Be Excellent To Each Other

Donkey Kong Kong Country Tropical Freeze is released on Friday at which point all other gaming priorities are rescinded.

I'm going to buy it on cartridge because the boxes are small and cute and the cartridges are even smaller and cuter, and putting a cartridge into a console feels right whereas putting a disc into it doesn't.

Also as a protest at how FUCKING SHIT the eShop is and the fact it costs exactly the same on cartridge.

Plus I think it's a 'play through once game' so I'll have something to trade in afterwards. (I never touched it again on Wii-U once I'd 100% completed it. Also, a couple of my chums have Switches and we've already started lending each other cartridges.)

What an absolute joy it is to play through DKCTF again, although the 'K' levels - (one per world, unlocked when you collect every K-O-N-G letter in every other level in the world) - are as teeth-gnashingly tough as I remember them being.

It looks and sounds almost impossibly gorgeous, just as the Wii-U version did. The bump to 1080p certainly helps (especially since I'm playing on a 55 inch screen now instead of a 40 inch screen), but fundamentally this is the same game as the Wii-U version. (Although they have added a new 'Funky' mode which is like an Easy Mode for those who don't necessarily fancy the sometimes ruthless challenge of normal mode. I can't comment on that as I haven't tried it.)

Total must-have for the console IMO, unless you don't like Donkey Kong Country games because you're a weirdo.

I hate how they control.

On the ones versions at least i agree with lewie. would love to have a demo for this for the first two levels to see if it clicks..

I've got it and man is it hard! It is brilliant though. An absolutely sublime platform experience.

He's a big monkey! He has inertia!



Have you done a 'K' level yet? No checkpoints, you have to do it all in one run. If you die, back to the start

You'll need a paid subscription to save your Switch games.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018 ... your-saves

It's hard to like Nintendo sometimes.

Nintendo can be some greedy, backwards morons at times. Still, no worries - I'll just use whatever free Switch hack is available to backup my save games locally, I'm sure a suitable hack will be made available soon.

Cloud storage infrastructure is expensive. I think that’s unfair.

PS4 owners have to pay for it too (it's part of PS+). I suspect the same is true for Xbox.

If there was a choice to backup to local storage (SD card or USB device) then I'd agree, however all that Switch owners will have is the ability to PAY for cloud storage for their precious save data, or nothing at all. That to me is very unfair.

Look at the PS4 for example - you can pay for Sony's online service to use cloud storage, but at least there is also the free option to backup locally. With the Switch there is no such option. Now THAT is what I call UNFAIR.

But at least with the PS4 and Xbox One you can also backup locally, for free.

For example:

http://www.babyusb.com/Help/save-ps4-xb ... -usb-drive

That's the whole point here.

The current situation is if your Switch dies, your saves go with it, which is clearly total horseshit. There is no local save functionality. (Despite the Switch having an SD card slot and two USB slots, and natively supporting, for example, the ability to save your screenshots to a USB stick.)

Under the new regime, you get cloud save functionality if you pay for it. There will still be no local save functionality.

(Cloud saves are free on XBox One and Steam, off the top of my head, and the PS4 supports local save if you don't want to pay for cloud.)

Oh yes in other Switch news the Pro Controller ('XBox 360 pad') is much better than the standard pad.

At £59.99 it's stupidly expensive and the battery is built into it (a USB-C cable is supplied to charge it with), I'd rather just put AAs into it as required as they can be replaced indefinitely unlike the one that's in there which will degrade over time.

That said, it's massively nicer to use than the standard arrangement which is very clever and all, but it ain't no proper gamepad.

No other console has ever locked save backups behind a paywall.

I don't have a problem with them charging for cloud saves, but they should also let you do you own local saves at no extra cost.

Edit: Cloud saves are free on Xbox, Steam, GOG, Ubiplay, Origin, Android and iOS.

Did anyone ever back up saved games before consoles/PCs were online? I know I never did.

I always did with the PC.

Also, on older consoles (we're going back a bit here) when games were stored on cartridges, each save-supporting game stored the save data on the cartridge, so if you lost the cartridge or the save was damaged you only lost the save for that game. With modern consoles (Switch included) all of the save data is all stored on the console, so making save game backup essential (and not solely locked behind a paywall).

I usually kept my Saturn saves on both the onboard storage and on my memory card.

And there is a sentence in the release ‘no games under the vc banner’ which makes me wonder if that just means they are going to put super mario Sunshine just as a separate game. Or i should look for a gc copy.

I wish I'd known more about the Mega CD RAM cartridge when I had a Mega CD first time round. Games like Eye of the Beholder used ALL of the Mega CD's available storage to save one game, meaning everything else had to go.

Since then, I've not really needed backups for saved games. I did want to back up my Bejeweled 2 game on the 360 when I was gunning for the Endless Mode achievement as I was convinced I'd accidentally quit without saving which wipes any progress (it takes 100-300 hours to get the achievement) and unfortunately they blocked copying of that saved game anyway.

I had backup solutions for the PlayStation, PS2 and Dreamcast, but I think they were more of an "infinite number of memory cards" thing, rather than a backup thing.

I used to back up things like Harvest Moon and Animsl Crossing because there were lives going on there.

Yeah animal crossing would feel really terrible for that reason/.. (for other games i don't really care that much.. but maybe because never really have had a console get broke..knocks wood)

Could you summarise?

I've not watched it, but I'm guessing:

Nintendo users are annoyed that they cannot back up their saves unless they subscribe to the online service.

That's about the size of it.

It really is a dirtbag move though. It'd be no problem whatsoever if they allowed you to save your games to a local storage device, but it's £20 per year for the cloud saves, or nothing at all.

So what was the point of the video? We already knew that!

Why not watch the video? It's well argued and worth 7 minutes and 20 seconds of your time.

Yes, I didn't link the video for no reason at all, I like the guy who does that channel, he keeps his videos fairly short and snappy and offers some decent insights into what's going on in the world of gaming. It's almost a sort of 'daily videogame news bulletin' with some opinion and commentary.

That’s seven minutes and ten seconds longer than it takes to read this:

But that doesn't cover it at all.

I'm sorry that my post did not meet the expected high standards of the BEEX Quality Police, and will endeavour to do better in future.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to improve going forward from this low point of my life, and for helping to make BEEX such a pleasant, friendly, and inclusive environment.

Its continuing success in attracting new members, and retaining existing members as active participants speaks for itself.

New members are for the birds. I already have enough friends.

Beex is forever. Beex is eternal.

Beek is for right now. Got some?

We had a new member offer us informative insights into Windows 10 just a couple of days ago.

We'll have to agree to disagree.

Zelda hearts have burned into my tv screen:



Probably my own fault for leaving it on too long (without dimming - e.g. waiting for the weather to change!).

Tried running the "Clear Panel Noise" option a few times, to no avail.

I've got an extended warranty with Domestic & General, but it says the plan does not include "image retention on LCD screens, plasma or projection TV screens". Gave them a call to ask, as my tv is none of those (OLED), does that mean it is included after all? They don't know, but are sending an engineer to take a look anyway.

To be honest, I can't get too upset if they tell me to bugger off. As I say, probably my own fault, and it only really shows up when there's an area of solid bright red in the top left corner, which isn't that often. Expensive tv, mind, and I'd certainly advise against believe LG, when they tell you image retention isn't really anything to worry about with OLED TVs.

Yeah, I thought screen burn-in was a thing of the past until I borrowed my mate's old Galaxy S7 (also an OLED screen) at one point and noticed that the fucking Facebook navbar was burnt into the top of the screen.

Yeah, who has time for youtube videos, eh?

I don’t think many (if any) screen technologies are immune yet. I had a Dell LCD monitor about ten years ago that ended up with ghosts of various Windows icons burned in.

Not me when it's basically arguing the same obvious point I already broadly agree with.

This thread has gone to shit. Time to unsubscribe I guess.

Thanks for contributing

OLEDs don’t suffer from the same kind of burn-in as other TV technologies, but they do something else, and it’s what I think has happened here. They’re made up of a very large number of sub-pixel cells, each containing an organic light-emitting substance that illuminates when an electric current is passed through it. They use a different substance for each of the RGB sub-pixels. These substances have a finite life span — they slowly break down over time as they are lit up, so gradually (typically over thousands of hours) they get dimmer.

I think you’ve run Zelda enough that the red pixels in the parts of your screen where the hearts are have taken a battering and started to noticeably dim. That’s why the heart area in your screenshot looks darker than the surrounding red area. On normal TV playback, all the different sub pixels are being worn out at the same rate, and you just get an imperceptible drop in brightness over a few years. But here you’ve displayed the exact same data (the game’s UI) for a very long amount of time and the wear is concentrated to that one specific area.

Phones with OLED displays usually subtly shift their persistent UI around by a few pixels eg. if there’s a clock shown on the lock screen. Again, this is about spreading the wear caused by that image over a larger area of screen.

There’s no fix for this, I’m afraid. It’s not like some forms of plasma or LCD retention that can be cleared with test patterns, because it’s actually a minor amount of damage to the screen itself.

Nice explanation Doc! That makes perfect sense.

Aye, that's more or less what I figured. I still think what LG say on their site (strongly hinting that any damage is repairable) is a tad misleading. My tv has built-in pixel shifting, but obviously that hasn't helped (or maybe it would be even worse had that not been enabled).

I'm guessing the engineer (who hopefully is coming Tuesday, but didn't call to confirm...) will tell me a less-articulate version of what you said, Doc. The question then is whether Domestic & General feel like buying me a new tv. I'm guessing not, but c'est la vie. (It'll be interesting to hear them arguing that, for the purpose of their exclusion, "LCD screens, plasma or projection TV screens" implies "oh, or OLED screens", though.)

(And, to be fair, we did indeed play Zelda for a hell of a long time!)

(And it's still a bloody lovely tv, occasionally-visible dim hearts or not!)

It just looks like you love that show, or menu, or whatever it is in the box with the red header