Good show.


Between the grinding of Rhythm Heaven Megamix and the potential time sinks in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo's game design has been sliding to the tendencies of contemporary AAA video games to occupy the player's time at all cost. As a person who has chewed through two big open-world games in succession (Xenoblade Chronicles X and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain) and enjoyed it, any dilly-dallying Breath of the Wild engages in will most likely see little complaint from me. Heck, I'm not bothered at all by the many menus and loading screens of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. Ah, it will be chilling to hear next week about a game that has some severe pacing issues.


Good talk with all the Unreal Engine stuff. While the NX remains a mystery and Nintendo history suggests pessimism, there is a strong hope from how many Japanese developers and publishers are using Unreal Engine 4 in their upcoming games. In fact, I have the impression that more major Japanese publishers are using Unreal Engine 4 than major Western publishers. Of course, this is due to the trend of major Western publishers developing their own proprietary game engines.

I know it was just a comment made in passing, but I’ve seen it a lot and the whole Pokken Tournament outselling Street Fighter V thing is misleading. It outsold SFV at retail, which sounds somewhat impressive until you consider the fact that SFV has sold the majority of its copies between digital purchases on the PS4 and PC (neither of which figure into NPD sales numbers). Across all platforms and distribution methods SFV has sold 1.4 million units as of the end of March and I doubt Pokken was anywhere close to truly outselling it when this became a talking point (or now, when SFV is most likely still outpacing Pokken sales by a considerable margin).

However, Pokken did sell fairly well overall (a little under 500,000 retail units between North America and Japan by the end of April) and last week they hinted at another playable Pokemon being announced for the arcade version on July 14, so it looks like DLC may be likely. It's also doing well as a competitive game so far (4th highest number of entrants at EVO behind SFV, Smash 4, and Melee) and, as Greg mentioned, a data miner found files in a recent update that hinted at Scizor, Darkrai, and Empoleon possibly coming to the game in some capacity, so there's that adding to the case for DLC being on the way as well.

Are there plans to record an NFL preview podcast this year?

I believe Bloodstained is being made on Unreal 4, actually, so I think it'll actually be the first game running that engine on Wii U.

Yup. I'm sure it was just a mistake though. Unreal Engine 3 on Wii U was/is supported by Epic. The whole brouhaha was with UE 4. Armature will be porting Bloodstained and will be using UE4 on both Wii U and Vita, which aren't actively supported by Epic.


Valhalla received the source code for UE3 on Wii U from Epic, but still had to modify it in order to get the game working. Probably due to the switch in PS360 architectures to Wii U?

I loved how off Lindemann's description of Pokemon Go was.  Kinda shows you how little the game is tutorialized.

To be the devil's advocate...weren't you guys back 100 episodes ago complaining about how some games do not evolve and yet breath of the wild has many new elements and suddenly I hear - 'A link between worlds isnt a real Zelda' and 'don't add crafting to my Zelda games'? Open world game design is a fad these days in gaming but isnt that a path of evolution that the series should take? Wasn't openness a thing for Zelda from the very start before being somewhat forgotten with Ocarina? 

I expect/hope Jon was trolling when he said Link Between Worlds was indistinguishable as a Zelda game. The only real difference is that you have to get the dungeon item before going into a dungeon, rather being given it almost immediately after entering a dungeon.