Some Stupid or Bad Decisions and/or Moves Nintendo Has Made

[Zap!]

Really Nintendo? Thats the reason why? You do realize that Conker's Bad Fur Day(a former N64 exclusive) was rereleased on the Xbox right? And you know how Resident Evil 4 was exclusive to the Gamecube? That got rereleased on the PS2 also. And yet you don't want Microsoft getting a version of Goldeneye because you would rather people go track down used copies and play them on the N64 with that horrendously awkward controller? Considering Microsoft allowed one of their exclusive games(Viva Pinata) to be released(or will be upcoming) on the Ds I would have expected better from Nintendo. But despite that, theres no way in hell they are going to stop Perfect Dark 64 from coming to XBLA later this year.

I strongly agreed with Nintendo's decision to block Goldeneye from coming to XBox Live. It was a top three N64 classic and belongs on a Nintendo system. If they can't work out a deal to bring it to Wii VC, sorry, but it's all or nothing.

[The 1 2 P]

I strongly agreed with Nintendo's decision to block Goldeneye from coming to XBox Live. It was a top three N64 classic and belongs on a Nintendo system. If they can't work out a deal to bring it to Wii VC, sorry, but it's all or nothing.

You obviously didn't read the story I linked. The "deal" wasn't the issue. Not only was this game going to appear on both XBLA and Wii VC, but Nintendo would have been paid a very large royalty fee by Microsoft. Cue the quote from Iwata san. And thats my issue with him/them. This wasn't an Nintendo first party game(it was an exclusive second party game) and several other Nintendo non-first party games have been ported to other systems(see my original post). The fact that they cockblocked it means that future generations won't be able to enjoy this classic game.

There is some good news though. Activision(current holder of the Bond license) won't be the license holder forever. They basically gave in to Nintendo's demands. However, once the license changes hands again(in the next few years) Microsoft will once again have a chance to get this game on XBLA. I can't wait for that day to come. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying Perfect Dark 64 when that releases.

[Baloo]

The fact that you need 3 hands to play with the Nintendo 64 controller is one problem.

Those niches on the analog stick while playing a game like Mario Party, what the fuck Nintendo they like tore through the palm of my hand.

[otaku]

I disagree I think the wii is proving to be a decent system at least as good as the 64 and GC I have at least 10 games for it that I play regularly all of which have quality ratings from reviewers. I love the gamecube discs and the gamecube is a neat piece of hardware still worth owning potentially even while owning a wii I mean they go for 50 bucks so why not? I do hate the purple though so I own black

I liked the 64 controller I remember the joystick being a little rough on my hands but for the most part its a really great controller. As for this bond business is it really that hard for someone to get an n64 (25 bucks) and a copy of the bond game? (fond memories of this title!) pretty sure future generations will still find a working 64 system.

[Zap!]

You obviously didn't read the story I linked. The "deal" wasn't the issue. Not only was this game going to appear on both XBLA and Wii VC, but Nintendo would have been paid a very large royalty fee by Microsoft. Cue the quote from Iwata san. And thats my issue with him/them. This wasn't an Nintendo first party game(it was an exclusive second party game) and several other Nintendo non-first party games have been ported to other systems(see my original post). The fact that they cockblocked it means that future generations won't be able to enjoy this classic game.

There is some good news though. Activision(current holder of the Bond license) won't be the license holder forever. They basically gave in to Nintendo's demands. However, once the license changes hands again(in the next few years) Microsoft will once again have a chance to get this game on XBLA. I can't wait for that day to come. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying Perfect Dark 64 when that releases.

I know what you're talking about, that news is quite old. I still agree with Nintendo 100%. That is a Nintendo 64 game and belongs on a Nintendo system period. No dual deals. It should never appear on a M$ or Sony system, and if that means no one will get to see it, then so be it. It's all or nothing.

Cockblocking is necessary. If I can't have the babe over there, I don't want you having her either.

[The 1 2 P]

I still agree with Nintendo 100%. That is a Nintendo 64 game and belongs on a Nintendo system period. No dual deals. It should never appear on a M$ or Sony system, and if that means no one will get to see it, then so be it. It's all or nothing.

So does that mean you cried when Conker's Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie came out for the Xbox and Xbox 360? Because according to you, they should never appear on a MS or Sony system. Looks like you are in the minority there. With the exception of Nintendo's first party franchise games, everything else is fair game. Thats why so many Nes classics are now on XBLA.

Cockblocking is necessary. If I can't have the babe over there, I don't want you having her either.

Since we are talking about video games(and expanding their audiences) and not relationships, cockblocking is "not" a good idea. It's actually a dick move, but thats pretty redundant. Hell, it's not even a good business move because Nintendo is missing out on millions from the Wii VC version sales and millions more in royalties. Regardless of how much money you have, turning down millions more won't help your bottom line.

That story was a bit old but like I said before, once the Bond license changes hands again theres still a chance this game will come to XBLA. I just hope that the next company who has it makes smarter business decisions towards their licenses.

[Zap!]

So does that mean you cried when Conker's Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie came out for the Xbox and Xbox 360? Because according to you, they should never appear on a MS or Sony system. Looks like you are in the minority there. With the exception of Nintendo's first party franchise games, everything else is fair game. Thats why so many Nes classics are now on XBLA.

I did not "cry" but I don't believe NES classics belong on a non-Nintendo system. Those two games you mentioned certainly are no Goldeneye in terms of classicness, importance, and popularity. I am in the minority quite often, true, but I kind of like that. I don't ever take a "me too" opinion. I'm not only happy, I'm ecstatic that Nintendo made this move.

However, I respect your opinion totally and agree to disagree. We were bound to clash heads, under your name is "DP's Most Sarcastic Mofo", while I'm the anti-sarcasm, and prefer in-your-face, Austin Powers style humor and sillyness, and have had smiley fever for over 15 years.

[The 1 2 P]

However, I respect your opinion totally and agree to disagree. We were bound to clash heads, under your name is "DP's Most Sarcastic Mofo", while I'm the anti-sarcasm, and prefer in-your-face, Austin Powers style humor and sillyness, and have had smiley fever for over 15 years.

Fair enough. We can agree to disagree.

[darkslime]

1. Releasing the wii.

[Chemdawg]

1. Releasing the wii.

psh.. i love my wii!

[Sonicwolf]

Probably been said already but the original GameBoy Advance's lack of lit lcd screen was a major brainfart on Nintendo's part.

[Zap!]

1. Releasing the wii.

I don't think you understand the OP. Releasing the Wii was in no way a stupid/bad decision Nintendo has made. It is on pace to outsell any other system in history, and has brought them billions.

[The 1 2 P]

Probably been said already but the original GameBoy Advance's lack of lit lcd screen was a major brainfart on Nintendo's part.

Actually, the "real" stupid part was when they said it just wasn't possible. Cue average Joe making it "possible" out of his own garage and dubbing it the "Afterburner", making himself very successful to the point that he could no longer keep up with all the orders. Several months later Nintendo steps in to say "We have a new GBA coming and this time it will have a backlit screen. It's a miracle."

[jesus666]

Not forcing Game Freak to release an RPG Pokemon game on N64, I mean seriously?!?! here we have a system famous for it's lack of RPG's, and a company famous for it's massively popular RPG series and what do we get?! two Pokemon "fighting simulators" a puzzle game and a photography game! what's wrong with this picture? I'm sure instead of releasing four crap cash-in's they could've released one proper RPG :S

Not putting more emphasis on making Mother 3, for the same reasons as the previous, N64 needed high quality RPG's

Not buying full shares in Rare for cheap (or cheaper I guess as they were still asking for quite a bit, just nowhere near the Microsoft levels) when they had the chance, if only to re-use their popular back catalogue for Wii

Not releasing their NES games earlier and at a more competitive price with better advertising in Europe instead allowing Sega to gain a foothold in that region and use it as a launch pad (I'm glad about this mistake as how much more boring would that early period have been without Sega?)

Screwing around with DMA/Rockstar North for ages with Body Harvest causing them to miss the N64 launch.

Mucking about with that big court case against Codemasters and Galoob trying to get cheat cartridges ruled as illegal.

As mentioned before the terribly slow online adoption

There's probably loads more that I can't think of at the moment, If this was a mistakes of Sega thread it'd probably be a lot longer

[Malon_Forever]

Those niches on the analog stick while playing a game like Mario Party, what the fuck Nintendo they like tore through the palm of my hand.

Does anyone else remember when Nintendo was giving away free Nintendo "gloves" for this problem? I remember my brothers and I calling, and they said all the gloves were gone...

I always hated being the "bowser" in the tug-a-war game!

[mobiusclimber]

I'm going to harp some more on the whole "no backlighting" business w/ the GBA: Nintendo had backlight Game Boy Pockets, released exclusively in Japan, so the technology to do this was there for even longer than the GBA!

Also, I'm sorry, but the N64 was a major disappointment. Not only were most of the titles for it "kiddie," but by sticking with a cart-based system they lost out on having the biggest selling title at the time: Final Fantasy VII. And considering that both the NES and SNES were filled with quality RPGs, the fact that not only didn't the N64 have many but the ones it did have were almost all garbage was a huge disappointment. This was actually when I stopped caring about Nintendo.

The DSi, while maybe not from a financial viewpoint, is also a huge mistake, imo. While Nintendo can film commercials with two teenage boys play around with the camera, the fact is no one buy a 12-year-old girl is going to use that feature. The DSi is just an example of Nintendo triple-dipping the public, expecting people who've already purchased a DS or DS Lite (or both!) to fork over even more cash for features that are generally useless while removing one of the better features from the DS: the GBA slot. Not only does that remove backwards compatibility (a decent selling point considering how many great games were released for the GBA), but it also squashes the high hopes one might have had for possible new peripherals developed to take advantage of that slot the way Guitar Hero did.

[jesus666]

Also, I'm sorry, but the N64 was a major disappointment. Not only were most of the titles for it "kiddie,"

The N64 had a lot of faults, but i'm not sure It could be criticised for being too Kiddie, it was certainly the most adult orientated console they ever made.

Most kiddie was definately the SNES, there was so many content guidelines with that console that had to be followed that releasing anything adult was next to impossible

[BetaWolf47]

Releasing Wii before it was really ready. I'm not going to pull stuff out of my *** and say MotionPlus should've been there at launch... I did research and the actual technology that it uses was patented in 2008.

I'm just saying that they should've negotiated with software developers to have better games out. They made development kits so cheap that average Joes could buy them if they put their spending money aside for a few years. That's causing lamebrain developers to just make cheap cash-ins.

That, and they should've stepped back to think about how much flash memory to put in the system. A lot of us here have no problem spending money for a few WiiWare titles a month, so how could they expect 512MB, half of which is used for the firmware, to be sufficient? The SD card upgrade boosted the system a lot.

[youngamer]

Another bone to pick with the N64 is that their cartridges have no end labels. Why get rid of something so useful?!

[Chemdawg]

I actually bought some lame coil light that attached my original gba because it didn't have a lit screen. all i remember is I hated that coil light and it was super annoying to move around and made a nasty glare on the screen.

Probably been said already but the original GameBoy Advance's lack of lit lcd screen was a major brainfart on Nintendo's part.

[Sonicwolf]

I actually bought some lame coil light that attached my original gba because it didn't have a lit screen. all i remember is I hated that coil light and it was super annoying to move around and made a nasty glare on the screen.

I got the same damned thing. It was awful, sucks batteries dry and only lit a little patch of screen with added glare.

[sonic-boom]

Making the Virtual Boy, the N64 controller, not enough online games and cartridges for the N64.

[Rickstilwell1]

My problem with the N64 controller is not the feel or design. It's the way the thumbstick was manufactured. It is a cheap plastic twig that breaks down and wears out over time, losing its center position. even today I have still not seen a redesigned clone controller that uses the kind of thumbstick with a dome shaped base like the PS1 and even 3rd party PC controllers use. It's standard thumbstick technology. Come on Yobo, quit screwing around and actually fix the problem Nintendo started with this controller! Not keep it the same so everybody has to re-buy your 3rd party controllers when they break too! Or was that the idea? "Let's make flimsy thumbsticks so we make more money on controller sales"

So much fighting over who got to use which controller when friends came over. "It wasn't fair, I was using your worn out controller and you had the good one"

[Icarus Moonsight]

Stupidest thing Nintendo didn't do lately;

Give Factor 5 a big ol' moneyhat to scrap Lair and do Rogue Squadron IV instead.

Screw Rare, they don't make good games anymore. At least Factor 5 had a chance.

I think Nintendo 'fixed' the 64 controller through VC N64 titles on Wii, or through HBC and using a GC controller.

[FoxNtd]

Not all of these things I will come up with will be necessarily bad for them because some may have very well been profitable for them, but I will select ideas that piss me off (and probably others) regardless if it was outright stupid for Nintendo or not. That being said...

NES model 1 being a front-load lunchbox instead of a top-loader. Look at the Famicom model 1. Top-loader.

Changing the number of pins on the cartridges for the American version to 72 instead of keeping things at 60 pins like Famicom. Annoying physical region lockout is annoying but easy to beat; changing the hardware slot altogether is much more mean.

Going so many years without a backlight when Sega Game Gear had it, oh and GG had color right off the bat, too. When I was young I went with Sega because the display was much more brilliant unlike the original Game Boy. Trying to get the right amount and angle of light to see a GB screen correctly is horribly irritating.

Using those damn tiny hex screws. It's easy to get hex socket bits down to about 3/16" but 3.7mm, you don't see those laying around. It took me one minute to open my Genesis because Sega was courteous enough to use standard Phillips head screws and not piss me off. Some NES games actually did have standard screw heads, but not all of them.

Perpetuating the region lockout all these years. SNES had the tabs, N64 had the tabs, Gamecube needs to be modded or have custom software or something to be able to load a Japanese disc, and at least Wii is a bit easier since I am sure the homebrew software out there presents no issue loading Japanese discs. You guys want to not bring games over to the states? Fine, but let me play them if I choose to go out of my way to get them anyway. Stop making life harder. Is this a tactic to try to force sales of the import console to game importers? I still don't get the obsession with trying to stop us from doing this. At least SNES was basically an SFC inside the case and N64 (I think) was the same thing. (Actually, I don't know if N64 was the same. Please, someone confirm this.)

N64 games did not have sleeves. NES had sleeves. SNES had sleeves. At least there are those great plastic cases you can get that store a cart, a controller pak, and the manual lies nicely on top. Only problem here is you had to spend extra to better protect the games and no end-labels. I'm considering putting some kind of lettering on the spines of my cases because with over two rows of the cart contact view of the carts side by side, I can't have the entire library's order memorized and finding things is just annoying now. They did it right with NES and SNES, how did they screw it up here? (Also, did the Japanese carts EVER have covers of any kind? The only thing I've seen is that FDS diskettes come in some sort of sleeve or case. I don't have FDS games yet so I'm not sure.)

To those who mentioned Virtual Boy, I mention N64DD.

The memory cards at Gamecube launch were terrible. The capacity was far too low. I think the second generation had 4x capacity which was fair. Then later I believe they went beyond that one more time.

The Wii. Yes, the whole console itself. This one is a massive (extremist?) opinion so I'll try to illustrate it. It's like they completely abandoned their loyal fans and just want to get "non-gamers" into gaming with simple, fun activities. Ok, this seems to have worked. Really, really well. Sales are crazy. But so many games for us big gamer fans are most likely disappointed with the majority of the titles available. I tested this on myself by using a list of all games for Wii, including imports and games not yet released. I couldn't even pick a dozen total. I feel so disappointed that Wii is the only major Nintendo platform I do not have (strictly American consoles.) I'll get a Famicom/FDS later on but not a Wii. Maybe I'm crazy, but maybe I'm not, because Wii games for the most part are definitely different than what we used to have, and since a lot of us here surely have a ton from the NES/SNES era... I think I've made the point here.

Wii's hardware. You can go online, but only if you have wireless access. It does not come with an onboard Ethernet port. It does not come with an adapter to allow you to connect an Ethernet cable. You have to spend more money (a LOT more money) for a cheap piece of crap connector. The Wii is also inferior substantially to its competitors and to its own predecessor! Gamecube had basically no online support. Wii is not that much better. Hardly any titles implement online multiplayer. The only really good thing about Internet access is the VC/WiiWare stores. But of course the hardware had no real good amount of storage either, so you need to buy memory cards just to save this stuff. I've also read about how poorly designed some things are regarding their firmware point releases and backward compatibility with older Wii games that expect things to be a certain way as they were with older firmware versions. And did I forget to mention how the Wiimote responsiveness feels lagged and difficult to use with precision? Ugh. I haven't used the Motion Plus yet, but since most games do not implement it, it doesn't matter much. As said previously, seems like the Wiimote was released before it was designed correctly. This whole Motion Plus should never have happened, it should have been designed correctly the first time. Also the capabilities of the machine are not apparently much better than Gamecube. Wii feels like a Gamecube with motion sensitive controllers. I'd like to play Twilight Princess next to a Wii with a mirror to compare how much more detailed Wii is. I doubt it is since, besides being totally backwards, I can't tell them apart.

(Flipping Twilight Princess is a stupid thing in itself but since it's just one game and not something that plagues the entire platform, I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. Especially since you can play the Gamecube version on the Wii.) (By the way, one more game-centric annoyance. The wrong numbers of Final Fantasy because they skipped around when bringing them over here. At least after FF6 this nonsense was over, but hey, after FF6, they weren't Nintendo games anymore.)

We have a fourth generation DS coming now? How many times are they going to re-release the same platform? It's like they did it once, and didn't like it, so they redesign it a little and re-release, and repeat this over and over. Like mentioned before, why throw away useful functions like GBA compatibility? I also hear that the newer generations of DS have region lockout re-introduced. Just wonderful.

Not bringing over substantially significant games to other regions. Super Mario Bros. 2 comes to mind. Instead we got that SMB USA insult of a game. A slap in the face because we're too dumb to play something challenging apparently. Yet we got things like Battletoads and Zanac. (I can't be the only one who finds Zanac to be quite difficult to complete.) This also reminds me of regionally changed games like Megaman 2 adding in an easier difficulty option. Rockman 2 did not have this. If only they'd bring over almost everything (with very unusual games like very Japanese-culture centric silly things being forgivable to omit) then importing would be mainly a collector's value sort of thing and not also a necessity for those seeking out those wonderful experiences with everything we didn't get.

Now, did I miss anything?