Feature Articles
Saturday28th Jan 2023
Talking Point What Are You Playing This Weekend? (January 28th)
Shaken not stirred
Well here we are folks. It's the final week of January and we have had our first big Nintendo release of the year. Consider 2023 to be well and truly underway! This week at Nintendo Life, we got all kinds of excited for the eventual release of GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo Switch Online N64 library and suggested a quick fix for...
Thursday29th Dec 2022
Feature 25 Years Of GoldenEye 007 - 25 Facts You Didn't Know (Or Forgot You Knew)
I watched you from the shadows as a child
As you've probably noticed, GoldenEye 007 is now 25 years old and can legally hire a car in a foreign country. The influence of Rare's seminal shooter on the FPS genre and console video gaming in general is enormous, and gamers have now been poring over it and picking apart its secrets for the last...
Wednesday29th Jun 2022
Movie Review GoldenEra - A Celebratory Examination Of GoldenEye 007's Creation And Impact
Worth its weight in gold
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." Ah, yes. The classic quote that may or may not have been uttered by Shigeru Miyamoto. With the gaming industry (understandably) experiencing an unusually high number of delays in recent years, the proclamation has been the subject of memes to the point...
Thursday7th Apr 2022
Feature Nintendo Reigns Supreme At The Science Museum's 'Power UP' Exhibition
Play some of gaming's most iconic consoles and games
Walking into the Basement Gallery of the London Science Museum, you're greeted by an uncomfortable warmth that often comes with gaming events, but this is soon forgotten when you cast your eyes over the sea of consoles lying in wait. We're all so used to seeing old gaming systems locked away...
Tuesday8th Feb 2022
Feature Our Predictions For The February 2022 Nintendo Direct
Kirby! GoldenEye! Triangles!!!
Another Nintendo Direct? In this economy? That's right! And it's a 40-minute one, focused on the games coming to the Nintendo Switch in the first half of 2022. Or, technically, mainly focused on the first half of the year... The Direct will take place tomorrow, February 9th, at 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 10pm GMT / 11pm CET...
Tuesday28th Dec 2021
Quick Beats Grant Kirkhope On How Batman Inspired Banjo-Kazooie
"I’ve used [those chords] a gazillion times, it’s in everything I write"
Throughout the Nintendo Life Video Game Music Festival we're speaking to a range of composers and musicians for a mixture of in-depth interviews and shorter, sharper (and perhaps a little goofier) Q&As where we ask just ten rapid-fire personal questions; we're calling...
Wednesday25th Aug 2021
Feature The Inside Story Of Mockumentary Sequel 'Bringing Back Golden Eye'
And it's all for a good cause
Rare's seminal N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 is coming up to its 25th birthday, and for a whole generation of players, it remains a pivotal experience in their gaming lives – a fact that was playfully acknowledged by Jim Miskell's 2017 'mockumentary' Going For Golden Eye, which focused on the fictional Golden Eye World...
Thursday31st Dec 2020
Soapbox Mario And Zelda Were Great, But GoldenEye Really Switched Me On To Nintendo
It caught my 'Eye
These days, I'm very much living the Nintendo life, but rewind thirty years and I was a SEGA Mega Drive kid. I enjoyed Super Mario Bros. 3, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Duck Hunt and of course the seminal Rareware classic, Battletoads & Double Dragon on my brother's NES, but given the choice between Mario or Sonic back then,...
Monday10th Aug 2020
Feature Rare Turns 35 This Week - We Pick 10 Highlights From The Nintendo Years
Rare talent
Three-and-a-half decades ago this week, British developer Rare was formed. Formerly known as Ultimate Play the Game, the company was created with the express purpose of creating titles for the Nintendo Entertainment System and from the mid-1980s until the early '00s the Twycross-based team would deliver some of the finest video games on...
Friday27th Dec 2019
Feature Why You'll Never Get To Play Your Favourite Retro Game On Switch
Companies really do want your money, but at the right price
A few weeks ago while scrolling through Twitter, a particular video clip caught our eye. It showed Slipstream, a 1995 F1 arcade game from Capcom. Using Sega’s System 32 board, it was produced in very limited quantities for the Latin American market and never saw wide release. As you can...
Monday23rd Dec 2019
Feature GoldenEye Dev David Doak On Shaking (And Stirring) The FPS Genre On Console
"All we could see were the bad things"
You couldn’t escape it. It was here, rife and potent. It ploughed a path through conventional gaming conversations from the casuals to the parents of gamers that had to put up with the noise, the screaming and the not going to bed because if you didn’t kill John with thirty-seven remote mines stuck to the...
Monday21st Oct 2019
Feature How Switch Brings Back Game Boy Multiplayer Memories
A link (cable) to the past
Quite apart from the huge number of great games coming to the system every week, one result of Switch’s success that we’ve really enjoyed is how it has brought back a focus on local multiplayer gaming not seen since the N64 days. Online is still king, of course, but we’d argue there’s nothing quite like the rush of...
Saturday22nd Jun 2019
Talking Point What Are You Playing This Weekend? (June 22nd)
Here are our picks, but what are yours?
After another busy week full of Switch Mini suspicions and a Mario Kart Hot Wheels announcement of all things, it's time for us to sit back and talk over our weekend plans. Members of the team have shared their entries below, and we'd love for you to get involved via our comment section and poll, too. Enjoy!...
Thursday20th Jun 2019
Feature The Best Movie Licences On Nintendo Systems
They're not all awful, honest
There are a number of video game maxims that you'll see crop up time and again on the internet, many of which are rooted in truth. Gameplay, for example, really is more important than graphics, and a delayed game does indeed have the potential to be good, while a rushed one is forever bad. The old chestnut we're looking...
Saturday15th Jun 2019
Talking Point What Are You Playing This Weekend? (June 15th)
Here are our picks, but what are yours?
What a busy, busy week it's been in the Nintendo world. E3 has now come to an end, and a good 90% of the Nintendo Life team is feeling ready to retire to our beds for long, well-deserved naps. Before that, though, it's time once again to share with you our weekend gaming plans. As always, we invite you to join...
Saturday8th Jun 2019
Talking Point What Are You Playing This Weekend? (June 8th)
Here are our picks, but what are yours?
Phew, thank goodness it's the weekend! This week has brought with it all the drama of a Pokémon Direct, fresh Banjo-Kazooie rumours and even more games for the Sega Mega Drive Mini, but now we can finally calm down and talk about o
Tuesday26th Feb 2019
Talking Point Nintendo And Microsoft Working Together Isn't As Crazy As You Think
Dogs + cats living together = ?
The whispers that Microsoft is preparing to launch games and services on Switch are, in some ways, too fantastical to believe; a dream-come-true for fanboys-and-girls of a certain age. The rumoured deal suggests that the company is planning not only to launch Xbox Live and Game Pass integration, but also to publish...
Friday19th Jan 2018
Movie Review King Of Kong Meets Spinal Tap In Going For Golden Eye
"Rule no. 1: Absolutely no use of Oddjob"
Video games and movies often make uncomfortable bedfellows; just look at the Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993 and Jean-Claude Van Damme's equally risible Street Fighter flick. However, sometimes the combining of these two mediums can yield positive results; King of Kong is one notable example. Jim...
Monday25th Jan 2016
Feature Why We're Still Playing... GoldenEye 007
Steven Smith revives the laser watch on N64
In the latest entry in this series we have Nintendo Life newcomer Steven Smith (@N64Memories) talking about GoldenEye 007; no, not that one on Wii, but the N64 original. GoldenEye 007 was my first true experience of a first-person shooter (FPS). Yes, I had played Doom – a classic, o
Thursday11th Jul 2013
Feature Taking A Look Back At The Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak
The little peripheral that shook things up in a big way
Nintendo has always been a video game manufacturer renowned for innovation. From revitalising the video game console industry with the NES back in 1985 right through to opening it up to the mainstream with its Wii and DS systems in the mid-2000s, the Japanese company has continued to have a...
Saturday19th Jan 2013
Feature Nintendo and Bond Through the Ages
A license to thrill
While film tie-ins are expected these days, few games can attest to having their origins found in novels, and fewer still can claim to have outgrown those origins and become a success in their own right. But that is exactly what the James Bond franchise has done. What initially began as a series of novels by Sir Ian Fleming,...
Saturday29th Oct 2011
Feature Fun and Frights on Nintendo - Part 2
Moments of gaming horror
Halloween is almost upon us, with many gamers making plans for a night of terrifying gaming. Whether these are modern titles or retro, old-school goodness, there are plenty of scary games to enjoy. In the first part of our Fun and Frights feature, we gave a brief outline of how horror games have developed through the...
Sunday31st Oct 2010
Be afraid. Be very afraid
Halloween is upon us. We've been celebrating Spook Month for the past thirty-one days, with reviews of frightening or fright-themed retro games every Friday and Saturday, and after a good bout of trick-or-treating or dressing up to go to Rocky Horror, we'll be sitting down to some of our favourites that make us cringe, jump...
Tuesday26th Oct 2010
Features Things We Miss About the 8-Bit Era
It's the little things that count
Today, the virtual reality experience of the Wii is as immersive as Lawnmower Man director/writer Brett Leonard ever could have hoped, with Mario as real and in-person as an actual member of our family and special effects so vivid that we compulsively hold our breath during underwater levels. Okay, maybe things...
