Anachronism

My understanding is that this game is absurdly power hungry, often for no discernable reason. It sounds like it should have a lot of room for optimization if Capcom throws enough money and programmers at it, and given it's the biggest black mark on what's mostly been a stellar few years for them, maybe they'll actually put in the effort to fix it.

That said, I will be very surprised if they manage to get a Switch 2 version running with decent visuals and anything approaching a stable frame rate.

I've only become more convinced my Switch is going nowhere. If anything, I regret not buying a bigger microsd for it before those prices exploded.

I'll likely even grab a few more Switch 1 games over their digital-only Switch 2 versions just to save whatever storage space I can for indies.

Looking back at the launch lineup half a year out, it's a list of really impressive games that all had one or two drawbacks preventing me from either buying or fully enjoying them. Hopefully once I clear out my Switch 1 backlog a bit, I'll have more motivation to dig into those and other Switch 2 releases I've put off.

@ShadLink Wait a second. The starting price for FFVII Remake is $40, so assuming a bulk order of carts lets you get them a good bit cheaper per unit than an equivalent microsd express, they actually might be able to sell a proper physical version for $70...if that cart size was available. Though even then, I'm not sure the average consumer cares enough for the benefits of a fully physical game to outweigh that $30 price bump when it comes to sales numbers.

@Serpenterror I hate to be the bearer of bad news on this one, but it really is impossible to properly release FFVII Remake physically. It takes up ~90 GB, so even with the biggest Switch 2 cart, you'd still have to download a third of the game.

I was looking forward to it after the demo, but I doubt I'll ever have enough storage to sacrifice that much for one game.

Narrowing down my wishlist using the rules I made up to keep myself from spending too much money on too many games still leaves ~100 games costing ~$500 that fit the criteria. I don't think the system is working...

Luckily I have the backup contingency of staring at my backlog until I feel too guilty to buy anything.

My only question is why Nintendo would put their foot down on this with all the other degenerate garbage on the eshop. Maybe they just ignore shovelware and only police the games that are likely to grab a decent amount of attention?

Anyway, I think it's probably reasonable to not want people showing that much skin on a platform accessible to millions of kids. Tons of parents are either awful at putting up effective boundaries and safeguards for their children or just don't care.

Well now I've got the Wii soundscape AND Vengabus playing on loop in my head. Thanks for that.

Right now, all AI is buggy and poorly understood. Once it actually is competent enough to mimic professional work down to the smallest detail, that opens up a whole can of worms on the value of human labor in general, but for the moment it's an inferior substitute. I don't mind it being used internally by say a non-artistic game designer to generate concept art for an actual artist to work off of, but none of that should make it into the final product.

I still want to play most of these, though I can't say when I'll manage it. My gaming wishlist is slowly creeping towards a thousand entries. I wonder if the number of hours it would take to finish them all has already exceeded the total remaining time I'll spend on gaming.

@Dr_Awkward When I buy something, I usually want to actually keep it in my possession. If I didn't plan on keeping my games longer than it takes to finish them, I'd be better off just getting them through a subscription.

Please. I don't want to choose between skipping games because I don't have the space for them or spending more on storage than on the console over the next decade.

I feel like most free merch is just an excuse to turn customers into walking billboards. I guess you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but the opportunity to wear or carry around the name of a company or product in big bold letters is never going to motivate me to buy that product.

I watched someone play through it recently. The animation is pretty cool, but it feels like the story was written specifically for teenagers. It has its moments, but watching a bunch of dysfunctional people repeatedly screw up their relationships while jumping on every possible opportunity to make a dirty joke gets old pretty quick.

@AussieMcBucket I think stability usually has to do with preventing crashes, glitches, etc. Basically the difference is between improving something that's functional but inefficient and fixing something that's flat out broken.

I have some confused feelings about Monolith Soft. They worked on what might be my two absolute favorite games, Xenoblade 1 and Skyward Sword, but while they've never made an outright bad game, nothing that's come after those two has gotten close to them for me. Zelda dropped the semi-open metroidvania design that no one else gets quite right and Xenoblade became a lot more dependent on all the worst anime tropes. BotW/TotK are still technical marvels and Xenoblade 3 was my favorite game that year despite its flaws, but it's frustrating knowing someone can give you exactly what you want and simply has no interest in doing so.

I hope it's separate from the main game. I already got my 100% completion and having it get decompleted would sort of feel like having someone open the back of a book I just closed and shove a bunch of extra pages in it. The only reason I even bought Silksong at launch is because I assumed they couldn't have anything else they wanted to add after spending all that time on it.

@Luigia Oh it's definitely a cool game. Shinen's just known for doing magic with Nintendo's hardware, so it's a shame Fusion feels like it had to make some compromises.

I wonder how Fast Fusion would look with the standard DLSS model. I know it already has like five graphics settings, but considering four of them seem to use the light DLSS model that breaks down when things move quickly and the last one cuts back a bunch of effects, I still wouldn't mind another option or two.

@Pillowpants @Smithicus I think they've achieved an iconic status by sheer virtue of their visuals and world design, at least if the number of people still watching them is anything to go by. Even with the first one, I always felt like the story was mostly just an excuse to create a bunch of gorgeous CGI set pieces.

We see a similar attitude with a lot of video games, especially Nintendo's, and even some popular book series are held up more by clever writing and moment to moment events than a good overarching narrative, so I'd say you don't always need a great story to make a great piece of media.

I'd like to give about twenty of these a go. Can't wait to finally get around to one or two of them some time in the 2030s.

@rvcolem1 Good news, they're both getting released on Switch 2 the same day as RE9. There's even a $90 three-pack. All key cards of course, but I guess that's technically a step up from cloud.

@Smithicus The games have almost no story, so you can start pretty much anywhere. As others have said, Rise is one of the best and probably the most friendly to new players.

Your other option on Switch is Generations Ultimate. It's the last entry that could really be called old school Monster Hunter, and is basically a greatest hits collection with nearly all the coolest monsters from the games before it.

Rise + Sunbreak for $10 is ridiculous. I finally gave in and bought just Sunbreak for more than that a year ago. I'd be really looking forward to the next game if only I had the storage space it's guaranteed to demand.

I love the look of this game. Can't think of anything else that emulates that classic anime style quite as well. With how many cool co-op focused titles we've been seeing lately, I'm really starting to regret my solo gaming habits.

@Solid_Python I'll wait to see some video before really setting any expectations, though even in those shots it looks likely the hair has suffered similarly to what we've seen from RE9's Switch 2 version. It might be that the game's already running at the lowest framerate/resolution most people would consider acceptable, but if not, I'd rather they drop those further before dumbing down the visual effects if at all possible.

It's always cool to see a modern visual showcase making it to Switch 2, though I can't help but wonder what condition it'll be in when it gets there.

Love this game's art style, though I've heard the gameplay is a bit lacking. I still might give it a go just to get something a bit different from the endless tide of realistic action games, cartoony platformers, and anime rpgs.

Still a few sets back pulling for the 3* Lugia. I'll get it any day now, I'm sure.

It sounds like they care about WB Games roughly as much as Microsoft cared about Tango Gameworks. Guess that's one more on the pile of bad omens for the future of gaming.

@Reprise AI development works on a trial and error system, a lot like natural selection. Throwing more computing power at it lets them do more trials and eliminate more errors. But the holy grail of creating an AI that's good at everything is a lot harder than making one that's only good at one thing, and the tech giants are trying to overcome that problem by throwing every computer they can into the training programs to speed up their AIs' evolution.

I do wonder if all the guys competing to create a digital god will eventually drive demand on these components so high that even Nintendo can't get enough anymore. I'd hope they have all kinds of long-term contracts set up to prevent that, but it would be crazy if they just couldn't build any more hardware because all the parts got dumped into the AI arms race.

@theberrage Sure they get something out of it, but considering the real shovelware strategy is just putting out seventeen different versions of an M-rated, AI generated puzzle game, I still think they deserve some bonus points.

Have they fixed that tree in Whiterun not loading correctly yet?

Ahh, another Christmas, another comment section being weirdly hostile towards someone offering them free things. Anyway, glad No Gravity's keeping up the tradition. I've gotten some fun time wasters and a couple games with cool art styles from them. I'll still boot up Destropolis once in a while because of how fun that weapon/upgrade system is until you stop leveling up.

I was wondering why such an established name would even want to sell itself, but looking through its history, the actual Warner Bros. company has been mashed into, split from, and tossed around by so many other big players that it's a miracle they've maintained any kind of positive reputation. Hopefully the brand and all the classics tied to it manage to weather whatever comes next as well.

I was a day one adopter on Switch 2, largely because there was so much uncertainty around availability and rising costs at the time. I don't regret it, but I probably would have held off if I'd had any reason to think it would actually get a discount within its first year. The screen doesn't matter to me, I trust all the big exclusives will come out eventually, and I suspect the opposite about an affordable microsd being available in the next few years, so I can't see much reason to wait now.

I've only gotten through Mario Kart World, Fast Fusion, and Silksong, and I've put them all dead even at 8/10. They're games with some really cool aspects to them, but also with some disappointments that prevented them from blowing me away. I think I'll be rooting for DK Bananza to win game of the year because it's still the one I most want to play.

This is the first time I've owned a game console for half a year and not bought a single physical game for it. A decent part of that is the sizable Switch backlog I'm still working through, but the rest is all down to the pricing and key cards. There are plenty of games I'd like to play, but I just don't feel right buying them, and that dampens my enthusiasm for the console as a whole.

@kal_el_07241 I still consider any decent port of a realistic open world from this decade a miracle. These games truly would be impossible on Switch 2 if it weren't for DLSS, because in terms of raw numbers it is not close to Series S. Nintendo's very lucky their partnership with Nvidia and the timing of hardware releases allowed them to get a console with that technology out at a competitive price well ahead of Sony/Microsoft.

Glad they're continuing to fix up the game. There's still plenty more to improve, but considering they'll likely be making back several times their development costs over the next decade, they'll hopefully feel motivated to keep working on it.

Well since we've gotten 1 and X remastered in the style of the new games, it's obviously only fair if they remake 2 and 3 in the style of the old games now.

As a general rule, I do like to have some side characters in my games. There's not much point in saving the world if there's no one to actually save. That said, a series so well known for its sense of isolation should probably make interacting with those characters mostly optional, and definitely shouldn't make any of them chattering quip dispensers. For the sake of all the people who've waited eight years for this game, I hope the drama around them ends up being severely overblown.

No surprise they had to make some cutbacks, but the clips on the page this info comes from still look pretty solid. I'll be interested to see digital foundry pick it apart. Though regardless of how the game turns out, I'll have to hold off until it no longer requires me to sacrifice a quarter of my storage.

That was a beautiful example of how not to edit a video. It'd make me want to apply, if only I had any inclination toward public speaking and hadn't spent years commenting on and criticising things here through various levels of sleep deprivation.

Nintendo's recent acquisitions feel pretty different from what's been going on in the rest of the industry lately. While other companies seem to be cannibalizing each other left and right just to add to their hoards of IP, most of Nintendo's recent purchases are just people they have good working relationships with. To be fair, Nintendo's hoard is already so big that they're reluctant to expand it further, but building up a network of competent teams still seems like a much healthier business model than continuously driving franchises into the ground by buying out the people who built them up and immediately firing half of them.

@BaldB3lper78 Can you look at these side-by-sides and honestly say the Switch versions ever look better? The game's whole visual identity has been stripped away.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMKXGXo8Ig

@Inaroomalone Transferring virtual cards between the same account on different consoles doesn't work the same as loaning them to another account. As far as I know, the only restriction is that you can't split your games between more than two systems.

@JayJ Cool, good to know.

Awesome. This is one of the Switch games I saved for Switch 2 so I could get the best experience out of it. Glad it's finally ready to go.

I've been looking at some comparisons, and I'm pretty sure the "definitive edition" looks worse than the original release on 360/PS3. They've taken out some visual effects, removed foliage interaction, and changed the lighting in a way that ruins the moody atmosphere and makes everything look more plasticky. All the frame rate and resolution boosts in the world aren't worth compromising a game's artistic design.