McGuildicuff

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. 😎

@Anti-Matter You make a good point. Open-world, nonlinear games themselves are not the problem-- it's the AAA mentality behind their production in the industry at large. Not everything can be Skyrim. Not everything should be Skyrim.

If the aspirations of these games were realistic or intelligently contained and the visuals were more stylized, maybe these publishers wouldn't be laying off so many people a year.

@Yoshi3 Couldn't agree more. Heh, maybe I agree too much, with my fondness for arcade games dictating much of what's in my Switch library.

But in the end, whether or not a game can sustain an audience beyond the initial purchase comes down to game feel and fun mechanics, which Nintendo swears by. The Switch sold like hotcakes, and the Switch 2, despite my grave reservations about pricing, is off to a great start-- and neither of those are dependent purely on open-world Zelda sales. (Or open-world Mario Kart sales, but come on, it's a new Mario Kart either way!)

And Zelda already had a long history of strong mechanics to put into an open world. When will AAA publishers and developers take a freaking hint?

If everything is open-world just for the sake of being "SO F**KIN' BIG," that's a good way to collapse the industry. Not even AI will save you, because then the customers will notice the game sucks. 🙄

Yokoyama threatening to shut the project down if it's not good enough sounds like a nothing-burger, but there may be a point. Releasing a halfhearted sequel and tanking the series further would only add to Sega's long list of franchise casualties.

This one needs to be a hit, and another bog-standard VF entry is not gonna overshadow Tekken in the public consciousness. Tekken is too indelibly over-the-top.

I remain hopeful because that brief concept trailer looked incredible-- an exaggerated, fast-paced depiction of martial arts, sure, but not absurd. Hitting that sweet spot will make a new VF stand out.

Yeah, it took me a minute, but I realized that it's dubious at best for SAG-AFTRA to rally behind the case of Jones' voice when he isn't even alive to benefit from a win. There are more pertinent cases with living, working actors getting replaced that they could be suing over instead.

Still... I want Epic and the chatbots to win even less.

@JimNorman Thank you for that little quip at the end 😁

@SaltySpitoon957 Something tells me they knew it wasn't. They just wanted to release some broken crap that would trend until people rightfully complained.

My most recent console is a Switch. My latest full-price purchase is the preorder of Capcom Fighting Collection 2, which I am glad was announced before the Switch 2, lest Capcom would get the idea to sell it for more than $40. Retro games tend to be bargain-priced anyway, but shoot, imagine what a 'bargain' will look like in 2026.

The Switch 2 remains a hard sell for me. So do the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles. I had a 10-year streak working in the increasingly unstable entertainment industry until last November-- so even without the economy s***ting itself, I'm not in an ideal position to keep buying brand-new systems that only support a sliver of titles I can learn and enjoy quickly.

As a matter of fact, I recently booted up the Wii and enjoyed a Grand Prix race in F-Zero GX. It was great to remember how much I loved and missed that game, but it was even better to do it out of spite for it being an NSO game on Switch 2. I intend to keep physically owning that game, thank you.

@vincentgoodwin @yamber Totally valid-- thank you for clearing that up. I'm still adamant in my other concerns about the format (and the erosion of physical media in general), but if we can still borrow games from friends in a post-digital landscape, that counts for something.

@AussieMcBucket I appreciate your taking the time to reply, but I'm still confused. If it's a key to download the game to your system, which still takes up space, what makes it so special compared to a code in a box? What are the advantages of having a Game-Key Card rather than just downloading the game from the eShop-- or for that matter, buying a code in a box? And if Nintendo can squash a game like Mario Kart World into a functional cartridge, what compression technology are they not sharing with developers? Keeping that big a secret doesn't sound like a way to make anybody happy.

It may just be that I was in a haze over the controversy of the Switch 2 Direct and I couldn't process what Game-Key Cards are meant to accomplish, but I still don't see the advantages.

I'm beginning to wonder why Nintendo even brought this heinous 'format' into existence. We have two flavors of code-in-a-box now, and that's two flavors too many.

...All snarking aside, this is making Nintendo's handling of the first Switch seem so much more careful and ambitious in hindsight. The Wii died with diminishing support from Nintendo and general disinterest from third parties. The Switch, meanwhile, will have new titles coming down the pike for a while, and it's already outlasted two new PlayStation launches by its sheer down-to-earth nature.

I can't forecast whether the Switch 2 will fail or not-- Nintendo's cruel bet on price hikes and 'Nintendults' to buoy sales may yet yield profit-- but I'm beginning to realize we had no idea how good things have been. And the mixed messaging about what the new console can and can't do is placing them on increasingly shaky ground.

Pfff, Nintendo didn't need to plan this launch! They have a loyal userbase and have bumped up the tech exponentially. This is gonna go over ten times bigger than the first Wii-- I mean, Switch. Did I say Wii? I meant Switch.

Praise jeezus! I've been wanting a proper Offline Versus mode for a while, and playing the upcoming CFC2 at the Dreamcast's internal resolution would have made me wince a bit. Glad they're doing this 😁

So let me get this straight... to qualify more highly, I have to currently have a 12 month subscription with 50 total gameplay hours? What is this classist BS?
I'm kidding with the word 'classist', but I'm also not... customer loyalty to a multibillion-dollar corporation should never be the driving force.
I don't even use my Switch that much, but the Switch 2 is shaping up to be an insult to its legacy.

@Samalik True, I'd still like the game to the point that I wouldn't care that much about the ending. I'd still buy the collection. But I wouldn't tear down Capcom's decision to make changes, either, however cold and financially motivated it may be. Just because Japanese gag comics, which tend to take a disturbingly light attitude towards sexual menace, still do jokes about female shame and subjugation doesn't make them timeless. Sweet lord.

You're at least right that fighting game endings tend to be lame. Beating the boss(es) will always be more satisfying than a bunch of jpgs passing as an epilogue.

So I was just watching the endings to Power Stone on YouTube, because I knew those were undergoing edits. When I saw Rouge’s ending, I understood why. If any of you ‘originalists’ laugh at or get off on a cutscene like that, I’ll happily accept the censorship.

Just because they’re classic games doesn’t mean we have to make new audiences squirm. The originals, warts and all, are worth documenting-- that's one reason game preservation efforts are so important. Maybe by including the warts in this collection, Capcom would be more accountable to its past. Maybe, conversely, they'd turn people off to what was good about these games in the first place.

The gameplay is timeless. I can live without the smut.

@Tempestryke I have indeed been asking for it, rabidly! But I was a latecomer to that game.

I didn't play Power Stone, let alone have a Dreamcast in my possession, until... 2006? Seven years after that system was off the market, I was still curious about it. And although Power Stone ended up feeling a little different than playing a 3D Smash Bros., I loved it-- I was not disappointed.

My hope is that collections like this will not only satisfy fighting-game fans, but also create new ones. The genre can include so much more than just Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and that deserves to be seen and appreciated.

@PKDuckman Yeah, that struck me as weird too. I'm guessing... that they're guessing... that if anyone has nostalgia for Plasma Sword, it's on the Dreamcast. But it seems like unnecessary fuss to just rip the options menu and other modes out of a console version.

I'm still stoked for this anthology. I'm over the moon about playing Power Stone the first again, which is the purest and most fun arena fighter I can think of to this day, barring SSBM. But I do wish they'd packed in the console versions of every dang one of these. Taito did it with G Darius HD, and I'm pretty sure they have less cash coming in than Capcom.

The only thing I wish they would include (and given previous collections, they probably won't) is the ability for winners to change characters in offline matches. When I play friends at fighting games, we always like to pick someone new just to shake things up-- we trust each other not to spam or cheat. Barriers to that should only be enforced online, says I.

But who am I kidding? There's so much in this collection to crow about that I probably won't miss it. 😎

I look back on the SNES era not just with nostalgia, but also with a much deeper sense of admiration, for how many vastly different kinds of games Nintendo cranked out in that system's lifespan. The DS, 3DS, and Wii provided them similar latitude to experiment and collaborate with ambitious third-party teams.

So it strikes me as ironic that, for all their emphasis on unique gameplay experiences and ambivalence to higher tech specs, Nintendo has provided Switch owners with an increasingly safe and conventional lineup over the past few years. They've been the industry leaders by a few laps, simply by meeting the markets that Xbox, Playstation, and Mountain Dew don't care about. But now they're acting like they could lose everything, allocating more and more resources to Mario spinoffs and remakes, always rendered and visualized with care (except the DKCR remake... oof) but designed with a lot less ingenuity.

Then again, the Switch continues to sell, so they certainly know their audience. And they have, indeed, almost lost everything a few times. The Wii U wrecked the previous generation's goodwill. The GameCube (much as I love it) came in last in its own console war. I don't blame them for getting cold feet. But I still find it disquieting that they've focused so much on tentpole releases and so little on lower-budget, more creatively challenging oddities.

Whether or not ARMS sold well-- and it certainly didn't perform to their satisfaction, or we'd have seen more-- I am beginning to think that Nintendo projects like that and Part Time UFO were the last of their kind.

Finally, I would like to reinforce how much I appreciate Imamura's mix of humility and candor as he reflects on NIntendo's past, present, and future. I don't think we'd be hearing half of that if he wasn't now a free agent.