When you spell it out like that it makes it seem even more petty...

I did read the article. I consider myself pretty clued-in with the gaming scene, but honestly - who actually knew who this guy was before he was fired?

Yeah I’ve noticed!

It’s been a slow news day so this story has been pretty much the only thing in my news feed on various websites, Kotaku included

Who is this guy and why do people apparently care?

People actually care about this???

I actually started a project like this about 6 years ago, the plan was F-Zero style rather than karting. Karting probably would have been a better choice.

I actually think Mario Kart DS is the pinnacle of skill in Mario Kart, that game felt pretty fair and balanced and snaking took some real skill to get right and pretty much anyone could do it - I never had a MKDS game where I thought I had no chance of winning (except versus cheaters, that game was rife with cheaters…

“force-downloaded” made me imagine some kind of hipster-tech Jedi.

Am I the only one who has noticed that he went straight from the “3rd thing” to the “5th thing”?

but saying after 100's of hours you never saw the same issue seems very unlikely

To me it seems unfair that you’re believing it to be a CYA response.

QA is literally Quality Assurance, a QA team will identify areas where the quality is not being, uh, assured.

Dev’s response was that they missed the hiccups problem because they never encountered it and all the problems they did encounter were too late to get fixed before release due to the fixed ship date.

To be more thorough; The Wii U uses eMMC storage, just like a smartphone does.

General observation (not an assumption, this is measurable and reproducible), USB 2.0 HDDs are a lot (LOT) slower than on-board flash storage. USB 2.0 is 60MB/s tops (doesn’t matter how fast the connected drive is, SSD, flash or HDD will be locked at 60MB/s).

Load times with a physical drive and any content streaming performance will be measurably worse over USB 2.0 with a spinning external HDD.

Flash memory is by no means cheaper than a physical HDD. The reasons to use flash memory is disk access performance and lower component size inside the console.

By modern standards it isn’t too weird any more. It’s a PPC CPU, an NVidia GPU and a load of stream compute units - these days we do stream computations on the GPU as well as graphics in much the same way that the CELL SPUs operate.

What do you mean with this reply?