BulkSlash

If these are ports and not emulation, I wonder if they’re based on the Christian Whitehead mobile ports of Sonic 1, 2 and CD? Maybe this is what they’ve been working on instead of Mania 2?

I’m replaying Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at the moment, I’m particularly enjoying the new tracks from Tour with the way they change on the last lap.

I might go back to Chrono Cross, but I’m not really feeling it. The battle system makes absolutely zero sense to me and the frame rate is terrible.

@Jackpaza0508 I’m not sure that’s the video’s fault, I think it highlights the inaccuracy of Nintendo’s N64 emulation.

In the end credits to Mario Kart 64 on NSO, Mario says “Hey, you’re very good, see you next time!” before the music has finished playing and the end credits to Ocarina go out of sync too. Its because the emulator isn’t fully timing accurate and so things with a specific timing will go out of sync.

From the GameCube onwards I’ve bought every major Nintendo hardware release at launch (before that I was relying on parental generosity! 😉) I’ve only ever skipped minor updates like the DSi or some of the 3DS variants, like the 2DS.

So, yeah a new Switch model would definitely be an insta-buy for me, even though I bought the OLED at launch last year.

@Ade117 Oh yeah definitely, they can still work that magic when they want to. Even stuff like Labo and the remote controlled Mario Kart cars show they're still able to think up clever new things!

@retroman64 Absolutely. A lot of game companies tend to do more of the same with their sequels, but Nintendo are usually pretty good at trying to do something new with each game rather than just make a sequel with shinier graphics. Forgotten Land has been brilliant!

I voted SNES, but I think NES, SNES and N64 represents Nintendo at their creative peak. While they’re still a very innovative company, they don’t tend to make anything new anymore and just make sequels to the same games over and over.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing as Nintendo generally don’t make a sequel unless they feel they can make something new and unique with it, but it would be nice to see the Nintendo try more new franchises.

B for me. I lament Nintendo’s pivot towards making the “bottom” and “right” buttons the main buttons when throughout the SNES, N64 and GC years the two main buttons were left and bottom (i.e. Y/B on SNES and B/A on the N64 & GC) which were aligned with the direction of one’s thumb.

Nintendo’s bizarre switch from the DS onwards to make B and A the main buttons just doesn’t work for me at all, my thumb doesn’t point to the right like that. I still find using B to cancel and A to accept on Switch menus counter-intuitive and wrong. At least Sony let you choose if you prefer Square/Cross or Cross/Circle. 😢

Wait, how long has Guru Larry been writing for Nintendo Life?

@Emceehamster Can you use gyro and analogue stick at the same time? The review seems to imply you can’t but from what you’ve said you can. If it’s possible, I’ll definitely be getting this as playing with analogue stick and gyro in tandem works really well for me. 👍

That art is incredible, I love how faithful it is to the game while adding extra details that you previously couldn't see. I wish we could get the original game in the NSO app, but a remake with this visual style would be epic.

"See you at Axelay 2!"

I’m glad it’s not just me, I always leave the sleeping ones alone unless I’m trying to figure out the secret mission objectives and think they might be related. Same with that level where the enemies are just chilling around tables eating.

There’s also a level where there’s a bunch of sleeping enemies in a hidden area with a pile of food in the corner. Even though I needed some health, I left their food stash alone.

@Travisemo007 That's why I haven't watched it too. That said, I've just binged Ranking of Kings and it's amazing despite being one of the worst looking animes I've ever seen (aside from Ex-Arm). So maybe I should give this a shot.

Most likely just a salary bargaining posture. It’s like when Daniel Craig said he’d rather slit his wrists than do another Bond film, yet he still came back.

This better not be an April Fools! I hope Area 88 (UN Squadron) is in the next batch.

I hope they haven't locked the best ending behind the hard mode like they did with iX2.

That's a big meh. Why can't we have Axelay and Actraiser?

I spend ages tracking this down for the GameBoy as a child, I think it must have had a small production run as it's expensive on eBay now.

I'll definitely be giving this a shot I think. It reminds me a lot of Pang Adventures, which I thought was a great modernisation of a classic.

I think we’d have seen more of it if it was coming this year, so I’m not too surprised. I also suspect it will end up releasing towards the end of next year, not Spring.

I'm not a fan of Double Dash, it was the start of the common problem of being near the finish line and being hit by a Blue Shell that costs you the whole race. It doesn't seem very fair to have been in the lead the whole time to end up in 6th like that.

I personally like Mario Kart 64 the best, it has always felt "fair" to me, especially as the Blue Shell travels along the ground and hits everyone, rather than allowing 8th place to penalise first place like happens in many of the other games. I wish they'd bring that back.

I do like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe quite a lot, but races do feel a bit boring when all it gives you in first place is coins. I know the further back you are the more powerful power-ups you get, but it's boring being in the lead and sometimes not even being able to drop a banana skin on the person behind who's flush with red shells.

@JasmineDragon Indeed, calling it that makes it sound like they expect problems.

If it’s got gyro aiming I’ll definitely give it a go.

I found AirPods 2 very quiet, but even before this update I found the AirPods 3 to be satisfyingly loud. I might have to be careful I don’t blow my ear drums out if they’ve boosted the volume! 😅

@RupeeClock Yeah, I did that too! Even though I had loads of games, I was able to keep it all tidy on one screen thanks to folders.

It's a shame it's such a long winded way of working, you've got to scroll off to the All Games area and then hit L before you can even start opening a group. It was much quicker on the 3DS and Wii U. Oh well.

One nice little feature is you can search by publisher name, so I was able to group all my Sega games up quickly that way.

“Expert Mode demands tighter wrist action”

You did that deliberately! 😂

@Raffles @sketchturner Absolutely, GoldenEye is still awesome fun to play. I beat it just the other day and immediately started a new save. My latest thing is making sure I unlock all of the cheats before deleting and starting again.

The unpredictability of the AI means every time I play the game it surprises me in some way.

Because the N64 controller is so awesome, Nintendo have to patent it in pieces to prevent all the awesomeness being in just one listing.

@TheRedComet I wouldn't say it was odd by the standards of the day. The 3DO and Jaguar controllers didn't follow the SNES layout, they both had straight rows of three face buttons.

The Saturn had six face buttons like the N64 and so did the Jaguar six button pad. So the N64 having six buttons was more in line with every other system of that generation. The PS1 is actually the odd man out! 😅

The two controller innovations I will always give Sony credit for are the handles and the symbols on the buttons. Trying to do QTEs on a Nintendo or Xbox controller is just confusing as they reverse the layout. 😩

That said, I think Sony hit on the winning formula more out of luck that skill with the DualShock. I don't think they added the second analogue stick out of visionary brilliance, I think it just follows their standard pattern back then of just adding another one of something to make their controller look better, i.e.:

-Original PS1 controller- SNES pad with extra L & R.
-PS1 Analogue Controller- has to do one better than the N64 so they added another stick.
-PS1 DualShock- the N64 added rumble so Sony created a pad with two rumble motors.

He didn’t do a very good crash course if he couldn’t work out that no N64 games expect you to keep switching between the left and middle handles. 🙄

If only they’d patch it so you can get the best ending on Normal difficulty… 😥

That is a seriously good collection, I think that’s every single Konami game and they even include the Japanese versions (which is good for TMNT2 on the NES as that’s my preferred version). I’ll be buying this day one for sure.

I'm looking forward to playing F-Zero X again! I still wish there was an option to play in original res and with a CRT filter, like the other NSO apps for NES, SNES and Megadrive.

I solved this problem in a much more expensive way- I just bought the arcade cabs. 😂

I’m not sure how to vote as the case was falling apart on my launch console, so I bought a replacement case and fan and it’s as good as new now. That said I also bought an OLED model and that’s my main machine now, with my launch console being relegated to my office to be used when I’m on long conference calls.

Arkham City on the Wii U was excellent. While it did have some performance issues, it was also able to display two separate views of Arkham City on the TV and on the Gamepad, it had gyro aiming, the map on the Gamepad was great and it had an excellent off-screen (handheld) mode.

I don't get why the eyes need to line up, the cat is clearly looking slightly to one side and the "mis-alignment" is trying to convey this.

If it needs fixing (which I don't think it does), it needs one eye to be slightly larger than the other to convey the slight angle of the head. They may have even tried that and found it looked odd so just went with the eyes offset.

I'm not a fan of 3D World, the lack of camera control made it very awkward for me to play. That said, Kirby isn't Mario, and it doesn't require the more precision jumping and moving that Mario requires. I had a lot of fun with the demo, it was extremely easy, but hunting for the collectibles and completing the side missions meant it kept me engaged. I'll definitely by buying the full game.

I've still got my component cable, although it was modded with a VGA connector. The only console of that era capable of a picture as sharp as the GC was the Dreamcast.

I've never really understood why the Wii's component output doesn't look as sharp as the GameCube's. It always looks muddy to me.

I'm probably going to skip it. I find one Pokemon game every 3 years or so is enough for me. I'm currently playing Arceus (some of the landscape shots for Violet/Scarlet look straight out of Arceus!) so I don't think I have much appetite for more of that.

But we'll see, I'm nothing if not inconsistent.

I’m tempted to say Sprigatito but I’m haunted by memories of Litten evolving into a giant muscle-bound furry in Pokémon X. It was distinctly uncomfortable going into the options screen to stroke that thing to boost its affection levels. 😳

If they’d ported their mobile versions of the games instead of making the insane decision to force the game into Unreal Engine there would have been far fewer bugs and it would have run at full resolution and 60fps on the Switch.

@PtM Exactly. While it’s not N64, overclocking the SuperFX chip in Starfox doesn’t really make the game smoother, it just makes it run faster. Like you say getting better frame rates out of those games would mean making changes to the code.

All those reviews and no mention of battery life? I’m surprised as I get the impression the SteamDeck will be the GameGear to the Switch’s GameBoy when it comes to battery life.

@nmanifold Sadly not. I’ve gone and created a system button remap so that A and B are mapped to the correct orientation of Y and B, but it’s not ideal.

I’ve got one of the N64 controllers but it would be nice to a have a proper N64 joy-con with 6 face buttons for playing N64 on-the-go.

@Rosalinho If you do a Google image search for Doctor 64 you should get some examples of the CD-based machine back. It was a bit of an expensive beast and I think people had to upgrade the RAM after a while when larger games started shipping.

I’d love to have a remastered Code Veronica on the Switch, even if it is the X/Complete version rather than the DC original. The PS4 BC release is horrible; blurry and low-res, it runs at 50Hz and has massive borders.

@InJeffable I feel the same. Most of the additions did nothing for me, especially the tedious tower defence portions. I’d have much preferred a 1:1 update or better still just giving us the original in the SNES app.

I wonder if the lack of doing things the VC way is because Nintendo didn’t want to (yet again) weather all the justifiable anger from people who would expect to be able to carry their purchases over from a previous console.

I’ve bought many Nintendo games (like Mario World) 3 times on Wii, 3DS and Wii U and would have been very annoyed to have to buy them all again on Switch.

By using a subscription service and presenting the old games as a bonus, Nintendo somewhat sidesteps this issue by not having any purchases for people to expect to carry over to their next console.

Looks like a Dreamcast game in some of those screenshots. Luckily I like the Dreamcast and still play on it, so the graphics wouldn’t put me off.

@Damo I’m usually wrong though! 😅