Nintendo used to be one of the best racing game developers and publishers in the business! This was true for several decades... and then came the current generation, and Nintendo abruptly abandoned everything other than kart racing games. In volume Nintendo's racing game library was its largest on the N64, but the Gamecube and Wii both had some great games to partially make up for the lesser number of titles in total. On handhelds the Game Boy Advance has the most racing games from Nintendo; other handhelds all have only a few each, though the 3DS is the only one with nothing but Mario Kart and a NES remake, unsurprisingly. It's the same on the Wii, only Mario Kart and NES Excitebike stuff in NES Remix. It was too bad that Nintendo had fewer racing games on GC than N64, but at least the top ones were still great. On the Wii the games were still good, again, but sadly F-Zero, Wave Race, and 1080 all permanently (so far) vanished. Excite did return with three quality titles, though, which was great.
But then came the current generation, and so far at least, there has been nothing but Mario Kart. It's horrible! Yes, I know that the Mario Kart games now are some of Nintendo's best-selling games, but I don't think that games like Wave Race or F-Zero compete with Mario Kart for sales! They're completely different, and just as great -- or better, in the case of F-Zero -- things. There is a rumor that Nintendo might be working on a new Diddy Kong Racing game, but that's another kart racer of course, and would not fix this issue on its own.
I hope Nintendo reverses this soon, because we need Nintendo racing games again beyond just the kart racers. I mean, I like Mario Kart a lot, but I like Wave Race or F-Zero more.
Here's a list of Nintendo-published racing games, to show what I mean. Kart racers bolded. Games are first-party (developed by wholly owned Nintendo teams) unless noted with a 'second party' (partially owned teams, ie Rare or Left Field) or 'third party' (outside studios contracted to make a game for Nintendo, or making a game Nintendo exclusively published).
Arcade
--
Vs. Excitebike
Vs. Mach Rider
F-Zero AX (third party developed) Mario Kart Arcade GP (third party developed) Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 (third party developed) Mario Kart Arcade GP DX (third party developed)
All three Cruis'n arcade games were also licensed by Nintendo, who owned (or owns?) rights to the Cruis'n name.
NES
--
Mach Rider (J version supports Famicom Basic Keyboard + Famicom Data Recorder for saving custom track data)
Excitebike (J version supports Famicom Basic Keyboard + Famicom Data Recorder for saving custom track data)
R.C. Pro-Am (third party developed)
F1 Race (J only)
Slalom (third party developed)
Nintendo also published the third-party game Rad Racer in the US and Europe, but not the original Japanese release.
Famicom Disk System (J only)
--
Famicom Grand Prix: F1 Race (not the same as the Famicom cart game)
Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally (supports Famicom 3D System 3d shutter glasses)
Vs. Excitebike
Game Boy
--
F-1 Race
Super R.C. Pro-Am (third party developed)
Wave Race
Nintendo also published the third-party game Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing in Europe, but not the later US release.
SNES
--
F-Zero Super Mario Kart
Stunt Race FX (third party developed)
Uniracers (third party developed)
Mini Yonku Let's & Go!! Power WGP 2 (J) (this is sort of a "racing" game, maybe)
Nintendo also published the third-party game Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing in Europe, though not in other regions (it was first published in Japan.)
Virtual Boy
--
None, but one, Zero Racers, was near-completion when cancelled
SNES Satellaview (J only)
--
BS F-Zero (port of the original SNES game, separated into three parts by cup)
BS F-Zero Ace Cup (new cup with new cars)
BS Excitebike Bunbun Mario Battle Stadium (in four parts)
N64
--
Cruis'n USA (third party developed)
Wave Race 64 Mario Kart 64 Diddy Kong Racing (second party developed)
1080 Degrees Snowboarding
Cruis'n World (third party developed)
F-Zero X
Ridge Racer 64
Excitebike 64 (second party developed) (supports the Expansion Pak) Mickey's Racing USA (second party developed)
Star Wars Episode I Racer (third party developed and published, supports Expansion Pak) was exclusively distributed by Nintendo, though Lucasarts did technically publish the game. Nintendo also released a system bundle with the game and an N64 in the US.
Nintendo also published the third-party game F-1 World Grand Prix in Europe in Japan (though not the US, where it released first), and published the Europe-exclusive N64 version of F-1 World Grand Prix II as well, though the game was published by other publishers on other platforms. Cruis'n Exotica was also licensed by Nintendo since they own the IP rights, though Midway self-published the game.
Game Boy Color
--
Mickey's Racing Challenge (second party developed)
Star Wars Episode I Racer (third party developed)
Mickey's Racing USA (second party developed)
[The two Mickey's Racing games are kart racers in theme, but in gameplay they're probably as much or more R.C. Pro-Am as they are Mario Kart, so I don't know if they should really be bolded or not...)
Nintendo 64DD (J only)
--
F-Zero X Expansion Kit (requires a J copy of F-Zero X for the N64)
Game Boy Advance
--
F-Zero: Maximum Velocity (third party developed) Mario Kart: Super Circuit
F-Zero: GP Legend (third party developed)
F-Zero Climax (J only) (third party developed)
Bit Generations: Dotstream (J only) (third party developed)
Classic NES Series: Excitebike
E-Reader Excitebike (cards for E-Reader card-reader accessory)
Nintendo also published Top Gear Rally in the US and maybe Europe, but not the original Japanese version. Also Cruis'n Velocity was licensed by Nintendo since they own the IP rights..
Gamecube
--
Wave Race: Blue Storm Mario Kart: Double Dash!!
Kirby's Air Ride
F-Zero GX (third party developed)
1080 Avalanche
Nintendo DS
-- Mario Kart DS
Pokemon Dash (second? party) Diddy Kong Racing DS (third party developed)
Wii
--
Excite Truck (third party developed)
Donkey Kong: Barrel Blast (third party developed) Mario Kart Wii
Excitebots: Trick Racing (third party developed)
Wii Sports Resort (jetski minigame, particularly)
Excitebike World Rally (WiiWare Shop Exclusive)
Art Style: light trax (third party developed) (WiiWare Shop Exclusive) (a followup to Dotstream on the GBA)
Virtual Console: Excitebike (NES), Mach Rider (NES), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario Kart (SNES), Mario Kart 64 (N64), F-Zero X (N64), Cruis'n USA (N64), Wave Race 64 (N64)
Also Cruis'n was licensed by Nintendo since they own the IP rights.
DSi
--
Crash-Course Domo (third party developed) (DSiWare Shop Exclusive)
White-Water Domo (third party developed) (DSiWare Shop Exclusive)
3DS
-- Mario Kart 7
3D Excitebike (A port of the NES original but with 3d layers added to enhance the graphics)
Virtual Console: F-Zero: Maximum Velocity (GBA), Mario Kart: Super Circuit (GBA), Mach Rider (NES)
Wii U
-- Mario Kart 8
NES Remix (Excitebike remix stages only)
Virtual Console: F-Zero: Maximum Velocity (GBA), Mach Rider (NES; U only so far), Excitebike (NES), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario Kart (SNES)
Is anything missing?
Mario Kart is one of the great racing game series for sure, but F-Zero is my favorite Nintendo racing game franchise. F-Zero, F-Zero X, and F-Zero GX are all incredibly, incredibly great, some of the best racing games ever made. Wave Race 64 and Excitebike 64 are right up there near them. Other things, like Excite Truck and Excitebots, Wave Race: Blue Storm and 1080 Avalanche, Uniracers, R.C. Pro-Am, and more are also great fun games. From the SNES on, the games on the list above are consistently among the better non-sim racing games of their generations, and as I don't like sim racers, they're consistently among my favorites. And we've gone from that, to... nothing but Mario Kart and NES Excitebike re-releases. Argh! It's quite sad, and I hope this changes, soon! This E3 was great for Nintendo, but seeing Nintendo announce not one single racing game, with none currently announced either, was the one downside to an otherwise great show. If that DKR sequel rumor is true I'm sure it'll be fun, but Nintendo needs to go back to making racing games beyond just their successful kart racers! Other publishers just don't always make the kinds of games Nintendo has, and their absence is noted. Losing Wave Race, 1080, and F-Zero on the Wii was bad enough, but this is exponentially worse.
Good to see Captain Falcon returns, as well as a smattering of new Fire Emblem characters, who aren't necessarily clones! "Robin" is in there, and if you were one who picked "female" Robin, fear not! She's in there too, they just picked the male version for the video...
Anyway, still good stuff, and the varied costume options are nice too! (I confirmed via the smash tourney video that female Villager is selectable skin, so all's well there).
Hideo recently went on-record saying he hopes Sakurai puts Snake in this version too, but well, there's no telling at this point. I'm also still waiting for the Ice Climbers, Game & Watch (the "Mr" was never necessary), Ness/Lucas, Wario, Metaknight, Jigglypuff, and ROB. Those all at least count as the "unique" characters I'd like to see (ones that aren't clones), but there's just so MANY that it seems very likely that many of them got the boot this time around. A shame, but since one of my friends is a diehard Ness player (Lucas this time around), I'm hoping that fellow gets in. I'd say Ness and Jiggly are the most likely, as up until now the "original cast" have always made the cut in the games.
Other than that, there's brand new characters they have to pick from as well. There's Tempo from Gamefreak's own "HarmoKnight" game (surprisingly fun little rhythm "runner" style platformer). There's also Dillon the cowboy armadillo who never says a word and wears a permanent scowl from his own series of weird action/tower defense games (pretty enjoyable too). There's also whoever these characters are from the upcoming Splatoon. In other words, there's plenty to pick from from Nintendo's newer IPs that could finish out this roster.
As for third party, I still hold out some hopes for Simon Belmont to complete a "Captain N team" for us. That'd be sweeeet. (I also would love to see King Graham in there, but let's face facts, that's about as long a long shot as one can hope for, the sort that Japan in general isn't even slightly aware of. Still, I think he'd work great as a character with a wide assortment of unique items.)
This exists. Someone decided to make a comic sequel to the SMB movie... They actually got some people from the movie to help with the story. I'm... not really sure what to think here.
Here is a review of 3 tapes. This video starts with the third, a weird Japanese tape that starts out just... Japan odd, then goes into a diatribe about the evils of evolution, abortion, and bar code scanners. (Yes, bar code scanners. Back in the 70's and some of the 80's, Christian groups were terrified that "bar codes" were related to the "mark of the beast".)
Nintendo's recent strategy of "turning our things into other things" still hasn't grown old, so we've got new Kirby Rainbow Curse with the power of claymation (and also some Canvas Curse mechanics). Yoshi went all wooly, and it looks pretty fun there.
I read some articles and watched direct trailers, because when I watched their "direct", I got a face full of Reggie and Robot Chicken combined. It's like they specifically engineered that to annoy me personally, so no thanks to that. (I still don't get why people actually like Robot Chicken.)
However, some news. Another god descends to earth as Palutena has joined Smash Bros. Also, Mii. This is good, great even, though I still would like one minor cosmetic option in the form of female Villager. Still no sign of Snake... He's kept us waiting, huh?
Bayonetta 2 seems to include some Zelda cameos, as well as, well, the entire first game. Never played the first one, so I just might pick this one up.
Nintendo is going back to their roots and are making toys again, namely ripoffs of Skylanders (just like Disney Infinity) in the form of figurines you buy in the real world to net in-game rewards. Frankly, considering that in ALL those cases, the "toys" are motionless figurines that don't actually DO anything, it really just feels like a (surprisingly successful) rip off. Why can't those things just... be IN the game? I did BUY it after all, stop making me buy stuff just to "unlock" content that's already there! Sorry, I've got a fundamental issue with the way these toy/game hybrid products function. It'd be better if it worked the other way around. The toys were mechanical, say, and the games could "control" the toys via instruction sets. That seems more fair and frankly more fun.
Another Xenoblade game, and it looks interesting. But it has a "Xeno" in the title so Weltall hates it :D. I dunno, maybe it'll be good, but Weltall's got one thing right. It's a cryin' shame that so many developers end up having to abandon entire universes they made when they leave a company, only to rip themselves off by making a slightly different version of the same universe and essentially "rebooting" those series. Sure, I'll get Mighty Number 9, but it'll take a good long while before that series "catches up" to the vast universe that exists around Megaman at this point, and all the while it'll still feel like retreading old ground, never really feel like "the real thing" all while the original still sits, gathering dust, begging to actually get the story finished.
So other than that, there's a new Mario game that lets you design your own Mario levels. Hackers have made similar tools for years, but this'll be designed from the ground up so everyone can more easily do it no matter their skill level. While the level creator lets one use the visual style of either Super Mario Bros or New Super Mario Bros, it appears as though it is still limited entirely to original Super Mario Bros.' items, enemies, and physics. It looks potentially fun, but something using a later game's far more vast reserves of different "stuff" would have been preferred.
As for new properties, I'm looking forward to this new paintball squid battle game. You shoot the enemy, you paint the enemy, you paint everything else, you turn into a squid and "swim" through your paint. I'm sold.
There's rumors about a new Star Fox floating around, but nothing concrete. More notable, the next Zelda is going even more towards the "open ended" approach than Link Between Worlds did. They've made it clear that areas will still be locked off here and there, but in all cases it'll only be due to missing the right items or abilities, never because a lion shaped boat told you you can't go there yet. Good, that's the sort of open ended thing that brings Zelda back to its roots.
All in all, very enticing bunch of upcoming Nintendo games, and I'm looking forward to most of it.
Actually, the game announcements from the other 2 (Nintendo's Big Red, so Microsoft gets green and Sony gets blue, we got our primary colors accounted for) weren't bad either. A lot of the others were cross-console (many of them also on PC) but there's a few interesting ones. I'm actually really looking forward to Phantom Pain. Yes, we all know the big issues Metal Gear games have, and Ground Zeroes was WAY too short even for the reduced price, but if they keep the cinematic down to a reasonable length as in Ground Zeroes and earlier Metal Gear games, an open world Metal Gear could really be amazing.
More specifically, I have to give major credit to MS. They did what they needed to do between last year and this year and undid all those terrible choices they made with the XBox One, bit by bit. The current XBox One is actually something worth getting, and while we certainly need to keep our eyes on MS so they don't try to pull those same stunts in the future, I gotta give them credit for the change, even if that change was out of self preserving panic. About the only thing wrong with the XBox One at this point is the lack of a built in way to replace the hard drive. One can "extend" it, and that's good (though even USB 3.0 won't be as fast as a straight internal SATA connection), but without a means to replace it, it's as vulnerable to failure in the future as the drive in my original XBox. Yes, that goes for Nintendo's internal memory as well, but flash is still more reliable in terms of no moving parts to fail (it will of course inevitably die, but that's many many rewrite cycles from now).
All in all, the big thing about this E3 was that they actually focused on games that I actually want to play. Oh, I think there may have been a FPS game or two there as well. I've grown a bit weary of that genre as of late. I miss Perfect Dark.
I was never too impressed with the surprisingly lax standards of a turing test to begin with. I always thought some more rigor in the form of providing some intelligent questions for test takers to ask should be required.
Namely, if this chat bot is intended to be self aware AI, then it fails completely. If all it was meant to do was fool some test takers about 30% of the time, I have to ask what the point of chat bots aiming for such low hanging fruit is supposed to be.
Here's the crux of the matter. I have been able to fool every single chat bot I've ever come across with a ridiculously simple question: "What were we just talking about?". Eugene is, essentially, designed in the same way as every other chat bot out there. As I read on it, the only unique tricks were lowering the expectations of test takers by purposefully emulating a foreign 13 year old (one from the Ukraine that apparently can't answer basic questions about what happened last month IN the Ukraine). The problem is that every single chat bot programmer is stuck in the "Chinese box" notion of how to design a chat bot. Namely, they try to build the biggest database of responses they can (either themselves or trying to build one from user input ala the Alice chatbot) and then, if ONLY that database is big enough, it'll be able to pass for human. If only! Except, it's trying to build "perfect" responses to one-off inputs, ignoring the critical notion of CONTEXT. It doesn't matter if the "learning" AI is only "learning" which response to use for one specific input, because a "good" response to MOST input in a real world conversation changes moment by moment based on the situation. In a word: Context! If I ask "how are you doing today?" no SINGLE response will do, your response is determined by a multitude of events during that day and your current state. The same could be said for something as simple as "How's the weather?" or "Have you eaten?". However, no matter what tricks you set up for those SPECIFIC questions (often they'll set up a special exception for weather questions to check sites like weather.gov to determine a response, which by making such an exception is a tacit acknowledgement that their whole general strategy is flawed), the one question they can never find a "trick" to work around is a basic question about what you and the AI were JUST talking about. No specific response, short of actually making a competent chat program that can understand context, is going to fool such a question. The best they could hope for is to treat such questions with a special exception that just regurgitates whatever the AI stated last, but even that will be broken in certain series of strings.
In short, I've lost a lot of interest in the field of chat bots because programmers can't seem to get past the whole "build a bigger database" paradigm they're all stuck in.
Pretty good stuff. Too bad it's not real. :)