N64-ROX

Where's the review for this, NintendoLife?

I hope this is that janky catastrophe that Let's Game It Out played, that was a masterpiece.
Edit: double-checked, and yes it is! Watch this video and you'll probably find yourself much more interested in this weird game than you ever thought you would be:

What is this, a Dragon Quest protagonist with a personality?!?

Am I going crazy? I was absolutely sure that this had been out on Switch for 2-3 years already. I thought it was already in my eShop wishlist but no... Must have been some kind of Mandela Effect situation...

Not to mention, I got pretty darn excited when I read 05/12 on screen. Bit of a let down when I realised it was the North American stream.

And yeah in a Direct filled with 20 farming games and 20 anime-style RPGs, for the main headline to be "that Zelda game we've been talking about for 4 years, is still over half a year away. But we've given it a name at least" is a bit disappointing.

Once again the jackasses who continuously cite insider knowledge that Wind Waker and Twilight Princess remasters are coming, are proven to be the clickbait fakers that they are.

Even though it didn't come out of nowhere, seeing that title screen and hearing that music just put a huge smile on my face.

@Crockin @nimnio yeah I do agree as well, I was just surprised and amused by such polar opposite opinion coming from my two favourite review sites. I'd definitely say that Ars's review sounded a lot more like someone enjoying themselves while writing, as opposed to not enjoying themselves while playing.

@nimnio yeah it is Ars's thing to not give scores. But I read Ars (and Sam Machkovech in particular) because I like their style and insight. They're usually an excellent source of journalism and opinion, aside from that whole Wata Games thing which is still an anomaly to me.
Anyway to each their own; there's a certain degree of jadedness there and a certain degree of fanboyism here, it comes with the territory.

I can't imagine that anyone would do any of this crazy stuff in order to use it to play the game. This is glitching as performance art. It's done for its own sake. Let's not forget that BOTW is still a wonderful game to play normally, with solid physics and rewarding balance even if you're not stasis launching yourself miles into the air or duplicating items just to show off.

I just read a review on Ars Technica which absolutely savages this game as a complete cash grab with nothing to recommend it over Splatoon 2 at all. It's quite shocking to compare these two takes on the same game.

If I was younger and poorer I'd feel differently, but in my opinion Splatoon 3 is a fair counterpoint to free-to-play live service games. You can play Fortnite and Rocket League and it's technically the same game for like 10 years. They're not asking you to buy Fortnite 2 for $80, and having to justify that with enormous new features. But on the other hand, Splatoon isn't microtransactioning its players to death. If Nintendo were to just let you play Splatoon 2 for 10 years without a sequel, at some point they're just providing a service out of the goodness of their heart.

(edit: I forgot about the Switch Online fee... That does change the maths a bit from the consumer's perspective. Probably not much from Nintendo's perspective though)

I think this whole chapters thing was a terrible idea. I played chapter 1 when it released, really got into it, then it ended. That was 3 years ago now and I don't remember anything other than broad strokes. When chapter 2 dropped I knew that it would be pointless to play. I'd have had to replay the whole chapter 1 again to get back into it; then wait a few years for chapter 3 at which point I'd need to replay #1 & #2 again. Who out there actually enjoys a delivery setup like this?
Edit: I guess even Toby Fox realises it if he is planning to release the rest all at once. Kudos to him.

I'd love to play these games on the Switch. But I had to vote for the Backwards Compatibility / Virtual Console option (which I assume would include the ability to purchase these Gamecube games digitally since we ain't gonna be jamming disks into this thing).
I never played the Wii U version of Wind Waker but the screenshots had me shocked that they had changed the cell shaded art style. Definitely the best way to play any classic games like these is to do so as accurately as possible to the original.

That would be just too much. This machine is getting close to having pretty much every great classic game ever made. What kind of hedonistic timeline is this!

@frogopus Yeah those three are excellent also. Lucasarts were the absolute kings of the genre. Grim Fandango has the control scheme that I don't like, but it's an all-time classic for sure and it was really unique at the time.

@Mortenb nah I still disagree: with today's decades of tricks and tools and power there are indeed lots of ways to do things like this (I once implemented twinkling stars in the sky by having two cameras with different draw distances, for example) but back in the 90s there were serious constraints if they wanted to get any kind of realistic performance at all. And the proof is in the pudding: this unintuitive solution is what Nintendo chose to do. Nintendo, who knew the limitations of their own machine better than anyone.

@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.