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Even Nintendo has been willing to lean back on its cash-cows lately -- Mario (platformers, Party, and Kart) and Pokemon get minimal-change frequent-releases, Ki

Even Nintendo has been willing to lean back on its cash-cows lately -- Mario (platformers, Party, and Kart) and Pokemon get minimal-change frequent-releases, Kirby's been static even by its own standards for the last few years, lots of their other first-party stuff hasn't seen a release in ages. Zelda's looking good between BotW and an upcoming remake of a relatively-small and especially old game, Fire Emblem has something that looks like an interesting shift coming up, and Metroid... well, Metroid's been a mixed bag since Other M, but if they were willing to scrap and start over on Prime 4 then there's room to hope. So it's not all bad.

huffmsa 7y ago
Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively. Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering. They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around. My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  if it's fun, why do you need major changes? I'm certainly not upset that Mario Kart 8 plays basically the same as the old SNES Mario Kart.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    More of the same is definitely something people want sometimes -- but other people want something new (or more-of-the-same of something else that hasn't been done as much, e.g. a sequel in a smaller series). The article is about (among other things) the stagnation and general tendency of big developers towards increasingly-stale safe bets. Mario Kart is an example of that: Nintendo is perfectly willing to make more-of-the-same for Mario Kart, but when asked in interviews about the possibility of a new F-Zero, the answer has generally been "we don't want to just release more of the same, we want to come up with some new twist on it". It's not about novelty (or if it is, their standards for novelty are inconsistent), it's about one being a cash cow and the other not.

huffmsa 7y ago

Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively. Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering. They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around. My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.

celticmusic 7y ago
if it's fun, why do you need major changes? I'm certainly not upset that Mario Kart 8 plays basically the same as the old SNES Mario Kart.
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  More of the same is definitely something people want sometimes -- but other people want something new (or more-of-the-same of something else that hasn't been done as much, e.g. a sequel in a smaller series). The article is about (among other things) the stagnation and general tendency of big developers towards increasingly-stale safe bets. Mario Kart is an example of that: Nintendo is perfectly willing to make more-of-the-same for Mario Kart, but when asked in interviews about the possibility of a new F-Zero, the answer has generally been "we don't want to just release more of the same, we want to come up with some new twist on it". It's not about novelty (or if it is, their standards for novelty are inconsistent), it's about one being a cash cow and the other not.