Anachronism

This is one of the ones I'm a bit hesitant about. It's one of the most graphically demanding games announced for Switch 2 and, as far as I can tell, there's no sign of a proper physical release. Until microsd express prices get a bit closer to standard microsd, I'm mostly sticking to physical games and sub-10GB downloads.

There's a reason why selling out has become synonymous with prioritizing profits over principles. Even if the people on top of these conglomerates were decent human beings instead of ruthless execs and money-grubbing shareholders, they still wouldn't have the same vision for the businesses they absorb as the people who created them, nor would they be able to fully devote themselves to each one like the head of an independent company can. What's best for a group will almost never be what's best for each individual, and past a certain size, it's impossible to keep making decisions without some parts suffering disastrous consequences for the benefit of the whole. This kind of thing even happens on the scale of families, so you just can't expect some random suits to give proper consideration to the employees and fans of a business they barely even remember they own.

I need a dark mode eshop to match the home menu. The bright orange and white already bothered my eyes and the red is even worse.

I think it's also worth noting that you can redownload games in the virtual game cards settings even without borrowing the virtual game cards, after which you can still borrow them in the way people have been up to now after flipping on the online license toggle in the user settings. I'm not actually sure why they even added that toggle, unless having it on somehow interferes with the virtual game cards.

We probably have a few years before even getting a glimpse of it, but I'm more curious about the next 3D Zelda than anything else. I'm really not a fan of most of the changes Breath of the Wild brought to the series, and while Tears of the Kingdom improved on that formula a good bit, I'm hoping to see either a return to form or another reinvention of the formula from the next entry.

I'm not sure when I'll get around to it, but I'd like to have a case and the GameCube controller, though I plan on mostly sticking to my Switch 1 pro controllers if I can. As for the microsd, I'd ideally like to wait until I can get a 1TB one for less than $100, but we'll have to see how long I can last on the Switch 2's built-in storage, especially with how few third parties are aiming for proper physical releases.

I think I've looked at it every day. I'm not expecting to get much actual news out of it, but the bite-sized bits of concept art, concert performances, cartoons, and comics are a nice way to break up the monotony for a few minutes.

Saw that yesterday and took a minute to be sure it was a fake. There's also clones of A Game About Digging A Hole, Exit 8, Chained Together, and who knows how many grocery store, card shop, and tavern keeper sims along with one or two for nearly every other simulation game too. It's getting a bit ridiculous at this point, honestly.

I'll be hoping for another Nintendo-targeted Monster Hunter, and maybe Dragon's Dogma 2 and Okami 2 if they can get them running okay.

It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out between the different studios/publishers. The ones who put the full game on the cart are definitely earning bonus points with me, but for games that I'm okay buying digital, the key card allowing them to start off both that and the fully digital version at a lower price could be nice. I'd still rather the key cards not exist at all, but I'll take the silver linings where I can find them.

Yep. Fought with Target for a while before Walmart finally let me through. Now I just have to hope it doesn't get randomly cancelled.

@GoldenSunRM Yep, gambling addicts are notorious for trying to figure out "the system" when they're really just throwing darts blindfolded and hoping they hit more than they miss.

Guess I'm glad I waited on this one, though I honestly still might just go for a Switch 1 copy with those storage requirements. Actually, I've even been holding off on playing Frontiers just in case it runs a bit better, so I'm in no rush. Maybe they'll release a proper physical version some day.

Darn it, and I just finally got back down to one missing 3* card. Why must they keep doing this to me?

@Bunkerneath Nah, probably just some rotten luck. I was dealing with the same for a month or so before the newest pack released.

The file size is what's really impressing me. It makes me worry a little about how many tracks the game has if they're able to fit all those high quality assets in such a tiny package, but hopefully it's just another example of them doing things the right way.

Geez. The combination of third parties refusing to properly compress their games and refusing to put out proper physical releases is going to make maintaining your library a nightmare. Soon we'll have to start bulk ordering 100 GB microsds and keeping one game on each.

I'll be looking forward to the inevitable digital foundry video on this one. The series has become a good benchmark for what a well-optimized third party game can look like on Nintendo consoles.

My GameCube library is largely made up of Nintendo games and licensed games. I'm looking forward to checking out everything I missed as a kid from the former category, but it's a shame we'll likely never see most of the latter.

I like the look of the illustrator's work. Some of it reminds me of what you might see in a school textbook. Seeing pokemon drawn in a similar style should be interesting.

I've put a lot of time into Skyrim, but I'm still not actually sure if I like it. It earns some respect just for the variety of gameplay mechanics built into it, but the controls were always unpleasantly clunky, while I found the characters and world both visually and narratively unappealling. I know very little about Oblivion, but if this remake takes a similar formula and smooths out all those rough edges, then I could see myself having a lot of fun with it.

Pikmin was the first home console game I owned, and it taught me at a very young age that I never want to be responsible for a bunch of other people's lives. I really like a lot about the games and I've owned three of them, but I've barely played them at all because I just give up as soon as my little guys start dying. I rarely mind getting a game over and losing a few minutes of progress, but if a game makes me permanently sacrifice other characters in order to progress, I just stop wanting to play.

@StewdaMegaManNerd But why? I understand that brand recognition is important to grab the attention of casual fans and kids, but I can't count the number of great games I've played with completely forgettable main characters. It just seems a waste to focus on the characters over the gameplay, especially when it comes to the perpetually blank slates of the Mario cast.

I've been surprised to see some people disappointed that they're leading with a 3D Donkey Kong instead of a 3D Mario. Either way it's a major first party platforming collectathon, and it's likely even made by the same team as Odyssey. If we were talking about a story-focused series that'd be one thing, but since it's not, who cares if you're playing as a plumber or an ape as long as the genre and quality are the same?

This kind of reads like one of those "Dark Souls should have an easy mode" pieces. All other types of entertainment are more or less pure escapism, but games are supposed to have some degree of challenge, and the form that challenge takes is just as much a creative choice as the art style or story. Fall damage isn't just there to add realism. It's a punishment for failure or a way to keep players from skipping large chunks of the game. To be fair, I've complained vigorously and repeatedly on this site about things like level-scaling, excessive openness, and overuse of assets ruining the sense of progression and novelty in open world games, but seeing a personal preference like that declared as a sweeping statement in the header of an article just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Welp, glad the prices on the things I care about are staying the same. Still never paying $80 for a game, so I guess I'll have to start waiting on sales for their biggest titles.

The game still looks cool, but there was no news here worth making an event out of it, and definitely nothing that makes it worth more than every other AAA game. I don't know who's taking the reins on this console launch, but aside from the one hour between the start and end of the Switch 2 Direct, they have not been doing a good job.

I managed to have a great time with Witcher 3 on Switch. If this game's most taxing area in an already outdated build can still run passably, then I don't think the performance will be a problem for me.

I was expecting this once that list was put out there, but I'm glad to see they're already starting to patch up the holes in the backwards compatibility. I'd guess the first thing some studios will do with their Switch 2 dev kit is figure out why their Switch 1 game isn't working so they can keep selling it on the new platform.

I'd also like to see what the Switch 2 eshop looks like. I imagine having trouble getting a dev kit is frustrating, but hopefully that will at least leave the new storefront blissfully free of shovelware for a little while.

@Toastmaster I would. I've never cared about frame rates as long as they're stable. The only time I even notice the difference between 30 and 60 is when I go out of my way to directly compare them. PvP was the weakest part of Destiny anyway. I only really want to play through all the solo/co-op content.

@Toastmaster The game did launch on the base last gen consoles, right? Unless later updates tanked the performance, I don't see a reason they couldn't get it running on Switch 2. Not that I think it's likely to happen regardless. They've obviously never felt the need to support Nintendo's systems before, so there's not much reason to start now.

Can we get some Destiny complete editions instead? I played the first game at launch and liked it well enough, but spent way too much time on it and burned out before they could release more content.

I'm not as high on Mario Kart World, but I'm pretty much in the same boat with my favorites. It's hard to argue that 8 isn't the best so far with all the polish and sheer quantity of content packed into it, but Double Dash will always hold a special place in my heart. The same goes for Smash Ultimate vs Melee and Brawl.

Yep, no open world has made me feel nearly as insignificant as Mira. Since its original release, its been the bar I've judged all other open world maps against, and so far they've all been found wanting. The sheer scale of it, both in terms of map size as well as the geography and wildlife, puts it in a league of its own. And while I'm sure there are plenty of reused assets in there, it really doesn't feel like it the way other games do. It seems to be designed very cleverly so that you're always discovering new things while almost never feeling properly lost, somehow managing to have plenty of clear horizons with obvious landmarks despite the landscapes' staggering verticality. I know Monolith Soft has since helped out with the Switch's 3D Zeldas, but I'd gladly trade both those games to see them build another world like this one.

I never understand why these comparisons are done using inflation, which might as well be a made up number to the average person, rather than something like the ratio of the median incomes for those years. That would be a way more useful metric for how much the money actually means to people.

The Nintendo Online icon still doesn't match the others, but at least it stands out a little less than on the Switch. That red circle next to all the gray ones on the dark theme has bugged me ever since they added it.

@TimelessJubilee @GrailUK I can assure you there were plenty of people arguing about game visuals long before Digital Foundry gained their reputation as the arbiters of truth on all things graphical. That and exclusives were always the biggest points of comparison in the "console wars" arguments that if anything have settled down considerably in the last decade.

@kmtrain83 Oh, I don't actually expect them to make the things I want. It's just awful when something you like that used to be the norm has become such a tiny fringe interest that it's not even worth catering to anymore. I've enjoyed video games a lot less since around when the Switch came out, and I'm worried I'll eventually lose interest entirely just because nothing feels close to the older games and systems I loved.

I don't think the Switch 2 is terribly overpriced for what it is. It's just still not the console I want. I'd much rather go back to the days of separate portable and home consoles built entirely around weird gimmicks. I never use my Switch's screen or battery or joy-cons because the thing's just a bit too bulky to comfortably carry around and if the games are built to look good on a big screen, I'd rather see them there. All the money that goes into trying to squeeze a home console experience into a portable is wasted on me because I want a home console experience at home and a portable experience on the go, and these hybrids don't deliver on either of those as well as two separate systems could. Plus, the few interesting features they still stick in them largely go to waste because they're treated more like peripherals than a central part of the hardware's identity.

I'm okay not having the Wii U Zelda ports. Wind Waker HD had some nice quality of life improvements, but the game looks good either way and I have no interest in replaying it regardless. I'd like to give Twilght Princess another playthrough, but I really wouldn't call that remaster an upgrade.

What I really want to know is how long all the old Pokemon games will stay locked in the vault. If they ever do start rolling those out, I'll likely just keep looping through them on the side indefinitely.

I'll be interested to see a launch year comparison. Launch day is never going to have more than a handful of heavy hitting exclusives just so they can avoid cannibalizing each other's sales, but with the games announced so far, Switch 2's already looking to be one of the best on both fronts.

Don't mind me and any other Americans. Just here to stare longingly like a little orphan child looking at a happy family through their window.

The hoverboard movement in the demo was pretty fun and the BotW-esque powers work surprisingly well, though the on-foot movement and combat could use some more polish. The upgrades you get do help a bit, so maybe it starts working more smoothly once you get further in. I still would have at least boosted the base walk speed a little, though. I also find it pretty funny how they chose not to animate the main character's face and then seemingly hid it by making him always try to face away from the camera.

@nightspades But you can do that with digiatal copies. That's exactly what the whole "virtual game card" thing they announced in the Switch 1 Direct is for. Even before that, your kids could have just played it through your account and still had their own save data as long as they turned off the cloud save settings, though I'll admit that can be a bit clunky. An actual physical copy gives you the benefits of not having to clear storage space or download it to each console to trade it around, and a digital copy is impossible to break or lose as long as the eshop is still running, but these give you the worst of both.

As a side note, announcing virtual game cards and game key cards a week apart is probably going to confuse a lot of people.

If they announce payed DLC now, people will be out with pitchforks and torches. If they somehow manage to justify the price tag and then give it another year or two, there'll probably be some people begging for more content.

@AussieMcBucket Companies are the ones responsible for properly setting those expectations. Obviously they can't account for the nuts who get caught up in their own wild speculation, but considering Nintendo only dipped their toe into the $70 pool with one game after a decade at $60 (and even faced a decent amount of backlash for that) they should have been fully aware how badly their audience would take a sudden $20 jump over their established standard. Aside from that, I agree that none of the other complaints are outrageous on their own, but all those little disappointments pile up, and if someone finds any one of them particularly offensive, that spark is all it takes to whip up the rest into a full-blown outrage.

For some people, the biggest insult won't even be the price tags, but the clear favorship of digital media over physical, or even just how they tried to sweep all the bad news under the rug. Good will is an extremely valuable asset for a company, and in some cases an even more useful one than money. Nintendo's earned a lot of it just by consistently making great games at accessible prices, but you can't just burn through it and earn it back as easily as you do with cash. A company should always aim to earn more good will than they spend, and whipping their fans into a euphoric frenzy with a Direct that only focused on the positives before immediately dropping a bunch of harsh realities on them achieved exactly the opposite.

@AussieMcBucket Honestly, I don't know if it's even possible to make a budget game system that's worth buying anymore. I was expecting the Switch 2 to be around $400. $450 isn't a devastating price hike over that, and I still plan on buying one when I can, assuming the price doesn't rise any higher. I think most people could have gotten over that without too much fuss if it was the only surprise. But the various price hikes for new games and ports, the game key cards, charging money for a tech demo, the physical/digital price split, the expensive peripherals, and the fact that the information about all of these things was intentionally obfuscated very much makes it look like the company that's been drowning in money for the better part of a decade has decided that that's still not good enough.

I'm not one of Nintendo's accountants, so I can't tell you what the profit margins on all these things actually look like, but whether on not Nintendo's actually getting a better deal doesn't matter to their customers, because they already have more than enough evidence that they're getting a worse one. With how much financial turmoil the world's already been in for the last few years and the Switch 2's reveal coinciding almost exactly with the US governments decision to pour an olympic swimming pool's worth of gasoline on that fire, Nintendo picked just about the worst possible time to tell people everything is going to be more expensive than they expected.

@AussieMcBucket Customers like to think there's an unspoken agreement between them and companies where they give the companies money for their products, and then the companies use that money to make more of the same or similar products. Companies obviously have no real obligation to follow those terms, but doing so is one of the safest ways to build a loyal customer base. All Nintendo's most successful systems this century have stood out as reliable budget gaming platforms, and that's a big reason why a lot of people bought them. All those people are understandably unhappy that the company they supported has decided to abandon what's perceived as one of their most admirable qualities.

Aside from the obvious ones about pricing and pre-orders, I want to know more about backwards compatibility and cross-gen games, I want to know more about Kirby Air Riders, I'm interested in what other big third party games are coming, and I want to see what a really well-optimized game that still pushes the Switch 2 down to 720p 30fps docked looks like.

Man, I'm glad I forgot what time the Direct wa - I mean cleverly waited an extra hour for a more seamless viewing experience. Gungeon is the only roguelike I've invested a decent number of hours into, and even though I was already sick of it by the point where I started making it to the final floor, I wouldn't mind putting some more time into a sequel, even if I know I'm just going to burn out on it again.