Kestrel

The stereoscopic 3D certainly was a great feature in MK7... but it ALSO had a first-person view! That was incredible! It absence is literally the only flaw in MK8 — which is otherwise perfect.

It's really mind-boggling just how many of these games they made.

Would absolutely love to see ports/remasters of the Legacy of Kain games. Probably too much to hope for, sadly.

I hope the new games play more like Arceus. Tried to get into the older ones in 3DS but found the gameplay loop just too dull. Loved Arceus, tho.

@Browny You're not wrong. Definitely check out Suiko2 (and Suiko5, for that matter) sometime. They're regarded as pillars of the genre for very good reason!

Suiko3 is also very good but hasn't aged well. IIRC it was a launch title for the PS2, or very near to it, and very rough around the edges.

PS3 storefront is still up, so there is at least one platform being pro-consumer here in at least one respect. I just bought Grandia III a couple days ago.

And, yeah, it'd be nice to see some 3DS/WiiU sales, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. Most of the games I'm still waiting on (and will probably wind up paying full price for) are either Square-Enix (Dragon Quest VIII!) or 1st party (WiiU virtual console!) and we all know what those two are like.

Is this gonna have the same gameplay as Arceus? EG hunting Pokémon in the wild w/ light stealth/fps mechanics, and seamless battles?

I don't really care about the visuals. They look fine. They're passable for gimmick-DLC meant to bolster NSO subs.

What does bug me is just how poorly-designed (and boring!) these new tracks are. They really highlight how well-executed the original game's tracks were, even the least among them reaching a far higher level of quality than the best (so far) of this new lot. To the point where I genuinely be,I've that buying this new DLC actually makes MK8U a worse game.

Download Play would be nice and all but there are some much more basic features we should probably get first (and honestly should've gotten years ago). An Activity Log, proper folders (or some other way of customizing the initial home menu), themes, etc.

Through the virtual console. Goddamn, I miss the virtual console.

Seems weird to cite XC3 as "lesson learned" when we got so many incredible sidequests in XCX. It's more along the lines of, "lesson forgotten, then half-remembered."

We need(ed) more big eShop sales. Even with the eShop closing, a lot of games I'd be willing to try are a bit of a hard-sell at full price.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 for me. One of those old classics that I never had the opportunity to play, due to either being prohibitively expensive or simply not having been ported. One of those games that'd been on my 'wishlist' for years.

A bit overpriced for a fairly barebones port, but it's a really fun game and I'm happy to finally have the chance to play it.

I mean, the new stuff looks good, but it a.so looks mostly like stuff that could have been DLC for the first game. Which was also the case for Splat2. For folks who really care about the game as a competitive online shooter — the folks who've been playing Splat2 regularly since it launched — Solat3 doesnt need to justify itself. But for everyone else? I'm not really seeing any compelling reason for anyone to get Splat3 if they've already got Splat2.

Which was also the case for Splat2 in relation to Splat1, so while it's disappointing the content is so marginal, it's also hardly surprising.

Pricey. Anyway, they ever get around to patching the NS port?

@Sonos In my case it's more that I'm interested in a lot of indie games that tend to be in bundles, where it's ultimately cheaper to buy the bundle of 8-12 games than just the one. I do make an effort, when I can, to at least try the other games, which has led to finding some incredible hidden gems I wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

But, yeah, going out of your way to buy games you don't care to play just because you can is potentially pretty unhealthy. I am reminded of all those "collectors" you see on Reddit, especially for platforms like the WiiU or Vita (platforms that simply never had very many decent games, period) showing off shelves of hundreds of game cases, mostly shovelware.

@Sonos I've been accumulating a vast library on Steam for more than a decade, thanks to generous sales and copious bundles. I still only have 800 or so titles.

I can't even imagine hitting 2000 there — let alone on the Switch. More than a mess, I'd say,

Oh, I see. It's a remaster, then.

Hard to get excited by DLC, especially after the sublime Cadence, but I'm eager to see what the sequel's like.

All I want from the DLC is at least one track that's half-as-good as the worst MK8U track, but that seems unlikely.

@YoshiF2 Probably because it's low-res? You don't exactly get a lot of aesthetic decisions when working with 16p resolution.

There's a reason why the "better" looking skins are 128p. Or maybe even higher these days? Haven't looked at Minecraft skins in years.

@Wilforce It certainly had much better visuals. And a clearer narrative. Altogether making it a much better game IMO.

Regardless, I'm excited for whatever's next. NecroDancer 2? If so, I hope the levels/maps/floors are a bit bigger.

I'm pretty psyched for SD Gundam Battle Alliance. Which, based on the demo, will run like a dream.

Splatoon 2 was just, "Splatoon 1 again," so this doesn't really seem very surprising. What IS surprising is that Splat3 is an NS game, not an NS2 game.

Given how much the SP is an afterthought, at best, you'd think Nintendo would want to keep it to one release per hardware cycle, like Mario Kart and all the various Sports games.

These are the best character designs in a Xeno game to date,,so I'd say it was worth it.

Yeah, those were a nightmare. Not just because they were all extremely boring tasks, but also because of all those goddamn harpies that were such a pain to fight. Easily the worst part of an otherwise near-perfect game.

And also, yeah, TW3 would definitely have benefitted from having fewer icons on the map.

Very excited to see Tauruses in the demo! Hopefully they'll be playable, too. Always nice to see some decent grunt representation.

Just playing BotW and Odyssey for the first time, for me. Both games were so wildly imaginative and unpredictable... it was an incredible set of experiences.

I picked up Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2, one of the best ARPGs out there... but it ain't on the list.

@NerdNoiseRadio Yeah man,there's no "English intent" here — Japanese is a phonetic language, and that includes foreign loan-words. There's only ever one way to pronounce English words in Japanese as a result--no one is picking and choosing a specific pronunciation.

And, yeah, "you can only call it one thing... and be correct," is a perfectly valid argument... if we were all speaking in Japanese here. We're not. You've noticed this, right? We're all speaking English here, and in English there is no singular, universally correct pronunciation of any word.

Also, wow, what a weird hill.

Wow. Some branded scrap paper. How exciting.

Oh, okay. Now it makes more sense. It's not Nintendo being awful, it's Nintendo of America being awful. That tracks.

We just had a Direct last week so I'm not gonna hold my breath.

@kingbk Hardware is irrelevant to the quality of ports. It's only ever down to optimization... the companies that can't be bothered to optimize Switch ports are unlikely to put any more effort into Switch Pro or Switch 2 ports.

Anyway, this really isn't surprising. HBS is terrible at optimization and even worse at support. The mobile port of the Shadowrun games mentioned in the review? Yeah: it doesn't exist any more. A minor iOS update broke the game and HBS just abandoned it.

Yeah, a Switch 2 would definitely be ideal. But inertia can be a helluva thing and Nintendo has a very long history of failed consoles following up successful ones.

The only real exception is the 3DS, but even then that's only because Nintendo made a huge effort to turn things around after an enormously disappointing first year or two. (Something they pointedly did not do for the WiiU.)

I guess this explains why they had so many isolated announcements in May and June--they must have a lot of confidence in XC3 for it to warrant an entire Direct all to itself.

I actually liked Cat Quest more than Cat Quest 2. Objectively the second game may be better, but it's also bigger and grinder. Takes a lot longer to finish and you have to spend a lot more time fiddling with the inventory. First game was a lot more straightforward and enjoyable IME.

I just want a port of Wildermyth.

Website is working again, but release date is back to TBD. What a ***** show.

@Arawn93 framerate's noticeably worse than Age of Calamity (played 'em back to back) and enemy pop-in is really bad.

But possibly the actual game with have better performance than the demo? Here's hoping.

@Giancarlothomaz I really don't think being developed for the WiiU had much of an impact on BotW's visuals. It's still one of the best looking and best performing games on the Switch.

Demo is fun, but performance is... pretty bad.

Really like that we can select genders/names for both Byleth and Shex. Would be nice if we could play as all four variants with the same save.

The "expected thematic beats?" KOTOR2? The whole point of KOTOR2 is that it doesn't do that.

I on,y feel obligated to get this because I also have the CE Steelbook for XC2 (which was so easy to just order off Amazon). I've had the Nintendo Astor's page open in my browser for weeks, checking every day. And now... yeah, I kinda doubt they'll have any stock left by the time the web store is functional again. What a mess.

Rather than just looking at total sales, it might be more interesting to examine the attachment rates (IE game sales divided by console sales) to see what the most and least popular games were among the people who could potentially buy them.

Hard to believe that Nintendo used to have a reputation for making some of the best, most durable and reliable gaming hardware on the market.

I hope they'll expand this rental service globally, because I haven't seen first party docks in stock anywhere in years.

Sometime I feel like I'm the only one who wants space combat out of a Star Wars games. It's like no one, anywhere, at any level has had any idea what to do with this IP since TPM.