mario gets that (team also does smaller releases like Capt. Toad and NES Remix,) nor does Mario Kart (team also does Nintendogs and Arms, fwiw,) EPD 3 is the only internal team that only does one game series. The deceptive part of that, though, is that "pumping" out a AAA game with only a single team (no Ubisoft multiple studios around the world here) and no corners cut really does take four or five years these days.

But I was internally slating in Mario Kart, or a port of it, as a Switch 2 launch title even before this recent round of rumors, anyway. Nintendo should have an EPD 4 controller gimmick game out as well. So Zelda this year, and Mario Kart two years from now. But where would that leave an Odyssey sequel? Hopefully in 2023...

Anything Mario related will probably come around a movie. If we're getting a sequel to Odyssey they're going to want maybe the next movie to push it unless the sequel has been in development and nobody's aware of it and it will come out with the first film.

Uncharted got two PS4 games though(4 and Lost Legacy), and GOW and Horizon both came relatively late in the ps4's life around 4-5 years in, they were not there from the start in 2013. Here we have a Horizon game a little after the first year and usually playstation consoles last 8+. Horizon and BOTW both follow the open world formula pretty standard. You could also make the argument that GOW2018 follows the more traditional zelda formula with some twists in level design and combat (they did a better job at what Skyward Sword was attempting to do with melee combat).

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

I haven't played Horizon but I think the Zelda comparison was only really made because its release date lined up.

This is correct.

Could have sworn crowbcat did a video on this but I guess not. By the way new crowbcat video last week.

 

[ForgedBlades]

BotW isn't overrated, it was always shit.

 

[Marissa Moira]

BotW isn't overrated, it was always shit.

This is true, after 100%ing it I've yet to go back to it. Meanwhile I've gone back to other open world games and was able to finish them 100% again without the desire to jab something into my head like BOTW made me feel.

 

[Patrick X Tomlinson]

Pretty much every Nintendo system from now on has to be portable, right? After the success of the Switch if they did just a traditional home console it would probably flop harder than MovieBob's tits.

 

[ForgedBlades]

I have literally never taken my Switch out of the dock.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Pretty much every Nintendo system from now on has to be portable, right? After the success of the Switch if they did just a traditional home console it would probably flop harder than MovieBob's tits.

It's assumed so, but you have stuff like The Evercade who went from portable system and for it's next version became a console. It's going to depend on what people want. All the emerging markets want phone games and don't want a portable system and if they're going to make a purchase it's going to be an at home system since their phone acts as their portable games.

I have literally never taken my Switch out of the dock.

Yeah The only game I played in the portable mode was BOTW and that was because I was too lazy to set up the dock at the time. Since then I've never really taken it out of the dock. Xenoblade 2 was absolute ass in portable mode.

 

[Buttigieg2020]

It's assumed so, but you have stuff like The Evercade who went from portable system and for it's next version became a console. It's going to depend on what people want. All the emerging markets want phone games and don't want a portable system and if they're going to make a purchase it's going to be an at home system since their phone acts as their portable games.


Yeah The only game I played in the portable mode was BOTW and that was because I was too lazy to set up the dock at the time. Since then I've never really taken it out of the dock. Xenoblade 2 was absolute ass in portable mode.

Maybe, but Nintendo is trying to make a successful console that normal people know about.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Maybe, but Nintendo is trying to make a successful console that normal people know about.

Evercade at this point has more old Nintendo games on it that you can buy in physical form than the Switch does.

I think the question is are they going to fuck up the Switch's successor's name like the Wii/Wii-U?

 

[Pissmaster]

Pretty much every Nintendo system from now on has to be portable, right? After the success of the Switch if they did just a traditional home console it would probably flop harder than MovieBob's tits.

Computing in general's at a point where portability is no longer the exception, but the rule. Other consoles justify being stationary by having powerful hardware, but having powerful hardware hasn't been Nintendo's forté for 20 years. Nintendo won't make a new stationary home console for the foreseeable future because technology's just moved on.

If anything, I'd imagine their next hardware would be a cellphone-sized Switch.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Evercade at this point has more old Nintendo games on it that you can buy in physical form than the Switch does.

I think the question is are they going to fuck up the Switch's successor's name like the Wii/Wii-U?

DS/3DS was also confusing and led to sales issues at first. So I actually think yes. It might keep the name Switch but it will have some sort of logical differentiater and it will clearly look different and, probably, won't be compatible with Switch joy-cons.

 

[Sundae]

Better this than the cavalcade of retards that think/have been fooled into thinking that Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are good. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are ass.

Go play Okami instead.

I'm torn. On one hand, Twilight Princess is my favorite Zelda game so I disagree with you there.

On the other hand, Okami is one of my favorite games ever, so I agree with you on it.

 

[The Southwest Strangla]

I'm torn. On one hand, Twilight Princess is my favorite Zelda game so I disagree with you there.

On the other hand, Okami is one of my favorite games ever, so I agree with you on it.

okami is great. Played it on the ps2. Wonderful and underrated

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

I enjoyed Horizon much more than BotW but both have their pros and cons. Aloy had the better story. BotW story just felt like a rehash of the typical Zelda formula only this time angsty flashback cutscenes out of order because....reasons.

BotW the stamina bullshit just gave me horrible Skyward Sword flashbacks. I just find it so unnecessary. I enjoy riding through the fields in BotW (Ghost of Tsushima did this too but....more realistically)

I do wonder why they essentially crapped out the blah dungeons though.

Also full voiceover in Zelda was a mistake. A big mistake. This however started with Brawl because now we get the same damn actors from every anime or JRPG in every game and its usually Valerie Arem (I have some info about her which......everything makes sense now) directing and I hate it. (Unpopular opinion but Patricia Summerset is the sole best one of all the other voiced characters. Maybe I like her because she's not as high profile as some of the other cast members)

 

[BananaSplit]

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined (Kiki Kaikai) has finally a release date set for April 21st in Japan. Western release should be around this spring too.

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined launches April 21 in Japan - Gematsu

Pocky & Rocky Reshrined will launch for PlayStation 4 and Switch on April 21 in Japan, publisher Natsume Atari announced in the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu. The January 13-due issue features a new…

www.gematsu.com

Go play Okami instead.

I have this one in my Switch backlog and has yet to get into it, although I definitively will.

 

[moocow]

Did the PS3 even have anything good that WASN'T multi-platform? Im genuinely asking because I can count a shit load of PS2 exclusives that were awesome, but don't remember the PS3 having anything worthwhile.

Yeah now that you mention it heck even the ps3 didnt have many great titles

PS3 was shit, there were some great games on it, but overall it was shit and it permanently killed a certain momentum video games had been on.

I'll spend the rest of my life I guess wondering what it would have been like had the PS3 been a worthier follow up to the PS2.

Even 15 years later I still honestly can't believe what happened really happened, it's just how did Sony manage to fuck it up? A PS3 should have been a sure thing.

And then the cell was way too hard to program for while Microsoft made a lot of smart choices.

The PS3 really got the shaft, and as much as people love shitting on Sony (I'm one of them), it wasn't all their fault. It was a complex architecture, but between IBM, Toshiba and Sony (who collaborated on the design) there was a pretty strong toolchain to let developers work with it. Sony's mistake was assuming most game developers weren't complete fucking morons incapable of grasping multithreaded programming, asymmetric processor capabilities and large-scale high-performance computation pipelines.

Spoiler: Architecture sperging

In terms of hardware capabilities, at the time of the PS3's launch there was literally nothing else like it outside the real of god damn enterprise mainframes (the Cell was practically a mainframe CPU -- a PowerPC core surrounded by 9 vector units on the same die -- binned out of mainframe land by the fact that one out of the 9 vector cores on the die was defective; the PS3 got the "leftovers" to provide a PowerPC core and eight vector units).

There's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the design of the Cell processor and the PS3's overall architecture, leading people to think it was an underpowered console when in reality the damned thing should have absolutely smoked its competition. There's a reason it was legitimately the most popular compute node to run Seti@Home on for the longest time and the US military scooped up thousands of the original versions (the "fat" PS3) to build a supercomputer cluster because they could run Linux. It was a $500 computer with a fast core and 8 Really Fucking Fast(tm) cores and a modest GPU. It was a babby mainframe node you could stick on a bookcase shelf.

The biggest misconception was that the Cell had one "good core" that everything ran on and eight "kinda crappy cores that were only good for a few things" which isn't actually true. It does have a conventional, general-purpose core running the show and is what runs the operating system and applications/games, but those eight so-called "vector units" are beasts in their own right. Each vector unit can simultaneously operate on sixteen 8-bit integers, eight 16-bit integers, four 32-bit integers or four single-precision floating point numbers in a single cycle and perform a memory operation in the same cycle.

For comparison, the CPU in the machine you're reading this on (whether it's a desktop, laptop, cell phone or Mk. IV Abacus) can generally deal with one value at a time in a single cycle and most instructions actually take more than one cycle to execute, while the Cell's vector units could burn through most instructions in their instruction set in one or two cycles. The vector units' ability to execute instructions on four, eight or sixteen values at once in a single cycle translated to utterly insane performance on workloads the units were most suited for.

Each vector unit was individually programmable and could operate completely autonomously from the PowerPC core, including memory transfers and communication with other vector units and the GPU. Each unit also has its own software-transparent cache (like an L1/L2 cache on a regular core), software-accessible scratch memory, and DMA access to the rest of the system's memory. Additionally, they can all talk to each other across a custom-designed interconnect mesh with latency as low as a modern Ryzen's. And this was available for production use 16 years ago.

The tradeoff for all this computational power was some extra complexity in working with the architecture. The "right" way to use a Cell-based system (and thus the PS3) was to offload as much work onto the vector units as possible so the main processor could focus on running the show (for a PS3 game, this meant handling AI, UI, player inputs, game logic and state, streaming assets, scene graphs, etc.). The vector units were at their best when they were used to handle things like physics calculations and as part of the graphics pipeline to complement the not-so-hot GPU in the PS3. Games that did this had fantastic performance, whereas games that relied entirely on the GPU alone didn't run nearly as well.

The vector units couldn't directly access system memory; they had to use DMA buffers. They also had their own instruction set that differed from the PowerPC core's general-purpose instruction set and there were some things they couldn't do that the main core could (this is why developers were expected to split their applications' workloads into tasks best suited to either one or the other type of execution unit and dispatch work accordingly).

If you wanted your game to run really well on the PS3, you needed to write it with this architecture in mind. You needed to maximize use of the vector units to augment the GPU's modest performance and handle other number crunching tasks to free up the main (multithreading-capable) core for other work. This requirement was laid at the feet of game software developers at a time when multi-core processors weren't quite the norm yet and the limited exposure most of them had to multi-processor systems were limited to "one main core, one GPU, maybe a math coprocessor" architectures.

You could just treat the PS3 like Generic Gaming Console 42 and compile your stuff to just run on the main core and GPU, but your game's performance would suffer for it. Unfortunately, this is what most developers did, and the result was a lot of not-so-great-looking games running at 30FPS and with noticeable lag.

What's most frustrating about all this is the fact that the very same techniques you'd use to make the most of the PS3's capabilities are pretty much exactly what you do today to squeeze every drop out of modern GPU's, which are composed of a main general-purpose GPU core and thousands of "shader" cores with custom instruction sets that are hyper-fast at crunching numbers and operating in pipelines. Sound familiar?

Cell just landed at game developers' feet ten years too soon. Of course many modern game developers continue to be terrible at it (on the software architecture side), so not everyone would have been able to push the PS3 to its limits even if it was still "current" today, but a lot of the techniques it needed are common practice today.

Sony didn't help matters by eventually removing the "Other OS" option entirely and eliminating backwards compatibility in the "slim" PS3 -- the removal of the Other OS feature famously pissed off the military agency that was using the PS3 by the thousands and let to a scramble to push the government procurement process to its limits to snatch up as many fat PS3s off the shelves as they could while they were still available.

TL;DR: Ah well. Sony done goofed and game developers suck in general, so really neat hardware was largely wasted on an industry that had no clue how to use it.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

I have this one in my Switch backlog and has yet to get into it, although I definitively will.

Make sure you collect all of the beads.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Make sure you collect all of the beads.

Those damn thwomp looking motherfuckers with their memory game shit

 

[moocow]

You have to love that the re-release of Conker ended up being more censored than the N64 version. Incredible!

What they did to that game was criminal. It already had a rough life even making it to launch on the N64 as it is.

Wait what the fuck? Are they hiring indians for their emulation teams?

Well their other options are "hire local talent that's probably got almost no experience writing emulators" and "hire tranny lunatics from the same emulator scene they've been aggressively trying to destroy through litigation for 20+ years," so they're kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place on that one.

Now where have I heard that befo...
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... oh

I'm not sure what's funnier -- that this screwup actually made it to launch, or that they misspelled "tether." Ah, that game was such a wonderful clusterfuck.