BulkSlash

Japanese version hands down, it includes so many elements from the game. The US one is almost Phalanx-esque in its lack of detail on what the game is about. That said, maybe it’s supposed to be a hint to use lightning on the pyramid to get the hidden item? 😉

I remember quite enjoying the GameBoy game, I think I beat it too, although I'm not sure if there was a better ending or something as I think there was treasure you were supposed to retrieve before rescuing the princess.

I remember it was pretty cryptic working out which jelly bean to use and where too. I think there was a rocket one that seemed to be completely useless.

If they wanted to added modern quality of life enhancements I think a map would probably have helped a lot.

I'm trying to decide what my favourite port is. It might be Turtles in Time as while it's graphically a little bit downgraded from the arcade, they added lots of cool extra features that makes it the better game IMHO.

Or possibly Time Crisis on the PS1, that basically played 1:1 with the arcade with just reduced textures and frame rate.

I can't believe this won't be cloud, it ran so badly on PS5 and Series X at launch. That said, this was originally a cross-gen game so maybe they were doing it old-school and the cancelled PS4/Xbox One versions were a completely separate game/engine and it's that version they've down-ported to the Switch?

Being able to use the y-axis on the right analogue stick when gyro is enabled. Every other game with gyro allows it, the dev team are just being obstinate now that their reasoning for doing it has been disproven.

I'd be very interested in trying the Hall Effect stick but I suspect it won't be any good. I've tried 4 different N64 replacement sticks (and the NSO one) and none of them match the accuracy and sensitivity of the original.

It seems to be a characteristic of the early analogue stick era that the sticks were much easier to move and had no dead zones. It was like that on Saturn, early PS1 and Dreamcast too. I think the manufacturers started stiffening the sticks to compensate for drift on badly worn controllers. They also started putting huge dead zones in around that time too. 😞

The best solution I've found is to buy a replacement bowl for an original N64 analogue stick. That fixes the loss of range you get when the bowl wears down and you get to keep the smoothness and accuracy.

I’ve been playing this non-stop since it came out, I’ve unlocked pretty much everything now (my one criticism is it doesn’t make it easy to tell what is left to find) and I’ve had a real blast.

I’ve not noticed any “jank” in the gameplay, if anything I worry going back to Jet Set Radio will be very hard because of all the tweaks they’ve made to make things easier (double jump, boost, manuals to preserve combos, right stick for camera).

It’s quite funny how at the start of the game it’s tricky to rack up even a small combo but by the end it has taught you so many tricks (like holding R when jumping off a rail) that you can be chaining all sorts of different techniques together to easily rack up combo scores in the millions.

Unless Mario Wonder or Sonic is amazing I think this will be my GOTY.

I'll be giving these a wide berth if they don't make it 60fps. MGS1 I can understand as I'd expect that's emulation rather than a port, but they're re-using the PS3/360 ports which were updated to use modern rendering APIs. There's absolutely no way this should be 720p30 on the Switch or even more ridiculously only 720p on the PS5 and Series X!

Been playing it (almost) non-stop since it launched, and it’s really great. If anything, having good camera controls and other little QoL features like the double jump mean going back to vanilla Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast will be quite hard! My progress has been quite slow as I’ve been determined to find all the hidden items in a level along with completing the cat chain challenges I’ve found.

I’d like to see it happen, but short of another unexpected game that gives the current hardware a massive shot in the arm (like Pokémon did for the original GB and Animal Crossing did for the Switch) I can’t see it happening sadly.

Also, if it did happen, I’d expect a lot of people saying it doesn’t count because the Switch is a “handheld”. I wouldn’t agree with that, but I’m sure it would happen.

@Mauzuri That's cool, I didn't know they'd done that for Origins. It was possible to retry the bonus levels on the iPhone by swiping out of the app and when you went back it would be on a pause screen with a retry button! 😂

The fan remake of Triple Trouble let you sacrifice a life to retry the bonus stages which I thought worked well, although the levels had plenty of bonus level entrances so it never felt as frantic as it did on the other 2D Sonic games.

I think this sounds really good, I like that these abilities give you new ways to traverse a level but I do worry how it will work in practice.

What if you haven't got the Cyan Emerald before reaching the water level? You're basically missing out on something to help on those levels. Or maybe you can't reach a bonus area if you haven't got the Green Emerald making it harder to actually get all of them.

I think I'm just worried it will be like the old 2D Sonics (and Mania) which were quite unforgiving with the Chaos Emerald bonus levels. There was no way to go back to a previous level to try and get missed Emeralds again so once you're at the end of the game if you've not got them all there's no way to get the good ending. I just hope this game isn't like that.

Excellent, I hadn't heard anything for a while so I was worried they were going to delay it again. I really hope this lives up to the old Jet Set Radio!

I had a lot of fun playing the demo on my Steam Deck, so I’ll definitely be getting this. Plus it’s Nightdive so it should have gyro aiming. I only ever played the demo back in the ‘90s on a 486 so it will cool to finally play the full game.

I’ve tried a couple of times but I wasn’t able to get through the wall, I’m actually not that bothered about locking myself into a looping underwater level to be honest! 😅

I’ve not managed to jump over the flag pole either (I think it’s only 3-3 where that can be done).

The best I can do is beat both loops of the game and get 100+ lives jumping on the Koopa Trooper/Buzzy Beetle in 3-1.

I prefer the NES versions. The music in All Stars has that tinny reverberation that many later SNES games seemed to have, which I don’t like.

Plus there’s that glitch with the way Mario gets pushed downwards when he hits blocks from underneath which is backwards to how the NES versions work.

I really like these new tracks, Moonview Highway is interesting in that the arrangement of the boost pads seems to change with each CC class. I’ve only played through on each class once to get three stars, so I’m not sure if the pads are random per race or just different depending on CC yet. But I do like that you have to look ahead and plan your route to get all the boosts.

The Squeaky Clean track is excellent too, there’s so many things to see, all the fun details like the things that have been washed down the drain and the three routes at the end of the track are great too.

All in all, I really enjoyed the new tracks and I’m looking forward to the last set. I hope when they’re all out Nintendo will sell a new cartridge with all the tracks on the card so I can have something not dependent on Nintendo keeping the DLC servers running.

I’ve had three sticks start to drift, and I’ve always stuck the replacements Amazon sell in them and so far they’ve been fine. It’s a shame the Gulikits are so stiff as that’s probably the thing I dislike most in a joystick.

I do wonder if putting a tall joystick cap on would make these easier to use as the moment of force would be lower when pushing from further away. I tend to use joystick caps anyway as I find it allows for more precision.

I’m almost tempted to buy some of these just to see how bad they are! 😂

I’ve not seen the trailer as I like to be surprised, but despite not liking Double Dash much, Daisy Cruiser was a lot of fun on that game so it should be really good in Mario Kart 8.

Thanks for the heads up! I nearly missed the last one (I spotted it on a Monday morning!) I've got all the themes so far so I'd be annoyed to miss one even though I don't play Tetris 99 as much as I used to.

The good news is it's not Virtuous doing the port. Their Arkham ports on PS4/Xbone were terrible. I'm sure the Switch will be able to handle Asylum and City without issue (it would be cool if we got the Wii U's enhanced port of City on the Switch, including gyro aiming).

I'm not to bothered if Arkham Knight doesn't run well as I didn't like that one anyway and won't be revisiting it. The world was too large and spread out to justify the inclusion of the Batmobile and the story was disappointing too.

I approve the large number of Ocarina of Time bosses in this list. I’d also say the showdown with Ganon in this one is the most epic- set in the ruins of his castle with rain lashing down and lightning bolts arcing through the pitch black sky. It’s genuinely climactic and exhilarating.

I definitely think it’s from the same lineage as the New games but after such a long break (and assuming it’s the same team) I think they’ve perhaps taken the criticisms of the previous games being too unadventurous to heart.

If this plays as well as Super Luigi U I’ll be extremely happy.

I love Sega, but this is just typical of them. They can’t help but make the stupidest decisions. The game looks great from the trailers so I’ll give it a chance, but that’s not a team with a particularly good pedigree.

The problem I think wasn’t necessarily with the drag and drop, it was there was no way to encapsulate parts of the game logic, so you just end up with an unmanageable spider’s web of components all over the place.

If it was possible to group parts of your game up into boxes that could be closed so you didn’t have so much clutter everywhere it would have made it much easier to work with.

Also, I think it needed much better texture and sprite tools. Animating sprites requires such a huge amount of manual work when all that should be needed is just to be able to load a sequence of drawn images.

An update or sequel with much better tools could be truly excellent, but I don’t think it sold well enough for Nintendo to try again sadly.

I don’t like the graphical style at all or the over-designed main character. I really like the idea of the game, but the execution doesn’t work for me.

It’s funny he says that when the first level they showed looked like Green Hill Zone to me! 😂 It doesn’t bother me anyway as I like Green Hill Zone.

I think either the original or DX is best. The remake could have been better but they padded it out too much and made it feel tedious to 100% the game. If they hadn’t done that the remake would probably have been better

Every review of the stick I've seen so far says it doesn't properly recreate the feel of the N64 stick. The range benchmark looks good but the response isn't right, which means things like GoldenEye and Wave Race won't play well.

It seems even Hall Effect sensors can't replicate the original optical sensors the N64 sticks used. I can't say I'm too surprised, I've not found a single replacement N64 stick that works like the original. They're all usually horrid to use. It's a pity there's no-one selling steel bowl replacements any more as those can be dropped in to an original stick and make them like new again.

I hope it's not too soon, I'm still trying to get good at the latest two cups they've added. 😅

The Japanese cover is the best. The European cover seems to have fallen into the ‘00s habit of making all posters/covers orange & teal.

Personally I think this is great, back in the Wii U days being able to carry on playing on the GamePad when the TV was in use was incredibly useful.

I'm probably going to finally get a PS5 this year for Stellar Blade and FFVII Rebirth and I'll definitely get one of these with it (or better yet maybe a deal where it's bundled in).

It should be 120fps on PS5/Series X and 60fps on the Switch. I don’t know what they’ve done to the graphics but looking at the trailer it’s the same stylistic flat shaded, low-poly, minimal texture look of the original so I can’t see why it needs to be 30fps.

I’ve still got all my G&Ws, I think my favourite is Zelda, it actually still smells brand new somehow! The crystal screen Super Mario Bros. is also very cool. Purely by accident I also have one of the rarest G&Ws- Mario the Juggler, which I bought without even realising it would be the last one they made.

While it’s not a G&W, I was working on the old LCD Grandstand game Star Force today. My original one was sadly thrown out, so I bought a cheap one off eBay. One of the battery contacts was corroded and snapped off. I dismantled the whole thing, cleaned it and replaced the spring on the contact and it’s now working good as new. Despite being just beeps, the music is actually quite cool.

Kururin Squash on the GameCube was awesome, I’d love to see that make a comeback, although the small analogue sticks on the Switch might make precision manoeuvres trickier.

The box art on Amazon doesn’t match the one in the article. I’d guess that’s Amazon’s mistake. That said, I want the Japanese cover but Amazon only have the PAL one. I guess this means I’ll have to preorder from Play-Asia.

The tricky thing with this is the early controllers are all on a continuum and all made me feel I was playing with something new and innovative.

The NES broke new ground with the precise d-pad, (the dog bone is also a marvel of simple elegance), the SNES pad found a way to give us six easy to reach buttons and the N64 brought us analogue, camera controls and rumble.

So I struggle to pick a favourite, but in the end it has to be the N64 controller because it a) gets the most unjust hate and b) it made so many innovations possible.

It's a pretty cool game (both in looks and gameplay) but as the review says, that last level is a bit of a chore. The story is totally incomprehensible too, but that just adds to the charm I think. 😆

Not surprising really, it had been on life support for quite a few years now. All the big platform holders were holding their own events and simulcasting them online and the big publishers were starting to follow suit.

The reach of those online events was much greater than just the people who can physically get to LA for the event. Then there's the cost of having a booth which was going through the roof. I've seen the same in the car industry, shows just don't generate the sales the way they used to and aren't worth what the organisers charge to attend.

Then there was the fact that your game could get lost in all the noise of all the big releases being announced at once and even small publishers were starting to see it as pointless.

Sounds great, the one item in the cons list is a pro for me! I'll definitely be grabbing this.

Four.

The original in blue, a white XL, the white New 3DS Ambassador Edition and finally a metallic blue New 3DS XL.

@Burning_Spear Yeah, I couldn’t get on with this theme at all. I’m not sure if it’s the background or all the busy symbols on the blocks. All I can say for sure is I won’t ever be using it after unlocking it! 😅

The Western art is iconic, but Mario is a bit off-spec and also looks like he has sunburn. The Japanese artwork is much better in every way.

Cool, I look forward to trying the original Triple Trouble as the recent fan remaster was fantastic, it will be great to see how the original plays.

I'm glad we got a reminder here, I've got all the themes so far so I'd be gutted if I missed one.

Still no Axelay. 😩

My most anticipated game of the year! I was rewatching the trailers for this the other day, I really hope it’s a good as it looks.

Crazy 8? Bullet Bill? What are these power-ups? All I ever seem to get are green shells and coins! 😅

I'm replaying all the tracks at the moment so this is good timing for them to add some more.

Colourful Game & Watch is my favourite.

Mario really seems to get the short end of the stick when it comes to special edition Switches. Zelda, Pokemon and Splattoon have all had various special Joy-Cons, docks and backplates. Mario Odyssey got some red Joy-Cons and that was it, and they seem to be recycling those again here. 😢