N64-ROX

Directly from the recent Rayman Legends preview here on Nintendo Life:
there was an element of 'We remade Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine' sheen to the whole thing that takes away from the original's charm
Yes indeed. It is frustrating and saddening to see this continually happen. OOT is a masterpiece and an important moment in time. There is no need to remaster it with shiny graphics!! People are making Unreal versions of it to exercise their skills and express their love for the original. They're doing it for their own enjoyment. When Nintendo does it, it's to milk the IP and tide everyone over until the actual next Zelda game gets announced in 2032 for the upcoming Switch 3. All these comparisons between the Switch 2 and the Wii U get clearer and clearer by the day. Nintendo don't want to give me any reason to buy their console, so I guess it won't happen.

And yes the FFX theme sends chills up my spine like nothing else in the entire world.

These are gorgeous on the Switch 1, there's absolutely no need to buy it again for Switch 2.

@Sketcz yes, I don't think game developers in the early to mid 90s really ever designed games for kids properly. Maybe it was a holdover from the 80s when only "computer people" really did computer things, and yeah almost certainly there was the rental angle.
Then as the CD age of mutimedia took over, that was where you'd find the kids' stuff. Media rich and insultingly basic. As a teen and self-styled gatekeeper of cool, I had the utmost contempt for such non-games but I recognize now that it was catering to an audience which had been excluded from the party until then.

Wait, does the girl on the left in the title image have a boner??

@Dogorilla "Hey, little girl! Want to change the wallpaper in Barbie's living room? You must beat this clunky Game Boy game to proceed! I hope you're a connoisseur of 30-year-old software which was a low-effort license cash-in even at the time!"

Yep the North American one has Temu Rayman and a McDonald's-font logo. Doesn't matter what the rest of it looks like when the most important bits are screwed up so badly. I can't imagine what they were thinking, it's like they asked AI to do it, but back before that was a thing.

@1Kismet thanks for clarifying; I got into Minecraft on the Switch but it has been legitimately unplayable for the past 5 years or so. Crashes just trying to load the world upon start-up over 50% of the time, runs like a dog all the time, and complains about save file size limits you didn't even know the Switch had. I had to abandon my precious starter forever world and start again on Java as a grizzled veteran. Good to know that it will already run well on Switch 2 if Nintendo ever decide to release a Zelda game and make the hardware worth buying.

@datamonkey he thought that Animal Crossing would be "Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment"!

There are people who speedrun this game, completing it over and over again until it becomes part of their soul! Knowing that, I don't think DK64 is "too much" in this day and age. This is the age of choice and convenience. Of infinite libraries and fleeting attention spans. We can choose to dabble in DK64 for as long as works for us, just like with most of the rest of the NSO smorgasbord. To get whatever we want out of it and move on.
Back in the olden days when it came out though? You'd buy one game for $80 and that would be what you had, for months and months until it was finished. By gum you had better learn how to win Jetpac. You had better get good at swatting mosquitoes in the barrel minigame dimension. You had better grind out those long extensive platforming challenges where, without save states, a single mistake meant running all the way back to the start, hitting the switch, viewing the cutscene and trying it all again. I both liked and hated DK64; I think finally my mental scars have healed enough to meet it again.

@StarCollector I'm pretty sure that we're already not getting 60fps on Switch 1 in UE3. Or perhaps it's the crusty networking, one way or another we're definitely playing at a disadvantage. I suspect that when this update gets closer to going live it will come alongside an announcement that the Switch 1 is no longer supported.

I've never really noodled around much post-completion in Zelda games, since fully completing them involves so much scouring of every corner that by the end I just want it to be over. Coming back to play it properly again from the start is another matter though.
Probably the only games that I've really done that with are the GTA games, since they leave so much of their worlds untapped, meaning plenty to discover just for the fun of it. But to be honest Minecraft has completely broken the equation for me anyway. I've probably put tens of thousands of hours into that game, and counting, precisely because there isn't any critical path at all. Everything is always noodling around and the interweaving systems provide endless intrinsic rewards.

Let's not play games about what a mainline Mario game is. They are industry-standard-setting, generation-defining platform games. SMB 1, 2, & 3. SMW. SM64. Sunshine, Galaxy, Galaxy 2, and Odyssey. Everything else is either a retro stopgap title or just using the Mario IP for random other game genres. Nothing wrong with them, but they are not what people are referring to when they talk about Mario with reverence.

I was reading this trying to gauge where the line was between genuine enthusiasm and "it's my job to write something good about Star Fox Switch 2" but the final line made it all too clear:
If all else fails, 42 quid for a bundle of GameChat AR filters and James McCloud's new sunglasses sounds like a pretty good deal.

I think everyone has gotten the wrong idea, the whole time they were just talking about this old thing. Then they discovered that the Game Boy Colour already exists and saw the writing on the wall.

@Dr_Lugae I definitely agree that Zelda and Mario in one year was pretty special treatment. But for me, I need at least one of them for an underpowered Nintendo console to be worth buying at all.
I also concede that for (seemingly) many people either Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, Splatoon or Pokémon is good enough to take the plunge. For me though, those games are just icing on a cake which does not yet exist.

Okay then, how about a new Mario or Zelda game then, you crazy company!
Seriously after being all in on the Switch 1 from day 1, I have been waiting and waiting for a reason to buy a Switch 2, and they still haven't even teased at anything worthwhile.
I have money, I will buy one at almost any retail price if it's where these generation-defining experiences will live. But no. It's like the Wii U all over again. Sure there are some quirky B-tier Nintendo games which some people will remember fondly and are good for filling out a console's library, but no actual obvious must-have industry tentpoles. Come on guys, it's not rocket science!

@Solid_Python Have you seen the screenshots on the eshop for Switch 1? It looks like a muddy, low-res mess, and that's when the publisher chooses the best screenshots it can find. Such a shame for such a beautiful game. And now to read that the Switch 2 version looks better but still with bad performance, even sadder.

The fact that it doesn't include the 3D Dreamcast game, and that the new game will include a level editor, suggests that the new "contemporary game built for the modern era" is just going to be 2D as well. A bit disappointing.

Yeah I reckon that he's thinking about a Switch 3 because there's nothing to be excited about with the Switch 2. It's just a higher-res Switch 1 and was already a "worst version of multiplatform games" destination at launch, and a year in still doesn't have even a tease of a new Zelda or Mario game. My guess is that we're going to have to wait for a Switch 3 for anything to get excited about.

@LinktotheFuture this is exactly their business model, and I'm guilty of falling into that trap all too often too.
Like, "$2 for a rip off of Only Up, even if it's jank city it will be worth it!"
But no, it's almost never worth it. I'm basically paying money to be insulted. And you can tell that with today's tools it probably cost them less than $2 to create in the first place, so every single sale is an encouragement for the slop merchants to keep doing what they're doing.

Sometimes I truly wonder what it must be like to be a young gamer these days. On top of the constant undercurrent of nostalgia and remasters and re-releases and neuvo-retro, we have something like this which appears to be a cool new thing but is actually TWENTY FRICKIN YEARS OLD. Roblox is also 20 years old; Minecraft is 17 years old; Fortnite is 9 years old. GTA 5 is 13 years old. World of Warcraft is 22. It must feel a bit like you're playing in your uncle's shed with your uncle's toys. Back in the 90s once a game was a couple of years old it might as well have been a cave painting compared to the latest hotness. Games were being made for us. What must it feel like to be surrounded by a landscape of games which are older than you are?

That proposal sounds pretty much just like "imagine if you monetized your games in the way that everyone else in the mobile space is already doing it."
Nintendo did end up releasing F2P mobile games, indeed they even released gatcha games. They were smart enough to avoid completely selling out the cultural capital of their biggest IP, but that's the difference between a random suggestion by a shareholder and an actual real-life business decision. It seems to me like the general thrust of this guy's suggestion was taken on board quite wholeheartedly.

@Ogbert Well said! If only they had released that stereo dock, the little thing's battery would never drain to zero and indeed it would get played far far more, being permanently on display (and they would sell more games too, as a result). That would have been an absolute genius accessory, no idea why they abandoned it. But yeah if you make the effort to play it, the Playdate is an utter candybox of fun.

@hcfwesker (cue "the crying game" montage)

@Sylamp cool, thanks!

Is this game designed to be played with a keyboard - e.g. typing commands, since one apparently has a million possibilities for interaction? Or a mouse? If so then I would be interested to know how the controls translate to the console.

This isn't a vague statement at all, in fact it's surprisingly clear. They didn't need to put this question in their FAQ, and they could easily have given it a non-answer such as "you never know". Instead they pretty much said straight up: No. NSO is what we're giving you now, stop asking for Virtual Console to return. We reserve the right to occasionally re-release games like this or Mario Galaxy for full price as a special event, we're not going to start giving you a stream of cheap simple romdumps, which would cannibalize sales of both "event" games like these and the NSO subscriptions.

@LightSpirit Imagine if the only way to play Ocarina of Time on Switch was to play a version which had had all of its original music replaced with new, different music. Even if it's good new music, it's not what you remember, it changes the entire experience, and it would most likely complicate and sour a lot of what the game means to you in your mind palace. I can tell you right now that I wouldn't buy that.
Music is a very important part of games, and exponentially so when we're talking about re-releases whose entire purpose is to satisfy nostalgia.

@rvcolem1 I wouldn't be surprised if the original Carmageddon doesn't hold up anymore these days. But back before GTA3 changed expectations forever it was a spectacular game, and not just for edgelord teenagers. The freedom to go anywhere, the fun of an interesting world to explore (including stuff on city rooftops which you had to get very creative to reach), and an engine powerful enough to display it all crisply without it looking like a murky fog filled mess - it was an unprecedented experience. Everything about it has been done much better now by other games, but in its time it was definitely a good game.

This was a weird review to read. A lot of talk about laps and speed and getting as far as possible. The original Carmageddon was an open world sandbox game; one might almost say an exploration game as much as anything else. Is that the case here, or is this new game more like Burnout with weapons?

The guy very clearly said that he loves Mario Kart and plays it all the time. This game is designed to fill a niche between that and more simmy racers. There are a lot of people in this thread who seem have been triggered by absolutely nothing.
Obviously there are many people out there who prefer less cartoony aesthetics, that describes like 80% of all games being made.

@mackers84 oh that's cool, thanks for the heads up!

Dear lord what is that D pad! Just give me 4 discrete buttons please.

I've been playing Rocket League on the Switch 1 almost continuously since 2019, but a few weeks ago I made the decision to put it down.
After they added voice chat it didn't take long for me to mute it as the toxicity was getting too much. And that was fine! But something odd has happened over the past few months. The same toxicity has somehow crept in to the text chat. In a game as relentlessly fast paced as this, people are taking the time to stop and type out aggressive put downs. I initially thought it was one or two jokers, but it seems to happen pretty much every match now.
It's a real shame because Rocket League is a game which just feels so good to play - the movement, the control, the speed, the spectacle, the competition, the quick hit 5 minute games, the fact that all of the F2P monetization stuff is easily-ignorable cosmetics. It's a great way to shift into a different zone after a hard day of work. But now heaven forbid you make a single mistake - whiff a block or accidentally bump a team-mate while concentrating on the ball - because then it's time to get mercilessly belittled by your own team on the text chat for the rest of the match, and not in a joking way either. And of course playing on console I'm not going to spend 2 minutes pecking around on an on screen keyboard to respond. It's too much and I've had enough.

Gorgeous visuals but I've never enjoyed fishing in any game (and we all know that it's in a lot of 'em). Fishing in real life is the most boring activity on the planet, and video game fishing usually boils down to RNG gambling crossed with waiting.

I'll definitely be keeping notice of this thing. I already have an n64 pad for TV gaming but will this be a solution for handheld? My experience with older telescopic phone controllers (and hell even just telescopic tablet holders) tells me to not get my hopes up. I can't imagine it's going to be the sturdiest setup; would have been nice if they were true joy con replacements. Still the possibility for greatness is tantalizing.

@molkom somebody tell him that Cho Aniki Collection is available on Switch!

I have very similar habits. I eventually learned that the eShop (at least the Switch 1 version) actually has two limits to the number of games you can have on your wishlist. There is a "hard" limit, where you're literally told that you're not allowed to add any more and you're hit with a mix of shock and embarrassment while you go off to spend 30-60 minutes pruning off games which you've never bought even though they've been 75% off a dozen times. And then there is a "practical" limit somewhere before that, where the eShop has an almost-100% chance of crashing before you can scroll to the end of the wishlist itself.
Of course the other danger is that these wacky games which you wishlisted just for the title go on a sale that you can't refuse, and you wind up with your actual library clogged up with stuff like Gran Carismo and Duck Creator and Funny Truck and Doronko Wanko and Toilet Shooting Star etc.
From the examples in the article though, I would definitely recommend the delights of Milkmaid of The Milky Way, About An Elf, and Bahnsen Knights; those are some fantastic games.

Ever since the PS1 I've been a big fan of separate buttons instead of a D Pad. No wonky accidental diagonals; you get precisely what direction you intended, every time.
Now the joy con sticks, on the other hand...
And if we're talking about diversity, how about a joy con with 6 action buttons instead of 4 so that you can play Street Fighter or N64 properly...
And how easy would it be to add freakin' analogue triggers for racing games and GameCube...

My parents weren't fans of video games so they never once bought me anything video game adjacent, aside from a couple of family computers throughout the years. Everything I got, I saved up for and bought myself. But my fond memory is of the TV ad over xmas for Banjo Kazooie whose Grant Kirkhope themes were already a combination of adventurous and christmassy, with a tantalizing narrator and footage of them jumping over moving cogs in Rusty Bucket Bay and traversing a giant tree in Click Clock Wood. I didn't have an N64 yet but I was already obsessed with Mario 64; it was that Banjo Kazooie commercial which pushed me over the edge and made me realise that I needed to make an N64 happen in my life.

Thanks for the review. I really enjoyed discovering Moon on the Switch. But that game too had a lot of friction. You meet these amazing quirky characters but then you get paranoid that you've chosen the wrong dialogue option and locked yourself away from ever being able to see them again. At least it sounds like here with Lost Children you can approach it like Undertale's True Pacifist run: bang your head against a wall during the fights trying to find the correct sequence of nonviolent options, but the worst that can happen is that you fail, die in the fight, and have to try again. As opposed to some random dialogue choice popping up in the field which may or may not ruin everything.

This looks and sounds amazing. I always enjoy a well executed walking simulator so I'll definitely be grabbing this.

@mjtaylor76 I'm from Australia, perhaps we had a different one? I definitely remember a giant 4-page feature article prior to release which made it look amazing, and the end of the magazine always had a big bunch of 1-screenshot, 1-paragraph micro-reviews of every game on the system (which is quite sad for the N64 now in retrospect) and that certainly never served to turn me off of it.

@Adamn you're definitely not. I excitedly played chapter 1 as soon as it released, but then years later when chapter 2 came out I realised it had been a terrible mistake. I'd forgotten so much that I had to start again from chapter 1, which ruined the discovery and freshness of it all and made me not want to play the way I like (slowly and methodically scouring every corner and drinking in every bit of content) since I knew I'd just have to do it all over again later when the next chapter came out, and then the next...
So I gave up before even starting chapter 2 and have put the whole thing on my "wait until it's done" pile. Frankly I don't understand how this piecemeal release approach doesn't ruin it for everyone else, but if people are managing to enjoy it then more power to them.

After reading about Rayman 2 all the time in N64 Gamer magazine I eventually got a hold of it later on PC, and by then it felt dated, restrictive, and a bit lame. But those were the days before nostalgia, when a couple of years (and definitely a new console generation) would render a video game laughably obsolete. Right now I am super pumped to rediscover N64 Rayman 2 on Switch, as well as Tonic Trouble.

Let's look at it this way: if Nintendo actually do abandon this deal in 15 years' time you will have already paid $750 USD just to rent the access to these virtual boy games. Another $100 USD for the premium headset is just a drop in the bucket!

So let me get this straight: you work for Nintendo Life, and your own son has spent (what would feel like) an entire year being denied a Switch 2. You're a monster!

@h3s personally I wouldn't want indies to have to use an engine which only works for the Switch. But yeah I'd place the blame on Unity (and definitely also Unreal Engine) for treating Switch support as an added extra as opposed to something which can be properly optimised for.
Anyway this is a good news piece so I'm just happy for these guys.

@Farts_Ahoy you could say that about pretty much any pixel art game, but the number of graphically simple games which struggle and chug on the Switch 1 proves that it's not just about whether it should be able to run at max FPS, it's about whether the developers have put in the effort to get it to actually do it. So it's always good news when it does happen. Especially from indie teams who are often bound to the limitations of third party game engines and tend to have less resources to spare to polish something which is already 'finished".