Spyke

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Disney has announced it will stop releasing DVDs and Blu-ray discs in Australia.

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There only needs to be a couple people knowing how to get a rip for it to end up everywhere.

If physical releases start disappearing everywhere, I can see piracy getting a significant boost. It will be the only way to "own" a movie and be sure you can still watch it whenever you want. Disney has been removing content from its service already, even some recent stuff.

I know Gabe Newell's old quote is being parroted a lot but it's relevant : "Piracy is not a pricing issue, it's a service issue". Steam may be a digital market, but it doesn't require a continued paid subscription to access stuff you've paid for, and it doesn't delist games whenever it feels like it.

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X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014

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I don't think anybody seriously used twitter as storage.

Rather the point is that, similarly to every time a blogging platform or another online service with user content shuts down, a bit of internet history disappears with it. Links are broken, traces of opinions or bits of knowledge from another time are not available anymore...

It's not the end of the world, and at that point I wouldn't really care if twitter disappeared completely overnight, but still, some stuff will be lost.

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Just revealed Bobby Kotick and Nintendo have had active talks about the next-generation Nintendo console, is close to Gen 8 in power (PlayStation 4 / Xbox One)

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If any of this is to be believed, that's not unreasonable for a handheld device that's supposed to be in the $300-350 range.

And no, it's not reasonable to think Nintendo will be going for much more expensive stuff to cater to a minority of gamers. Everyone and their grandma are not going to buy a $800 device to play Mario Kart.

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PS2’s Two Towers was the coolest way to miss the whole point of the Lord of the Rings

If you want a game that uses movie clips and proceeds to butcher the original movie plot and atmosphere, try the old Fifth Element game. It's amazing, they took bits of the movie and used them to make a weird new cut that completely changes character motivations, adds huge plot holes and mess with the order of events.

For example : the game starts as Korben (at that point just a taxi driver) saves the lab where Leeloo is being revived (also random mutants freeing themselves from capsules).

In turn, Leeloo then saves Korben that's been arrested by the police (you know that "meat popsicle" bit? They've recut it so it looks like Korben got arrested).

Leeloo then spends about half the game in her strap suit from the lab, instead of like 3 minutes. Just because they took the iconic plunge into Korben's taxi scene to use it way later, in a random subplot they added, and she needed to be dressed like that because that's how she is in the movie clip.

Which also means that in the game's plot, her falling right on Korben's taxi was somehow intended, and not how they met.

Many other examples of scenes that were reinterpreted like that to create new subplots, like that one time Zorg blows up a phone booth to kill an incompetent henchman becomes a terrorist attack on the spaceport with a dozen of exploding booths.

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Protip:

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Depends on how low you want it to drop.

On the EU e-shop (seems to be similar for the US one) Breath of the Wild has regular 30% discounts starting about one year after release. It's been 6 years, it never went lower, and probably never will.

Same for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. It's been almost 10 years since the original release of Mario Kart 8, and eshop sales never go under 30%.

Nintendo is known for keeping their games mostly full price. The only games that get big sales are the ones that didn't perform as well as they wanted, and even that is becoming rare.

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What are your Favorite and Least favorite genre names?

I started to use the Japanese term "search action" rather than Metroidvania unironically, sue me.

Yeah, it sounds silly, but it's descriptive and feels less limiting to me than "a game that looks like Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night". I love those two, but lots of games do the big interconnected map with ability gates, and they're not that close to them.

Some of those even don't have a map made of blue rectangles! Only like 90% of them.

Really, if we can do with genre names that are not built like that in general, all the better. I'm not going to the library to read a FrankenDracula or a DuneFoundation or whatever.