Let's Drink Coffee and Discuss New 3DS Games

Awesome stuff, Patrick. You just spitting game in features like this has become my favorite thing on the site.

That essay was completely ridiculous. The guy who wrote that doesn't even understand the first thing about game design, yet all these journalists eat it up.

That makes sense, then. I figured Fire Emblem would have to sell more than that in Japan. Hopefully some of the other announced things do well.

Thanks Patrick!! It's exciting to see Nintendo get into mid season form with the Wii U.

Jar time with Jeff. Coffee break with Patrick.

I'm a huge fan of the single person to-camera pieces. Keep 'em up guys!

nice!

Don't you hate pants!?

dude, turn your mic gain down.

What kind of bike you got Patrick?

@patrickklepek You should really consider a standing mic. Watching you talk with a headset on is really funny, but probably not much fun for you. lol

Good to hear that Patrick shoulder is getting better. Biking is awesome!!!

Link to the Past is good because it is incredibly well-designed. The dungeons in that game are still better than most in the entire series, and the other aspects of the game are just extremely polished as well. While there are plenty of things the Zelda series needs to do to mindfully expand on existing standards, as well as bring in other modern ideas from a lot of other modern games. That essay, while appealing in some ways, is...overrated.

Anyway, I hope this Link to the Past 2's gameplay/combat has all of the mechanics added in The Minish Cap, and it has a wealth of exploration, secrets, side quests and so on. Best part of the series.

@frostedminiwheats: Brad = Devil Juice

@mrfluke: who is this bizarro patrick?

Fantastic video, Patrick. Keep up the great work!

Enjoyed this. Thanks, Patrick.

Can anything Nintendo does ever be characterized as new? They all look like mods that should be free, or sold for 5-10.

awesome, the other things i liked in the Nintendo Direct were.... Yoshi's Island 3(3ds) and New Luigi U expansion dlc for New Super Mario Bros. U where they gave us the Luigi from Super Mario 2(usa) with the Higher jump and Flutter Jump. definitely looking to get a WiiU after E3, cause i wanna see what Nintendo's move will be in this game of Corporate Chess. I love my 3DSXL , as i have larger than average hands, and the 3DS normal was just too small. My OMG moment was when Reggie announced LOZ:LinkTothePast's Sequel. I played the NES versions with my Dad helping me, but A Link to the Past is the First Zelda game i beat by myself. and if this game is as great as the Four Swords games were, i can't wait! Nintendo is really putting out the Bribe, before the Shiny New Systems take everyone's attention at E3. Props to Nintendo, not wanting to give up the fight like Sega did. FIGHTthePOWER - NINTENDOPOWER! peace

@beardfish: its the patrick we all deserve,

its the patrick that seems more loved by the community than the beardless patrick :P

hahahaha haha ohhhhh...

wait... you're serious...

*TM

I really enjoyed this for whatever reason. Nice work.

Good to see you doing something besides being racist and stupid against Brazilians....

lol

Coming Summer 2014.......... Mario & Luigi "Mac & Cheese"

I like this type of video. Worth going to more events and doing these informal responses. Go Patrick

I'm kind of tired of people feeling like they get to establish something as ridiculous just because they say so; "Saving Zelda" has a lot more coherent arguments about the detriments of increased "accessibility" in modern games, even beyond the Zelda series. It's altogether pretentious to just say "Oh, that's overrated," or "that's completely ridiculous," especially if you don't present any counter arguments; that's basically the definition of "pretentious".

Honestly, guys? Nobody ever felt like they were playing a Zelda game, got an item, and were funneled into the next part of the game which magically required incessant usage of that newly-acquired item? Nobody ever felt like solving a puzzle in a Zelda game was more about finding the correct "key" on their proverbial key-ring and employing it, as opposed to having to actually work-out a solution using your brain? Thompson is just pulling that out of his ass? Maybe I need to go back and play "A Link to the Past" again, but I sure do encounter a lot of games which just seem to funnel me between parts in a brainless, linear way, and I don't think the Zelda franchise is exempt.

I'll give you Minish Cap though; I really enjoyed that game a lot, and I'm pretty sure that has at least something to do with Keiji Inafune...

Patrick, have you never played or seen Pipe Dream before? That was a really, really convoluted and drawn-out explanation of Mario and Donkey Kong for what is very simple gameplay.

Secondly, this video comes off as entirely unnecessary. Nothing happened here that couldn't have been said in the next podcast.

What kind of bike are you riding, Patrick?

Really glad you did this. Since I work a rather focused job, it gets hard to read stories on news. With this I can run it in the background and keep up to date with Nintendo's latest announcement. Thanks :D

@driftspace: My takeaway from that essay wasn't that he was wrong so much as incredibly self centered. I accept his argument that for those willing to invest heavily into a game, that a game with less guidance and more punishment as he describes is more rewarding. But... most people don't invest into games that heavily. He talks about how a solution in the original Zelda came to him in a dream. That his sub conscious worked out the approximate area the dungeon ought to be in just based on the biggest dungeonless area of the map. That's cool... but most people don't have dreams about their video games! That kind of single minded dedication to a game (or any work of fiction, really) is abnormal.

I think the closing was almost right. Zelda really doesn't cater to the Dark Souls crowd anymore. But what he never addresses is that maybe it shouldn't. With Legend of Zelda in particular, a new game with the kind of difficulty and lack of direction that defined the originals would absolutely be beyond a lot of the fan base. Because people who are fans of Zelda today... they're fans of modern Zelda. My little sister plays Zelda. Never beaten one, but she loves to take a crack at each new installment. Gotten to final dungeons three times now. You know what happens when Thompson's Zelda comes out? She, and others like her, can't even beat the first level.

For some gamers there needs to be a huge wall to climb in order to properly feel accomplishment... but for more gamers those walls just aren't worth scaling. There's a reason that Zelda is bigger than Dark Souls, that Final Fantasy is bigger than SMT, that New Super Mario Bros Wii did better than Donkey Kong Country Returns on the same hardware, that Call of Duty is bigger than Shootmania. I would argue that the second entry in all of those couples is more rewarding for the enthusiast who gets into them. Deeper mechanics, better balance, etc. But there are more non-enthusiasts than enthusiasts in this market, and we shouldn't decry a game for targeting a different (and larger) audience.

I hope From Software keeps making niche super hard games for Tevis Thompson. But his notion that games that don't fight him every step of the way are in some way inferior and ought to be designed otherwise is impractical, short sighted, and selfish.

Oh look, Phil Fish

Thanks for articulating my thoughts in a way I couldn't. It just upsets me that people who have never designed a game in their lives bitch about something being changed or "streamlined" without giving proper consideration to the legitimate reasons why something may have been changed. Let me be frank here - the original Legend of Zelda making you bomb every rock-face was bad game design. There are ways of retaining a sense of mystery and exploration that don't boil down to arduous trial-and-error.

And this is where I have a problem with journalists. Rather than simply admitting that they've grown tired of the series format, or that the games simply aren't for them anymore, they decide to latch onto some guy's hair-brained critique in order to explain why they no longer like Zelda games. Don't get me wrong, there are many valid criticisms of the recent Zelda games. But there's nothing inherently wrong with the core format, Whether you still like that format is what's the issue here.

I love these kinds of videos. Cool to hear about what's coming to the 3DS.

I would have definitely preferred an original new 3D Zelda game for 3DS, personally. I did hear a bit of the music though from LTTP 2 and it sounds great.

Thanks for this Patrick. It was very informative and interesting. More and more now I want to get a 3DS, some pretty great games on it now and there are more to come. Maybe once my course is over I shall invest in it! :D

Thanks, Patrick. T'was very informative! I think I'm still most excited about Dream Team, I love the Mario & Luigi series.

The new Mario & DK sounds a bit different from the other titles! Yes, they are all puzzle-centric, but the older games reminded me more of Lemmings, where the Minis automatically move forward in a 2D platforming level, and you use springs, switches, platforms, etc. to get them to the exit.

Really dig this!

Those headphones are ridiculous.

Great video.

But....can you communicate with aliens with those fucking things?!

Superenjoy these vids, would love to see more of them!

Brad = Bo Rounds

great vid Klepek! you clearly have a rational handle on what Nintendo deserves to be praised for, and what deserves criticism.

Unfortunately Alttp 2 looks pretty damn generic visually.

It looks like every wannabe-cute action-adventure.

They should have made it some great and detailed sprite-based visual style to do the original masterpiece at least some justice.

Not to sound facetious, but are you a game designer? Go back and read essays about the original Legend of Zelda for NES; I guarantee that a common factor you will find in those essays is actually praising the "game design." Thompson writes specifically about the game design of the original NES Zelda games in his article, and also gives examples why he thinks that design is good. You forget that a lot of why we have these other games today is because of the accolades leveled specifically at that first Zelda game ... and for game design. You're right that having to "bomb every rock face" seemed tedious to some, but to the people that figured out those secrets on their own: it was a revelation. What are the deeper psychological implications of removing that kind of revelatory discovery from games?

This may be a stretch, but, for example: what do you think happens when the bar is continually lowered for "convenience"? Do you think, for example, that a bunch of high school students would opt to go to school and have homework if given the option? No! Most of them would label going to school and doing homework "arduous." Do you think they would be better people for not going in the end, or would we just have a bunch of uneducated (and lazy) people a few decades later saying: "that's just good educational design; making me go to school and experience things which I may have not otherwise experienced was bad design"?

How can people learn to appreciate a challenge if everything is increasingly less challenging? Don't we learn from challenges?

I don't fully disagree with you; I'm not going to say that the idea of bombing every rock face in a game like NES Zelda doesn't seem arduous to me too, and there certainly "are ways of retaining a sense of mystery and exploration that don't boil down to arduous trial-and-error." However, I think the obligatory flashing yellow arrow or the blinking map point crosses that line. It's kind of like playing chess and having a professional chess player tell you exactly where to put each piece when your turn comes; you just have to move your fingers and arm. Sure, lots of people who suck at chess might take that as an opportunity to brag that they "completed" a game of chess against someone, but does it teach one to think like a chess player? There sure are a lot of people who suck at video games, but is it their fault, or the fault of things being continually dumbed-down? When things don't make us better: don't they -- by virtue of not even giving us the opportunity to learn something -- actually make things worse?

I understand your point, and the point of @frostedminiwheats that some people don't want/appreciate a challenge, but aren't we all better off if more of us were excited by the prospect of overcoming challenges? It's hard enough to triumph in the real world; why remove hard-earned triumph from art? What are the long-term implications of awarding triumph for increasingly-less effort? I get that corporations need to make money, and that aiming low is a key part of that formula, but to what place will that lead us long-term?

(By the way: thank you both for your thoughtful responses! I really enjoy discussions like this, and sincerely appreciate your perspectives.)

Me too! But no dog in the background this time : (

This video makes me want to play my 3DS again! I fired it up a week or so ago, and thankfully the battery was charged, because I had to sit at the hospital with someone for a couple hours, played Mario Land 3D until the battery died. Makes me want to play it some more, considering i was a day 1 purchaser. Also, Link to the Past is my favorite video game of all time. period.

1) Nope.

2) I might not be on it.