fnrslvr

It's been the Elite and the Switch Pro for me. Voted Elite, but Nintendo made handles that feel more-or-less perfect to grip, so maybe I should've went with the Switch Pro. Oh well.

DS4 feels better than the DS1/2/3, but still a little unsettling? Like, they realized that the handles are meant to have depth and conform naturally to the user's grip, so the handles are no longer these painful pancake things that the DS1/2/3 had, but it's still strange. Like, the volume is there in the handles now, but I'm still not sure it's shaped right. Also obviously the left stick is still in the wrong place, and the d-pad is still weird.

I have never understood why Nintendo's older controllers get so much hate around here, when their contemporaries were the DualShock lineage. If you don't fill out the handles on your controller then people get a whole lot of avoidable medical issues with their hands from contorting their hands to grip the handles. Nintendo always filled out the handles, Sony didn't. It's an open and shut case.

@therealseaman: yeah, that's roughly where I figured the 1080Ti was. I wouldn't feel great about pairing that with a PG27UQ.

I'd go with one of the 1440p or 1080p gsync high refresh rate low lag monitors and leave it at that. I'm not familiar with every monitor on the market, but ASUS's PG series seems to have a lot to recommend it, including aforementioned low input lag. Also, the PG279Q's price seems to be dipping a bit lately.

(I have a GTX 1070, went with a PG248Q. Really just wanted a monitor that my card would consider child's play, and that would display fighting games with minimal lag without screen tearing, and didn't want a 1080p signal to display awkwardly. If I had my decision again, one thing which might make me favour splashing out extra cash for the PG279Q might be IPS, since configuring colours on the TN panel was a bit unpleasant, but I got it into a good place.)

I wouldn't look at 4K monitors. I don't get the impression that the 1080Ti handles 4K comfortably at high framerates, standardization around 4K HDR adaptive-sync is a total mess that will hopefully change, and the monitors that do all that stuff at once are ridiculously expensive early adopter things that will likely be rendered obsolete if the market shifts to good standards.

I personally wouldn't want to be on the market for PC monitors right now. Nvidia basically owns the high-end GPU market, and they're using that control to proprietarize the next generation of video standards: adaptive sync, HDR, etc. Maybe with Intel supposedly entering the market by 2020, or if AMD's next generation of GPU tech surprises us and manages to compete with Nvidia at the top, we'll see GPU hardware commoditize and open standards like freesync/freesync 2 and HDMI 2.1 prevail. Until then, I think buying into 4K HDR is risky.

Howard should know that nobody's going to shut up until we get confirmation that we're going to Summerset to take the fight to the Thalmor.

(Okay, so that's probably Not How Elder Scrolls Games Work, but it's probably the main hanging thread left from Skyrim.)

Most of Bethesda's studios put something out in this conference, right? Arkane is kinda MIA aside from a bit of DLC, and not a peep from the Evil Within guys. Who else could be regarded as absent?

That said, for someone like me who couldn't give less of a shit about Fallout and wants to know whether the Deus Ex-alike has a future, I'm not sure I care much about what I saw at this conference. Wake me up when some Arkane news drops, I guess.

I was okay with this conference. (Direct? Whatever they're calling it.)

Nintendo's biggest stuff hit last year very quickly after the Switch launch, and I already got at least 500 hours out of those games between Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, and MK8 Deluxe, so that has more than covered the cost of entry for the Switch. Meanwhile I have a gigantic pile of games waiting for some love on my Xbox and Steam accounts, so it would be frankly improper for Nintendo to rob me of another 500 hours of my life at this point. Smash and the other things they announced will do fine for the near future (honestly I worry I won't get around to even what they announced), and they have enough in the pipeline that I don't worry about the future of first party Nintendo at all really.

I do want them to finish porting Wii U treasures over, though. Mario Maker is the first to come to mind.

Smash Bros Ultimate looks great. I still have to hope that they go in a direction with my mainstays that feels good (they went in a good direction with Yoshi in 4, hope they don't fuck it up), but otherwise this is an insta-buy for me. I don't understand the animus against Smash around here, the games are built around having stupid fun with an all-star cast and the mechanics always felt good to me.

I'll buy into Fire Emblem. I agree that a Wars would be more fondly received, but FE scratches a similar strategic itch. (I do miss clogging narrow passes with disposable units and the like, though.) I'm not sold on the look of new FE, and I'm sick of how FE fetishises royalty, but those things won't stop me from getting my fix of simple, well-delivered turn-based strategy.

I might try the new Pokemon Let's Go game. The first 151 pokemon are my jam, and I always wanted a less "contrived" 3D experience out of my Pokemon games, which this might be? I'll keep an eye on it. Not being able to evolve your Eevee companion is stupid, though.

As for the things they didn't talk about:

• No way they were going to talk Metroid Prime 4 today. They probably had the early talks and maybe some early exploratory design far enough along last year to drop a title card, just to shut up the rabid fanatical haters who rampaged all over that DS game they put out. MP4 is probably still another 3 years out at the least, since 1) most AAA games take at least 3 years to make; 2) games that aren't direct engineering follow-ups to something made by the same studio (Nintendo allowed the original Retro MP devs to scatter to the winds) tend to take longer; and 3) this is a Nintendo AAA game, which means it'll probably stay in the oven longer until it's just right. In some ways it's crazy that they're bothering to re-amass the tech and the talent to make this thing at all, because the Metroid Prime trilogy is a very difficult thing to follow in the shoes of when you don't have that team ready to go anymore. I'll hang out for gameplay 2 years from now, and be pleasantly surprised if it comes earlier.
• I guess Bayonetta 3 could've been on-track for detailed dive now? nfi.
• What else were we expecting? We won't hear about Mario or Zelda for a few years yet. Something unannounced? These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of thing people were hoping to see here.

They should add Banjo. My more out-there pick would be Max Caulfield.

I'll get this at or near launch and sink the customary 40+ hours into it that I sunk into 2 and 3.

Might pay to hold out on the TV until variable refresh rate (basically the HDMI standard's version of adaptive sync, i.e. freesync/gsync) starts showing up in TVs. Might not be until next year for the OLEDs, but apparently Samsung announced QLED screens with freesync recently? Depends on how long you can wait. Xbox One X supports freesync, and I imagine it'll support VRR as well.

That being the case, I'd get the Xbox now. But then again, being on the precipice of tech change with a buy decision to make always sucks, so I wouldn't blame you for pulling the trigger on the TV sooner rather than later.

Seems like a shitty character who shouldn't be celebrated. Whilst it's good to hear they managed to revamp enough of the God of War formula to make a very well-received game in 2018, I'm apprehensive about whether they really did deal with Kratos properly. Hopefully they killed him off in the second act or something.

Majora's Mask is the greatest game of all time.

I will die on this hill.

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I don't mind Wind Waker. I agree with you that the dungeons are weak, which pushes it pretty low on my personal ranking of Zelda games. (But Zelda games are generally better than other games, so this is still a good place to be.) I also think it uses its visuals as a bit of a crutch, plenty of people seem willing to overlook weak content or annoyances for the slick cel shading. But I tend to sorta disagree with you on the exploration: whilst there is a lot of blue nothingness and the content is very regimented into an island per square, the act of navigating the seas and figuring out an island or a random sea altercation with enemies or whatever is really satisfying. I also think Windfall Island has some of the more endearing townsfolk and minigame content in any Zelda game.

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That being said, I think the bigger problem I have with WW is that it was the wrong Zelda game for its time.

The hype surrounding the new consoles circa 2000 was all about this massive leap in visual fidelity. It was an era of fanboys poring over hardware specs and talking about polycounts like they had any idea what they were talking about. Sony had MGS2; Microsoft was entering the console war and had Halo. Zelda needed to be Nintendo's trump card; Nintendo fanboys were waiting for a hyper-realistic, gritty, *edgy*successor to OoT, the most critically acclaimed epic adventure of all time, so they could talk mad shit next time they ran into the Sony or Microsoft kids in the playground.

Against that backdrop, with console manufacturer levels of money at stake, Nintendo decided to get weird. Wind Waker would go on to undersell, the GCN would barely eke out 20 million units sold as the PS2 confirmed Sony's dominance of the console market, and Nintendo would never bring another "mainstream" console to market ever again.

And yes all the edgy fanboy shit was/is asinine. That's the entire point. Nintendo misread the room: gaming sentiment was in its awkward teen years, gamers were in endless pissing matches about which console had more graffixxx. Wind Waker was poor marketing. It was impossible to defend that game against the other thirteen-year-olds in the playground, so Nintendo lost market share. If self-preservation was at all a priority for Nintendo, then they should not have made that game at that time.