Thursday 4th November

At this point it's no longer a matter of money, for instance the staff used in Sword and Shield is bigger than any Xenoblade games. Granted Pokemon has far more monster to design and animate, overall the graphical fidelity is low and the animations are barren and recycled enough to be done with smaller teams.

The matter here is clear for me: Lack of technical skill. Game Freaks are mediocre devs, period. They essentially reused a nice game design from Shin Megami Tensei series with a more approachable image to kids and the rest was a combination of genius multimedia marketing, the games themselves were never quite there. Their games outside Pokemon franchise got mediocre scores and underwhelming reception proves the point Pokemon ubiquitous popularity and public-friendliness are pretty much the only thing making the game score 80+ every gen 

For 25 years GameFreak only made games from handhelds which were by definition 2 generations behind the current one. We can see Legends Arceus with specs one would expect from a PS3 launch title. Their conservative nature don't make them hiring new talents, for some reason Game Freak still with only ~200 employees and we can clearly see they cannot fill deadlines for their own games anymore as they are for the first time outsourcing a Pokemon mainline remake

If you don't hire new talents how are you supposed to progress to modern day mechanics? You have a team of 90's dinosaurs who only made handheld Pokemon games in their lifes, how can they make advances in gameplay? Or in online design? There is no chance to a game with a core team from Game Freak meets contemporary gaming design standards, they would need to outsource most, if not everything, and if they will outsource then it's better close the doors, fire everybody and focus on marketing and strategy while more skilled studios work developing quality titles. Game Freak CEOs doesn't seem interested in this and Nintendo is quite lax when it comes to Game Freak. With Pokemon consistently outselling anything from other Nintendo IP's (except Mario Kart) it's not hard to understand why

Mario Party is great. One of the biggest problems Mario Party has had for a long time was how long and drawn out everything is, watching animations play when anything happens that are way too slow and take forever. The new Mario Party is snappy, no unnecessary waiting and can even fast forward some events.

Only played a couple of rounds but definitely has the potential to be the definitive Mario Party. Hope they add more content in future as the boards they've chosen aren't my favourites but going back to the classic mechanics is great and with some basic improvements to the formula, such as 2nd/3rd place in minigames getting minor rewards.

Think I'd still like minigames to show as ??? until they've been selected but that's just a minor thing.

World War Z out now on Switch

The Swarm has arrived!

Band together to defeat swarms of zombies with up to 4 players in World War Z, the heart-pounding co-op third-person shooter, available now on #NintendoSwitch.

?: https://t.co/AWc9ztjW3r pic.twitter.com/09EFW6mo9e

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) November 2, 2021

Second Quarter report tomorrow.

Jumped back into MH Rise, still very smooth even after a break Capcom didn't really give much info on Sunbreak during their TGS segment.

Digital versions of SMTV are now available to pre-load.

Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light and Lara Croft & the Temple of Osiris are coming to Switch in 2022.

The ports are being handled by Feral Interactive, the team behind the impressive Switch port of Alien Isolation.

https://www.thegamer.com/tomb-raider-switch-games/#:~:text=Ports%20for%20two%20isometric%20Lara,be%20available%20on%20the%20system.

I enjoyed Guardian of Light on 360 and never got to play Temple of Osiris, might grab it when it comes out on Switch.

https://realotakugamer.com/twitch-app-is-now-available-on-the-nintendo-switch/72410/

Surprised it took them that long tbh.

Since yesterday, but you can't stream from the Switch and the chat isn't viewable when watching the streams normally.