The Halo 1 and KOTOR twists do hit pretty hard if you somehow haven’t been spoiled. KOTOR has one of my favorite reveal sequences ever with showing you how much foreshadowing you missed, and Halo’s twist turns the game on its head.
It’s been a while, but I think the disc didn’t center as it went in and the system just spat it out. The rest of the system was an original model Wii, so the software should have still been there, but the newer drive couldn’t handle minidiscs. Launch model was apparently the RVL-001. The RVL-101 dropped GC support, but looked almost identical. The RVL-201 was the top loader model.
There was a model before the tray loading one that dropped GC support, too. I found out when the disc drive on my Wii died and I replaced it with an official later model drive and it couldn’t read Wind Waker anymore.
Slot-loading CD drives would get jammed if you inserted anything other than a round, full-sized disc.
The launch model Wii was an exception, with parts in there specifically for handling mini-discs for GameCube compatibility. The feature was quietly removed from later models.
The most recent trilogy is better about that. 2013 has no natives, and Rise and Shadow both have her siding with the natives. Still snags a bunch of artifacts.
People have argued nobody would buy AAA if it’s not an open world with XP, skills and crafting.
See, I hate crafting systems. A game advertising its crafting system makes me less interested. Too many things to remember and the game grinds to a halt for several minutes while I navigate menus. Dragon Age Inquisition was particularly bad with entire sessions lost to inventory management. The Horizon games are bearable just because I can generate pointers to the stuff I need and I’m generally swimming in components anyway.
If there is a commercial failure of an IP, there is a good chance that its failure will be seen as the IP generally failing or falling out of poluarity instead of the failure to best utilize the IP that likely occurred.
For example, when EA released Tiberian Twilight and it was absolutely awful and didn’t sell, they said that people just didn’t want RTS games anymore and shelved the entire C&C franchise. That was fourteen years ago and we haven’t had a new C&C since then that wasn’t mobile shovelware.