You absolutely can have innovative installments of existing franchises. And Nintendo has certainly done so in the past (Super Mario Bros. was a pretty revolutionary variation on the Donkey Kong/Mario Bros. formula, for instance). But I don't see much evidence of that happening lately. Most Mario and Zelda games since…

QUOTE | "The majority of what the other developers exhibited was bloody shooter software...I believe this is a revelation of creative immaturity on our part as creators in the video game industry." - Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's legendary designer, speaking to Nintendo investors about how Nintendo can improve its…

The problem isn't that shareholders are focused on making money. That's their purpose, after all: they provide the money, the corporation uses that money, and (ideally) makes more money in return. That's why I don't find anything particularly objectionable about this investor's comments: she's not interested in the…

What was the point, then? If I'm talking with my bank, I probably want to talk about my account. If I'm talking with my pharmacist, I'm probably more interested in my prescriptions than the future direction of pill bottle design. Investors want a return on their investment, and a shareholders' Q&A is the forum…

That's not really the purpose of an investor meeting, though. Nintendo talks about "what the future of video games should be" a lot. At E3. Or GDC. Or in press releases. An investor can and should be familiar with these things without needing Nintendo management to recover the same ground here. Meanwhile, business…

The problem is that Nintendo, as a business, is losing money at (for them) an unprecedented rate. How the Wii U is performing compared to the GCN or the N64 is relatively unimportant, because the company itself was still keeping its head above water, either because they were keeping their budget under control, or…

That's not how the description of the meeting makes it sound, though. The key, to me, is talking about where the future of video games should be, versus where it will be. The latter is market prognostication, the former less so. Beyond that, yes, I'd expect Nintendo to be involved in driving the future direction of…

What you're describing is absolutely subjective. My expectations are almost certainly not the same as your expectations, after all. Appealing to as many customers' ideas of quality as possible is arguably a prerequisite for commercial success (though I'm not certain even that's an absolute requirement), but that's not…

I'm not sure I accept that, though. Advertising may serve to muddy the waters somewhat, sure, but even without traditional advertising things get muddy enough. A good product can still be sunk by bad management: over- or underestimating demand, not knowing who your audience is or what they're looking for, or spending…

That's not the complaint. The complaint is that Nintendo is focused on games in a shareholder meeting, where it's not the be-all and end-all topic.

Most shareholders don't want to run the company they're investing in. They invest because they trust the current management to be successful. That's what makes Nintendo's presentation so terrible. This shareholder doesn't particularly care about Nintendo's detailed plans and strategy. She just wants to know that the…

That's not strictly true, though. Quality products don't always succeed commercially, and commercially successful products aren't always quality. Caring about their product is good, but Nintendo also has an obligation to talk "capital gains and dividends" to show that they have a plan to return to profitability and…

If I'm putting my money up, I may or may not care if the company is doing something creatively worthwhile. I do care that they're making money in turn, and have a plan for continuing to do so.

It's a valid topic, sure. But there are more pressing matters, from a shareholder perspective, that Nintendo needs to be talking about. When you're busy trying to earn enough money to pay your rent, you probably aren't considering your retirement savings. When, as a corporation, you're into your longest unprofitable…

Do we really want shareholders taking an active role in determining corporate strategy, though? Should that guy who felt Nintendo should be pursuing micro transactions be calling the shots?

The Far Lands were removed over a year ago, yes (accidentally, by all accounts: changes to the terrain generation code did it). The world can't go on forever, though, because of limitations inherent in the game engine. The game (actually Java itself) uses floating point math, which means that the further you go, the…

Command blocks are a legitimate feature of Minecraft, albeit one not normally available in survival mode. They're there for creative mode or, more importantly, for people maintaining servers or creating custom adventure maps. They're basically just a fancy way to automate console commands.

Yeah, more or less. The game world's size is limited by a number of factors. In earlier, beta versions of the game, anything 12,550,820 blocks/meters from "center" (your initial spawn point) would result in severely distorted terrain that would eventually lead the Minecraft client to crash because of chunk updates.…

I don't particularly care for 3D movies, but my complaint isn't really the 3D effect itself. It's the fact that I need to wear glasses on top of my regular glasses. So these 2D glasses don't really help me out in any meaningful way.

I haven't used the RetroN 5 yet, but with the old RetroN 3 the provided consoles were a joke. They looked like wireless variants of the six-button Genesis/Megadrive controllers, but for some reason they didn't even work well on that system: the button layout was inexplicably reversed. The d-pad was terrible, the…