Cwiiis

Slightly concerning that this got like, what, 10 seconds and random indie farm simulator got 4 or 5 times as long and they spent minutes on various other things. I may well not pre-order this one, I think there's a chance it could be solidly mediocre... Here's hoping I get to eat my words!

I don't think Silksong being difficult is the problem, it's the game being unreasonable that's the problem. Two examples (mild spoilers ahead - nothing big, but tune out now if you don't want to hear any specifics about the game);

• Hunter's Wild boss arena - this arena is several screens worth of difficult enemies beyond the closest checkpoint. If you get here too early, you get some help but not much and the extra visual noise of that help makes it more difficult in a lot of ways. If you come back later when you're better equipped to do the area, you don't get that help. The problem is really towards the end of this long challenge and you're not going to get the opportunity to practice this outside of this scenario.
• Bellhart boss - Again, this boss is several screens away from a checkpoint. In this case, at least you can get to the boss without too much risk of damage, but if you die from this boss, there's no way to recover your items without triggering the boss. And it still takes a decent amount of time to get there. The boss itself is tricky but doable with some practice in its first phase. But then the phase switch happens and it becomes suddenly much harder, and different enough that your first phase prowess isn't going to help that much. Dying means having to get here again and complete the long, tricky first phase again. This is such a huge amount of wasted time, and it just feels unfair.

Both situations, it's not that they're too hard - it's very satisfying when you get past them. It's that the cost of retrying can be minutes of repeating a sequence that becomes quite boring. Nothing outside of those scenarios is going to properly prepare you for them - you are almost certainly going to die on the first encounter. This just feels unreasonable to me, as much as I'm enjoying the game otherwise. Hollow Knight 1 didn't have me feeling like this at all.

A warning for anyone interested in the Mega Drive/Master System themed one, it's an extremely low-effort product... I've finished every puzzle in it, so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth (I bought it in the last sale), but it's so disappointing.

The Mega Picross puzzles are all just duplicates of the standard Picross puzzles rather than unique images, there's only 1 song per mode (so get used to hearing that 1 song!) and there's no reward for completing every puzzle, not even a message. A message pops up when you complete each section, but the only thing you get for finishing every puzzle is a label on the main screen showing your total time.

The actual quality of the puzzles is often quite low, with them being completely inscrutable on completion until they get colourised - almost as if they were computer-generated from a collection of images with no human interaction beyond that point. The one exception is the colour puzzles, but they're all very easy and there aren't very many of them - plus, even as someone with perfect colour vision, some of the colour choices make them trickier than they need to be... Good luck if you have any kind of colour blindness.

The whole product is very unsatisfying - if you like picross, you'll get something out of it, but it leaves a bad taste for sure. Avoid it and maybe check out something like Murder By Numbers instead.

Weird to do an article about the AYA Neo Air and not feature a single picture of it, not even in the headline picture

"we haven't seen neither hide nor hair of it"

Huge missed opportunity to say "we haven't seen top nor Tails of it"

I don't understand why the superior SNES version of Turtles in Time isn't getting online when SNES Tournament Fighters is, but I'll probably be playing these all locally anyway - pretty psyched for this!

A shame to hear about crashing... If I was going to get this it'd be mainly for the co-op multiplayer, but having to contend with crashing during multiplayer doesn't sound like a recipe for fun I'll wait for a sale I think...

I'm pretty sure this isn't 'true' 3d - the camera only has one axis of movement (the X axis - i.e. tilt) and I expect a lot of the image is really made up of scanline tricks rather than polygon filling. Makes comparing it to actual Stunt Race FX, or even X, a bit unfair, but it's cool to see something more involved than the usual 2d indie productions we see on the GB(C).

I'm very surprised to see the amount of positive sentiment... The original game is pretty average and I don't remember it being particularly highly regarded or popular when it was released (not compared to Chuck Rock at least). Hope it's good anyway!

Finally! Been waiting for this to get to Switch for a while - my only concern will be frame-rate/latency, especially for classic mode (which is really the only mode I'm interested in...) You'd think with it being on Quest that it ought to be good though.

@LUIGITORNADO Of course they don't, why on Earth would they...?

Glad to see it's already gotten a bunch of support - Metal Gear Solid GBC is legit the best MGS game in the series.

Glad to see all the love for Ghost Trick, legit one of the best DS games in the entire library - I miss the unique DS games that really took advantage of the form-factor, I guess Nintendo can't afford to be quite as whacky now as they used to be...

Er, so a USB drive that identifies as a hard drive works on a system that has hard drive support? Slow news day, eh?

For the record, I don't think any non-specific high score records have been broken with rolling yet, it's just letting people play further into kill-screen (post level 29) than before - so slightly misleading article header... The scores will probably come soon though.

@Slowdive That's crazy, this game brings PCs that are considerably more powerful than the Switch to their knees! Even at the absolute lowest detail this looks quite a bit better on PC, but that still looks pretty good... It'd be interesting to see a detailed article on the cuts that have been made...

[Edit: And shows that I'm seeing stuff that isn't there, apparently that was streamed - so no idea how this'll be on Switch yet...]

£6.25 to deliver a pencil-case? Come off it

THPS 1+2 must've taken the wind out of Skate Bird's sails a bit. I'd be interested in knowing what differentiates this, other than that you're a bird...

Wow, I completely missed this when it was out, it looks great! Also looks like it could control with dual-analogs just fine, left controls movement, right controls cursor...

Truly, now everyone in Gengar.

@Thaliard So two more previous gen games and then a borderline-unplayable port of an actual current-gen game. That doesn't reflect well on them, in my humble opinion...

A little bit cheeky to be elevating themselves over other teams when all they've handled so far is ports from a previous generation of consoles... They haven't produced anything of the same sort of level as The Witcher 3, Doom 2016 or Alien: Isolation yet, though I look forward to seeing their future works if they're feeling this confident!

That second poll needs another option - I voted anyway, but I originally had the physical edition pre-ordered for Switch, but the delay and lack of a physical release has put me off. I don't have it on another platform, but the release hype has died down now and I realise I don't really want it all that much in this form.

I'd heard that this doesn't have online, the devs themselves said as much... Is that "Online and local multiplayer" listed in the Pros section accurate? Maybe it's a Pro that it doesn't have online?

It's strange how many people in the comments section here are defending Amazon's clearly slightly dodgy behaviour... They aren't our mates. I pre-ordered, complained to them before it was delivered when I saw the price-drop and got a £5 account credit. I promptly cancelled and re-ordered to get it for 39.99 - I can wait till Monday to play it for the saving of a tenner. I'd have been happy for them to just refund me the difference and I'd keep the order, but them sticking to their weird system and not just being reasonable has meant they're down £10 instead.

Just came to say how great a tag-line this article has - well done

It's those weird human teeth that spoil it - otherwise pretty cute...

If you click on "Why wired?" on their site, the top thing they list is that it's almost half the price of wireless... And yet this pad is going to cost $60? No thanks.

The E3 footage very clearly showed the inferior PS1 version of the first game, so I'll wait for release and/or new footage to believe any of that...

I have one of these and feel I've got to express that these are nowhere near as good as reviewers are making them out to be. The screen refresh is awful, everything has tearing and almost nothing runs at a consistent full speed. NES and SNES are particularly bad, which given the button layout (and the site this review is on...), you might've expected to be alright. Also worth noting, you can't just turn them off either as it corrups data on the SD card, you have to go through a shutdown process before actually flipping the off switch - very irritating for a device you might expect to use while on the move. If you want something like this, better to spend an extra 10-20 bucks or so and get the LDK handheld. Even better, find a second hand PSP Go - the emulation quality, feature-set and overall experience is vastly superior and the size is roughly equivalent.

I dunno, Donald Faison didn't get anything for the much longer and more popular emote... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgd8dwA5EEM

@Equinox ... What... Really? Link being female would ruin the series? Not motorbikes, not snow-boarding, not removing dungeons entirely, not creatures flying on make-shift air rafts... But Link being female? Yeah, ok.

Forget 4, translate, remaster and re-release Shining Force 3!

@FX102A Yes! Glad this is the first comment - I'd pay good money for Zero Gunner 2, such a great game...

@Damo not sure I'd go that far, but I'd have gladly worked for them if it had ever come up!

Great to hear this news! Cameron's a great guy, I did my work experience there back when I was a young teenager and they even paid me (assuming things haven't changed, it's pretty unusual to get paid for work experience). It was really cool to see inside a game developer at the time, and they were all a really nice bunch of guys. I hope they see success with their future projects, would love to see some Switch games from them.

@LiamR the review being short suggests that there isn't much to write about, which in turn suggests that the game is lacking in content. Seems like pretty clear logic...

Fan of the original NES game, so I'll be getting this - the trailer looks great. Shame there's no demo, but pretty sure I'll enjoy it and it's hardly premium price.