N64-ROX

@Mortenb "They could have made it a big box in the frame of reference of the terrain, but there i nothing to gain"
This is not true. One big limitation of all 3D games (especially early ones) is draw distance. If the skybox was literally a huge box, you wouldn't see it at all most of the time since its polygons would be too far away from the camera. Not to mention, stretching the texture out onto a huge polygon and then pushing it a million miles into the distance would look terrible, you'd lose all the fine detail. That's why cool tricks like these are both necessary and fun to see behind the curtain of.

@dugan I may be biased due to nostalgia, but I'd say these classic LucasArts ones are the best examples:
Day of the Tentacle (funniest)
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (best adventure)
Monkey Island 1-3 (best combination)

Some great newer ones:
Technobabylon
Broken Age
Kentucky Route Zero
Milkmaid of the Milky Way
Paradigm

I also really liked the Deponia series, but I recently double dipped on the Switch version and discovered to my horror that they'd changed it so that you have to walk around with the analogue stick. My frustration at that was the impetus behind my original comment...

Thimbleweed Park was great but too long and confusing to hold my attention until the end, to be honest.

I've probably played a hundred point-and-clicks, and every time they decide to make you directly control the character "like a console game" it's just a misery. How is that any better than pixel-hunting with the cursor? You're basically just pixel hunting using a slower, more cumbersome cursor.

Video gaming is a downright cheap hobby these days, I'd say. Video game collecting is another matter. But if you're not averse to digital downloads, the amount of gold you can get in sales, bundles, and even just good games cheap makes gaming a ridiculously frugal hobby.
I present some counter examples: gambling, clubbing, yoga/gym membership, online shopping, trading card games, tabletop games/wargames, water sports, and so on and so forth. You can have a pretty rich and varied gaming experience if you spend like $20 a month; way less if you're into indies from places like itch.io which are often free. Not to mention, you can always play the games which you already own consarn it!

How can anyone say that this art direction is faithful to the original? They look like plastic mannequins! A proper Tintin game needs to be cell shaded. Hergé's style is defined by the linework; the comics were originally black and white!
Actually I've just recently been playing Sable on PC and it makes me keep saying to myself: now this would be an awesome art style for a Tintin game.

Weird, in Australia we usually get the same PAL stuff as Europe, but we definitely got that North American box art. Huge black borders weren't really much of a thing for us, if memory serves.

When I first played this on the freshly released N64 in-store demo kiosk, it absolutely destroyed me. The analogue stick was already a bit of a challenge to get used to, but with real inertia and choppy wave physics, I was just sliding around and bumping into everything. 3D was exciting but Wave Race made me think that perhaps I wasn't ready for it.
Took me a couple of years to save up for a 64 of my own, and still then I mainly stuck to 3D Platformers and Zelda for quite a while.
It was only after 64 was old news, when games were going cheap and I was building up a respectable catalogue, that I bought Wave Race for myself and gave it a proper go. And man, what a satisfying game it is to master. Once you get the hang of the controls, the difficulty increases and it becomes a true race as opposed to a fight against nature. And then you have the ice to figure out, and the winding tunnels and the deceptive jumps. It's the first "hard" game that I ever mastered, and it made me feel like a king.
This game's simplicity and shortness is its strength. And after sitting through loading screens on my other favourite Switch racers it's quite shocking to see the way Wave Race snaps instantly from one course to the next, like a Star Wars screen wipe. No distractions, just pure gaming bliss.

I think the other thing that we need to remember is that there weren't many classic games on the Switch for those first few years. No SNES online, no Final Fantasies, even M2 and Arcade Archives took a while to get going. I still remember putting "Fox n Forest" on my wishlist because I really wanted a 16-bit platformer on my fancy Switch. Now that almost all prayers have been answered on this machine, devs really have to do something unique to get traction.

One reason why Wave Race has aged well is its simplicity. It's just you, the physics, and a small handful of courses. From a modern perspective of dipping into a retro game for a quick hit of fun, it's the perfect balance. Play it for 25 minutes and you'll have everything unlocked. Personally, if they would release 1080 Snowboarding I'd probably barely give it a glance: too much depth tied to a type of game that has been vastly improved by the successive console generations. Similarly to the way that Banjo Kazooie is a fun breezy adventure today while Donkey Kong 64 would be a nightmare slog.

@Beaucine don't listen to the haters; if you're not turned off by classic 3D genre-defining graphics and gameplay then it's not you who has the problem!
Not everything from the late 90s early 3D era still holds up today, but the great ones still do, and Wave Race is definitely among them.

"Don't sweat it!"
Finally this gem comes back! This baby is going straight to the top of my chill-out group on the Home screen. I can play Wave Race for hours... For months!

An unforgettable game, but that western box art is just useless. This is peak "it's gold, it's Zelda, you'll buy it" material. I mean, they were not wrong. But if we're comparing it to an actual colourful box art, drenched in blue and showcasing Link's wicked new art style, there's no contest.

I still remember the Penny Arcade comic from when the harassment started and Ron Gilbert vowed never to talk to the internet again.
"I didn't know that was an option!?!" says Gabe.
Unfortunately, it turns out that it's not.

My first console, the Sega Master System, I had 3 games for. And that included Alex Kidd which was built in. I would read magazines and hang out at the mall and dream about having lots of games. Now I'm in the "hundreds upon hundreds" club on the Switch... 12 year old me wouldn't even be able to comprehend it!

@MeloMan I finished Goragoa back in the day and had no idea it had any story at all! Just a bunch of amazing puzzles and visuals.

@AcridSkull personally I have no interest in cloud gaming, especially given the current state of network quality and coverage. But I don't think that Google Stadia failed because it was cloud. It was just a terrible value proposition to begin with (buy games at full price, from a small pool of available titles, only playable in the cloud, and only until Google characteristically dumps the service... PLUS pay a monthly fee PLUS you need special hardware for some reason). And then Google did the expected and abandoned the service.
Some people seem to like Xbox cloud and Geforce Now; they are much better value and you're not losing purchases if you end your subscription or MS / Nvidia pulls the plug. So a machine which is just a delivery system for those already-successful services isn't the craziest idea.
Still you'd want it to be cheap if it's nothing but a streaming box. And you'd want it to support 4G /5G simcards if you want it to be able to fill any niche at all that's not already owned by the Switch.

@Mattock1987 I wouldn't write this sale off so quickly - some of my favourite single-player experiences on Switch are often marketed as multiplayer games. Minecraft, Descenders, Tony Hawk's, Grid, Burnout Paradise to name a few.

For sure, it's not just skateboarding as a sport that THPS brought into the limelight, or extreme sports as a videogame genre; it's this immaculate collection of punk, ska, rock and rap which THPS also introduced to many an impressionable teen and showed them just how cool videogames can be. The soundtrack still lives on in my memory to this day.

Looking forward to an explosion of N64 content!

Oh and let's not forget the clown shoes!

I don't see any ridiculous belts or shorts, doesn't look like Kingdom Hearts to me.

What a mess! I would love something which actually invokes the style of the N64 Deku Tree. Moody orange lighting, spiderwebs, etc.

But to be clear: nobody is getting this game for free, unless Epic is giving it away. PSN and Game Pass are not free.

@Paraka I disagree. If two thirds of the people in the burger shop were getting their burgers for free, you would definitely start re-evaluating whether you should be paying full price for that burger.
Definitely value is what a consumer thinks is reasonable, but those thoughts are influenced by what they see going on around them.

@xiao7 it's worth it for the most badass M Bison you'll see in your life.

Mega Drive Champion Edition (with the huge blue M Bison at the top) will always be my favourite since it's the one that I owned. But it's also pretty classy, I think!

Wave Race is a game that I would literally and unironically play in heavy rotation if Nintendo gave it to us. It would even work fine with their disgusting joycon button mapping since it's essentially a one-button game for the most part. And the game really is timeless - despite the 10-polygon character models it's still the best-playing water racing game I've ever experienced.

The frogun is also cursed. But you get your choice of topping!

"secretly an immortal doom-bringer who could bring about the end of the world - except she doesn't want to."
Ah, emos. They're like goths who can't fully commit.

"Poor reception"? Poor product is the reality. The fact that those piles of trash sold 10 million copies indicates a spectacular reception.
Slightly of topic, but did you know that the games are now running pretty nicely on the Switch? I booted up San Andreas the other week and was pleasantly surprised. There are still some weird changes, like how the rhythm games (dancing and lowriders) have barely any connection to the actual music anymore, but it runs smooth and looks nice and the most egregious character remodels have been re-remodelled back to non-horrorshow status.
On principle I wouldn't recommend anyone buy these versions anymore, but if you already bought them and gave up in disgust, you might want to have another try sometime.

I take back everything I said about the Amico. This is the definitive console that nobody wants or needs.

Goldeneye / Perfect Dark proved how silly it was that licenced games had been so shoddy until then. Everything about Perfect Dark was technically better than Goldeneye - including the cutscenes (so much speech!) and story told within them. But Goldeneye didn't need fancy cutscenes or story. We knew the story, we knew the characters, because we'd seen the movie or at least knew who James Bond was. As a result, Perfect Dark's narrative ends up feeling a bit cheesy and amateurish by comparison, even though Goldeneye puts almost no effort into narrative. That's the built-in benefit of making a game based on a movie, but most other developers before and since have pretty much wasted it (or perhaps over-relied on it?) by plonking the license into a low-effort generic game.

What on earth is this monstrosity for? Which mega drive games use it? Seems like a bit of an oversight to publish an article about this without providing any context whatsoever.

I'm a Rocket League addict so I gave this a try. Man oh man what a waste of time. An hour or so of mine; thousands of man-days of Ubisoft's. The game is too complicated to control and the camera is terrible - where's the ball? Which way am I going? The whole thing is just a mad scramble. The menu UI is just all over the place. There's unskippable cutscenes all the time so you can't get into the groove of "one more game" - it will take you a minimum of 5 minutes between ending one match and actually starting the next one. And it even fails at F2P, which honestly should be a known formula by now. You need to give people a taste of the good life before you start withholding the really cool stuff behind a paywall. But this game is just unbelievably stingy. When you start playing, you have literally no cosmetics. No clothing options, not even hair. They give you one loot box and then you're on your own. Most of my 3x3 matches involved 6 bald clones, all wearing the same default t-shirt. And then no more rewards for at least 5 more matches. Ubisoft haven't even let me start playing dress-up, how am I supposed to get hooked?
I wanted to get into this game; I like the roller derby idea. But the gameplay is painful, the presentation is annoying, and the customisation hook is a non-starter. It fought me every inch of the way so I've put it down for good and had another weekend of Rocket League.

Anyone who watches the "Wha Happun?" channel on YouTube will tell you that this happens every time!
Sega always needs to release Sonic games on his birthday. No ifs, buts, or maybes: it's releasing on June 23rd or everyone is fired; quality be damned.
You'd think by now they would have realised that nobody cares about that date and Sonic fans just ache for a game that they can be proud of but no, rush it out, we already ordered the cake...

I know that I say this every time, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE update the app to let us change those terrible button mappings. "Peak stability"? Please. The N64 games have been unplayable without the N64 controller, since the day it launched.

@Arkay that's how mortal humans such as you or I would feel about it. These speedrunners though, they 100% BOTW every other day. My hat goes off to these mad champions.

How many times do we have to remind everyone: FFX had fantastic voice acting. The Tidus laugh scene was supposed to sound tortured and forced - he was stricken with grief and fear, and Yuna told him to laugh at the top of his lungs to kind of get over it and get some serotonin flowing.
I do miss the JRPGs of the late 90s / early 00s, they really started to dive deep into their characters' internal dramas. I like to call this the "emo period" of JRPGs...

@jowe_gw thanks for explaining! An entire team of Waluigis sounds like a good starting point for the next spicy meme!

I read a review of this elsewhere which said that there are only 10 characters... in this 5x5 game. That makes me interested to know: is every match the same 5 vs the same 5, just with different team liveries? I'm interested to know.

What is this game like from a racing perspective?
I'm not a huge fan of destruction derby or arena events like the one in this trailer, but if you can hoon around more interesting tracks like in Burnout or Flatout, I'd be pretty interested.

I have to admit, when they started inventing this exciting American console I was fearing that they would give it a really cringey name like X Box.

This is what we call in the business, a Strawman Argument:
"So when a company that didn’t exist two years ago launches with a white paper, a blockchain-based metaverse and sells hundreds of millions of dollars of digital real estate in a two-day period, sure, I’m a little sceptical."
That's not really a thing that is happening. If you're trying to score "cynic cred" then maybe discuss the Facebooks and Ubisofts and Warner Brothers in the room. Nobody wants their metaverses either but it's so much easier to punch down at some fictional "obvious scam" project...

I liked that line at the end of the article about the perpetual motion. I own at least 3 games on Switch where I've managed to fall off the edge of the level and just plummet downwards forever without any kind of death state kicking in. It's always a bit of a rush when it happens; I watch the whole world disappear into the distance, and start wondering how big of a (negative) number my Y position can go until something goes haywire with the code. But I tend to give up after about 20 minutes and just manually reset. One day, though, for science!

Looks great, I'll definitely check this out.

Oh wow, that parallax. They say there's three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Jim Power way. i.e. the wrong way, but faster.

The only time this really happened to me was with Saints Row 3 on the Switch. As soon as the opening mission is finished, you're presented with about 20 mission options, only one of which is the actual original story. Apparently you can jack cars and collect weapons in this game, as per GTA, but now you start with a full garage and arsenal of crazy overpowered DLC stuff, so there's no point. There are shops where you can buy clothes, but everything in there is $100 and you start with like $50000 cash. There's nothing to achieve, millions of distractions to fiddle with, it's just a schizophrenic mess.

LET US REBIND THE CONTROLS

Just turn it off if you don't like it, sheesh.

Bah, I'm pretty sure it always looked that good on my 12 inch CRT...