Abighoul

At current market prices, it would cost less to buy original copies of both games and a Wii to play them on

I mean they can't really require the headset; they might make the app not allow you to play in docked mode, but in handheld mode, it's just going to display the two screens on the screen in the spots where the lenses would line up. The console has no way of knowing if it's actually inside a plastic or cardboard enclosure, so if you're in handheld mode, you can just play it with the two screens displayed side by side. You could even play it cross-eyed and get the 3D effect. Still stupid that there's no option to just display one screen, though.

A big problem is that even among the devoted group of fans demanding another Banjo-Kazooie, most of them wouldn't actually want it if it happened. There was already a new big budget console game starring Banjo and Kazooie and continuing the story of their world (Nuts & Bolts), and there was already a game that played exactly to the letter like what a Banjo-Threeie would've been just with the names changed (Yooka-Laylee), and most people didn't like either of those, so i'm not convinced that combining those two would magically make a game that people would be satisfied with.

@sanderev How would it be impossible to get the tablet out of the dock without joycons? The top sticks out enough to grab onto. And i'm pretty sure the NS2 dock is even lower than the NS1 one, so it'd be even easier.

For Animal Crossing, they'd need to figure out some way for visiting other towns to work. In the original that wasn't multiplayer; you'd put your memory card and your friend's memory card in the same GCN and you'd travel to your friend's town and walk around it by yourself.

Interesting how they've still never shown GCN games with the control overlay; they made a point of turning it off at the start of the Treehouse stream. I guess they don't want us to notice that it doesn't have rewind?

They're going to need to communicate this very clearly for at least the first couple years, and really push the officially-licensed ones (and maybe even put some big stickers on the official Switch 1 ones still in stores to say they're not compatible with the Switch 2). Searching "micro sd express" right now brings up a lot of SanDisk Extreme cards, which sound very similar; lots of people are going to buy the wrong ones.

They won't do this, because there's absolutely no financial incentive for it, but they really should limit these to a single controller per paid Expansion Pack account per restock (not 32 controllers per basic family account like it is now) until they can get things under control.

The way it is right now, if someone's using bots to buy a bunch of them up, the price of an NSO membership is completely negligible — when you're already paying $1,600 for 32 controllers (that you can then flip on eBay for double what you paid for them), NSO adds $1.09 to the price of each one. But make it one controller per paid account per restock and now each controller costs $100 if you're trying to flip them, but for the people who have an EP membership anyway and just want a damn controller that they've been trying to get for a year now, there's no negative impact — having to wait a few weeks to the next restock to get a second controller would be much less of an issue if normal people could actually reliably get on and buy one each time.

Also, this probably doesn't have any real impact on demand for the controller, but for me personally, it would be slightly less of an issue for me if Nintendo could just trust us to make our own control schemes (like they did on the Wii U VC) so games would actually be playable on joycons/pro controllers. It is inexcusable that there's no way for me to reassign buttons to be able to play Ocarina with the control scheme it had on the Gamecube, with the C-buttons assigned to X, Y, and the right bumper. A pair of joycons has almost twice as many buttons as an N64 controller, but the only way to have all the buttons actually mapped to buttons is to buy one of these.

i can't imagine ever wanting to play this with stylus instead of button controls myself but enough people wanted it that it's pretty inexcusable that it took this long to do it.

nintendo really needs to get away from their philosophy of "every game has one perfect control scheme that will work for everyone, and having control options is an admission that we failed at finding that perfect scheme"

i'd pay 100,000 bells for a weed whacker that can kill flowers; they're the real weeds of this game

@drewber2635 Sin & Punishment maps both the left and right Switch sticks to the N64 stick so that you can approximate the Left Position (left hand on N64 D-pad and L, right hand on N64 stick and Z) if you want. Works pretty well with the in-game default control scheme, but yeah not giving us any option to change that is just utter nutter butters.

@norwichred it's "press X on the menu to check button mapping" — to see what Nintendo has mapped the buttons to. You don't get any say in what they've mapped them to.

@marandahir The problem isn't with the rom, it's the emulation. And while N64 emulation is extremely difficult and there's really never been any actual good general-purpose N64 emulators from anyone, Nintendo has gotten it better than this before — the Wii U VC version of OoT had better fog effects, and the Wii U VC version of Yoshi's Story properly emulated the timing of the pulsing fruit frame at the ends of levels. And for the premium we're paying, and the fact that they're launching with only nine games (eight in Japan, because for some reason they don't get Dr. Mario 64 even though there's already a fully translated rom of it in Nintendo Puzzle Collection from 2003) as the console is nearing its fifth anniversary, i would expect them to be better polished than this.

@norwichred Because there's not? There are no options within the NSO app to change the button mapping, only to check what the mapping is (and there are slight variations between games — in Sin & Punishment, both sticks are the stick and both ZL and ZR are Z (which is weird because ZR is also still the modifier to access the C buttons), and when playing Dr. Mario 64 with a single joycon, the stick is the D-pad instead of the stick).

You can remap buttons at the system level, but that's still subject to the limitations of the NSO app (and also the limitations of the games, if the game itself allows remapping) — C-right and C-up are only accessible on the right stick or by holding ZR, and you can't map a stick direction or a combination of buttons to a button.

Since you can't remap within the NSO app, the only way to use the item assigned to C-right in OoT is by flicking the right stick (which is an awkward way to use an item) or by holding ZR (which means you lose the A and B buttons). In the Gamecube version, your three items were mapped to X, Y, and Z (which would be R here), which would work great, but there's no way to do that here.

what the hell is "oh how convenient that they waited until after they released a big game to come out with these allegations" supposed to mean? if they had said it earlier then you'd say "oh they're just trying to tank the game's sales to be vindictive; why couldn't they wait until after the game comes out"

@Gravitron there is no wrong way to hold an N64 controller; the whole point of the controller was there were three different ways to hold it. if they're showing someone holding it in home position while playing a game that used the stick, then that's wrong, but if it's just a shot of the controller with no indication of what game is being played, then they could just be playing one of the games that uses the d-pad, which is why they put a handle there.

@r0mer0 If you're splitting an NSO family plan eight ways, it's less than the price of one VC NES game per year.

@NTELLIGENTMAN The eShop isn't any more permanent than NSO, but you can still connect those Bluetooth controllers to your phone or computer twenty years from now and play whatever roms you want

i still really don't understand the cognitive dissonance that people have to have to say "NSO is a terrible value; bring back the VC." the games on NSO would cost over $1,000 on the VC. even if the expansion pack takes the price up to $50 (and you still can't find seven people to split a family plan with), it would take decades for NSO to be a worse value than the VC.

when the VC was a thing, people were constantly saying "why do i have to pay $5 for ice climber? they should just make a netflix-style subscription for these" and, well, NSO is exactly what netflix is in the 2020s — mostly their own stuff and a few other things they could get the rights to, because all the big companies realized they can sell their stuff on their own now.

@jsty3105 the point isn't "sega is perfect" the point is "nintendo is doing a bad." showing an instance where another company did a similar bad doesn't change that.

capitalism wants you to believe that armed robbery is the same thing as software piracy which is the same thing as a derivative work. rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead is fanfiction of shakespeare, but the reason why that's okay and prime 2d isn't is that metroid prime is recent enough to be protected by copyright law.

it's honestly kinda disgusting that bootlicking nintendo fanboys will say stuff like "well that's what you get for using someone else's intellectual property you terrible terrible people" every time this happens, and meanwhile sega openly encourages romhacks on the steam workshop, never tries to shut down sonic fan games, and even hired romhackers to make their last 2d sonic game. i love nintendo games too but as a business they hate us and y'all really need to stop doing volunteer work for capitalism.

nintendo does have the legal right to shut down this project, but the idea that they are obligated to is ridiculous, as plenty of intellectual property holders get by just fine while allowing non-profit fan works (sega, as previously mentioned; pretty much all authors have stopped trying to outlaw fan fiction of their works; there's a website that has every jeopardy question ever on it and the creators of the show know about it and leave it alone; etc etc etc), and there's certainly no moral justification for shutting it down since it isn't actually infringing on anything they're doing — nintendo isn't making a 2d version of metroid prime, so it's no more a replacement for any product or service nintendo offers than the wikipedia plot summary for metroid prime.

literally all i care about is if they let us take the guys' shirts off again

I would own a Lite right now if it could still output to a TV at 720p or if having an account on two consoles worked seamlessly without having to do the primary/secondary account thing that almost feels like an exploit. If they're not going to fix either of those, then maybe i'll get one in a few years if it's cheap and hackable.

@UglyCasanova Even if you completely ignore thousands of years of human history and cultures other than your own with more expansive definitions of gender than you're used to, Christine Jorgensen was a white American who transitioned 70 years ago, so no, the concept of being trans is not younger than the Gamecube. However it does turn out that more people are willing to publicly identify as queer when it's less legal to kill us for it.

@smithyo What difference does it make if I am or not? Did Jesus say you only have to follow his teachings while other Christians are watching?

@invictus4000 you have to be pretty self-absorbed if you honestly think that christians are the only group of people in the world being attacked. try loving your neighbor for a change.

@AtlanteanMan "if it's okay to poke fun at the dominant global imperialist power of the past millennium for the oppressive things they've done, why isn't it okay for that imperialist power to keep doing those oppressive things in retaliation? the real nazis are the ones changing the names of football teams methinks."

@Moistnado Definitely see where you're coming from there, but also if you really want to play Super Metroid on your Switch in 2035 and Nintendo doesn't want to let you pay to do that anymore, you could just hack it (gonna have to open it up to replace the battery by then anyway). Renting instead of "owning" isn't great in general but it's not like we're in danger of losing the SNES ROM library any time soon. I still feel like NSO (especially splitting a family plan for a few cents a month) makes the most sense for most people during the console's active lifespan.

@Toy_Link ah! good point! also i forgot that Clu Clu Land D and Smash Ping Pong are already on the Japanese app, so they go with Joy Mech Fight in the category of "probably could've done it but decided not to"

@Moistnado i'll try this one more time:

on the wii, if you wanted to play three snes games, it would cost you $24. playing games online was free.

on the switch, you can play those three snes games and also play games online for $20.

so if you are playing three different snes games per year and playing online, it is cheaper to do that on the switch than it was on the wii. if you have absolutely no interest in nes or snes games and only want to play games online (or if you want to play nothing but those same three snes games for several years in a row), then that is more expensive on the switch and my comparison does not apply (but if you had no interest in nes and snes games why would you be commenting on this article).

@Sinton Games I left out:

Need the Power Pad or ROB (definitely not happening):
-Short Order/Eggsplode
-World Class Track Meet
-Dance Aerobics
-Gyromite
-Stack Up
-Super Team Games

Need the Zapper/Super Scope (could happen but unlikely they'd put that much effort in at this point):
-Hogan's Alley
-Barker Bill's Trick Shooting
-Wild Gunman
-Duck Hunt
-Gumshoe
-Battle Clash
-Super Scope 6
-Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge
-To The Earth
-Yoshi's Safari

Needs the SNES Mouse (even less likely than light gun games; would feel awkward in docked mode and would take a decent amount of reprogramming to get it to feel right on the touchscreen; you could plug in a USB mouse but i doubt they'd want to require that):
-Mario Paint
-Mario & Wario

Games that would need a translation:
-Famicom Wars
-Fire Emblem
-Famicom Detective Club (definitely not happening now)
-Shin Onigashima
-Yuyuki
-Marvelous
-Shigesato Itoi's No.1 Bass Fishing

Originally published by Nintendo but would probably have licensing issues now:
-Cobra Triangle, Pin Bot, RC Pro Am, Slalom, Snake Rattle n Roll (Rare)
-Faxanadu (Hudson)
-Rad Racer, Final Fantasy (Square)
-Tetris, Tetris 2, Tetris Attack (already have Panel de Pon anyway), Tetris & Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie (Tetris)
-Nintendo World Cup / Super Spike V'Ball (actually Kunio-kun games)
-Pinocchio, Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, Uniracers (Disney)
-Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run, NHL Stanley Cup
-Terranigma
-Mega Man 6
-Popeye
-SimCity
-Derby Stallion 98
-Nintendo World Championship (has Rad Racer and Tetris)
-Nintendo PowerFest '94 (has Ken Griffey Jr)
-Nintendo Campus Challenge '91 (has PinBot)

Games I should have included:
-Tin Star (can be played with Super Scope, mouse, or gamepad)
-Kirby's Star Stacker (Japan-only SNES version of the GB game)
-Nintendo Campus Challenge '92 (Super Mario World, F-Zero, Pilotwings)
-Smash Ping Pong (Famicom only, was already renamed Smash Table Tennis when released on the European virtual console)

@Moistnado If you play two SNES games and one NES game on NSO per year, then you're getting a better value than the virtual console (without even adjusting for inflation or splitting a family plan) plus free online.

@bigpale By my count, these are the first party games not on NSO yet that wouldn't need new English translations, don't require peripherals, and don't have major foreseeable licensing issues:

NES:
Anticipation
Clu Clu Land D (already have first one)
Devil World
Donkey Kong Jr. Math
Earthbound Beginnings
F-1 Race
Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally
Golf (already have NES Open Tournament Golf)
Kung Fu
Mach Rider
Mysterious Murasame Castle
NES Play Action Football (already have Tecmo Bowl)
Pinball
Urban Champion
Zoda's Revenge: Startropics 2

SNES:
Earthbound
Kirby's Avalanche (already have Puyo Puyo 2)
Super Mario RPG (actually probably would have licensing issues)
Super Play Action Football
Sutte Hakkun (the big controls screen filled with Japanese text would be a bit intimidating but it seems like it'd be playable with some explanation in the NSO description blurb)
Vegas Stakes (actually they probably can't release this and keep an E rating)
Wario's Woods
Winter Gold
Wrecking Crew '98 (menus and cutscenes are all in Japanese, but it seems like it should be playable)

it's pretty trivial to hack a 3ds and pirate whatever game you want but why aren't more people mentioning pokemon bank? once that's shut down, it'll be impossible to transfer pokemon from anything before sword and shield.

and using the eshop gift cards on the 3ds and wii u is really annoying because it's impossible to not end up with an unused balance. on the wii, you paid tax when you bought the card in walmart and then you had 2000 points that you could use on games that were 500, 800, or 1000 points, so maybe you'd have like 200 left over sometimes but you could get to 0 with enough cards, but on the eshop, you pay $20 at walmart for $20 of credit and then the game is $21.59.

Prime is a first-person shooter. It's a game played from a first-person perspective where you shoot things. "It's not like what i think other FPSs are like" does not mean "it's not an FPS." That's like saying Metroid isn't a side-scrolling game because you can't jump on enemies.

i just got back into it like a month ago because all of a sudden it didn't suck for rural players, and now they're going to remind me of exactly why i stopped playing for four years. if it's gonna go back to how it was before where i can walk around my house for a mile and find absolutely nothing, then i'm just gonna transfer everything i can over and finally delete it.

i really don't understand the complaints about the art style; it literally just looks like the original game in 3d. if you liked it then but don't like it now then the only thing you liked about the art style is that you could see the pixels

maybe for the 50th anniversary they'll do this with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks built in

@Reaast You can trade any of the systems on the right for any of the systems on the left. They're not going to make a dozen separate ads to make all the possible combinations make sense. It's like when a lawyer commercial lists a bunch of side effects a drug had, including death, and then says "if you experienced any of these, call us"

The thing is there's just not room for dedicated handheld gaming anymore. Historically the three types of handheld games were "as close as you can get to the console game on a handheld" (Super Mario Land, PSP versions of GTA et al), "quick time waster while waiting for the bus" (Tetris), and "non-game productivity app that's a lot cheaper to run on the computer you already have instead of buying a new dedicated piece of hardware" (PDA, dictionary, and translator cartridges on the GB and GBC; the GBC sewing machine; DS titles like 100 Classic Books and Personal Trainer Cooking). Now that everyone has a smartphone, people aren't going to buy a game console for those second and third categories anymore — why would someone buy a $200 handheld to play a $40 sudoku game when they can just play a free version on the phone they already have?

@Rika_Yoshitake "Ah yes, the real issues are being addressed thanks woke capcom."

Yeah, because that Capcom pixel artist could have spent that 20 minutes solving world hunger and passing universal healthcare instead. You're on a video game news website.

I don't really understand why this specifically was treated as the death of Geno in Smash hopes. Geno was already deconfirmed for this pass when they announced Sephiroth a week earlier; they weren't going to put two late-90s Squaresoft RPG characters in the same pass — and if they decide later they want to do a third fighters pass and put him in that one, the fact that he's already a Mii costume won't stop them. Once they announced Sephiroth and I knew Geno wasn't getting in, I was hoping for his Mii costume to come back in this direct because otherwise he wouldn't be in the game at all.

@Supadav03
"The amount of energy people are wasting on this is baffling."

no one is like sending death threats or storming the nintendo offices with pitchforks or recording themselves destroying their switches over this or anything; people are using the exact amount of energy to complain about this as you are to complain about their complaining.

Kinda tempted to get a Series X mostly for the backward compatibility — i've never had an Xbox before, so by the time i get through the thousands of new-to-me games, the Series X should have some games of its own — but neither of them are an option until i can get a decent internet connection.

Don't use the word "lazy;" that puts the blame on the developers, who i'm sure did the best they could in the time they had, with the conditions they were under and with the orders they were given by the people at the top. It's not a lazy port, it's a rushed port. Just like with Pokémon, the executives felt a need to get the game out in time to meet a self-imposed deadline and so couldn't give the developers the time or resources they needed to make a better game.

The pre-race taunts (hold ZR while starting a race) aren't voiced for some reason. Was that how it was in the PC/Dreamcast version that this is more closely based on, is it a glitch, or is there some other reason for it?

EDIT: i guess it was a glitch because i just tried it now and all of a sudden this time it worked? The fonts are different now too, so i guess there was an update.

Other than that it's perfect. The tracks were designed with the fog in mind; removing it would change the game. I do kinda wish there was an option to not have the music play until the final lap like on the N64 version, though. I know it was just because there wasn't enough cartridge space, but it did give a nice atmospheric feel to the tracks.

Oh one more thing — it seems like if you're using the modern racing controls, you have to press both Accelerate and Turbo to get the rocket start at the beginning of the race (in the original, and with the classic controls, you activated the turbo by just double-tapping the accelerate button)

They absolutely should have either made it just one purchase that automatically works with whatever version you have, or let you buy the other one so you can pick up the other version's exclusives while you're doing the new stuff, like buying Black and then White 2 or Moon and then Ultra Sun.

With New Horizons on track to eventually sell more than the entire rest of the series combined, there's going to be a lot of people who just started with the series now who will have no idea why so many people are so enamored with the cute-but-annoying ditzy dog lady who just wastes your time every day by telling you she doesn't have anything to tell you.

Instead of trying to understand what people actually liked about her in NL and trying to do it again and build on her appeal here, they just went "Oh hey, you guys like this character, right? Look at her! Look at this character you liked in the last game! ...She's back! We'll... uh... I guess we'll put her in the daily announcement thing that we're putting in here because that's what we did in Splatoon, even though after the first few weeks we'll basically never give her anything to announce anymore."

Bandai Namco has the rights to Ms Pac-Man, but the MIT students who made Crazy Otto (the Pac-Man romhack that Midway bought and released as Ms Pac-Man) were receiving royalties on sales of any Ms Pac-Man stuff to recognize their contribution; AtGames bought the right to those royalties from the company that those students founded and then tried to claim that that gave them the right to release Ms Pac-Man games without Bandai Namco's permission (which they had been trying unsuccessfully to get for a while; Bandai Namco kept turning them down because they didn't want AtGames to screw things up again like with those plug-and-play systems that were supposed to have arcade roms but ended up having NES roms instead).

Typing in the app is ok when it works, but it's a lot easier to just plug my USB keyboard in.

probably worth noting here that all repair centers in north america are closed until further notice