Hey, let's give credit where it's due... at least this one has new levels. 😅

I'm out of words. Except "Kill it with fire."

Just to put this in perspective, can you imagine what the room would feel like if Miyamoto held a Nintendo Direct to show how fast he made a Mario game by 'himself'? I already don't like Miyamoto, but I'm glad he's not Yuji Horii-- and I hope that day never comes.

Not a creepy name at all. Nope. 🫠

At least these are based on games Sega currently has in the pipeline, not... y'know, things they'll never rerelease or revive again. 🙄

Hey, actors with lower profiles and solid resumes will always be less cringey to me than big names being typecast. As Street Fighter: The Movie Reloaded seems poised to prove, that problem is not unique to animated films.

Aside from all the problems mentioned above, and assuming physical media does indeed go extinct: We'll really have to start picking and choosing which games we can even fit on our systems of choice, especially if external RAM prices continue to go up.

@MontyCircus Cruis'n Blast is the only entry in the series that drives itself that aggressively. I love Cruis'n World and Exotica (just the arcade version, mind), which demand more control, but they were also guilty of throwing a lot of cheap shots at the player to increase challenge. It's a shame the series never aimed for the middle of those two extremes, because the wild, wavy tracks and ludicrous tone are what I love most about it.

That said, Sega's own racing library is insanely underexposed on modern consoles...

@Serpenterror Yes indeed, they own the IP. But they stopped taking care of it after Cruis'n World. I wish they were taking more care of it, because then Cruis'n Exotica would've been ported decently to GameCube instead of getting Midway's suckass N64 port. [scratches vigorously at chip on shoulder]

Unlike Microsoft buying Rare's IP, I can only assume Midway was too broke to fully relieve them of Cruis'n, if they were even interested in taking it multiplatform. But I don't know how this works... I'm just throwing darts here. 🫠

@Dee123 Realistically, that might be the reason.
Sega did the same thing with OutRun Online Arcade and After Burner Climax a decade ago (although those MFs are bigger than Raw Thrills and I'm not cutting them any slack).

Oof, this breaks my heart. Cruis'n Blast is aggressively on-rails even compared to its predecessors, and the Switch version has plenty of recycled levels, but it's still a surrealistically fun time. Why the hell would they withdraw it?

My best guess is that Raw Thrills, who makes most of their money in American arcades, is simply hemorrhaging cash and can't afford to keep selling the game. But not telling anyone? That's a dumb move, even for Eugene Jarvis.

Being a Sega fan after, oh, 2003 is a masterclass in disappointment. 🫠

It was hard for me to whittle down my best N64 memories, and I already doubled down on my first comment as a submission. My obsession with Rare was indeed the reason I begged for an N64, so I count it as a formative memory-- but that wasn't the whole story. Above all, it foretold the reputation Nintendo would cement as kings of couch multiplayer.

I've never embraced the concept of online-only multiplayer, because even if I was playing online with friends, why should some greedy-ass publisher who wants to sell three extra units deny me the opportunity to invite them over and play together? It's always been more fun, cathartic, and congenial to play in person, and nothing will ever change my mind. Playing the very first Super Smash Bros. with middle-school friends or cousins in the same room proved it. And with characters as unforgettable as Nintendo has (little though they celebrate half of them nowadays), it was easy to identify with mains and squeeze your own kind of enjoyment out of their tentpole releases.

GameCube is still a party mainstay for the same reasons. Switch carries on that lineage. And Sony, for all their success and the fun I've had playing PS1 games in hindsight, was foolish to think those two extra controller ports didn't make a world of difference.

When I learned that Rare were making games for Nintendo 64, I realized I had to have one. Learning that Diddy Kong Racing didn't even use the D-pad was a rude awakening, but I acclimated. It goes without saying that's Rare's efforts to make Nintendo-style games with more cinematic aesthetics were a huge part of how much I enjoyed it. Messy controls notwithstanding, the hours I poured into Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini were time well spent.
Honorable mention to Cruis'n World, whose tumultuous track design defined arcade racing for me then and (sigh) still kinda does!

As someone who liked Muramasa but didn't get far in the original, seeing it again was a neat surprise! I just hope it runs ok on the original Switch.

@gojiguy I'm similarly concerned, especially about the use of slop and the uncanny character expressions (which are... honestly a common problem for Sega).
If Sega's own R&D staff made it, that would be both awesome for the game and sad for them, knowing they're being forced to cut corners.

Wait, Sakaguchi's a fan of soulless computer imagery? Whoof, slow down...

(I still hate the AI video more though.)

I'm afraid I'm one of those weirdos who thinks the low-poly abstraction of the original never needed to be changed. I was lukewarm on the reveal yesterday – if they were going to change it this much, they could have done a new damn Star Fox.
Still, if it sucks a new generation into the primal thrills of Star Fox 64, then...

@squiddu-real Yes, there are plenty of meaty games on Switch 2 at the moment, and DK Bananza does look crazy and charming. I'm not trying to write that off. I have friends who love Donkey Kong so much, with or without Rare's involvement, that it was their Super Mario Odyssey. (I'm stubbornly in the 'with' camp, but that's my baggage, innit?)

I still think that the early Switch 1 lineup had breadth that the Switch 2's lacks. ARMS was the game I loved the most in 2017. It was fast and frenetic and had its own personality. I had hoped that Nintendo was on the path to regaining some of the quirkiness and versatility that defined them in the SNES era. But then, I'd better get off my high horse, because I'm sure they still have aces up their sleeve we haven't even seen yet.

I just hope the price stays stable...

Looking back at first-party titles in the first year of the Switch, we had Splatoon 2, ARMS, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, FE Warriors, and most helpfully, a new mainline Zelda and Super Mario Odyssey. Switch 2's first year couldn't compete by just featuring Mario Kart World and DK Bananza, no matter how good they were. I don't know if Nintendo was uncertain or just arrogant, but they've lost some serious ground-- and speaking as a consumer who still doesn't have a Switch 2, I'm not sure how drastically raising the price could possibly help.

That trailer made me cackle! I don't do well with point-and-clickers, but I gotta try this for its sheer novelty and ludicrousness.

They are championing the film industry, Miyamoto. You're just exploiting it.

@Wakkawipeout This 100%.
There are a few things that could be better about Star Fox 64, and my first suggestion is proper save points and stage selection. I know the game isn't that long, but even in 1997, it could have used them.
But it's a rail shooter at its core, and that is why it's special. Even arcade-born genres have room to grow, and the processing power of the Switch 2 (or 1, for that matter) definitely allows for greater spectacle and a denser story. Granted, I like the idea of an upgrade system, too.

P.S. Even though Star Fox Zero bombed, I think the character designs were the series' best-- a nice hybrid of the SNES box 'puppets' and SF64's striking geometry. Don't mess with that too much, please.

Dude, I f***ing can't with reviewers defending horrid animated films because "my kid liked it." Especially when so many artists are working their butts off on better films and still not sure if they'll have a paycheck next year.

Young kids are accepting and unconditionally loving, so of course we love them back. But they will not understand when executives feed them a film with no warmth in their hearts. I watched plenty of drivel in my youth and thought it was just fine. But I continued to watch the films that had staying power, which were conceived primarily by artists and not middle-managed to death (Aladdin, Toy Story 2, The Iron Giant), and quickly forgot the ones that weren't (We're Back, Quest for Camelot, and dare I say Shrek).

Let's look at Illumination's adopted sister studio, DreamWorks, and how intelligently they've tackled subjects like mortality (among other things) in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and found family in The Wild Robot and Dog Man, the latter of which is mostly absurd but had a surprisingly heartfelt B-story. That studio is hanging on by a thread and clearly isn't Universal's favorite, but they continue to do great work. And their biggest threat right now is in the form of jerks like Chris Melondandruff, who knows that his movies are just glorified, brain-rotting pacifiers and revels in it. Of course, if he can still goose the adults in the audience with nostalgia and take their money, he'll happily do that too.

I can't be the only one who saw the potential for character development in Bowser, or at least some basic narrative curveball, based on the first act (I won't go into spoilers, but with a plot this dumb, does it matter?) only to see it thoughtlessly shot down. Speaking of which: Much like in the first film, and maybe more so, the heroes are always going to do heroic things and never screw up or have a shred of emotional crisis so they don't have to grow. Illumination is not here for character development or storytelling, and gee willikers, I guess Nintendo isn't either.

I was fine with the first movie and hoped in vain that they would try to do better. But I'm getting flashbacks to Wii Music the way Nintendo is going to cash in on this dubious franchise with the least possible effort.

May I observe that this isn't even rentable on VOD?

Nope, the Amazon listing is real. 😳
I'm curious who would buy the movie on Blu-ray without seeing it first. I went in with low expectations for the previous movie and enjoyed myself. But the sheer amount of fan service has me worried, not excited.

So... take a big wet crap on the people, let the courts clean it up, and then find a way to do it again. Yep, sounds about right.

@N00BiSH Illumination is a plague. Ask any animator.

I didn't play the games as much as my peers when I was a kid, but I couldn't get enough of the series and movies. So Meowth was my main 'mon. 😎

Keep doing your thing, Sega management.

Ahh, tariffs and AI. The worst combination of flavors since pickled dog sh** and stomach acid.

I hate how perfect the picture at the top of the article is. The ramifications of another big studio being bought out are darker than Batman's stool.
Especially if it's bought out by Paramount.

I'm one of the rare (ahem) players who came at Banjo-Tooie having not played Banjo-Kazooie. Not a wise choice. Possibly due to getting lost in the sheer size and number of tasks, I never did finish it.

And yet, I still remember having a lot of fun playing it and being tickled to death by the hilarious character moments! Far more than in DK64, the side quests feel purposeful and enjoyable. There's a clear cause and effect to how the levels open up before you.

It's kind of miraculous how smooth many of the minigames are to control, too, given the struggles the team had with the development tools. I love wielding Kazooie like a shotgun-- it's actually made me hungry for more cartoony deathmatch games. (It's cute while being just a tad morbid!)

The team's insights here are invaluable. This is the era of video games I miss-- when we didn't think we knew everything and there were so many possibilities to explore. I think that's why the magnitude of Rare's work for the N64 still blows my mind to this day.

@SamSt565 Actually, that's a valid question, and you got me to thinking about why I'm such a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic. The fact that "they don't make games like they used to" isn't a bad thing. But when I think about the last deathmatch games I really enjoyed being TimeSplitters Future Perfect and Star Wars Battlefront II (the first Battlefront II, mind), a light snack of a game like Tokyo Wars suddenly seems more appealing than a bunch of COD wannabes that use every damn button on a modern controller including L3 and R3. An obsessive learning curve is a dealbreaker for me, and older action games-- especially arcade games-- manage to avoid that.

Still not jumping out of my seat to buy Tokyo Wars. There are better games for 17 bucks.

One more thing about that replay value... the games they've released from Namco so far are ridiculously short on tracks, maps, etc. For later, more fleshed-out titles like Dirt Dash and Motocross Go, with multiplayer tacked on, I'd say $15-17 is a bit more fair. For the one track in Ridge Racer, it's preposterous.

I also agree with a lot of users here that playing games in a big pack adds a lot of novelty. Hopefully Hamster is aware of this and will start packaging the 3D entries together in due time... but I'm sure Bandai Namco has a say in that too. 🫤

I was one of the players who excitedly wrote Hamster asking for split-screen play on future titles, and I'm glad they implemented it. I'm less glad that it's only available on the latest-gen consoles. Doesn't it seem like they're shooting themselves in the foot, excluding their install base from a feature that's easily implementable?

10 extra dollars for an incomplete logo, huh? What a world... 🫠

I love these kinds of games, but I would be lying if I said I've ever been good enough to rank. Regardless, the camp-horror aesthetic is plenty of motivation for me to give this a go. 😎

Nope, never owned an NES. Went straight on to the Super. And the quality-of-life features we've come to expect from games since has made a lot of NES games a grind for me.

But the original Super Mario Bros. 3 has my undying adoration... I love it more than World in some ways!

Talaka, Tossdown, and The Prisoning looked pretty cool to me. None of that really has to do with the Acclaim name as much as the developers responsible for them-- but if they can't use their old IP and licenses, they may as well embrace it, right?

At this rate, I wish they'd bite the bullet and port The Grid. It's not a deep deathmatch game by any stretch, but it's still way more fun than Mythologies, smolderingly cheesy FMV aside.
Still... Mythologies is very much a historical document of that era, and it might give us the same morbid glee we get from movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space. The controls might make it a little harder to get to the end, that's all.

I do like the Midway history timeline that's shown off in the video above. Hopefully there's a solid amount of supplemental material for arcade history buffs!

Good gravy, I remember when this was on store shelves! [cough, hack, wheeze] I'M OLD!

Despite my constant fumbling with FPS controls, I want to at least give this one a try. I love the cartoony-yet-gritty visuals-- peak LucasArts!

@gojiguy Yes, I do. Nowadays, Eugene is way too fond of cashing in and letting go.

Hoooo boy... I want to like this, but I'm not sure I will.

I've seen the game they're porting in arcades, and unless they pull tracks from their other racers like they did for the Switch port of Cruis'n Blast, this is going to be a pretty thin cash-in, no matter how well it performs on the higher-spec platforms.

And as good as the driving was in Blast (praise God, no more pointless spinouts!), you know what I do miss from the earlier games? No stock library abuse. The landscape and music in Raw Thrills' recent racers are canned as hell, and the aesthetic is jumbled as a result. The flatulent faux-trap loop on the above trailer is not what I call inviting.

As cheesy as it is to go for bat for anything related to Cruis'n, 1) I'm cheesy and 2) this looks about as compelling as the first F&F port to Wii. It's really sad to see Eugene Jarvis settle for less, even where his brand of mindless fun is concerned.

You bet your butt I'm buying this! I hope we can wishlist it soon.

I love (and still play!) M2's G-Darius remaster, which skews more colorful and fanciful with all the cybernetic sea life. R-Type's art direction is almost the opposite-- a Gigeresque nightmare that ascended to beautiful chaos in the PS1 era. Kind of proves that you can slap a lot of different aesthetics on a classic gameplay loop and make them uniquely compelling.

I've been wondering where the heck Tekken 8 was at launch. Switch 2 already feels a bit crippled, but then again, I haven't been happy with the industry emphasizing sheer graphic detail over everything else, to the point that specs are practically unaffordable to developers and consumers.

I liked Tekken 8 enough when I played it with a friend on her PS5 a while back. I didn't think the mechanics were as pure as classic Tekken (read: anything up to Tekken Tag 2), since the Rage meter is really intrusive. But 8 has personality in spades and some wonderful new characters.

Keep in mind, I played it before the Season 2 patch came along. I wasn't aware that everyone hates it now. 🫠

Ima say it again... Sega's current retro 'effort' sucks. Aside from the programmers handling the Club Sega parts of the Yakuza games, they've been retreating where Namco and Capcom seem happy to advance. They've decided there's more money to be made licensing the classics out to other studios to potentially butcher them, rather than spending the money to accurately port and preserve them. It seems Lizardcube knows what they're doing, but Forever clearly doesn't.

Also, I continue to be bugged by how murky these remakes look. Why add all this graphic detail if the environments are sparse and the lighting is so dim?

Time to dust off the Wii...

Sigh...

1. The new Katamari looks fine, but the series isn't really exciting anymore. I still remember the original designer dropping out to work in other media after We Love Katamari because he was wary of Namco milking it too much.
2. I know they were just speculating, but once one of the NL editors suggested that Rare Replay might show up, I couldn't get that off my mind. Rare's audience is still with Nintendo gamers in their 30s. How is nobody banking on that? (Besides Miyamoto's prideful self, of course.)
For that matter, there were no release dates for upcoming retro games I'm genuinely excited for, but still in the dark about-- R-Type Delta HD and Mortal Kombat among them.
3. Goodnight Universe sounded like an interesting, poignant premise, but after seeing the footage, the game seems to be a lot sillier than the blurb printed in this article entails. Which is fine, I guess. That's in keeping with a lot of indie titles. Maybe the game will surprise us.
4. Still slim pickings where top third-party games are concerned. I wouldn't care about this on Switch 1, but their framerates looked choppy as all get out. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is eight years old for chrissakes. With more partner showcases like this, the Switch 2's success is going to rest solely on the shoulders of Nintendo games... which I'm sure is fine with them.

Everybody's going to rant about something in this Direct, because it just wasn't very good. But I'm sure there will be interesting third-party games coming down the pike if publishers actually accept the Switch 2 as a unique piece of hardware. Clearly, they've learned from their mistakes with underestimating the first Switch and emphasizing higher specs over truly novel ga--

Ah screw it, who am I kidding? 🫠

@smoreon Frankly, that works too!

I never played this one in my youth, but I was certainly aware of it. And I always enjoy a rail shooter with a unique aesthetic hook. 😎