DranSeasona

Probably more, to be honest… I understand that 1 million is the official verified number, but my understanding is that tracking has been difficult even at the best of times. So frankly… the real number is undoubtedly higher. For example, most places in the world seem to have not been paying the best attention to post-Covid deaths, many of which could have easily happened exclusively as a result of complications from having just finished fighting Covid off (like sudden boughts with not-Covid-induced pneumonia)… I’m not sure why anyone would consider such deaths as actually independent from Covid. So as far as I’m concerned, if we all really just let the chips fall where they would with zero interference, this could have easily devestated the entire human race all on its own.

Well, Covid knocked my house out of commission for a while (father-in-law accidentally brought it into the house), but we’re doing much better so thought I would drop in! I’m telling you though… despite almost certainly being the latest Omicron sub-variant going around (ie the “least dangerous overall” one, allegedly), it hit really bad… daughter ended up going to the hospital the first night due to breathing difficulty. We are all fully vaccinated too… so if this is what “mild” looks like, I would hate to see what would happen to someone who has not gotten vaccinated… In other news though, my wife managed to complete her decade-long saga to complete her BA, and will hopefully be accepted into an Occupational Therapy Masters program this week! So that’s exciting…

Some fun events lately, got a nice haul! Also caught some “hundos” (I think they are called) along the way…

Can concur. Sadly, some days, my body is NOT ready… lol

Myself, I finally completed the Pokedex in Shining Pearl the other day. After months of having no luck getting a Slakoth swarm in-game, I finally managed to snag one through Wonder Trade. And my daughter just started playing Sword with me. She always loved watching my son and I play, and really took to Zacian (who she calls “Wolfy”). Now she is excited to get her own!

Considering pollen’s place in the plant reproduction cycle, this train of thought is particularly amusing to me… though I agree with the overall sentiment.

Zelda tattoo of some kind, this time?

I mean, ILCA have heads of their own too, right? I would have hoped that someone on the dev side in either or both organization would have noticed that the base programming code is not the same and might not be compatible? It is quite strange to me that something like this was so easily overlooked when this is a huge piece of their business (ie. the unique coding for Pokémon). I work in a Technology setting for a Canadian bank, and while sure people are people and can screw up easily… we have monitoring controls in place for this very reason…

Now this is fascinating… so I guess getting BDSP-Home support is a much greater undertaking than one would expect… This is sad, pathetic and hilarious all at once. I hope they figure this out some time… this year. lol

This is the one Ty had done himself, like, a year ago, right?

Definitely seems like the natural direction to go in, eh? The Switch definitely has some… er, opportunities they could fairly easily take advantage of…

I disagree that there is never an overarching vision (besides money, which yes, I get that they are a capitalist company lol). I think the fact that they actually do try different things even in the modern age clearly demonstrates that there’s a degree of creative pride at work, even with the typical bottom line discussion wrapped in. Nintendo is well known for innovation and some would say being the “king of left field”. If money was literally the only explanation for every decision, why would they not have just joined the “pissing contest”, as Ty put it, decades ago? That’s what literally every other “AAA” publisher and company has been doing since the early 2000s and even 1990s… They clearly want to make money as easily as possible, but I don’t get the overly cynical vibe I am feeling, here… The “Nintendo quality” notion is not based on marketing alone, despite the mistakes/imperfections we still see in them as an overall company and brand. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to say that BotW plays differently on the WiiU or whatever, my point is, BotW’s reinvention of Zelda is just like reinventing gaming via the Switch. They saw an opportunity to tap into two markets at once, and take a swing at revolutionizing gaming again, in the process. For me, BotW embodies this notion of taking what they have and pushing their creative inspiration as far as possible. Yes, to make money. But I’m sure the actual developers would also like to fancy themselves as artists, too… and art is aupposed to be more to people than just the money piece. So sure, executive Nintendo obviously are sitting in their boardroom saying, “hm, how can we get the most bang for our buck from these IPs we own or at least heavily influence?” But… are you trying to say that you think this is the only kind of conversation happening in the whole company around strategy, direction, game development, etc.? I’ve always personally understood their overall strategy being to make money while also trying to spice things up as often as possible, if just from the developers’ points of view to help make the grueling pressures of working in a capitalist-Japanese company more bearable. lol Double whammy of crushing work culture, from what I always hear…

As I alluded to, obviously profit was a major consideration for every decision made. lol But I don’t mind that when it happens to make sense, or even just work out thematically, for other reasons. That’s why I said I “hope”… obviously they’re ultimately going to be told by the powers that be to do whatever said executives believe to be the most likely way for them to make as much money as they can, as inexpensively as possible. So sure… if we are in fact close to next gen console for Nintendo, they may very easily consider another dual-launch to take advantage.

I definitely believe that TP should have stayed as a swan song to Gamecube, personally… but truth be told, I believe in BotW’s case, marrying it more or less to the Switch (and to a certain degree, Nintendo’s business strategy going forward from the Wii U sadness) actually was the better choice. It honestly fit more for me as the beginning of a new era, so to speak, whereas TP was more like… tacked on to the Wii without real need, IMO. SS will always be the true Wii Zelda experience for me… TP will always be for GCN. BotW as a WiiU game just seems… uncanny? Hard to explain but I feel all the stars more or less aligned for BotW snd Switch. If BotW2 becomes another dual-console game, I would just hope it would be relevant to what the next console is actually trying to accomplish (besides profit, obviously). But if it’s more or less “perfected BotW experience”, I would think even coming out close-ish to the end of the Switch’s lifecycle (even just defining the latter half or third) would be much more thematically appropriate, anyway…

I started writing a response to the above to continue talking about the slap, but honestly? My point was to try to say I think a bunch of mistakes were made and focusing so intensely on one of those mistakes was silly… so I should probably just drop it. lol I will just shut up about that conversation and talk about BotW, now. I can’t say that I am surprised, or anything… they have seemed really intent on meticulously making this as “perfect” as possible for quite a while, now. Seems almost obsessively perfectionistic at this point. It will probably come out some day… probably…