Topic: Nintendo Free Radio Episode 10: Great Moments In Trolling

[broodwars]

With no less than two announcements that will shake Nintendo World Report to its very foundations.

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Nintendo Free Radio reaches double digits, which is quite frankly eight episodes more than anyone thought they'd survive, with another whopper of an episode. Donald kicks off New Business with impressions of Crashmo, the 3DS eShop puzzler with a 270-degree difficulty curve, and looks forward to some of 2013's action games with Bayonetta (360) and the demo of the Ninja Theory-helmed Devil May Cry reboot (PS3) before keeping the combo alive with DS import (unless you're in Europe) Jam With The Band. Austen jumps in next to save the planet from meteors, tsunamis and bearorrists with Disaster: Day of Crisis (Wii) and activates Sly Cooper's beast mode in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3/Vita). Stephen finishes with more Wii U impressions, ranging from the joy of flying balloons in Nintendo Land to gliding as a squirrel in New Super Mario Bros U and blasting away with the twin-stick goodness of NanoAssault Neo (brief impressions of ZombiiU also included).

The mania of Now Posted leads into the traditional Whatcha Watchin', joined partway through by NWR review domo Andy Goergen. Stephen's opening salvo is a Deep Space Nine update (yes, another one), Amazing Spider-Man, Strawberry Shortcake (for the kids), Arthur's Christmas and Rescue Bots, Andy brings impressions of Parks and Recreation and the final season of The Office, Austen gets economic with C - Control: The Money and Soul of Possibility (a show halfway down the Laffer curve), and Donald bears all after watching A Garfield Christmas. The Feature Discussion is more fun with Wii U, as the four discuss media reaction to Nintendo's new console and whether the haters may have a point. Finally, the Mushrooms get an extra dose of poison this week thanks to rule 34 on cords and certain sporting decisions, but also get 1up'd with tales of great customer service.

With the end of the year coming up, the show will be taking a break, but not before an end of the year show for the ages! Keep an eye on the host Twitter feeds (@DonaldMick, @cericme and @broodwars64) for more information on what and when it will all go down, and send your ideas by email to nintendofreeradio@gmail.com  - also, be sure to check out Andy's Etsy store (http://www.etsy.com/shop/8bitacrylic) if you need a last minute Christmas gift idea!

This show was edited by Stephen Shook. All music used under Fair Use permission.

[broodwars]

I don't think I'll ever understand the pure chaos that comes from trying to paste a few simple paragraphs from MS Word into the NWR forums. You never know what you're going to get, but whatever it is, it'll take a good 5-10 minutes to fix. 

[NWR_insanolord]

It also causes pure chaos when you paste from Word into the NWR news article form. You should copy it into Notepad before putting it in the forums or otherwise remove the formatting before pasting it in here.

[Shaymin]

New Business timing:
Crashmo 0:55
Bayonetta/dmc 6:10
Jam With The Band 13:20
Disaster 21:50
Sony Smash 38:35
New Super Mario U 52:45
NintendoLand 1:05:40
NanoAssault 1:11:50
End of New Business 1:16:55

[FZeroBoyo]

I just checked this out yesterday. It's very good stuff, gentlemen. Definitely have to check out the backlog.

[azeke]

Spectacular Spider-man is one the best shows of all time, seriously. One of the two and a half Marvel shows worth watching, unfortunately.

So i'm not the only one who noticed similarity in design between Home Movies character and Phineas from PnF.

Also, Maelstrom is a moron. He's basically some kind of anti-Pachter: very high on wii from start, but got more and more crazy as time goes. He still does an occasional good point here and there but overall conclusion are unbelievably crazy and feel contrarian just because.

Also, i keep hearing about those hard locks but i personally never had any, maybe it's region thing? Anyone from PAL had those?

On cords. I remember reading about some scientist who did a very serious and in-depth research on this, by throwing ropes on the floor and doing all kinda of experiments on them. I think he got Ig Nobel prize for this, which is kinda baffling for me since this is actually a serious problem.

Also Walking Dead doesn't deserve GOTY nomination not because of it's shortness (it's longer than both Portal games, probably even put together) but because of technical problems and overall jankiness of the product. I still like it but stuff like disappearing saves and other bugs really brings everything like characters and story (which wasn't all that mindblowing anyway) down.

Same as with Hotline Miami. This game i freaking LOVE, not just enjoy. But again, when your game simply doesn't even freaking start and if you somehow got to boot it up you can't progress in the middle of the game because of the bug? And Steam integration is busted? And they don't fix it for months?

It's like coming to theater and then the operator messes up and film reel burns up 10 minutes in.

[broodwars]

Also Walking Dead doesn't deserve GOTY nomination not because of it's shortness (it's longer than both Portal games, probably even put together) but because of technical problems and overall jankiness of the product. I still like it but stuff like disappearing saves and other bugs really brings everything like characters and story (which wasn't all that mindblowing anyway) down.

Same as with Hotline Miami. This game i freaking LOVE, not just enjoy. But again, when your game simply doesn't even freaking start and if you somehow got to boot it up you can't progress in the middle of the game because of the bug? And Steam integration is busted? And they don't fix it for months?

It's like coming to theater and then the operator messes up and film reel burns up 10 minutes in.

Here's the thing: as a PS3 gamer, the bar of QA failure has been set with pretty much every game Bethesda has released on PS3.  You want to talk about potential GotY experiences just obliterated by bugs, let's talk PS3 Fallout 3 (where the game crashes every 20 minutes, the framerate drops into single digits, and the game randomly crashes entering VATS) or PS3 Skyrim (where the game crashes every 5 minutes, every enemy I've ever raised through necromancy forms an army and attack me every time I fast travel, broken quests, etc.).  Compared to that, merely seeing the occasional Invisible character or a single choice not properly importing is nothing and doesn't kill my experience.

[Ceric]

...
On cords. I remember reading about some scientist who did a very serious and in-depth research on this, by throwing ropes on the floor and doing all kinda of experiments on them. I think he got Ig Nobel prize for this, which is kinda baffling for me since this is actually a serious problem.
...

I would definitely like to read a good article about that research.

[Plugabugz]

Apart from a little bit of backrgound noise sometimes (thats not someone cheekily playing their Gamepad at the same time) i thoroughly enjoy NFR.

[S-U-P-E-R]

My favorite part was when broodwars parroted my insightful gameplay analysis of PSAS. But then he got a bunch of stuff wrong anyway!

The worst thing is that the game doesn't have bar-chatting fanservice? It's a bad thing that all the characters are unlocked at the start? what

[broodwars]

The worst thing is that the game doesn't have bar-chatting fanservice? It's a bad thing that all the characters are unlocked at the start? what

Yes, those are by far the worst aspects of the game: there's almost no Sony fanservice whatsoever like Nintendo does, and what's there is pitifully poorly executed (like how badly the stages mash-up two different games, with no randomness or looping to keep the experience fresh).  And yeah, if you're going to have unlockables, make them matter like additional characters or stages.  There are no limits to how little I give a **** about crap for my online gamer card or even the 2-3 different character intros/outros available.

PSASBR just feels like an extremely unfinished game that wants people to give it a pass because it gets the core mechanics down well.  That's great, but its main competitor is SO much more polished and SO much more fun to play right now this game isn't even within eye-sight of the same league right now.  Don't get me wrong: I have really enjoyed my time with this game, but it could have been so much better had Sony not been satisfied with such a bare-bones, slapped-together experience.

[S-U-P-E-R]

Hey actually, I see exactly where you're coming from.  I don't give a flip about single player content, but if it's important to you, that's cool.

It seems we have very different ideas about what constitutes polish. Good gameplay, good netplay, good balance makes a good game for me. For a fighting game, I play any single player stuff once, if at all, and spend hundreds of hours playing with my friends or online or whatever. I don't "get" people that care about single player, honestly.

Locking characters (in multiplayer, anyway) is just plain terrible design though, and that's why most fightman games have moved away from it. Let's not even talk about events - why should someone have to wait to play their character? Why inconvenience people who want to play at a friend's place? For story mode or whatever, sure, whatever, but going to the versus screen and being locked out of certain characters is objectively a bad thing.

[TJ Spyke]

I have to say I agreed with David Stern coming down on the Spurs for their anti-fan action of sending the the top players home. It's bad enough when it happens in the NFL and you sometimes see teams in Weeks 16 and 17 only using their 2nd string and 3rd string players.