The finest panel in video games covers Sony buying Kadokawa, relitigates what counts as games versus DLC, and brings you the exclusive reveal of the Nintendo Listo. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Ash Parrish, and Brandon Sheffield. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
1: Brandon, two years ago when Microsoft bought Blizzard Activision, you proposed something that would be really funny that Sony could do to retaliate. Do you remember what it was? (05:35)
3: Whatās the biggest gulf in difference between a gameās singleplayer and multiplayer modes, and whatās the biggest golf in video games? (21:17)
havenāt finished the episode but i already have dumb things to say:
a) i think the biggest golf game would be Everybodyās Golf cause a golf thatās for all 8 billion people has to be pretty big
b) The Nintendo Listo spanish name thing works with even one more layer cause other than ready ālistoā can also mean smart. so itās like your nintendo smart buddy.
Gah! I forgot to mention the smart aspect of listo! Not feeling very listo here
@esper correction! Iām not recommending hereās to you, though it is fine. Iām recommending the ballad of sacco and vanzetti.
Every time I rediscover this song it makes me tear up - it feels especially appropriate these days. Plus it is absolutely a song that only these two people could have put together.
OG Sonic 1 & 2 arenāt completely missing from the commercial ecosystem: you can still get them on Switch via Sega Ages, but I suspect thatās purely a consequence of the disconnect between SOJ and Sega IAās legacy initiatives. Sonic 3 & Knuckles had been missing for a good while before the audio-sanitised remaster, and I canāt imagine the original MJ-adjacent versions will ever be reissued.
Sega just pulled the same trick with Sonic Generations, incidentally: they pulled the OG to make way for the (not especially accurately ported) remaster, but they did technically keep it accessible via a new āSonic the Hedgehog Legacy Bundleāā¦ and then they announced that most of the games in that bundle are part of next monthās larger-scale delisting, so who knows how available they will continue to be in actuality.
I presume theyāre clearing the table to re-sell all this junk again; this is particularly disappointing when it comes to their Genesis catalogue, as those Steam versions were tacit just-take-the-ROMs-who-cares releases and I donāt want to see them replaced, if only because they set a benchmark that other catalogue owners and rent-seekers ought to follow.
There arenāt many games that share the exact confluence of āgenerally terribleā, āonly exists due to some licensing quirk or proximity to something people actually care aboutā and āgiven a second push due to someone misjudging irony as sincere demandā, but Iām gonna guess that LRG and any other limited-print publisher one might care to name is probably sitting on a dozen of em at this point.
Devilās Third might be the closest, actually: the tldr was that it was a big melee/shooter hybrid from a Japanese director with 3D action game pedigree that went through years of development hell, got picked up by Nintendo as a Wii U exclusive and was later condemned to a low-key release once Nintendo realised the Wii U was dead and that the work required to properly salvage the game would probably extend past the life of the hardware.
Part of the low-key release involved sublicensing the game to a smaller publisher in North America (an arrangement they never made public) but when people noticed the game on Nintendoās JP/EU release schedules but not NAās, they kicked up a stink about NOA once again neglecting a future classic, as had recently happened with Xenobladeāthe demand got so loud that NOA decided to claw back the rights from the other publisher (permanently damaging their working relationship, or so Iāve heard) and put the game out themselves after allā¦ but once impressions/footage started coming in from EU/JP players, the game suddenly became an online punching bag, and NOA ended up giving the game the smallest possible print run and zero marketing, purely in the hopes of sidestepping a blemish on their metacritic (which they got anyway, and then again via an Animal Crossing Amiibo non-game that reviewed even worse than Devilās Third).
Speaking of Esperanto in video games, there was a recent plot point in Reverse: 1999 that hinged on the idea that nobody would intuit that āla unua cirkloā means āthe first circleā.
Iāll have more extended thoughts later, but I just spent half of my commute today thinking, āHidden Palace Zone is accessible in Sonic 2 in Sonic Origins? How did I miss that?ā I have played through that collection a couple of times. I guess my habit of running the high route through Mystic Cave Act 2 (whose name, over thirty years later, finally makes some sense) made me miss it.
ETA: More extended thoughts:
One place where the FPS logic of led-by-the-nose singleplayer and wide-open multiplayer also comes up is in RPGs. Iām thinking Fire Emblem Awakening, where you can do a local multiplayer dual-attack that feels distinct from the main game, or Xenoblade Chronicles X, which had this sort of multiplayer that could be passive (do missions, compare to squad) or more active (doing missions with other human players).
On the DLC potentially getting a full game award, I have the game nerd answer and the marketing answer. Game nerd: yes, thatās DLC, and DLC is different. I basically agree with Brandonās answer that the distinction between an all new game and what I think of as an accumulative game (whether āliveā or āDLCā) should be recognized. But then marketing is also a factor: is selling āELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree Editionā enough that the expansion is being sold as a whole new game? If so, that would lead to weird things like Game of the Year editions potentially being considered for GOTY, which then could create a GOTY GOTY edition. So maybe marketing isnāt a sound way to go about answering this.
Iām still early in my listen, but I wanted to say that my 7 year old son has very recently been writing fan fiction based on the Cat Ninja book series.
Disclosure: I havenāt listened to the episode yet, but I have some thoughts on this.
I donāt care how things are marketed. I have my own ideas about what year a game came out. In my nerdly giant spreadsheet where I track every game Iāve played, I list the year for each entry as the first release year of a game. This goes for ports, remasters, enhanced editions, regional releases, etc. Remakes, however, are new games.
So for example, to me:
Persona 5 is a 2016 game (even though it wasnāt released in the west until 2017)
Persona 5 Royal is a 2016 game (enhanced edition of the 2016 original)
Persona 4 Golden is a 2008 game (enhanced port of the 2008 original)
Persona 3 Reload is a 2024 game (remake of the 2006 original)
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 is a 1993 game (an enhanced port of the 1993 SNES remake of the original 1988 game)
3 : Whatās the biggest gulf in difference between a gameās singleplayer and multiplayer modes, and whatās the biggest golf in video games? (21:17)
I havenāt played it, but one of the first things to come to mind for me is in Sonic & The Secret Rings, where the multiplayer mode is a whole Party game unrelated to the
an audio mistake just before the break has been corrected and timestamps adjusted, apologies to anyone who caught it. you may now consider this episode āpost-crisis.ā thanks!
To be clear, Iām not saying that marketing offers a better definition, nor am I arguing you change any of the ways you classify games in your nerdly giant spreadsheet (thatās awesome). But I do think the distinctions between new game and not-new game feel less useful in an awards context when there are expansions that provide such a substantive new experience that they deserve highlighting.
To take the āI donāt care how things are marketedā angle a different way, letās ignore that itās technically marketed as an expansion or DLC. All that is marketing and publishing. Is there still enough game there to be its own game? The claim - which I find credible and almost unique in games - is that this particular one does have enough game to be its own game. So, to the extent I care about The Game Awards (almost none) or other awards (some), Iām fine with Shadow of the Erdtree being in the running for GOTY.
If I were designing my own awards[1], I would probably designate the best new in 2024 (according to your criteria), best updated in 2024 (including live games, expansions, DLC, all that), and then an overall category that includes both new and updated. That way, no one style of releasing game is ultimately put over another.
