So if you accept that the Wii U is Nintendo’s system for the foreseeable future, and that the system itself is not going to make any major changes, you considerably narrow down the list of problems that Nintendo can conceivably address in order to improve their console market standing.
Remember in the beginning of the 32-bit days when controllers simply weren’t designed for 3D cameras? You’d have games that mapped up and down viewing to the triggers, and the only way to rotate the camera was to turn your character in the right direction and manually recenter things with a button press. There were a lot of experiments, some better than others, but none held a candle to the introduction of twin-stick controllers. VR FPS is in the same state right now, and while there’s a lot of interest in getting to the twin-stick equivalent of whatever the solution ends up being, it’s not there yet. Minecraft deals with the motion sickness problem by breaking the immersion during rotation, but as long-term solutions go it feels like sticking the up/down view on the shoulder buttons. It may be graceless and awkward, but at least it gets the job done. Creating a workable free-roaming FPS viewpoint in VR is still an ongoing task, though, so until a better solution is found this will do
Monsters from many games in the series will make an appearance, as will many location names from other games. Specific hero characters from other games will not make an appearance, but there are plenty of reference to other Dragon Quest games that should make long time fans smile.
Minecraft on the Wii U is not the answer to all of the system’s problems. What it would be, though, is an almost guaranteed financial success that would serve as a loud and clear symbol that Nintendo is not only aware of the complaints against it, but are ready to start taking actions to remedy them. Instead, its continued absence serves as yet another cause for fans to invoke a phrase that’s becoming all too common, and increasingly disheartening:
Those who enjoyed being thrown straight in at the deep end in Don’t Starve Together will likely have a lot of fun with Raft . They’ll begin their playthrough with nothing but a single scrap of wood, but will eventually find the materials and resources needed to expand that lonely plank into the game’s titular raft. Well, they will if they can survive for long enough to find what they need, any
Still, it is the girl that Nintendo has brought to the dance. As such, it’s highly unlikely they will be replacing it with an entirely new console anytime soon. After all, they’re not a company on the verge of bankruptcy whose entire future relies on the Wii U becoming the dominant selling system. Not to mention that the 3DS is actually doing quite well, giving them a hardware buoy should they need it.
This has been gone over in many other articles, but the short version is that what the player sees in VR is strong enough to trigger an instinctual expectation of motion that, when the body doesn’t feel it, causes a nausea reaction. You’re seeing something that the brain knows is wrong based on physical feedback; the most likely cause based on data from the last several million years of evolution is some kind of ingested toxin, so systems get purged to remove the poisons from the body as fast as possible. Personally I just get a nasty headach and woozy feeling, but other people need an emergency bucket available. The cost/benefit ratio to FPS VR is completely off, no matter how cool it seems before the reaction kicks in. At this point I’ve learned the best thing to do with a VR FPS is to poke in for no more than two to three minutes to get a sense of the environment, and then switch back to the monitor and never use the headset for it again.
The game shares quite a few similarities with No Man’s Sky in terms of its core mechanics, but where the latter chooses to focus on providing an endless sandbox for players to explore, Space Engineers instead devotes itself to giving its players a first-class multiplayer experience. Whether or not it truly succeeds in this regard is debatable, but it’s hard to argue that what it does provide isn’t both unique and enjoyab
The Classic Control is what you’d normally put up with in a standard FPS, where head movement moves the view and body orientation is controlled smoothly by the right stick or mouse. This is the heart of the VR FPS problem, because while moving forward, back, and strafing isn’t much of an issue, turning the view without moving your body is when bad things start to happen at the base of your lizard brain. Even in a blocky Minecraft world the sense of Real is too strong, and while you know you’re playing a game the part that keeps things like your heart pumping and lungs breathing without conscious thought hasn’t the slightest idea what’s wrong. The trick is to break the idea of Real, and this is where the special VR Control mode comes into play.
