You Freak Out, You Lose

[Ultima Shadow]

The 3DS is not "a slightly fancier DS." That's like saying the Gamecube was a slightly fancier N64.

And the GameCube was beaten by the Xbox and absolutely demolished by the PS2, so I hope that's as far as the analogy goes.

That said, now that the price is dropping, I might give the 3DS a look in before the Christmas season. Star Fox 64, Mario Kart and the Virtual Console are just too appealing to knock back.

[nensondubois]

Admittedly, there are some good games on the way coming out for the 3DS that look all-the-more promising like the New Paper Mario, Mario Kart, Kid Icarus (poor neglected series) and some reiterations of older games, but I'm still not tempted to buy a 3DS not only because too much shovel-ware for my liking is out already, but due to other other factors I mentioned before. Maybe battery life will be reasonable soon. I'm waiting.

I am also disappoint at Crapcom for pulling Mega Man Legends 3, which was a title that may have swayed me more into buying a 3DS.

[WarpRattler]

too much shovel-ware for my liking is out already

If just the existence of shovelware seriously affects whether or not you'll buy a system, you should probably have never started playing video games. Shovelware has been around on home consoles since at least the Atari 2600 (to say nothing of home computers), and the only console I can think of that doesn't suffer from it had other major problems to make up for it.

(Name the console and win a prize! But not really.)

Furthermore, can we please have a moratorium on the use of the phrase "shovelware"? Some of the things that are shrugged off as shovelware now would've been AAA titles twenty years ago, but because they're obscure/Asian/not Call of Duty or Madden, the shovelware label comes out again and again. In a lot of ways it has about as much meaning as "hipster" or, in Weegee's case, "weeaboo"; here it seems to mean "games I'm not interested in."

And the battery life is perfectly reasonable. Do you people just never charge your systems or something? Do you complain that your cell phone's battery life is too low when you talk on it for six hours straight and it dies?

[CrossEyed7]

too much shovel-ware for my liking is out

There exists paper of subpar quality; therefore I will never write in any notebook.

[ShadowBrain]

The mere existence of shovelware doesn't make me dislike a system, but when that shovelware is successful (as has been the case with Nintendo's latest systems), it begats other shovelware (or at least cheaply-made/designed games--I'll agree that "shovelware" isn't 100% objective, but I'm confident I could point it out on a Wal-Mart shelf without fail), which can crowd out more quality titles from a business perspective (See: Why stuff like Operation Rainfall ends up existing).

Meanwhile, I'm just not buying a 3DS because it would likely suck way more time and money out of my forthcoming time at college than I can afford. Also, I've heard enough about the tech issues and games lineup to hold out indefinitely.

[WarpRattler]

I'm confident I could point [shovelware] out on a Wal-Mart shelf without fail

That's easy, though. How about you try that on actual game shelves (or, rather, terrible pictures thereof)?







I guarantee there are at least half a dozen games there that would be considered "shovelware" by most people. A few of them even happen to be on the Wii!

[Weegee]

How do you expect me not to call you a weeaboo after seeing that?

[WarpRattler]

I dunno, man...I don't know any weeaboos who own rows of western PC games, watch Firefly, play Magic: the Gathering, or actually like DJ Hero.

[Turtlekid1]

I lost when I saw you had defiled a perfectly good top hat by putting it on the head of that great chicken-wuss, Darkseid.

[WarpRattler]

Er...

(also, Weegee should check his definition of "weeaboo" if he thinks owning Japanese games and TV shows is the only qualifier; maybe if, for example, I owned more Japanese games than I do non-Japanese games, he'd start to have a point, but...)

[ShadowBrain]

Since I can barely make out any of Warp's collection, I'll just be a nice guy and assume anything vaguely Japanese is not shovelware.

As clumsy as it may be, I prefer "wapanese", seeing as it doesn't make me think of a cartoon businessman being paddled on the ass every time I hear it.

[Weegee]

Come on, say it...

[WarpRattler]

ShadowBrian, I guarantee some of the games you include in that statement are ones you'd automatically describe as "shovelware" if you were to see them on store shelves. You misunderestimate the tendency of western publishers to take games with box arts like this:



and turn them into generic-looking things like this:



because retailers don't carry anime games.

Also:

cheaply-made/designed games

There's an eight-page-long thread over in the video game sub-forum about a low-budget indie game that's easily better than half the high-budget AAA junk GameStop employees keep trying to push on me every time I go in there to buy games no one else has heard of.

Everyone on this forum should know by now that budget is by no means a deciding factor in whether or not a game is good. I mean, if it really mattered, Grand Theft Auto IV and Shenmue would be the best games ever made.

[CrossEyed7]

To be fair, though, a boxart featuring a sexy 12-year-old anime girl, a badass Matrix anime guy, a brooding white-haired anime guy, and an androgynous anime person in a beret with Japanese letters in front of them probably looks about as generic to Japaneses as a boxart featuring guns, planes, a gun-holder soldier guy guy, guns, and an ubisoft logo looks to Americans.

[ShadowBrain]

Well, when I said "cheaply made", I meant stuff like Chicken Shoot and anything with a "Z" in the name by Ubisoft. And I wasn't aware I was supposed to consider what those games would look like in multiple countries, although I suppose you're right.