That’s basically what Nvidia’s service is. You buy the game through Nvidia or Steam or another provider they support and then you pay a month subscription for priority access to the VM. The biggest downside is that a lot of companies pulled their games to ink-out exclusive deals with Google or others.

I get what you’re saying, but on the other hand, AWS already does a great job of spinning up Windows instances. If they don’t currently offer a Windows computing environment for Stadia, it seems kind of like a no-brainer to capture that market if they really wanted to.

I mean, if they develop their games for Windows PCs, then I don’t think it’s too much work to make them compatible with most cloud providers other than maybe Sony. AWS itself is pretty well setup to spin up a gaming PC when combined with Stadia. I don’t know if that’s how they have it currently setup, but there’s no…

I mean, I think developers are going to put their game up on anything that’s willing to pay them for it on terms they find favorable. The only real question is whether Google’s willing to stick it out to develop a game-streaming subscription service.

People are calling this a failure, but it really isn’t. Google’s had ambitions to produce original content before that fell through, but the technology used to distribute it was still a success (e.g. youtube).

Technically, Google hasn’t failed with Stadia. It’s still a pretty solid cloud computing platform for streaming video games and it only has a handful of real competitors (Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft mostly).

I mean, the tech is still pretty solid, so if you’re looking for a cloud computing platform for your game, there isn’t any reason that you can’t use the one Google built. There’s a few choices out there: Google, Nvidia, Amazon, and Sony. Google’s tech is solid, so it’s probably mostly about price and features. 

Maybe, but Mario 64 in pixel-perfect emulation of the Switch version doesn’t look great on modern LCDs. It had anti-aliasing designed for CRTs and often ran at progressive resolutions that relied on scanlines for softening.

N64 games always look pretty bad on modern LCD televisions. They were really meant for the era of more-forgiving CRTs. Also, between the limitations of the hardware and the cartridge storage, they always suffered from poor textures. The N64 would probably stand up a lot better today if the games had even used PS1…

I haven’t played the game in a decade, so I wanted to be sure that my assumptions on how the game calculated the dynamics of the Wiimote were correct, so I fired it up on the vWii to check.

So, that doesn’t make much sense to me. Between the accelerometer, which can always measure the acceleration of gravity and orient the Wiimote with the surface of the earth and the two-fork gyroscopes, you should get correct measurement of acceleration in 6 degrees of freedom. So there should be no need to calibrate…

It has recalibrating the Wiimote’s sensors, which is usually only done at the beginning of the game by turning the Wiimote upside down on the ground and it has recentering the Wiimote to point at the center of the screen, which is done whenever you want.

Yeah, I figure with Nintendo, no point in speculating. They’re not EA. If they think the game needs more polish, they’ll delay it five years until the next console release, like with Breath of the Wild. 

Yeah, that’s what I meant. They remade all four. They just need to port them and maybe increase the textures for the 3DS games. I’m hoping they made the textures with HD in mind and just compressed them down for the 3DS.

Yeah, I never had an issue with that. The Wiimote plus has pretty good accelerometers and gyros, so if a Wiimote plus needs to be recalibrated during gameplay (more than very rarely) there might be something wrong with it.

How do you figure that? With Nintendo, sometimes they don’t announce a game like that until a few months before its release. It could still be a possibility for the holidays, but who knows? 

I predict a three pack: Ocarina of Time 3D HD, Majora’s Mask 3D HD, Twilight Princess HD Switch edition.

I’m not. I’ve noticed an inverse correlation between how much development news there is on a game and the quality of the game. Nintendo is at least willing to burn a game to the ground and rebuild it from the ashes rather than release something like Andromeda and ruin a beloved franchise. I mean, Breath of the Wild was…

Honestly, the control scheme with the analog stick seems awful. We’ll see how it plays. The motion controls on the game worked pretty well on the Wii, so I expect they’ll work pretty well on the slightly improved sensors in the Joycon. 

I never really had that problem. The Wiimote Plus had a pretty good sensor. Usually calibrating it at the beginning was good enough for a play session.