And the artists who get involved in that are aware of that and willing to participate anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-f…

Difficult to comment or reflect on, not having played it and all. I doubt it's the kind of thing that would have appealed to me personally, and the narrative isn't really the driving factor behind the games I play.

"but the N3DS is almost like the Snes was compared to the Nes"

You realize his argument is that they are enough to justify giving it the same moniker that marked a generational shift from NES to SNES right? And holy crap, yes, all the things you are described have absolutely zero bearing on that kind of shift, ergo superficial.

K, what the fuck ever your reasoning is.

There is nothing wrong with allowing people to voluntarily do work for you. It's not like they are forcing people by having a competition like that.

More buttons wasn't a feature of the SNES, more buttons was a feature of the SNES's standard controller.

"You know what I don't want to hear when playing a game about cutting demons in half with a giant sword? A plotline that Tom Clancy's co-authors would have rejected." Couldn't have said it better myself! I mean, think about it: this is a game about demons and monsters and magical creatures locked in an eternal, epic…

Sure, sure, but it's one that doesn't really validate the point you were trying to me.

Each new iPhone is fully backwards compatible with the previous one's software though. Meanwhile it takes a while for a new console to really come alive.

I agree that the labels aren't important, but people who have arbitrary rules for things and when confronted with conflicts in their arbitrary rules, they just come up with even more arbitrary exceptions... those people annoy me. And it's like Straw Hat said... most of the logic people apply against competitive gaming…

"And every year, expectations grow higher."

2) A large percentage of Japanese developers—including Sakaguchi himself—have abandoned console development to chase mobile gaming and the Puzzle & Dragons phenomenon.

None of those things are even remotely the kinds of things that mark a generational shift.

Better screen is subjective. It has the same resolution and the only real features they touted for it were that they would improve the 3D technology via some facial tracking (which takes some form of processing power) and that it would use the cameras to track external lighting conditions and adjust the brightness…

I don't see that as a significant difference. At the end of the day, Xenoblade is still just a port and no one in their right mind would ever announce what is intended to be a new major console with only a single exclusive game to announce with it.

Xenoblade is still just one game and it's still just a port. When's the last time you heard a console announcement with exactly one game announced for it?

I mean they were an afterthought. They weren't part of the cultural export, they came as a result of the popularity of the character.

Time between Gameboy and Gameboy color releases: 9 years
Plus the hardware difference between Gameboy and Gameboy Color was actually not all that different from NES to Super Nintendo. Meanwhile this jump is basically the same as the DSi.