Anachronism

I do love some partical effects and some mysterious, mystical lands full of unknown wonders. That being said, I think the narration really does that trailer a disservice. Mysteries are a lot more exciting when there isn't someone actively telling you to go solve them, and the visuals and ambient sound would do a lot more to sell the game's atmosphere without someone talking over them.

I'm sure it's the usual "setting a legal precedent" kind of nonsense. It'd really be nice if the rest of us didn't have to tie ourselves in knots to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of the rules.

Cool. While partner showcases usually feel like a collection of B and C tier games from bigger companies, indie worlds will often have a couple truly brilliant games from people we've never heard of before. Though hopefully we'll mostly get games from the more standard genres rather than the "interactive narrative experiences" and other artsy things these are sometimes flooded with.

@rvcolem1 If I had to guess, I'd say it's because A) Valve has built up a ton of good will and trust with their userbase, maybe more than Nintendo had even before all the Switch 2's controversies, B) they can always fall back on piracy without worrying about someone bricking their hardware, and C) they, like a lot of us, see key cards as a much worse option than even purely digital games.

I still haven't gotten to the first one after buying it a while back. It always seems to hang around fifth place on the list of rpgs I really should have played already. Hopefully by the time I finally finish it, this collection will be 75% off and I can consider whether or not it's worth the storage space.

Unless they passed it off to another team, we're probably a good ways away from a new 3D Mario, with big news for Mario Kart and Mario Party also probably out. That leaves 2D games, sports games, rpgs, remakes/remasters, and maybe some more side character spinoffs.

Though that gets me wondering which character will get their first game next. I don't think Bowser's ever been the true main character, but they might want to keep it that way. Beyond him, there's just the second or third fiddle characters like Daisy, Waluigi, Pauline, Rosalina, Bowser Jr, and Dixie Kong followed by the miscellanious enemies and NPCs.

@AllBLK People might use false hope to manipulate the optimists, but they also use false hopelessness to manipulate the pessimists. It's important to remember that things can always change, and they'll rarely do so in the way you want without some amount of effort.

@MasterGraveheart I feel like that quote is mixing up the argument of products vs art with the one of toys vs art, though honestly I think both are false dichotomies. Developers have to balance between making what they want to make, making things their audience wants to play, and making enough money to keep making things. Investors and businessmen often don't care about the first two and players don't care much about the first or last outside of dedicated fans, meanwhile developers sometimes get caught up in their own creative vision and end up disappointing everyone else. From his own actual quotes, and aside from what I assume is a decades long obsessive compulsion towards making Pikmin popular, I think Miyamoto generally tries to focus on the second one. More than trying to create something meaningful or profitable, he seems like he really just wants to make things fun.

My rule for regular Directs is to go in without expectations. My rule for Partner Directs is to go in expecting nothing. There have only been one or two of these that managed to do anything really exciting, so I'd rather be pleasantly surprised by one or two mildly interesting announcements than ensure my disappointment by even entertaining the possibility of these presentations containing something worth looking forward to.

@MasterGraveheart Oh no, is that going to be the new apocryphal Miyamoto quote? He's never said that, at least on record. Someone who previously worked with Miyamoto sort of said he thought that way (in japanese, where I'm not even sure the equivalent for the word product has the same connotation) and the article title about it on here paraphrased that quote in the most inflammatory way possible.

@Punisher67 My mostly physical/indie Switch 1 library so far takes up 1 TB. The Switch 2 still only supports up to 2 TB microsd express, which doesn't even exist yet and will likely cost half as much as the console. It might not even be possible to keep my entire Switch 2 library on hand by the end of the generation if there aren't proper physical options for most of these big third party games.

I'm not sure this has any effect on the tracks in online matchmaking. The VS and Wireless modes mentioned are only in private multiplayer or single player, and after running a few rounds online, I'm still not seeing a single traditional track.

It's a shame it came to this, but at least Atari isn't the worst company they could have gone with. Then again, I was saying the same thing about some of Microsoft's aquisitions a while back, so I guess we'll have to see if it works out for Thunderful.

That's pretty cool. My decade old tv doesn't even accept more than 1080p, so it'd be nice if every game worked that way.

That is some really judgemental language from both Dgb and the NL writer. From my perspective, I don't understand how you can care about something and not want guaranteed access to it. A large digital library, especially on the Switch/Switch 2, is expensive and inconvenient to maintain, and to be blunt, companies are flat out incapable of looking out for the best interests of all their customers, so deleting the games I've payed for and trusting Nintendo or anyone else to keep them available to me is an unacceptable risk. Playing any of the games from my childhood is as easy as picking them off a shelf, and I don't see a single good reason why that should be different for games coming out today or in the future.

Looking at the list of games they've worked on, it seems like they usually stick to five or less a year, but in 2023 they suddenly jumped up to fourteen before immediately dropping back down to three last year. The fact that they were even able to get enough people to handle that many projects is more surprising to me than their need to cut down on staff after returning to their usual pace.

I still can't believe how little actually leaked out from this. Even if they can't go up on youtube, I'm surprised there weren't a bunch of gameplay videos floating around the internet.

Darn. This game checks a lot of boxes for me, but it's just too blatantly degenerate to actually spend money on. Knock this down to a T rating and I'd be all over it.

I've been letting my points expire for a while, so I decided to burn them on this and a few other things. Now I've just got to decide when I'm actually going to pick up the game.

Glad they're being more strict about it. Hopefully they'll start working backwards and cut the Switch eshop down to 10000 or so games.

I really wish they'd add World's soundtrack, though maybe they specifically don't want to devalue the most entertaining part of their $80 sandbox.

@LastFootnote Well that might just be it then, though it'll be hard to tell exactly how big they are until someone does some in-depth testing. It's not like they're actually showing the raw voxel dimensions the way Minecraft does after all.

That would be completely unsurprising. With the theme park, the new game, and the character redesign, they're obviously putting a ton of effort into building up the DK brand lately. A movie is a logical next step. I'll be interested to see if they plan to do anything similar with the rest of their IP going forward.

@batmanbud2 I'd argue a partially open-ended ending is the best kind, even for something that never gets a sequel. An ending where there's nothing interesting for the characters to do after the tiny glimpse of the world's timeline the story covers isn't even a happy one.

As you said, the story ends with the danger passed, the protagonists' original goals more or less achieved, and the project of rebuilding and exploring their new world that should have kept them busy and satisfied for the rest of their lives. But thanks to the later games, that last part ends up not happening at all. 2 comes in and, aside from stitching its mess of a story onto the original's like some kind of deformed siamese twin, also ruins Klaus/Zanza by changing him from a man whose conflicting megalomania and loneliness ultimately lead to his destruction to just the "evil half" of a more even-tempered guy.

Then you have Future Connected, a literal new ending to the first game which adds pretty much nothing of value to the story and completely throws out the future that Alvis had predicted in the original ending, changing that final story beat from confident optimism to looming uncertainty over some unknown threat.

And finally in 3, we see that the new world they were set to explore has ended up completely destroyed, with no clue what's going on in the new new (new old?) world we see in Future Redeemed. And while I'm on that, I also hate that they pulled the exact same split personality nonsense on Alvis, who had a ton of potential for interesting character growth as he was, turning him into a dull as dirt emotionless machine and a snarky girl with a catchphrase. They also pulled that trope writers recently seem to love and audiences always hate with Shulk and Rex where you take the old protagonists and just make them older, more beat up, more full of doubts, and ultimately weaker than the new protagonists to show off how cool they are. So nope, I definitely think the original ending was better as it was than with anything they've added to it since.

@xcape1587 I'd say there's a very good reason for the glacial pace of their retro releases, though most players (myself included) won't be particularly happy with it. If Nintendo released their entire library from say Wii U backward today, a lot of people would check it out, maybe play a couple games, and then never touch it again.

On our side, delaying releases has the minor benefits of reducing choice paralysis and giving us something to look forward to, but on Nintendo's side, it has the massive benefit of keeping the service relevant. It's basically the same reason why shows that come out one episode at a time tend to have a larger impact than ones that release a full season at once. Every article about a newly added game or wave of complaints about one not showing up yet is a chance for someone to find out or be reminded that the service exists. And once there's nothing left to add to it, there's nothing left to talk about and it stops being a reason to stay subscribed for anyone not looking to constantly replay any of those games. If they want that discussion to keep going indefinitely, they basically have to slow the pace to releasing one generation of retro games per new console generation.

A cool thing I hope they eventually do to boost the overall speed of new releases is get some Xbox retro collections to go along with the Sega ones. Microsoft is practically done with exclusives at this point and were already happy to allow Rare's games on the N64 service, so I think the idea has decent potential.

I honestly don't know the metrics to judge this by. With the recent 3D Zeldas, you've got a big open world with a heavy physics system, lots of particle effects, and potentially a bunch of enemies on screen at once, so some slowdown was expected. But even they run beautifully on Switch 2. This has a fully destructible voxel-based environment, but Minecraft also has that along with several of the things I mentioned from Zelda, and it could more or less run on a potato a decade ago. And sure, that game's graphics are obviously extremely basic by design, but from my understanding destructible environments are much harder on the cpu than the gpu, so all Bananza's more detailed visuals shouldn't have much to do with the slowdown in this case. So yeah, I guess I just don't know where the bottleneck is here. Are Bananza's voxels dramatically smaller than Minecraft's? Are there some other demanding elements I'm not aware of? A game made by one of the best dev teams on the planet just being poorly optimized seems like the least likely scenario, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see what's going on.

@SabreLevant That's not even true on PC though, is it? There are still games that come with mandatory frame rate caps, and some of those will even start to fall apart if you remove the cap with mods. I can't speak to every game, but I just saw yesterday that a popular build in Tears of the Kingdom that could solo a Gleeok now does even more damage because of the Switch 2 frame rate boost. There's no telling how many other frame rate dependent gameplay elements they might have had to test and rework just to keep the game functioning smoothly, so acting like they're charging you $10 to flip a settings toggle is a bit unfair.

@SabreLevant It sounds like you just don't understand the point of frame rate caps. A game that wildly fluctuates between say 25 and 45 fps feels worse than one that only goes between 25 and 30 because the changes in frame rate are a lot more noticeable. Heck, even a game that runs at a consistent 50 fps arguably looks worse than one that runs at 30 on most tvs because it doesn't fit cleanly into the fixed refresh rate that most tvs still use. And even more importantly for a portable like the Switch, having an uncapped frame rate would basically mean always draining the battery as quickly as possible no matter how simple a game's graphics are. If no one used caps, you might end up playing a 273 fps version of Picross and gain practically nothing over a capped version while making your fan whir like it's trying to take off and draining your battery in under two hours. We already knew which Switch games were capped at 30 or 60 before the Switch 2 was even announced since they absolutely never went above their targets, so I'm not sure why you were expecting anything different.

@Orwellian87 This is the full quote from Miyamoto that the article implies the Imamura quote mentioned in the title is commenting on, which, by the way, I don't even see any actual evidence for. Please at least read the last paragraph, as it contains his firsthand opinion on game design rather than what a guy who's not even working for Nintendo anymore says his opinion is. Then maybe consider why it's a bad idea to make snap emotional responses based on attention-grabbing titles on the internet.

"Mr. Hachiya is a media artist who is active beyond the framework of games, and I have known him personally for a long time. I have been discussing with Mr. Furukawa about the topic of the backgrounds of our directors, and we have been exploring various possibilities. Mr. Hachiya engages in unconventional activities, such as researching video games and building his own equipment. We believe that a connection between Mr. Hachiya and our company could lead to an interesting future, which is why we wanted him to join us as an outside director.

I am co-producing the animated film based on the world of Super Mario Bros. with Chris. We have reached a point where we are confident that the new movie will be an entertaining film, so we have announced its theatrical release for next spring. We do not want to set a release date first and then force the production schedule to meet it. This is similar to game development; we want to release something that we are confident will satisfy our consumers. I always tell our teams to “work for the consumer, not for your boss.” Because Chris is also on stage today, I would like him to say a few words."

@Olliemar28 That title is proving very inflammatory for those who don't bother to read past it. Considering you also have a direct quote from Miyamoto on his design perspective that's much harder to misinterpret, maybe it would be better to focus on that over one from a secondhand source.

@Orwellian87 I think you're interpreting it a bit more negatively than what he's actually trying to say, especially considering the quote from Miyamoto that he was supposedly responding to. For Imamura, choosing to look at games more as products than as works of art basically means designing them with the main goal of being desirable and enjoyable for other people rather than as a means of sharing your own creative vision. No one can argue Miyamoto hasn't put a ton of creative effort into the games he's contributed to. He just sees himself more as a toymaker trying to put a smile on someone's face rather than an artist producing his next masterpiece.

Think I ran into that wall glitch a few times. Just stopped dead in my tracks when going around a sharp gravity turn. Not great considering how hard the highest speed setting already is, so I'm glad it's been resolved.

I just happened to start Echoes of Wisdom yesterday. I kind of feel like they ruined the opening by putting it in trailers, but once you get out into the world, running around like a little kid picking up and playing with whatever random things you come across is very entertaining.

I think there are justifications for live service games that are pretty much useless without access to the company's servers, and for those companies needing to shut those servers down at some point. But I also think any game in that situation should be operating on a free to play model, and I personally avoid buying or putting a lot of money into anything from that genre. Still, it shouldn't be outright illegal to sell a full price live service game. Customers just need to wise up and not buy into things they'll likely end up feeling disappointed by. At worst, those games should maybe have a clear differentiator labeling them as a service rather than a product.

@OrtadragoonX That'd definitely be the best thing for the fanbase as a whole, but with how much work it would take, Capcom might earn more profit by just making another game like Rise that targets lower end hardware from the start. Either way, the chances of Monster Hunter skipping the Switch 2 entirely are pretty slim, so for now I'm content to just wait and see what we get.

So basically the Switch 2's not getting Monster Hunter Wilds unless they completely rebuild the game, but it could probably manage a competent version of something like Hellblade 2 without too much work.

I didn't have my expectations set too high, and while I haven't gotten quite as much enjoyment as I'd have liked out of the system's new games, the boost to so many backwards compatible ones has just about made up for it. I'd give the console itself a solid 8/10 so far, but the actual launch gets docked a point or two for all frustrating and confusing caveats that have come along with it.

Microsoft's big shopping spree has really become one of the most disastrous events in the history of gaming. I've given up on them redeeming themselves in any way, so now I just want to know how many of these layoffs and closures were planned from the start so I can decide whether to be more angry about their callousness or their incompetence.

I've taken to deleting the Switch 1 games I brought over as soon as I finish them. They're all still saved to my original Switch, but it's a shame I can't keep them on the platform where they run the best. Even with that, I'll be surprised if I don't run out of space long before getting my hands on a new microsd.

@Pak-Man I mostly agree with the analogy, although I think you're being a bit too dismissive of the appeal of older formats. Some songs and games are genuinely better with a softer presentation where the different elements blend together more. Even with things that weren't designed for them, it's still a pretty fun novelty if nothing else.

I could do with some more coop PvE. I think the last time I got invested in a shooter like that was with Destiny.

I've been wanting to give some of these a go for two decades. Glad I'll finally have the opportunity. I'll also take any excuse Nintendo gives me to play through my favorite Mario game again.

I keep seeing people say that if Nintendo didn't offer key cards, they'd just have people doing a code in a box. I have two problems with this.

First is that it ignores the obvious possibility of Nintendo offering cheaper carts, either by producing smaller storage sizes or even just letting third parties use the Switch 1 cart format for Switch 2 games that don't particularly need faster loading speeds.

And second, as far as I'm concerned, a key card is worse than a code in a box. At least with the latter you get all the benefits of a digital purchase along with some kind of physical representation of the game you bought. Key cards give you all the drawbacks of digital and physical with the only benefit being resale value, which is completely irrelevent to anyone planning to maintain their library.

I was wondering how I ended up getting a couple European versions of games as gifts. Guess it's because Amazon doesn't have a steady supply of the US ones.

Sounds to me like he just needs a bit more convincing. I've tried many Sonic games over the years, and Adventure 1 and 2 are the only ones I've ever really been attached to, so I'll keep waiting as long as I have to for more games like them.

People who don't understand that an aggregate score is not supposed to reflect their individual opinions really don't have two brain cells to rub together. I have more complaints about this game than any previous Mario Kart, but I still wouldn't rate it lower than an 8, and I doubt even these guys would go below 6 or 7 if they were trying to use the platform for its actual purpose.

I probably won't be able to declare a game of 2025 until at least 2027. It's already unusual that I've even played a couple games from this year, and I doubt I'll get to most of the rest any time soon. That said, I think DK Bananza, Fantasy Life i, and Silksong (if it actually releases) have the best shot at it.

@RejectedAng3L I'm at 1TB on my Switch with a decent physical library and already filled up my Switch 2's internal storage. I also have a backlog that's between a couple dozen and maybe a hundred games depending on how I feel like counting it. Doesn't change the fact that I can't meaningfully expand my storage without spending $100+.

I'm developing a similar opinion towards early HD games as a lot of people have towards games designed for CRTs. I think they just were not intended to be seen at higher resolutions and many of them end up looking worse for it. It's a lot easier for me to ignore the original blurriness than the flat textures and angular geometry that are made obvious by higher image clarity.

@DaftSkunk I played it for the first time on Switch, and since I prefer jam-packed semilinear worlds to oversized open ones, I enjoyed it a lot more than last generation's 3D Zeldas. Good game design is timeless, so I'd say taking the original game's solid foundation and rebuilding it from the ground up more than justifies the price.