I don't think licensing costs are a huge factor - there were more third party titles on the Mini NES than the Mini SNES and you could easily get to 30 games by going mostly for more Nintendo published titles.

No, it was completely shelved and the team started over for Star Fox 64. Star Fox 2 has two extra pilots (a poodle and a tiger) and walking Arwing sections like in Star Fox Zero, as well as some funky map screen stuff that 64 didn't bother with.

Well, they say they're going to make more of these, but pre-orders on Amazon UK sold out in 18 minutes (with uncertainty over whether they'll have more available), so I don't know that they have (yet).

I agree with all of that (though it's a shame you're not allowed to quickly use Mila's Turnwheel is Alm or Celica die - that would have saved me another three playthrough of the finale) and want to add that I love how much voice acting the game has too. I understand, given how much dialogue and different permutations…

I'm in the UK and it's hell getting Generations stuff here too. You never know which waves Hasbro UK is just going to completely skip. Back in Combiner Wars, they brought in the Aerialbots wave before the US and then just kept continually restocking that until the US was on like wave 3 or 4. Hasbro UK then skipped the…

"see him freed of his original brief, which was to play the Master as a dark inversion of the 10th Doctor,"
But that's pretty much the point of the Master - a dark inversion of the current iteration of the Doctor. Having Simm's Master alongside Missy means that's more likely to crystallise his 10th Doctor roots rather…

I was really looking forward to Ant-Man long before it came out, because it was an Ant-Man film, rather than an Edgar Wright one. And in a way, him bailing was the most beautifully dickish move of self-preservation any film director could make. He spent, what, eight years *almost* making an Ant-Man movie, finally got…

I liked season 6 and it was better than some of the other recent series. For me the show's faltered as its got obsessed with its own continuity. Season 3 or 4 (I forget which) was just a long string of episodes fleshing out Jonas Venture's past and the Guild 's history rather than telling fun stories in its own right,…

It happens pretty much any time the mass media gets hold of a specialised term. "Going viral" used to mean something specific, now it just means being popular. "Troll" used to be a specific kind of person online, now it means anyone who says anything apparently mean on Twitter (I got called a troll by a national…

Fire Emblem Echoes has a few problems with its dungeon crawling system (some of them go on too long, reusing the same map continually, without proper save points and locking you into using only the same 10 characters is frustrating) but it's definitely up there for me. A revisitation of the series early, developmental…

Yeah, I always find it bizarre that the movie lines are held up as successful, as they're always loads of shelfwarmers for months if not years after each one. I saw Dark of the Moon stuff still around about a year after the film came out.

I find myself wondering that as well. Like, is it the kind of news that would warrant interrupting films in cinemas for announcements? Is anything that big now?

I'm with you - huge Transformers fan, but hate the Bay movies. Thing is, it's the fucktonnes of money they've brought in that have allowed Hasbro do to all the cool stuff over the past decade, like the ongoing Generations line(s) and generated the mainstream interest to warrant the games like Fall of Cybertron…

I want to see this business model work the other way. Let's have Tony the Tiger at the Olympics.

Ha! It does raise a good point - the Federation is heavily reliant on a loose cannon "bounty hunter" (really just a merc) to sort out their biggest problems. They don't come out of it well.

Although the Prime games have carved their own little niche in Metroid continuity, I really want them to sort out the mess made by Other M, ideally by retconning it. Not completely out of existence, but by revealing that the terrible Samus in that is a flawed android replacement made by the Federation. Her awful…

They should pad it out with live feeds of the new stadiums being built and of the old ones mouldering in disuse.

Meanwhile I've seen pretty much every Amiibo in the wild, the Animal Crossing series - which is highly unlikely to have been produced in higher numbers than any other - is shelf-warming all over the place, and major retailers (Amazon and Argos) have been trying to clearance excess stock of most of the Smash Amiibo for…

The Amiibo shortages are overblown as a conspiracy. They sell out due to demand. You could get most of the Zelda Smash amiibo fairly easily until BotW launched, when the additional functionality added desirability. Nintendo's been pretty good at bringing most, if not all, of the "rare" Amiibo back into stock.

It was my first Metroid too. Came packed in with my Game Boy Pocket (along with Wave Race, which is… not good) in 1997, I think (Metroid II had an insanely long shelf-life, especially as a bundled game, which I can only assume is because it didn't sell well enough solo).
It instantly got me hooked on the character and…