N64-ROX

@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".

As a huge huge fan of Nidhogg 2 (in fact I'm a convert who initially thought the change in art style was a travesty until I actually started playing it) I've been super intrigued by this one and will probably end up picking it up even though I'm generally not interested in roguelites or even most top-down stuff in general.
Maybe not on the Switch though if the performance is as bad as people are saying.

A review of the Switch 1 version would be nice.
Although it's really only a curiosity for me; I beat this game on PS3 and had had enough of it well before I was done. It definitely does the Uncharted thing where it frequently locks you in an area until you have killed 200 people. With the added fun of QTE rollercoasters that are thinly veiled excuses for torture p*rn.

What an eyesore!

I get why they are insisting that you can still choose to play it fast even though the whole nature of card based games is to slow down and consider every single action. The secret sauce of Vampire Survivors is that the weapons fire themselves and all you need to do is focus on movement. The prospect of having to select each attack every single time seems like the complete opposite of that, even if it's possible to do it "fast" i.e. mindlessly. But I guess this is indeed a different game entirely (first person perspective completely changes the equation too) so it will have to be taken on its own merits.

I like how the North American one has a constipated Karate Kid on the cover.
And I like how the European one took the Japanese art and said: OK, anime characters we can live with, but speed lines? That's taking it too far for our delicate western audiences.

Hey what, this is a new Katamari game? For some reason I saw this on the eShop and thought it was a remaster of the Xbox 360 one which left me cold for some reason. I forget what that reason actually was (it may have just been a combination of exhaustion from completing the PS2 originals, and sadness that my exquisitely Japanese hidden gem game was now being marketed to the masses on the disgustingly American Xbox) but apparently it wasn't just me if this reviewer says that this new one is a return to form.
Upgraded from "eternally wishlisted" to "will buy at some point"!

@dazzleshell I remember when we all thought that we'd be getting something special for Zelda's 35th anniversary (e.g. Zelda 3D All Stars, or at least Wind Waker and Twilight Princess) and they kept us waiting all year and never released anything at all!

I never had a computer back in the isometric heyday, although I've read quite a few retro reviews of ZX Spectrum games so I get the concept.
I played the first Lumo and it was clearly a new entry to that old genre, but it all felt so tightly consistent that I had no idea that it was referencing numerous distinct games. As opposed to something like Horace which indulged itself with crazy surprises at every opportunity.
Anyway, Lumo 1... I found it cosy, ingenious, and impressive with its complex level design. I did figure out that ice block room, although it took literally hours and hours. But then I reached a section where you have a long, long gauntlet of jumps from moving platforms. I consider myself a persistent gamer. But friends, the isometric malarkey broke me.
It lives on in my "finish me!" pile, but the overall layout of the world is so insanely complicated that I feel that I'd need to start again now in order to have any idea where to go next even if I made it through that maddening gauntlet. And that ain't gonna happen. So in the pile it stays.

Seems like a bit of a stretch to say that this is "AI".
People were making CGI mockup trailers which were nothing like the quality of the actual gameplay for years before AI came along.

No discount on any of the Atelier Ryza games either. This looks like a clearout of the also-rans.

I like how the scorpion in the NA cover is just kinda chilling there. "For you human, this is a fight for your very life. For me, it's Tuesday."

I daresay that there is a big difference in writing code for a game (where intangibles such as "fun" must reign supreme if you're doing it right) than working to spec for most other commercial applications.
But even in my industry (financial and billing) the best developers don't just mindlessly follow the spec. If they can think of a better or more elegant way of doing something once they're knee deep in actually building out the solution, this is a valuable insight. They don't have carte blanche to just deliver something completely different to what was requested, but prototyping out an alternative will often end up being agreed to be much better.

Good thing Disney don't employ the same lawyers as Nintendo, otherwise they would patent the concept of a monster bursting out of a person's chest and sue these guys into oblivion.

Nothing like what I expected, it's like they're an indie publisher now!
None of these 2D games are for me, but the snowboarding game looks colourful and fun.
Kudos to Acclaim, I say. Better to make a fresh start with some fresh indies than to squeeze out some dire AA attempts or try to cash in on old licenses.

The North American box art was terrible in its day. But now from a retro perspective I actually think it's cool. It's pure 90s grunge, even though grunge had been dead for like 5 years by the time Forsaken popped up. For the un-discerning connoisseur it's a memorable classic.
The game is an utter dog though, in my opinion.

@Runex2121 if the code was on the cart then you'd only ever need to plug it into your console once. It would download the game and from that point on would work the same as any other digital download. No need to ever swap the cart back in again. Which in my experience makes a huge difference in how frictionlessly and how often you end up actually playing the game. So with GKKs you don't get to play easily and you don't get to keep it forever. It's the worst of both tradeoffs.

@Runex2121 you realise that all you've done is paid for an empty piece of plastic which you now need to put in and out of your switch whenever you want to change games, as if it were a real cartridge? Just buy it digitally if you don't care about physical media ownership. Not needing to switch cartridges is the one benefit of digital purchases, and a GKK is just a digital purchase without its one benefit.

Is it just me or was the Switch 1 really good when it first launched? I feel like it took 2-3 years to reach the point where every review and preview had to admit that the Switch version looked and played like a dog compared to every other platform. With the Switch 2 it's been the case since day 1. Makes me sad, to be honest.

@PKDuckman yep, still not up on the Australian eshop. I suspect it's because there are ladies in it, which is somehow worse than the daily hentai games which never stop releasing.

Just sending out a Public Service Announcement: you can still buy Switch 2 games without supporting game key card nonsense. Just buy it digitally! It's the same product except with the added benefit of not having to switch game cards all the time.
Not as nice as a real physical game, but there is no need for anyone to ever buy a game key card.

X = X, i.e. the letter X.
Anyone who claims otherwise about any title is just trying to be cute.

The moral of your travel story is not "it'll be fine"!
The moral is "always get yourself to the airport at least 2 hours before boarding, otherwise AT BEST you're going to be running around like a chump."
Oh and "German trains are always late - especially the expensive ICEs."
Seriously, you got very lucky in the end and learned completely the wrong lesson.

WWF Warzone, baby! Let's go back to the days when The Rock was a heel and Vince McMahon was a commentator. When Owen Hart was alive and The Undertaker had never heard of Limp Bizkit. When some pansy Wildlife Fund had no sway over the most electrifying force in sports entertainment! Where special moves required Street Fighter style button combos and create-a-wrestler was just overlaying different textures on a single skin on the model.

I tried to think of a "Nightdivey" game that I wish they'd remaster, but all I can think of is Shadow Man, which surprise surprise they have already done and I've already bought. Maybe PoP Sands of Time? But of course Ubisoft would be as likely to give that away as Nintendo is this.

Mad BMX Skills 2 may be of interest to any budding [insert BMX rider]

You mean Dave Mirra! He's just like Tony Hawk (TM)!

This one's not going to be close!
But at least the Japanese cover proudly proclaims "Made in Wario" - a claim most of us here only wish we could make of ourselves.

The title is fine - at least it's not "Action Explorer" or another weirdly literal internal-project-name such as Octopath Traveller (the game with 8 travellers), Triangle Strategy (the strategy game with three factions), and Various Daylife (where you do various day-to-day slice-of-life activities).

I was definitely all about the "Blast Corpse". Luckily everyone else at school was uncultured like me so nobody ever questioned my pronunciation.

Man those screenshots make it look like a Switch 1 port. A month in and we're already at this stage...

Let's be honest, the switch's touchscreen is terrible. It's not too surprising that they tried to implement it and decided against it. The on screen keyboard is the perfect example: it's easier to type with d-pad navigation than touch the actual keys responsively.

That European box is terrible. There seems to have been a weird trend in the 90s to put borders and pop-ins around everything to make the key art as small and as blemished as possible. And here we have a red & white banner pattern framing a picture of red & white banners which acts as a frame for another red & white banner. What a mess, it's amateur hour on the computer! Either go less-is-more with your logo, or more-is-more with the badass gigantic insect dude. Not just copy and paste the logo a bunch of times, then create another layer in photoshop and copy and paste it some more over the top!

@Porco Nintendo didn't force people to pay more if they wanted HDMI out. With the Lite they gave people the option to pay less if they were willing to sacrifice the HDMI out. Literally the only point of the Switch Lite's existence was to save a couple of quid by sacrificing features. And the consumer gets to choose what's important to them: the features, or $50.

@Stormcloudlive ha ha, I like the way you think. Did you ever play the 2025 April Fools "Craftmine Update" where one of the unlockable skills was that it just automatically throws away one of your dirt blocks every few seconds? Absolutely infuriating! But I wouldn't have minded if they were copper ores.

Another one to add to the pile! The 2D-on-3D platformer thing reminds me of Demon's Turf, which I couldn't get into. But I think that was mainly the weird vibes and constant stress which turned me off there. In that department this looks a lot more like Cavern of Dreams which I loved every minute of.

Why do you refer to it as a "sports" game, and mention that people are in "vehicles"?
It's clearly a wheelchair basketball game.
I had thought that Nintendo were being weirdly defensive in their marketing by using weasel words to avoid stating the obvious. But it seems that Nintendo Life is doing it too? Who is breathing down your necks, guys? And why in the world would anyone be afraid to use the term wheelchair basketball? It's literally an olympic sport in real life.

Hey what, I thought all of the recent hype was because it was finally finished. I played chapter 1 when it released 6 years ago, then years later when chapter 2 dropped I had to start again and realised, nup, this is a miserable way to experience a story. I'm a huge Toby Fox fan but dude, finish your game, then we'll talk.

I scoffed at Gex back in the day, comparing it to the N64's best. But man those PSX 3D screenshots look deliciously crunchy. I may have to wind back the clock with this and actually get it.

Obviously this game is not for me, and that's fine. But it still makes me really wonder who it is for. Like, once in a while a meme dating simulator will pop up, and it's like yeah ok, I get the joke. This time they're all pigeons! This time they're all old! Wait till I show my friends this one, etc. But people keep making tonnes of these things (check out itch.io for an unending stream) and at some point it's like: have I been completely misunderstanding this? Are these not joke games at all, but rather there is a huge market of people who actually get pleasure from the fantasy of dating something mundane instead of someone sexy?
Then the spiral kicks in. Are we as a society so atomised and insular and homey now that people are walking around the house saying "I love this cabinet so much I wish I could date it"? Or is that just how home-decorator-type people's brains have always worked and I'll never ever be able to understand them?
Anyway, fun concept for a game and good review!

Pretty cool, do Rocket League next, Epic!

"Modest asking price", get out of town.
Arcade Archives were always twice as expensive as they should be, and now this is twice again. Coming up to $30 AUD for a single track arcade game, they can go jump. I already have RR64 on the N64 Online for free, as well as Sega Ages Virtua Racing for a true arcade classic preservation.

Yep this game proves that the N64 was built for fighting games (6-button controller, baby!) but the NSO emulator is not. I hope you all have your NSO N64 pads!

@DanElectrode aw man, I was hoping it was that 2.4 ghz wifi technology.

I can't imagine I'll ever use Game Chat, but I am pretty pumped about one side-benefit: the fact that they put a headphone jack in the new Pro controller. I have one of those in my Xbox controller for PC and its so good - I never need to worry about syncing/desyncing a bluetooth connection, nor do I have to suffer through the audio-to-video delay that always seems to come with bluetooth. If Nintendo hadn't jumped on this social bandwagon they never would have bothered to add that.

I'll add my voice to the chorus that sales are the only metric that counts here. I hold a candle of hope that virtually nobody will buy these worst-of-both-worlds bait-and-switch cartridges (I certainly won't, for any reason whatsoever) and Nintendo and all the publishers will eventually get the message. But consumers as a whole have legitimised phones without headphone jacks and software-as-a-service; there's a high chance that the target market for these things won't even be aware of what they're doing. "Oh, my game needs to download something before I can play it; whatever." And just like that it's the new normal.

Or you could go down to the carnival and get one for $1 if you can knock down three cans with three balls.

"The game that started the extreme sports genre"?!
If I was a Japanese gamer I would have boycotted this one out of principle!
By the time 1080 Snowboarding released there had already been 2 Coolboarders games on PSX, and that was just its direct competition.
And let's not forget the likes of Skitchin' back on the Mega Drive/Genesis.

@Alaninho yes I'm letting my politics be seen. Politics is part of culture. It's important in journalism and content.
If you think that advocating for diversity and tolerance is "perennial nastiness" then there's no chance that logical arguments or appeals to empathy are going to change your mind. I won't be changing my mind either. But my hope is that people whose opinions are more open to influence can read between the lines to understand what you are really saying.

Just remember, folks: anyone who ever comments that Polygon is/was "too political" is letting their true politics shine through.
If you hate on a site for promoting inclusion, tolerance, and diversity then you are one of the bad guys.