Glassneedles

@KayFiOS if I were you I'd wait until January-February one year and buy a model from the previous year. The new TVs normally get announced at CES in January and then the older models marked down to clear them out. I got a 55" LG G2 for £1000 off this way (was around £1200-1300) a few years ago.

LG is also the normal recommendation for an OLED TV brand as well, they have 2 premium model lines the C and the G with the G normally being a little bit brighter than that years C model but otherwise identical. There are also cheaper A branded ones but normal advice is to get whatever number the C one is on, I ended up getting the G as it wasn't that much more expensive than the C and a fair bit brighter. Does 4K120 and Dolby Vision HDR which is what I was after.

@KociolekDoSyta Ok so people shouldn't play this game because there is a bad crossover DLC added temporarily?! Yeah that mission is bloody awful but it's 30 minutes long, has nothing to do with the main story, has rubbish rewards and isn't going to be in the game after next month.

I've put 180 hours into this game since March and it's a pretty decent open world thing. I'd probably give it a 7 rather than an 8 but the gameplay is enjoyable, the world is really well done and it's only let down a bit by the story. At a certain point it opens up a lot so you have a lot of choice on what main story element you do first but consequentially means there is no character growth for most of Act 2.

I wouldn't recommend someone put as much time into it as I have (have done every side activity and gotten all but 2 achievements and those 2 are tied to NG+) but if someone wanted an open world action game with RPG elements it's an easy recommendation.

@Kidfunkadelic83 Chronicles is a weird one because together I think it’s in the right place but if they were separated out I’d put the first game very near the bottom. I enjoyed the first 3 cases but they are so so slow and still tutorialising in the 3rd case since it’s the first set in London and there’s the jury system. It isn’t until case 4 where you get to both investigate and argue in court in the same episode and it’s notoriously not great. The game really feels like it’s just getting started when it ends in the 5th game and it’s the first game to carry significant parts of the narrative over to the sequel.

But the second game having had a whole game to set it up is incredible and the way everything ties in together at the end rivals the end of Trials and Tribulations as a series high but I can’t really blame people who peace out in the first game.

@gaga64 it definitely could. I normally fire up the first doom once a week or so and run through the first episode (I can do it in less than 20 minutes) and it worked well for that. I haven’t really touched any of the other games or even the latter episodes of original doom so it could be issues in those but I didn’t spot anything egregious in it. As I said I am effectively doing a speed run though and the only secret I go after is the backpack is E1M2 just in case I reach the ammo cap on something.

@Protion9 makes sense to me! I have a Retrobit NES style controller that has 4 shoulder buttons so that is normally my go to controller for NES and GB/GBA. I also have an 8bitdo M30 which I use for both the Mega drive and SNES apps which I might be a bit sacrilegious to some people but it’s the controller that’s most comfortable to me. Also got an 8bitdo Pro 2 I sometimes use for SNES.

GameCube and N64 I have the official classic controllers but N64 might see me use one of the Retro Fighters N64 ones depending on my mood. I have a bit of an addiction to buying controllers as you might of guessed!

Oh and Goldeneye/Perfect Dark I have set up customised schemes that use a Pro Controller to be as much like a modern shooter as possible. I played so much Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in the 90s/early 00s but my brain just can’t adjust back to any of the control schemes built in.

@Protion9 doesn’t the lack of ZL and/or ZR (can’t remember which if any the Z button on the N64 controller maps to) cause an issue for getting in and out of the emulator menus?

@jfp I map A&B to be the A button and X&Y to be B. Feels more comfortable and I can have my thumb over B&Y at all times. The A&X are just in case I have a brain fart momentarily.

I haven’t played any of the previous OPUS games but the demo for this one was one of the better ones in the most recent Nextfest and I was planning on picking it up day one. Hope the delay means it can launch as bug free as possible.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Something something something
Please upgrade xenoblade

Glad to see this got a good review. This was one of my most anticipated games of the year (and last year with all the delays) and I happened to read the AV Club review first which wasn’t nearly as positive as this one.

Played this too many times (PS3,PS4 and PC) to rebut it but this was one of my most wanted games on Switch back before I did the PS4 and PC playthroughs. Hope everyone who gets it enjoys and that the rest of the trilogy comes out too.

@Max_the_German all of this stuff is already in the Steam version so not creating it from scratch. Now mouse mode probably needed something extra rather than just a straight translation from the PC code but the rest would just need testing done for the most part. Shame they aren’t including a higher frame rate option as the PC it goes up to 144hz and has frame gen which always confused me since it’s so old it really doesn’t need it to run well.

@Patko_SK @Medic_alert @Songecku @Arcticpandapopz @JohnnyMind as others have mentioned in this thread buying a USB C extender and plugging it temporarily into something else like a phone, tablet or laptop fixes the issue at least temporarily.

It is a bit of a faff getting the extended plugged into the dock (at least for me) but after that it works for anywhere from a few weeks to a month or two. If you have a spare £5-10 and want to use the Ethernet while waiting for the (hopefully) inevitable dock update this I recommend, used it multiple times on both of my docks.

@Ikana64 I've got the Xbox version of this and it works for Clone Hero. Was a bit complicated setting it up as you need RB4InstrumentMapper installed too but it's been smooth sailing since then.

I will say if you are more used to the old Guitar Hero ones with the clicky strum bar it takes a bit of getting used to! Overall I like mine, especially since the Xbox version folds in half for storage. The review said the neck comes off the Switch version which is a bit different but still useful.

First Chapter was the first game in a long while that I just played through over a few weeks to finish without taking any breaks or getting distracted by something newer so very excited for the remakes to continue!

The wait is made worse by knowing I have second chapter and the third game sitting in my steam library ready to play but decided to hold out for the fancy remakes.

@AussieMcBucket Zero first is what most people (including myself) would recommend. There is an argument for going 1-5 then zero as that was the release order but the remake of the first one specifically fleshed out some stuff that wasn’t in the original in response to zero (the remake was the next game after it) so I think that way makes the most sense. It was the way I got into the franchise back in 2017 anyways.

Excited for everyone about to experience Kiwanis 2! Going from the old engine to this had me very hyped after 0 and first Kiwami and it did not disappoint.

I've got this on Steam but not started it yet. There was a demo put up for one of the Steam Nextfests (and it's still up if anything wants to give it a go) and both the cozy aspect and automation were pretty good! Not as good as Satisfactory (my beloved) but still good fun.

@Shmicko I've played through it and it's a pretty good remaster. The art style is a vast improvement over the Monkey Island 1&2 ones from the late 00s.

@Mainsaile @Shmicko of the ones on that list Full Throttle did get a remaster but it was spring 2017 so skipped Switch and never got ported across for some reason.

You probably already know this but if you have access to a PC ScummVM can play all of those listed titles (and a lot more!). It’s also on Apple and Google’s App Stores if you are partial to playing on a phone/tablet.

My favourite thing to play in it is The Longest Journey just to get rid of the jank inherent in playing the 1999 original on modern systems but there are also upgraded graphics packs which is a nice bonus.

Like with the Doom/Quake remasters if you already owned this on Steam you get the new version automatically so I haven’t had to spend a penny on any of these thanks to my compulsive Steam game habit.
Roll on Quake 3/4 and Wolfenstein 3D/Return! And doom 3 why the hell not.

@NotoriousWhiz you can remap the analogue stick on the N64 one (and GC) so definitely in Starfox 64 and it would be really stupid if you couldn’t in SNES. I used the remapping to turn Goldeneye and Perfect Dark control schemes to as close to modern shooters as possible and that worked super well.

@Yinyangfooey how long is the game? It took me about 30-35 hours to finish both of the previous ones, can I expect about the same time?

@Shmoo mouse controls wouldn’t be that great in ff14. There are 2 control schemes, mouse and keyboard and controller.

The mouse and keyboard one really only uses the mouse for camera control and some UI things. You can click on your icons on screen but that is a very very suboptimal way of actually playing and using the numbers on your keyboard +modifiers for different rows is the way pretty much everyone plays (who use M+K of course)

Personally I use the controller set up which is amazing. It was the first MMO I’ve played with actual decent out of the box controller support. The mouse mode would be slightly useful in this mode, using a mouse to drag and drop stuff onto your task bars during initial set up or reorganising them is very useful but you don’t do that a lot. I have 4500 hours in the game almost all of it played with a controller (I also have a similar number of hours in wow using a similar M+K setup). I think the mouse mode would be a nice to have thing like the touchpad on the dualshock 4/dualsense which does the same thing for PlayStation.

Still not sure if I’d get ff14 on switch. I have it installed on my steam deck as well and I tend to just play on my big pc. Would be nice on hot summer days like this to avoid heating my room up though.

I have a bit of a problem with buying too many controllers and can confirm this feels a lot nicer than the Dualsense Edge. The Edge does fell more premium than the standard Dualsense but maybe £20-30 more premium not £120 premium. I also think this has topped the Elite 2 for me in comfort and premiumness.

I though @AlexOlney was a madman when he started talking about vegetable oil and spoons but I think he was onto something with the analogy.

@Ramouz they cannot. I started Wind Waker using one last night and kept trying to click in the stick to sprint even though that’s not a thing in Wind Waker…

Need to get back in that rolling mindset

Now we have Survival Kids we just need Legends of the River King.

@Vyacheslav333 it’s $40 not $60. I’m more ok with a change to $80 games if they are more flexible on prices like this. I bought South of Midnight largely because I paid £35 for it and I’m more willing to take a chance at that price. Turns out it was a very good shout as I love what I’ve played. Just need to make time and do the last 3 chapters.

With Gears of War at the same price I’m definitely picking it up and can probably talk some of my friends into getting it too for some co-op/multiplayer together.

I was lucky enough to get an invite to the UK preorder and they had a limit of 2 GameCube controllers so I have 2 winging their way to me next month!

I never bothered getting a second official N64 controller for my original switch as the Retrobit version of the old Hori N64 controller and the retro fighters ones suited my purposes well enough. Hopefully we see a bunch of 3rd party GameCube ones with analogue triggers too. I have a few of the PowerA GameCube controllers but they aren’t the same without the analogue triggers…

@Enigk If you want a gamecube controller or the cheap SD Card you can just order those. My brother is keeping his John Lewis order for the console but ordered those through Nintendo.

Got mine through today as well. There is also a limit of 2 Gamecube controllers per account (on the US Direct stream it said 1 per account but nothing on the UK one) so got a Switch + Mario Kart bundle, 2 Gamecube controllers, a Pro Controller, carrying case and Micro SD Express card all sorted. Really glad I was able to get an order through Nintendo for the Gamecube controllers and cheaper SD Card (cheapest I've seen on Amazon was £90 for 256GB).

Still got my Amazon preorder open (I managed to luck into an invite to both the bundle and standalone console) and will keep it open until just before launch in case any of my friends want it but not going to scalp it or anything.

For those still waiting I didn't get an email last week saying I could preorder, I imagine what happened was the emails went out for the initial wave last week and then to a second wave today and it will continue that way until they sell through their stock.

@Skunkfish read my previous post on how this was calculated. It's all on trade deficits.

For those saying Vietnam is caving on tariffs the way they calculated them based on trade deficits not how much the other countries tariffs are. From the BBC article:

But if you unpick the formula above it boils down to simple maths: take the trade deficit for the US in goods with a particular country, divide that by the total goods imports from that country and then divide that number by two.

So the way to "fix" it is for Vietnam to suddenly start importing $123.5 billion more goods from the US. With a GDP per Capita of $4,282.09 and a population 1/3 the size of the US, I don't see this happening.

So did a quick conversion and £396 in the UK minus the 20% VAT is £316.80 and converted to US dollars that's $410.20 so it looks like they already factored in a bit of a difference for tariffs but the 46% on Vietnam obviously exceeded this.

There’s a demo of this on Steam if anyone wants to give it a go before release. I very much enjoyed it and am definitely picking this up next month. Gonna be an expensive month with Zelda, Ace Attorney, Age of Mythology, Demonschool, Ara History Untold, The Plucky Squire and this!

@HeadPirate the underlying engine is open source but the WADs aren’t. The shareware version of Doom is shareware so that gets included in a lot of source ports and then you supply the other WADs if you want more. Not saying the WADs aren’t easy to find but they aren’t officially free.

@KingMike There was the microvision in 1979 which mostly fits your criteria. Sound was through a beeper and it didn't have a CPU, those were included on the cartridges so the console was effectively just the LCD and controls. As you can probably guess it didn't do too well.

Wikipedia has a list of all handhelds and there were 6 before the Gameboy none of them really had much going for them. None of them released more than 10-15 games.

@PKDuckman on PC it’s 62GG! The theory is that is all 4K textures, I’d expect the switch one to be a bit smaller if that was the case.

As the game went live on Steam 10,000 people started it up to find out that there were 3 dedicated servers (64 people each) in battlefield 2 and none for 1 on top of self hosted servers not working. It truly is a spectacular launch fail.

Also on PC if you are in a 64 person match it caps out at 30fps! It is kinda nice to know that other systems are having these issues too. I bought kotor2 on switch for easy controller support with the removed content after having such a good experience in kotor1 on Switch but decided to get battlefield on PC since it’s where all my friends play multiplayer but looks like the whole thing was a mistake.

@badmotorfinger74 so the reason it didn’t come to Xbox at the same time as PlayStation was they couldn’t get the local co-op working on Xbox Series S. The maps are fairly large and I believe it was RAM issues with keeping different parts loaded in if the people were far away.

As Microsoft have a parity thing between S and X this stopped the release, it ended up being so lauded that they dropped the requirement. It also has a lot running under the hood and even on well specced machines the later areas can be hard to run.

They even had the 30 second limit for the best game award. While Swen was dedicating the award to the people at the studio who died during the development there were please wrap it up signs in the background for him.

https://twitter.com/javierabegazo/status/1732975428237934964

@Gamergirl94 the Batman game was a loss for them. The only profitable game they made were the walking dead season 1and Minecraft. The rest were funded with investor money and the losses written off that way.

(Source here https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/telltale-closure-the-walking-dead-minecraft-batman/ )

I imagine they went with the wolf among us since it was their most critically acclaimed one and hoped to turn that into more sales. I don’t think Netflix would want to work with them after the first crash.

@Princess_Lilly There is a sequel to Hotel Dusk, it's called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. You may of missed it as it wasn't released in the US. It was however released in Europe so you can play it in English.

Checking on UK ebay it doesn't appear to be extortionate either if you want to get a copy rather than hope Hotel Dusk is next in line.

@-wc- Yeah this sucks :- It wasn't my most ancitipated game (that was Sea of Stars which I am very happy about) but it was up there.

I'd be happy with a straight port too but then I think we'd get the same complaints that people are saying about the Metal Gear collection. It seems they are damned if they do damned if they don't.

Anything else you are still looking forward to this year? I'm very excited for the Super Mario RPG remake, I will get SMB: Wonder but I really suck at 2D Mario games so that is dampening my enthusiasm a bit for that.

I've also got hopes that Turok 3 and Star Wars Dark Forces from Nightdive come out this year. They are on a roll after the System Shock remake and it would be nice to finish the Turok trilogy.

I really love what they are doing with these ports. I already owned all Doom and Quake games on Steam so have gotten the updated versions for free. I also bought the Doom games on Switch as they were so cheap and Doom (1993) is my comfort game and having a great portable version was important to me.

Roll on the Quake 3 and 4 ports! Hopefully Epic will see the success of these and do something similar for the original Unreal Tournament as that was always my preferred online game back in 1999.

@Fizza I’ve played through 1,2 and am half way through 3 on Steam. They are pretty good versions of the game.

I’ve previously played the PSP and GBA versions of the first two and they hold up well compared to these. 2 especially has has been tuned so the weird levelling system is less annoying. Plus the soundtracks are amazing orchestral versions of the originals.

Only real downside is the font used is absolutely awful, it isn’t an issue to mod this on Steam but probably not possible on Switch.

Gavin, thank you for your service in ensuring Xenoblade Chronicles X gets ported.

I did my part recently by buying the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters on Steam and I'm working my way through all the Yakuza ones too.

I'm hoping for a Chrono Trigger remake in the HD-2D style. With them rereleasing Chrono Cross I can hope but in the meantime I have my DS copy avilable.

@dr-gorgo So Heretic and Hexen are both games that have been in legal limbo as far as I can tell since the IP is owned by Bethesda (through ID) but it was developed by Raven who still had some say in the matter. Raven was owned by Activision who apparently weren't interested in a rerelease but now Microsoft is buying Activision I hope we see them all come across.

@Joker1234 I don’t think they will release both Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment on Switch. They seem to go through and swap which one they release each time. This time it’s Eternal Punishments turn.

Now we only have one cycle of this so it’s not exactly a pattern but it’s a ridiculously stupid idea and remember Altus are owned by Sega now so it just makes sense.

I’m still holding out hopes for SMT Strange Journeys and both SMT 4 games coming to switch. Decided not to focus on Persona as I just get disappointed.

Mine arrived today but has gone away until Christmas so got a fun few weeks of waiting to go…

I ordered mine on the 2nd, it was dispatched on the 4th and it arrived today which is insanely fast for free shipping from China. I quite often by electronic components off Chinese sites and I’m used to waiting 4-6 weeks for their free shipping.

I will be picking this up day one if it’s real. I was more hoping for a collection like they did with Mana and Saga with Advance and Advance 2 in there but that was always a long shot

@nkarafo @eatdogs So this game syncs the music to what happens on screen and your button inputs. It's hard to explain but the music and visuals help you get into that Tetris Zone where everything else leaves your mind and you just focus on the game. I find it really really relaxing and if I'm starting to get stressed out I try to find time to play a quick 10-15 minutes of it and that relaxes me.

If you've ever played Lumines or Rez it's by the same guy trying to achieve the same type of thing.