Topic: Episode 17: PreDON'Tions

[oksoda]

What's coming up in 2012 for Nintendo? We just might (not) know!

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/connectivity/28954

We're back again with another brand spankin' new episode of Connectivity, and boy is it a doozy this week. Starting off, Danny, Patrick, Mike, and Zach all give their predictions for 2012. Will we see a new game from Retro? How about the release of Metroid Dread? Mike even throws in a "PreDON'Tion" for good measure. In our second segment, Danny, Neal, Patrick, Scott, and Zach do a roundtable on the latest news and follow that up with a healthy dose of listener mail.

But that's not all. After the regular show, Scott and J.P. have a nice long chat about hockey. You like hockey, right? I sure hope you do.

Feed our mailbag! It's hungry and if you don't send it a letter there is a very good chance it will eat Zach. You can save him from this gruesome fate by clicking here.

[Nbz]

Not appeared in iTunes yet, but I'll be sure to listen as soon as it goes up

[TJ Spyke]

Not appeared in iTunes yet, but I'll be sure to listen as soon as it goes up

I downloaded it on iTunes 1 1/2 hours ago.

[NWR_insanolord]

My criticism of Bryzgalov and praise of Bobrovsky have been borne out by the Flyers' play since we recorded this, with Bob only giving up 8 in his last 5 games compared to Bryz's 21. Luckily, Laviolette seems to be realizing this as well.

[Chiramii]

Ahh, I can't wait for SSX. I spent so much time playing SSX 3 and Tricky on Gamecube and it never got boring. Screw social life, I'm gonna be real busy by the beginning of March! I hope Retro is working on an F-Zero game although I don't really think they do. The question is, what would be better? F-Zero in 3D or HD?

[oksoda]

Ahh, I can't wait for SSX. I spent so much time playing SSX 3 and Tricky on Gamecube and it never got boring. Screw social life, I'm gonna be real busy by the beginning of March! I hope Retro is working on an F-Zero game although I don't really think they do. The question is, what would be better? F-Zero in 3D or HD?

I would EASILY go for an HD F-Zero. Gorgeous environments and effects, super slick framerate, and racing online with 29 other players. YES PLEASE.

[KDR_11k]

I too live in a town where two sports teams are at roughly equal distances. Soccer teams. The result is violence. The fans of those teams are arch enemies even though the teams themselves rarely interact (in fact they're currently in different leagues).

I just don't think multiple layers really belong into sidescrollers, especially not action-exploration games like Metroid. They're a clunky solution for not having semi-solid platforms (the kind you can jump up through). Puzzle games might warrant multiple layers but Metroid isn't about those. Also story-wise Samus is going to face court martial after Metroid 4 and she doesn't seem willing to go fugitive and fight the federation. As far as bounty hunting goes, Sakamoto doesn't seem to know what bounty hunting is and sees Samus simply as a wandering hero.


Also 3D Zelda is inferior to 2D Zelda. The combat is better in 2D Zelda and the level design feels less restrictive than in 3D Zelda with puzzles much more subdued and organic feeling. In fact it doesn't feel terribly puzzly and really that may be for the best.

[TJ Spyke]

Also 3D Zelda is inferior to 2D Zelda. The combat is better in 2D Zelda and the level design feels less restrictive than in 3D Zelda with puzzles much more subdued and organic feeling. In fact it doesn't feel terribly puzzly and really that may be for the best.

LOL, could not disagree more. In fact, the combat feels better in the 3D ones (and with more options), same with puzzles.

[Shaymin]

On the hockey stuff; I'm sure Winnipeg's players hate having to go to Florida, the Carolinas, et al three times a year, largely in the dead of winter. And they don't even have the most travel in the league - that's LA, Florida and Anaheim.

I really hope that the lockout doesn't kill Detroit/Toronto in the Big House, because that's a rivalry that needs more love and the game will be awesome. Plus, Toronto is the most American city in Canada so NBC doesn't have the right to complain.

[leahsdad]

Regarding downloading 3DS games from the eshop and installing on your SD card:

I've never owned a PSP-GO, so I don't know how well this works there, but with current filesizes hover over a gig for most 3DS games (I think?), wouldn't downloading kind of suck?  What, I just stop playing my 3DS for like the 20 minutes or even more that it'll take to download a game over Wi-Fi?  As it is, downloading multiple-gig games from Steam isn't awesome, because for some stupid reason it slows down my ability to play other games on Steam.    And that's on a wired lan connection. 

Installing from the cartridge to the SD card might be better, but until internet speeds increase I don't know how attractive the download option is. 

[Shaymin]

I think the theory is you'd set it up to download in sleep mode and let it run overnight.

[NWR_insanolord]

Finally got around to this. When Mike was talking about how he didn't like Link to the Past I had a feeling my name might come up, and Zach did not disappoint.

[KDR_11k]

Also 3D Zelda is inferior to 2D Zelda. The combat is better in 2D Zelda and the level design feels less restrictive than in 3D Zelda with puzzles much more subdued and organic feeling. In fact it doesn't feel terribly puzzly and really that may be for the best.

LOL, could not disagree more. In fact, the combat feels better in the 3D ones (and with more options), same with puzzles.

More options didn't make Twilight Princess's combat better, in fact they broke it. If you can spam so damn many special moves that no attack can touch you it's hardly even combat anymore. In 2D Zelda it's extremely clear what you can and cannot do and when an attack will hit and how to avoid being hit. 3D Zelda loves to give you options but most of them don't do anything different. You got all those modifiers from pressing different directions when attacking and yet you might as well just ignore them because a swipe is a swipe. Then Skyward Sword made it all annoying by requiring you to fake out enemies or your attacks don't do any damage so combat feels slow and tedious as you can't simply kill the cannon fodder and move on, you got to give an individual treatment to every single stupid goblin.

Also items like the hookshot became much less useful when they got restricted to attaching to special grappling points instead of simply anything you can find. There's so damn many object-specific items in 3D Zelda that many puzzles boil down to "find symbol and hit it with the matching item". It feels artificial.