Something I dislike is bad. I dislike things because I subjectively find them to be bad. But don't confuse poor performance with being old. We've done 60 FPS long before 2017, but they didn't make it a priority for Zelda. They didn't even seem to care about making sure 30 FPS was stable. The game they made is too big for that hardware to ever hit that metric, or the native 720p that the Switch supports. Metroid Dread, on the other hand, doesn't break a sweat.
This is not a flaw, it's a difference in intent.
It's objectively a flaw in an interactive game to remove interactivity for a minute and a half on a frequent occurrence like someone joining or leaving an island, and I think you'd have a hard time finding someone who thinks manually crafting the same item 30 times in a row rather than being able to do it in bulk is somehow better for the vibe the game is going. It's not my preference for weapons to break as quickly as they do in Zelda, but at least I understand why they made that choice, and it's not a fault of the quality of the software. It would be objectively better for Smash Ultimate to have less input delay and be more responsive. People have measured it at 6 frames, and Street Fighter V had a rough time back when it had 8. 3 or 4 is manageable. The most responsive fighting games have 1 or 2.
Tears of the Kingdom is a marvel of engineering and losing sight of that because it's not running on the most powerful gaming hardware is a huge disservice to the work put into it.
I'm sure it would be a marvel of engineering if they got it working on the 3DS running at 15 FPS in 120p, but I don't find it acceptable to play at those specs either. They can put all sorts of work into making something unacceptable. If it sucks, it sucks. I frequently don't care about the biggest AAA releases, and it's not a requirement that every game I play pushes hardware to its limits. However, I do care about responsive controls, playing where I'm comfortable, and not having to squint to tell what I'm looking at. Making a game of the scope they targeted isn't comfortable for me on the only hardware they allow it to run on.
Both Animal Crossing and Smash Ultimate too, like I said, the online is disappointing, but they are still excellent games both single-player and couch multiplayer. To call it "poor quality" and "unacceptable"? If you really mean it then I just don't trust your opinion.
What is there to trust? It's my opinion, not yours, and you've played those games yourself to form your own opinion. Maybe you don't care about a best-case input delay of 6 frames in Smash or that extremely common actions in Animal Crossing that you'll be doing hundreds of times are made more tedious and add more downtime, but it has a huge effect on me and mine.
Market forces are currently driving a lot of games toward live service, planned obsolescence, and all that nonsense. Totally true. Bungie was fully capable of making a gross live service even when they weren't under pressure from Activision or Sony. But market forces are also going to eventually make them stop, as we're finally picking up momentum on customers pushing back against this sort of thing. With or without Pokemon, Nintendo's name on the box has never been a guarantee of a good game, and it's not true now either.
I don't think they're interested in gatekeeping which group of their customers are considered "fans", nor do I think it's them that's out of touch. I know Morrowind is the cult classic, but Oblivion just does better numbers.
I can tell you that I find the frame rate and resolution of Zelda to be unacceptable, given that they don't allow any option for that game to run on other hardware, legally. I've heard enough complaints from my girlfriend to know how little they cared about Animal Crossing in the online experience (a minute and a half connection screen every time someone joins your island!) or the UX (manually hitting A over and over to craft something thirty times that you should be able to do in bulk). Smash's online could have been done right this time, but they took the cheap way out instead of properly developing it with rollback. Their voice chat solution is to hook up your phone with an app and use it separately rather than baking it into the device's OS. I would call all of these poor quality and unacceptable.
I agree with you as far as their attitude towards Mario 35, but what do you think is going to happen to Sea of Thieves once they decide to take the servers down? This is not something that Microsoft is going to fix, it's the pitfall of all live service games, and as time goes by gaming companies only seem to insist more on this direction.
So then why does Microsoft frighten you when Nintendo already does the shitty thing of their own accord? The stuff they do with their online catalogue of retro games is the shitty thing no one else is doing. Remember that Microsoft had a great remaster of Goldeneye ready to go for 360 that Nintendo denied in the 11th hour, and when that game finally came out again, it's only available in subscription services rather than for purchase, both the Switch and Xbox versions were worse than that remaster, and only the Switch version had online play.
The only reason I trust Microsoft and Sony to do better, even by a smidge, is because they actually respond to market forces, and Nintendo would rather go bankrupt than sell you a ROM of Super Mario Bros. for $8 on PC. But Microsoft isn't acquiring them anyway. Buying Activision closed that door, so all of this is moot.
If they can maintain retrocompatibility with older titles, that means they have a functioning emulator or compatibility layer for classic XBox and 360 games. It would be trivial for Microsoft to release them for PC but they don't seem interested in doing that.
It also isn't trivial. They had to write custom emulation code for those old games, and they had to negotiate that with the rights holders in a lot of cases.
On the flipside, I'd be more concerned that Microsoft's more inconsistent quality standards and monetization tendencies would make their way into Nintendo titles.
Right, as opposed to the flawless technical quality of the latest Pokemon games and the impeccable business model of tying games with a killswitch behind a subscription model?
I'll just say again that, for me personally, I'd rather see almost anyone else run Nintendo, because they're a good chance I'd find that entity to be less shitty. But maybe the better alternative is for them to just screw up the successor to the Switch and take a bath on it financially.
Well, there is, because SNES emulation is trivial, and Xbox emulation is much less so. Great SNES emulation is available open source and in many different flavors with many different features, and all you need to do is supply the ROM, preferably in a legal way. Most of Xbox's best games already have PC ports, and Microsoft's shift to supporting PC equally is as recent as only a handful of years ago. Especially in the interest of making the Game Pass offering more uniform across PC and Xbox, they still may yet backport those remaining Xbox games to PC in some way just like they ported Age of Empires II to console. Meanwhile, I have no prayer of Nintendo releasing their games on an open platform like PC unless they have an extreme change of leadership or another extreme failure in the market akin to the Wii U.
Their new games come out on PC day and date, and they haven't released a console-only game since Rare Replay, if I'm not mistaken. "ROMs" are a little before Microsoft's time, if we're being honest.
Your emergency fund is usually recommended to be 3-6 months of expenses, not salary...though I guess for plenty of people, even at high salaries, that may be the same number, but then you'll never have savings anyway. Really your emergency fund is for however much risk you can tolerate, like if you end up unemployed for 3-6 months, but your emergency fund is for things other than just unemployment, like sudden medical expenses or replacing a water heater. If you're comfortable with a line of credit on your home being your emergency fund, go for it. There's some risk to that, but there's different kinds of risk to everything.
how is Nintendo worse than other companies in that regard? Is microsoft or Sony better at the preservation than them in some way I don't understand? Are they better companies to support in that metric?
Both of them make PC ports now, which are automatically better for preservation, since PC is an open platform rather than a walled garden. Neither is perfect. They both put out live service games that are bad for preservation. But Microsoft especially is better at making their back catalog available for purchase years and years after release. Nintendo hunts down ROM sites and gets them shut down but won't make their old games available in a state that their potential customers are willing to pay for them.
As for the kid thing, they don't really get much pick in the matter of what game I let them try yet. It's just that I can't FIND any games outside of Nintendos stuff that is quality and fun for the family. It's mostly poor quality IP tie ins. I've looked!
Cassette Beasts (like Pokemon)
Lego <just about anything>
Overcooked and Overcooked 2 (it could be difficult for your kid at 5, but it might also be fun to play together depending on how they take to it)
Penny's Big Breakaway (upcoming, from the Sonic Mania team; 3D platformer)
Poi (I have no experience with this one myself, but I hear positive comparisons to Super Mario 64)
Sonic + All-Stars Racing Transformed
Sonic Mania
Do the kids still like Spongebob? There's that new Spongebob: The Cosmic Shake. That one's licensed, but I hear it's quality enough. It's also a 3D platformer.
Stardew Valley
Yooka-Laylee (admittedly, this one got middling reviews, but I liked it more than most people; 3D platformer)
If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant.
And if I had $100B, I'd buy Nintendo, but Microsoft can't buy out that much of the video game market either, especially after Activision got through by the skin of their teeth. Activision happened because Nintendo didn't.
Nintendo is bad for game ownership right now. Live service games like Diablo IV are bad for game ownership right now. I don't care what Game Pass might be one day. The second it becomes that, you can guarantee I'll turn on it.
...potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.
I'm a Linux guy. I was fearful of this for a long time, but it didn't take, and Microsoft clearly abandoned that strategy of trying to make the Windows Store happen for games. Even Microsoft couldn't force you to give them a larger cut of the PC gaming pie. Right now, they're struggling to increase Game Pass numbers beyond their ~30M subscribers even after they've added numerous publishers and developers to their catalogue in perpetuity, because, to my surprise, people can do math. The ones that the math works out for is probably not much larger than that 30M.
Sony is in a dominant position in the market. Xbox doesn't threaten them hardly at all. Even Sony isn't keeping games entirely exclusive anymore, probably because enough people like me did the math and found out that 4 exclusive games isn't worth having a $500 machine collect dust next to our TVs, so now their games get PC ports. These business models only turn to shit if you let them. We can live without all of them, so they're all optional. Don't give them money when they offer a bad product, and we'll only get better products.
There's some use for an emergency fund, but since businesses this size have steady streams of revenue, they usually only want to sit on tons of cash when they can't find anything better to invest it in. Microsoft went on acquisition sprees, but other companies might buy back shares to return that excess cash to investors.
No, I'd say that's why you want DRM-free games. Plenty of games don't even get physical releases because the economics don't make sense, and then they get crucial patches that fix game-breaking bugs. Your console will break over a long enough timeline, and eventually the parts to fix it won't be produced anymore; I doubt your Switch will still play Breath of the Wild 40 years from now. Basically the only way to preserve modern games that makes sense to me is to make them run on PC, DRM-free.
The playability of old games and not requiring paying again for a remaster/ release can only hurt their bottom line.
Nah, because making that remaster or re-release costs them money and is more of a gamble than just putting out the old version for cheaper. Most of GOG's business is built around this, and then you see things like Sega putting out a huge collection of their ROMs entirely DRM-free with ROM hacks built into the Steam workshop.
You can sit a 5 year old in front of all sorts of games that they'd enjoy, but Mario and Pokemon is what they've been exposed to, by you or friends or both. You'll have a difficult time arguing with them over the importance of how your individual market actions have lasting effects on what gets produced; that's true. But Nintendo only has a monopoly on marketing kid-friendly games, not producing them...not that that will matter to your 5 year old.
As for preservation, server dependencies are bad. F-Zero 99 requires a server and a subscription to be played, full stop. That game will not survive, and other battle royales or even other "99" games are already being decommissioned and will cease to exist. Online multiplayer can still exist without server dependencies, via private servers or LAN or direct IP connection; these features are becoming increasingly rare for business reasons, so keep your eye out for them. Without these features, multiplayer will disappear at some point. DRM is bad. While it often doesn't bother people who purchase legitimately, sometimes it does, including long after the initial release period, if that DRM hasn't been patched out, because the company authorizing the DRM usually doesn't care about the repercussions of it two decades from now. Baldur's Gate 3, not a game to play with your 5 year old for at least another decade, has all of those multiplayer features and is available DRM-free. BG3 will be preserved. The gold standard for preservation is open source, where anyone can view the code and change it, which means it will always run on whatever computers we use in the future. This is why Doom is ported to everything with a screen and an input device. But open sourcing your game is a hard sell for developers.