Smash Bros. Might Make A Terry Bogard Fan Out Of You

 

Passion project
I absolutely loved Masahiro Sakurai’s introduction of Terry Bogard for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. This to me was the real example of Nintendo ‘magic’. It’s the sheer enthusiasm of the developers and their refusal to take themselves seriously. Form the late, great Iwata goofing around in Nintendo Directs to Sakurai going on for the best part of an hour about his love for SNK and early days as a gamer.

There’s no way some American marketer from Sony or Microsoft would suggest something like that but here you have the guy going on and on simply because he likes talking about. Apparently in front of a crowd of colleagues that are laughing along with him.

I had a quick go on Terry afterwards and he’s great too. I love that they got all his moves in there and allowing you to input them in the tradition way is an interesting escalation for Smash. I also really like the unusual way the stage works too, great use of a character that probably a lot of people hadn’t heard of.

I haven’t played him enough to say whether he’s my favourite character or not but I really think he could be. But then I’m not sure what is my current favourite either, as they’re all great. Maybe the Hero form Dragon Quest, because I like the way they have the menu attacks? It’s so hard to choose… what a game.
Bearstool

New year fight
So, GC – that’s it for big fighting games this generation – yeah? There’s going to a new Guilty Gear next year, but I can predict right now that while it will handle very nicely, it will be light on content. I could be wrong, I always live in hope of being wrong, but time will tell.

There’s going to be a fighting game based on League Of Legends or something, right? But that’s probably years and years away. That means, there’s nothing major on the horizon. Unless we find out that Sega have been working on a Virtua Fighter 6 or Fighting Vipers 3 in secret since 2016 or something. Ditto for Capcom and the likelihood of Street Fighter 6 or something more interesting. They would have probably announced it by now…
DMR

GC: Guilty Gear is absolutely something to look forward to and Arc System Works has Granblue Fantasy Versus coming out next year too. There’s also The King of Fighters XV, which seems very promising.

Guilty as charged
I felt obliged to write in and express my outrage at Mr Jenkins. I find it impossible not to feel furiously outraged when he thinks he has any right, in his first paragraph of his Capcom Home Arcade review, to furiously bring forth tears of nostalgia from me about the sad fate of arcade venues across the country.

The way he used words to outrage me into reminiscing about those large rooms with all the ear-deafening ecstasy of 20+ arcades coaxing you into parting with your parents’ hard-earned cash. He seems to think it fair to also remind me of local chippies having a solitary cabinet in the corner which always ended up with kids fighting when one kept Hadoukening the other in Street Fighter II. I’m verbing you with my Hadoukening Jenkins.

It’s probably why I’d put Astro Bot as my favourite game of the last 10 or more years. It brought out that little kid in me that was totally wowed by ‘this gaming lark’ way back in the arcades of the late 80s and early 90s.
Andee, Blackpool promenade

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Warm welcome
Seeing Retrothumb’s request regarding a gaming PC I thought I would chip in with my twopenn’orth. I have both built and bought gaming PCs over the years. There have been times it’s cheaper to build, other times it’s cheaper to buy.

My last two gaming PCs have been purchased from the Dell refurb shop and both were excellent value. An XPS8920 was my last purchase, as I really don’t like RGB lighting.

It’s always worth a look, as they often have discount codes available on top of the discount already given.

Only caveat is, although fully upgradable, the current XPS8930 case is fairly compact and I’m not convinced it’s the best design for airflow. Still, my RTX2060 runs well within temperature parameters.

PC Specialist have a very good reputation and you can pretty much design your own system with them.

Never bought a PC from Amazon, so I can’t help there I’m afraid.

My advice is get the best GPU you can afford. Bearing in mind that Nvidia have advised an RTX2060 for for Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC at 60fps and 1080p gaming on high settings.

OK, it’s a beast of a game graphically, especially with the PC improvements, and at present this is an exception, but probably a sign of things to come!

If you do feel brave enough to home build, check out PC Part Picker. It shows other people’s builds and costs them for you.

Another thing to do is check out PC Gamer’s ‘best of’ hardware lists.

Finally, if you still want the console experience alongside your PC, Nvidia Shield will enable you to stream PC games to your TV and hook up controllers. I do this for Overcooked and other multiplayer games. This obviously only works with Nvidia graphics cards and does need a good 5GHz Wi-Fi connection…

Hope this helps! Welcome to PC gaming!
The Dude Abides

GC: That all seems very helpful, thanks.

Serious games
Great review of the Capcom Home Arcade. That Capcom mini sure looks and sounds very tasty. I aim to get one next year.

I’m not surprised about the Mario and Sonic Olympic game being a dud, however. I imported Sega’s proper Tokyo 2020 Official video game for Switch last month from eBay and that does play well.

It cost me just over forty quid and is fully English.
Ste C

GC: Apparently Olympic Games Tokyo 2020: The Official Video Game is out next year in the West, but only on PlayStation 4 and Switch. If anyone was curious.

One at a time
Hey GC, can you have a full four-player championship on the 21 3D events on Mario and Sonic Tokyo Olympics? I remember on the old Wii version you could only play four events at a time, which was a huge frustrating deal-breaker.

You couldn’t have a full championship on Beijing 2008 or London 2012 either, to be fair, so me and my mates still play Athens 2004 on PlayStation 2 with a multitap.
OakTree Inn (PSN ID)

GC: We think you’re stuck with that; you still have to select individual events each time, which we agree is very limiting.

Successful repair
I wrote in some time ago regarding my malfunctioning Switch Joy-Cons, expressing dissatisfaction at their build quality. I just wanted to update on how I got on with Nintendo UK.

Firstly, can I thank the two readers who wrote in with their own Nintendo support experiences, both UK (good experience) and Nintendo Australia (bad experience).

I submitted both Joy-Cons to Nintendo and got two new replacement Joy-Cons back approx. three weeks later, and a new 12-month warranty to boot.

For anyone experiencing similar issues I should say that submitting the support request on their website was very simple. You then simply send off your items in a suitably packaged box and they scan your phone at a post office, so postage is free.

You also only send the items that you want checked, i.e. Joy-Cons only in my case. Also, my Joy-Cons were almost two years old at the time and Nintendo didn’t quibble.

I hope a new Nintendo Australia Manager is somehow reading this and can help the other reader who experienced such difficulty with them.

Thanks to all concerned.
r-s-w

Room for debate
RE: Panda. I think you missed the point of most of what was going on in the Zelda conversation, which was that someone wrote in complaining that someone wasn’t a true Zelda fan because they appeared to criticise Breath Of The Wild. Which I said was ironic because it’s the least Zelda-like game in recent times, missing out on many hallmarks of the series that make Zelda games not only identifiable as a Zelda game, but also great.

In my opinion that was a bad thing for obvious reasons, and I didn’t enjoy the game much, and was very disappointed with the poor dungeons, lack of proper items, and poor bosses. If you love survival games or open world games, then I imagine you filled your boots, but neither of those things are what I’m after in a Zelda game. And neither has anyone else previously, since they weren’t survival games in the past and nor were they trying to be an open world experience to that extent.

If you want to argue semantics about what is an open world game and what is a survival game, feel free, but pedantry shouldn’t get in the way of my point. We’d be here all day otherwise.

However, I didn’t say the series shouldn’t evolve or change, and I did say that games such as Majora’s Mask did this and managed to retain a Zelda feel, so it is possible to do. Ocarina Of Time managed it as well and retained the Zelda feel, although it did stay with the basic formula. However, Breath Of The Wild hasn’t managed to retain the Zelda feel, in my view, and if it did, it was only because it tricked people into believing it had with the relatively thin veneer of colour palette, sound effects, and setting. Sounds a lot, but gameplay is what makes a game.

And the shrines were very lazy (and I only used lazy in regards to the shrines) – they reused the same formulas time and again in different shrines, and none of them were very good, clever, complicated, or memorable. I’m not sure there’s room for debate in that.
TickTockRob (gamertag/PSN ID/SW-5541-5798-6105)

GC: Breath Of The Wild is not a survival game, it just has a few survival game elements. Open world isn’t a genre either, it’s just a style of level. Trying to pigeonhole the game in this way seems like half the problem. And just because you don’t like something doesn’t make the developer lazy, that’s very disrespectful.

Catch up on every previous Games Inbox here

A good reveal
I like Guerrilla Games’ attitude to their upcoming releases. Why can’t all publishers be this relaxed?

I imagine their marketing managers said let’s keep it hush and not show anything until we officially announce a game, but at the same time not pretend it doesn’t exist by having anyone and everyone attached to the project sign NDAs. They probably worded the recent job advert in a way that would let prospective applicants know what the job was likely to be, and I’m sure they’re not bothered that we know Horizon: Zero Dawn 2 is coming.

We all enjoy a good reveal, so it only requires developers, publishers and consumers to respect the ways in which a company wants to first announce or show a game.

I guess the industry’s notorious secrecy dates back to the magazine world exclusive, whereby in order for them to profit from a publication’s hype (i.e. unofficial advertising) with a huge cover and several other perks, they’d need to promise that no one else would beat them to it with any leaks.

At its worst, what that that must have meant though was an opaque sum of money being paid, some sort of agreement over review scores, and the withholding of details from other journalists. GC, I dare say this still goes on today?

On another note, I think Horizon Zero Dawn 2 as a PlayStation 5 launch title would work perfectly. People say Sony might be in a bit of trouble the next generation but as far as I can see as long as they hold on to the talent in the studios they have under their wing, they’ll be able to churn out massive exclusives that draw an audience to the format.

The Videogamer.com podcast was saying the other day that they wish all games could be released for all formats and that exclusives are a bit silly in this day and age, but I for one enjoy the format ‘identity’ that a console can forge. As GC also said recently, the way Nintendo makes games and machines alongside each other means that this practice is unlikely to end any time soon.
Owen Pile (NongWen – PSN ID)

GC: It goes on today in that YouTubers that are regularly paid to advertise or play certain games, although they’re supposed to make it clear that’s what they’re doing. Anyone else would have far more to gain from exposing a publisher for attempting to bribe them.

Inbox also-rans
Nuclear Throne and Ruiner are free on PC on Epic Games Store from today for the next week.
Andrew J.

I’ve always thought that Russian dolls are full of themselves but I can only applaud this attempt at a gaming equivalent.
F1 Fan

GC: We thought this was going to be about Stacking.