Maxz

All living things evolutionarily converge to crabs, and all crabs eventually converge to nerfed crabs. This is the true meaning of entropy.

@Michael0916 Like this. Ehem…

The Switch 2 delivers an incremental but significant upgrade over its predecessor, tinkering around many of the edges whilst also meaningfully improving upon the core ideas that made the original such a standout success. It crams a veritable trainload of technological flim-flams into a wafer sized wadge of gaming wizardly, with enough juice under the bonnet to outrun a herd of stampeding mechanised bison.

The new PVC display adds zest and zing to games bedullened by the passing of time, making them pop and ping and bang and sing and POW and WHACK and BAM and SLAM.

Elsewhere, improvement such as the onboard microfibre CPU and high-upload variable-limit post-processing interlooper carry the weight of AAAAA titles with relative ease, turning an entertaining gaming experience into a truly transformative and transcendental one.

Switch 2 is the console to switch to if you have a Switch but want a console that is like a Switch but different to a Switch, too.

If poor naming was what killed the Wii U then the GROG Xbox Alias Tex-Mex Series X is dead in the water.

_{For what it’s worth I don’t think the name is why the Wii U failed and I don’t think these are dead in the water. I just think it’s an unwieldy name. It’ll be interesting to see how they stack up against the Steam Deck.}

Big N: hey game freak we have brand new super duper souped up hardware coming out soon and we wud rly appreciate it if u make like a rly technically impressive monster-based rpg

GF: monster as in like, beast?

Big N: what?

GF: …

Big N: yeah, i suppose monster as in like, beast

GF: ok

Big N: thanks

…

GF: done

Big N: wow great thanks

GF: beast of reincarnation coming to xbox pc and ps5 in 2026

N: oh

2013 was the Year of Luigi.

2024 was the Year of Shadow.

2025 is the year of Being a Woman Hitting People with a Sword LET’S FREAKING GO

Apparently I’m not in the credits.

@JAGleics This the third time but…

Our NS2 Edition reviews will focus on new features and upgrades, evaluating what they add to the original experience, and whether they're worth your time - and they will be scored accordingly.

The entire thing is an ‘added bonus’. It’s the ‘added bonuses’ (i.e. ‘new features and upgrades’) on top of the original that are the subject of this review.

Editor's Note: As this is our first 'Nintendo Switch 2 Edition' review (and with many more to come, potentially), we want to outline their focus from the off.

Our existing reviews — in this case for Breath of the Wild, both the Wii U and Switch versions, and the DLC — are still live and relevant. If you're coming to this game fresh, we recommend you look back at those first. Our NS2 Edition reviews will focus on new features and upgrades, evaluating what they add to the original experience, and whether they're worth your time - and they will be scored accordingly.

↑ This was at the top and now it’s at the bottom and yet a significant number of people will somehow not manage to read or comprehend it.

@Darthmoogle @JAGleics @Ajent @SurprisedRobinChu

@mr12calvin “In handheld a drain system under two hours in my personal experience, which is just tremendous…”

That doesn’t sound particularly tremendous!

Now this is investigative journalism!

(I’m not being facetious! Original source well credited, personally verified and written up with enough additional substance to stop the article from just being a glorified repost. Maybe not the hardest hitting news drop, but well worth reading!)

@Ryu_Niiyama The standard kanji for ‘vertical’ would be 縦, although 竪 (as in 竪穴/tateana, a ‘pit’ or ‘vertical hole’) and 経 (as in 経糸/tateito, the vertical threads of a loom) also occasionally get a look in.

The idea that they all descended from 立つ seemed very convincing so I looked it up and voilà, that does indeed appear to be the case!

https://ameblo.jp/gogen3000/entry-12829408510.html

Incidentally, I still can’t read the word TATE in all caps without thinking of London’s answer to MoMA.

I mean, it’s a tech demo.

It’s not that surprising that you need all the tech in the tech demo to demo all the tech demo tech.

…Would still be nice if it were a free tech demo, though…

It seems… fine? Not the most compact option, but still reasonably compact.

I reckon it could do with being less opaque to make it easier to see what’s in the box without opening it, but I’ve seen more useless bits of tech.

Making a game storage case which has the same footprint as a standard game case doesn’t seem all that wild.

@HugoGED I wish Game Freak/The Pokemon Company would admit the same thing. Imagine a Switch 2 open world Pokemon game half as technically impressive as Xenoblade Chronicles X…

Y’know, the Wii U game from over a decade ago.

@Riff-the-Don Split Fiction.

@Yoshi3 Yeah but I can’t go MOOOOOOOOO about that one cuz there’s no cow innit.

I suppose it was s…MOOOOOOOUSE…th…

…Nope.

That Biker Cow to Split Fiction transition was sMOOOOOOOOth!

@Bass_X0 In various media (I’m mainly thinking about the Young Bond series) he has the name ‘James Bond’ well before taking on the 007 moniker. Even in the trailer above, they refer to him as ‘Bond’ before he has joined ‘the programme’. Admittedly, I feel this fact alone is far from conclusive, and I’m also willing to accept the argument that the ‘Young Bond books don’t count’.

Perhaps more conclusive is this gravestone from Skyfall of Bond’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. … Bond.

It seems a rather remarkable coincidence that one’s codename happens to be identical to one’s parent’s surnames, and by extension one’s own surname. As a way to conceal one’s identity, it makes Superman putting on glasses and calling himself Clark Kent look positively inspired.

I admire the sheer imagination necessary to believe that all the Bonds exist in the same universe with unbroken continuity, but I’m more inclined to believe that James Bond is just a fictional character in a story (many stories), just like Batman is fictional character in a story (many, many stories), and that the enormous scope of both franchises requires that the actors be recast, the characters reinvented, and the stories retold time and time again… thus muddling any sort of overarching continuity.

Basically what I’m saying is it’s a mess. And it’s allowed to be a mess. Because it’s a story. And stories are allowed to twist and turn and reshape themselves through the ages.

@Mommas James Bond was 41 in 1971 (Diamonds are Forever) and 38 in 2006 (Casino Royale). He grew 3 years younger over the course of 35 years.

This is to say, if you can present me with a plausible cross-media timeline of what age Bond ‘should’ be in what year, I will be very, very, very impressed.

Nitpicking over the appearance (or exact time period) of James Bond is like nitpicking over the appearance (or exact time period) of Doctor Who.

As soon as you’ve established what Bond ‘should’ look like he’s replaced with someone else entirely. That’s the nature of the franchise and how it’s managed to remain alive for so many decades.

I’ve got a Switch, too.

Bet y’all hella jelly.

You can’t polish a turd, but seemingly you can polish a Turtwig — and this is the result!

There’s something about the world and overall game design that still feels distinctly amateurish, but getting around that world is now at least a fair bit smoother… which is something!

@Kingy …Why, exactly?

@StandardMario No, this means war. As self-appointed divine leader of the Shrek Resistance, I hereby declare a never-ending holy war on Garfield and Garfield sympathisers and people who own cats and people who like lasagne and just people in general who aren’t ogres.

Also, I might not be entirely serious. And I might not have been entirely serious in my previous comment. And I might not actually be that big of a Shrek fan, although I do think the first movie still holds up.

This game is just a cheap rip off of landmark racing title Shrek Swamp Kart Speedway.

I bet you’re thinking “Lasagna-esque Races? What’s that?”

Well, Lasagna-esque just means it has layers.

Y’know what else has layers? Ogres have layers. That’s just another thing this game is ripping off from the rightful king of kart.

@Medic_alert No worries!

@Medic_alert _{That’s the joke!}

It does look rather underwhelming, but I admire the sheer audacity of the title. Such a bold declaration.

Everybody’s Golf.

That’s right.

Everybody. Is. Golf.

He is golf. She is golf. We is golf. Even the artist formerly known as Kanye West and currently known as Ye is golf.

You don’t need to tell me your pronouns. I already know.

Golf/Golf/Golf

Sorry, you don’t get a choice. Everybody’s golf. That’s just the world we live in.

I just call this a “walk” because I am always reflecting on confidence-boosting spiritual alignment practices that vibe expressively with my celestial chakra promoting inner and outer peace and gratitude towards all things especially myself because I’m so damn hot.

Sometimes I dress up as a Pikmin because it makes me look a bit silly which puts people at ease. Otherwise they’d feel intimidated by my hotness and spiritual alignment and very embarrassed in comparison.

@Dr_Lugae All very well made points! Still, it’s interesting that we seem to be shifting away from a ‘retail games cost this much’ kind of model to a more finely graded system. On the UK store there seem to be a few pricing ‘rungs’ that have been been established for physical Switch 2 releases.

Mario Kart sits on the top rung at £75, then the rest of the major first party releases are £67 (DK and the spruced Switch games). Then you have 3rd party games which are all over the place (and currently all on game keys).

Given that, it’s interesting that Z-A doesn’t seem to sit on any of these existing rungs. Joe Merrick’s post doesn’t mention a physical/digital pricing split. If there is one (which seems likely) then I imagine the price we’re looking at is the cheaper of the two.

@Sensible I don’t disagree! I can’t say I like that games costs more than they did a decade ago, but I won’t pretend that all of the narrative surrounding pricing is very cogent.

If anything, the fact that it’s taken this long for ‘variable pricing’ to really establish itself (for first party titles) is somewhat surprising. Mario Tennis Aces and Breath of the Wild are both $60 on the US eShop which seems a bit… wild to me.

I’m not saying Aces is bad — this isn’t really about ‘quality’ so much as development costs. Admittedly, I am completely ignorant about how much time and most each title costs to produce (so should probably shut up), but I can’t imagine they were on anywhere near the same scale.

Aces had some new mechanics over Power Tennis, but was very much in the same vein. Every character shares the same basic move-set, and the courts are all variations on a theme with some gimmicks thrown in.

Zelda was a complete reimagining of the franchise on a preposterously epic scale that took the best part of a decade to develop. Of course, it made that money back by selling significantly more copies than Aces, but the fact they’re still on the same ‘tier’ feels like having the Mr. Men books sitting next to War and Peace and priced equally at a book shop.

Splat…ppy Birthday to the game that made me get a Wii U.

Completely agree about both the lack of voice chat with randos and the under-appreciated single player.

People often argue that unrestricted voice chat should be there as an option because you can turn it off if you want to. In my head I normally think, “Yeah, but that would disadvantage those who don’t use it and also create the same icky culture that pervades most all other online shooters. Please let me enjoy my nice colourful cartoony squid game unsullied.”

…I normally just stay silent though, smug in the knowledge that I’ve basically won the argument as Nintendo almost certainly don’t want the hassle of policing the online environment. They got a taste of that with Miiverse (RIP) and look how that ended up.

And the single player is great in all the Splatoon games. After Splatoon 3 game out, the local used game shop was flooded with copies of Splatoon 2 for like ¥1000 (under £10). Even without NSO it’s definitely worth that for the single player alone.

@Sensible

“Anyone that thinks buying physical games for the switch 2 is a good idea deserves to be penalised for their idiocy.”

This is… a rather loaded statement. Certainly not a universally accepted position, at any rate.

We could get into the nuances between ‘ownership’ and ‘right of access’ (i.e. can I sell/trade/give away the item I have purchased?) …But I’m not sure that’s necessary. The point is that Nintendo is selling the physical version of this game for £66.99 on their official store (£64.99 on Amazon) and this is the version a lot of people will opt for. With respect, it doesn’t matter what you think those people deserve, or whether you think their purchasing decisions are ‘sensible’, this is simply a straightforward observation.

A similarly straightforward observation is that, as you’ve noted, the game doesn’t cost £70. Not on any major storefront. One could argue that the £3.01 difference is insignificant, and in a casual conversation if someone said “70 quid” I probably wouldn’t correct them, but in a widely circulated piece of journalism I’m not entirely comfortable with it. “£67”? Fine, I’m not going to quibble over a penny. “Nearly 70 quid”? Fair enough, at least degree of imprecision is acknowledged. But stating as fact that we live “in a world of £70 Donkey Kong Bananzas” (especially in an article where most prices are given to the penny/yen) feels like stretching things to the point of misinformation.

So yeah, I agree that it should be corrected; not based on the argument that “physical media is for idiots who deserve to be punished” but because… well, the game doesn’t cost 70GBP.

@JimNorman

With the release date of the Switch 2 now so close I can barely sit still on the toilet

Very glad you weren’t forced to use the ‘journalistic we’ here.

Now nobody has to picture the entire Nintendo Life team squatting around a single toilet sharing a… uhh… ‘journalistic wee’.

Well, nobody except anybody reading this comment.

「カスタマイズ」の「カスタムテーマ」内で、これまでに配信されたイベントテーマ（スペシャルテーマ）のいくつかを、ゲーム内のチケットと交換できるようにしました。各イベントテーマはチケット30枚と交換できます。

became

You can now exchange some of your previously downloaded event themes (Special Themes) for game tickets using the Customize menu. Each event theme is worth 30 tickets.

For what it’s worth, I can sympathise with the mistranslation, despite the fact that what it’s describing is… a little odd.

In English, if one says, “to exchange A for B” there is a strong implication that we identify with the party giving away A and receiving B.

Things become more symmetrical if we take an observer’s standpoint and simply note that “A and B are exchanged”. (…Though you could argue that because A is stated before B, there is still a slight tendency to think of A as the thing parted with and B as the thing gained.)

The Japanese text opens with the concept of ‘Event Themes’ and then states that (some of) them can be exchanged with (I’m using this over ‘for’ to try and express the relative symmetry of the particle と) ‘in-game tickets’. From a purely linguistic perspective, all we know is that the two things have changed places, without knowing who has given what in return for what*.

_{*Of course there is no actual “exchange” occurring between two parties (player and in-game store) as the latter party isn’t a party at all. From the player’s perspective, they appear to be giving something (tickets) in return for something else (themes), but it’s not like the store is actually ‘receiving’ tickets or ‘parting with’ a finite number of themes. One thing is being destroyed in return for the creation of another, but the ‘recipient’ of the player’s tickets does not exist.}

Now, one might assume that the item corresponding to ‘currency’ (i.e. tickets) is given by the player, in return for the item corresponding to ‘goods and services’ (i.e. themes). Certainly, if instead of ‘exchange’ (交換) a less symmetrical word like ‘purchase’ (購入**) were used, then there would be little doubt as to who is trading what for what. However, as things stand, the wording is technically ambiguous.

_{**Admittedly, this could suggest spending ‘real’ money (assuming money is any more ‘real’ than tickets)}

Indeed, the two machine translation engines (DeepL and Google) I’ve run the original text through make exactly the same mistake. (I invite you to try.) So yeah, it’s human error, but machines are seemingly just as susceptible.

If anything, this could be argued of an example for the continued relevance of human translators, who are more likely to smell a rat if something is grammatically plausible but semantically suspicious. Humans have the capacity to doubt (some more than others) which can lead to fact-checking before the translation is finalised.

…Or after, in this case.

Anyway, good on @OatmealDome for being the human who caught the error in this case.

We are witnessing retelling the Star Wars in which @Anakin turns to the Dark side, not through the corrupting influence of Emperor Palpatine, but instead through arguing with the Toxic Positivity side over what constitutes an appropriate degree of excitement for GameCube games on Switch 2.

@sikthvash Now I can’t get stupid sexy Warilyn out of my head GAAAAH

Actually Mario Kart Tour is technically Mario Kart 76 because it’s the twelfth game since Mario Kart 64 which established the numbering system and you can’t count backwards even though that’s what Nintendo did but it doesn’t count so I win this argument and I put a feather in my Cappy and call it Marioni.

Sorry Brandon Semen uk you cannot surpass Blue Blur he is way too fast and far too cool for your silly car thing #LetsNotGoBrandon

@sanderev I was just reading up on it, and that was one of the reasons given! It seems Microsoft also wanted to distance themselves from Windows 8 somewhat, which wasn’t particularly well received.

@Novuscourvous They made (at least) 8 ‘proper’ Mario Kart games; the last one so big it had almost 100 courses in total — nearly five times that of Super Mario Kart. We’ve not been hard pressed for ‘proper’ Mario Kart games historically.

MK8D is a tough act to follow in terms of sheer volume and I’m not personally too sad that this title isn’t just ‘more of the same’. Each to their own, though.

“I’m-a Super Mario’s Super Papi-o! I’m-a DK’s rad, bad dad! You can’t tell Miy-a-what-to do! I’m-a Miya-freakin-moto, that’s who!”

…Yelled the 72 year old game designer in a ludicrous Italian accent, raising a middle finger defiantly in the direction of an imagined PR department. He then proceeded to discuss Switch 2 at great length with an impish grin playing around the corners of his mouth and a twinkle in his eye.

Nobody calls anything 9 anymore. Remember when Microsoft released Windows 9? Remember when Apple released the iPhone 9? Nope, because that never happened, because those companies decided 9 was lame and 10 was AWESOME.

I’m surprised Nintendo didn’t call this game MAR10 Xart 10: Xtreme Xircuit to draw attention to how cool and revolutionary the concepts of 10 and the letter X are.

“There is a scene in which the Masamune grows longer for the first time. I would love for you to check it out.”

There are plenty of places on the internet where you can check this sort of stuff out, but it’s nice to get a friendly reminder.

I agree that the following dongle looks pretty dope for keeping one’s donkey prong from getting dinged, danged, or donged.

If your lil’ DK is doing A-OK then get yourself a banana bag to help keep it that way. 👍🍌👍

I design my own cards using old receipts and a Sharpie and sometimes glitter which I stick on with chewing gum or toothpaste if I don’t have chewing gum to make them extra sparkly.

That way I know they’re one of a kind and no one will steal them from my shop because I don’t have a shop and also no one else wants them.

“Can shoot ‘em ups be erotic, though?“

Hold up my man, have you somehow not heard of Oresama no Nyanchan ga Kawaisugite Bakuhatsushichatte Doushiyou?

Like, seriously? Have you seriously not heard of it? What’s with modern game journos these days like seriously. I mean, yes I made it up, but you still should have heard of it.

Seriously.

@abe_hikura I think someone from Microsoft saw all the “DROP THE PRICE” comments in the Switch 2 chat and realised they could help make it seem relatively less expensive.

The ‘X’ stands for ‘expensiver’.

@NoPhysicalNoBuy Good point. Very lazy error on my part. Thank you. Corrected the original.