I have pre-ordered the neon Joy-Con version, and when I mentioned the possibility of major stock unavailability, my lovely partner pre-ordered the Zelda collector edition for my birthday! Woo. :D

I will reserve judgement on the NYC thing. I know I'm being pedantic, but clearly Nintendo isn't saying it's actually NYC in the canon.
I suspect that they will either label it as the Mushroom Kingdom (or part of it), or they will give it no name or it'll be some totally different locale.

In terms of Sonic, I largely agree with you. That's why I said that I don't think EAD will get it wrong; they are simply better game designers than Sonic Team were around the Sonic Adventure era. That said, my objection to the "real world" aesthetic in Sonic wasn't mechanical per se, it was thematic - it just didn't remotely match the world that Sonic had inhabited for his entire history. I wanted to see something akin to the anime FMV sequence from Sonic CD realised as a large 3D world.

In any case, we've seen a brief snippet of footage. The proof will be in the playing. One thing I'm really happy about is the huge variety of locales we've seen in the footage so far - I think that suggests good things for the final game.

Hate is such a strong word. Have you met the man?

All I can say is, when I saw this report I instantly pre-ordered here at EB Games in Australia. I want one at launch, and I'm not sure how frequent shipments will be post-launch.

Originally I was planning to get one when I visit the U.S. in June, but I figure I might as well just get one at launch (not that I needed much convincing). :-)

Don't let the fans deter you. You have to put aside the fans and focus on the actual games. When you do that, you'll find that every major platform has something wonderful to offer. :-)

The thing with new Mario games is that you never know what you're going to get. Naysayers like to talk about Mario being "recycled" all the time, but this couldn't be further from the truth when you consider the main games in the series - Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy were wildly different and innovative experiences.

Much as I adored the Super Mario Galaxy games, I was hoping to see a new Mario that fits more closely to the Super Mario 64 mould - that is, a game set in the Mushroom Kingdom, where you explore a large world full of different environments.

Super Mario Odyssey is a return to that general format, which I appreciate. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the Mushroom Kingdom looking so much like NYC...I was hoping for the Mushroom Kingdom that we see in other Mario games. It feels weird and jarring, and almost a Sonic Adventure style bungle.

That said, this is EAD, and I have every confidence that they won't bungle this aspect. Honestly though, we'll just have to see how it all comes together. I'm excited to play it, and I'm looking forward to something refreshing.

I'd argue the 8th gen isn't over.

I don't, really. I mean, I already have a PS4 and an Xbox One. These are both awesome consoles, but they're also both fairly "traditional" - there's plenty of room for something else out there to push the boundaries.

When I watched the Switch presentation, I wasn't bored; I was excited. The Joy-Con are incredibly high-tech controllers, and the way they integrate with the tablet is awesome. I was actually surprised by just how far they had pushed the concept. It felt like a breath of fresh air.

And that last sentence is what I'm looking for: breath of fresh air. I don't want another PlayStation or Xbox. As I said, there are already two of those. When I want a more traditional experience, I'll just jump over to one of those consoles.

I want to see companies pushing hard at innovation, and really challenging the boundaries of how we think about video games. I want companies to surprise and delight me, and to show me things that I didn't even know I wanted, because I couldn't imagine them before. Nintendo very much occupy that space for me, and to a degree, they always have (even the N64's controller was highly controversial when it was first unveiled).

Well, Phil was appointed in March of 2014 and the announcement happened in May of that year. There had been reports from August the previous year - from Phil Harrison no less - that Microsoft had "absolutely no plans" to release without Kinect. So, the decision clearly happened very quickly and the announcement was made a good couple of months after Phil was appointed (source,source).

You're right that there were some decisions made prior to launch (like killing the always online element, which was clearly a last-minute panic move in response to Sony). But that's neither here nor there.

I'm not seeing a strong argument here. The evidence suggests that the Xbox team under Phil's leadership acted fairly quickly to correct course on the ongoing Xbox One trainwreck that had been initiated at the unveiling of the platform.

Certainly, as I said earlier, we could always have more exclusives and so on - that's something which can be argued regardless of who is in charge. The decision to spread Xbox content across multiple platforms is not solely Phil's responsibility, either; it was a strategic direction announced by Satya Nadella, and I'm not sure that it's inherently a bad move anyway.

This is not to say - even remotely - that Phil is perfect and can do no wrong. Not at all. I just think it worth pushing back on the emotional kneejerk stuff. Remember there's a hell of a lot we don't know, which makes it hard for us to be the hanging judge here. I mean, why were those games cancelled? Do you know? Did you read an interview about it which explained the behind-the-scenes stuff? You can't possibly say it's all the responsibility of Phil Spencer, when there are numerous stakeholders involved.

By the way, lest I be accused of some sort of bias here - I've done similar pushbacks around mob-with-pitchforks attacks on other individuals in the industry (most recently, Shigeru Miyamoto). I always urge people to exercise caution, and to consider the issue more deeply without having a purely emotional reaction. :-)

@Vatusus: What cinematic moments do people hate though? I mean, if you're talking about games that have "in-game" cut scenes then there are a million ways this can be handled. I think what Half-Life 2 nailed was that the gameplay had an ebb-and-flow, which was perfectly balanced (intense action -> story moment -> exploration -> intense action -> story moment, etc...)

Some games do this really well, others don't. And everyone's appetites are different.

I mean, there are people who really love the cut-scenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 - but at times I found myself laughing out loud at the game because I was getting interrupted so frequently that I felt like I was watching more than playing many sequences. It wasn't just the interruptions though, it was the fact that you weren't actively doing anything during those moments (unlike other games where the characters might be talking, but you're still moving around in the world and controlling the action, for example).