N64-ROX

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.

I'm VERY surprised and disappointed that anyone in the cast likes Waluigi. Sure the internet likes Waluigi, but that's essentially because he's the Milhouse of the gang.

In fairness it's probably a very clever indie roguelike project.
But with what looks like the same amount of driving as The Oregon Trail itself had, I feel ripped off just for giving it the time of day.

@EarthboundBenjy I remember back in the N64 days, my friend telling me about how he had gone camping with his extended family and been deeply bored until he borrowed someone's Game Boy and played Pokemon Red for like a week straight.
We were in our late teens and only liked "cool" stuff; this guy in particular was a real badass. Pokemon was kids' stuff in tone, and its black & white sprites were ridiculously outdated technically compared to the 3D games we'd play at home. But to have a game of that depth and caliber in your hands, while stuck in a campsite far away from home, was actually the height of technology, comfort and convenience all the way until the early 2000s when the GBA launched. Badass, teenage-cynical Jim embraced the dated, childish world of the original GB Pokemon and to me that is as pure an illustration of context as there ever was. It would be very hard for anyone in the future to really get into original GB games if they never lived it, unless they are a very special kind of curious.

That Japanese art screams "PS3" to me, for some reason. Perhaps because that was the era when region locking died and I just got to see Japanese box art for the first time. Or perhaps I'm just still scarred from Noby Noby Boy.

I find it hard to believe that this is a spin-off of Gal Gun, isn't that a straight-up hentai game?

Yeah I'll definitely agree that the whole conversation around Hall Effect sticks has completely missed the point of the problem with the joycons. No other controllers than Joycons have ever malfunctioned the way Joycons do. If an analogue stick is worn out through heavy use, it gets loose and wobbly, with a deadzone in the middle and hard to push to 100% on the edges. The joycon sticks just do crazy stuff straight out of the box. They're literally just a faulty product. And the sticks on the pro controller don't have any problems. We don't need the Switch 2 sticks to be hall effect, we just need them to be as good as every other stick since the PS1 (note, not the N64 stick since that was a very special kind of stick).

I have to admit, I'm pretty happy with this outcome. I whinge alot about the subscription, but I also whinge alot about unnecessary changes in remasters. All I wanted to do was play the original Wind Waker on Switch, with the proper graphical style, and now I'll have that on the Switch 2. And I still have emulators if I'm worried about my license to play not lasting forever.

These are the ramblings of a mad person. Or at least, someone who isn't afraid to write an entire article of vacuous nonsense.
The "best feature" is that the existing rumble functionality - which the author admits that they don't care about and even switch off - is going to be a bit stronger? The best feature? Were all the good article topics taken? Hang your head in shame.

@OtterXPT in my opinion, the paper maché look comes mostly from the fact that the emulator is using a high resolution to render the low-poly models, not so much LED vs CRT. The option to render in original resolution would be a really great way to provide a true-to-the-original experience. It would remove all of the nagging little stuff like glitchy edge transparencies on textures which were never designed to be stretched out that far, and make the 2D GUI / menu elements actually feel like they belong alongside the 3D stuff behind it.

For all of my jadedness, I am REALLY happy that we're finally getting the ability to remap the buttons on the N64 app.
I've said it over and over again that Nintendo's default unchangeable button scheme makes most N64 games completely unplayable without the N64 pad (i.e. unplayable in handheld). Seeing them announce remappable buttons in the Switch 2 Gamecube reveal (and extrapolating that to the N64) was the one pure undiluted moment of joy for me in the Direct.

Hot:
New capabilities sound pretty good. 4K 60fps or 1080p 120fps!
Not:
The Switch 1 can do 1080p 60fps but barely any games actually achieve that. Let's find out about the actual hardware specs and see what the actual games end up looking like.
Hot:
Switch 1 games getting updated to take advantage of the new hardware.
Not:
Actually they will be paid "upgrades", not updates. And BOTW / TOTK take like 300 hours each to finish; as great as they are I'm not going to be investing into them again for a long while yet.
Hot:
Fancy chat and video sharing functionalities!
Not:
#foreveralone
Hot:
Open world Mario Kart!
Not:
Mario Kart alone is not worth $500
Hot:
Gamecube games! Ridge Racer 1!
Not:
These could have been released on the Switch 1.
Hot:
A big bunch of AAA PC games which would never have run well on the Switch 1.
Not:
We already have 30-odd different handheld PC options which can play these.

What a strange one. Gameplay wise it looks fascinating. But visually it's empty and grey and drab and utterly devoid of character. And the silence was deafening in the way that they never used the word "wheelchair" in the entire trailer. It reminds me of the the time that I got to try an evening of wheelchair basketball as a teenager, and had a great time with it. Years later I was telling someone about it and she was like, that's kind of not cool, disability appropriation or whatever. So nowadays just the word "wheelchair" has essentially become a political statement. And here's Nintendo, bold enough to build a game around it but too scared to describe what it is.

Man it's hard to say with this one. Perhaps if there was a Mario or Wave Race game, or if the DK game was available at launch. I can afford to buy one at launch but what am I really getting it for? USD $500 to play Mario Kart just makes no sense, especially since I'm not interested in any of the social or multiplayer features. Tony Hawk 3+4, Wind Waker, and Ridge Racer 1 would be trying to carry this on their own for me. The main thing that I was realistically looking forward to was my existing games getting updated to run better and look better, but now it seems like I'll be having to pay additional upgrade fees for each one individually.

Not sure that I fully understand this one. Is it just another Windows handheld with special Xbox branding? Or can it do something which the other Windows handhelds can't?

@Chlocean ah that makes sense. I'm pretty similar in that sense. Digital is great for easy pick up and play convenience, and I have heaps of them, but any games which are important to me I try to get physical.

@Chlocean how so? The potential for theft is one of the drawbacks of physical over digital. If someone steals your Switch then you can just redownload all of your digital games when you get a new one. But any physical game card which was in there is gone forever.

@Anti-Matter that's gold that you were able to get them to sing in Indonesian!

Aw man I glossed over the bit in the Direct where it said that you can only lend games to people who are registered as being in your "family". So I won't be able to lend games to my friends, that's a bit of a downer.
But yeah I can see that Nintendo needed to come up with something to address the fact that a huge proportion of Switch owners will soon own two Switches.

Another comment on the voices: with a few years of Tiktok under our collective belts, this actually now sounds completely normal.

Do they have those text-to-speech voices because there is some kind of emergent dialogue system? Or is it just a stylistic choice?

Nintendo cutting out the middle man of websites such as this one!
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer to get my daily news from (relatively) impartial journalists while joining the crowd on YouTube for the big events like Directs.

It's simply preposterous that Nintendo can patent graphical tricks and gameplay mechanics, end of story.

Can I vote for the the one which I have fond memories of? Browsing ROM sites in the early 00's and seeing just the plain text "Nobunaga's Ambition" with zero context, amongst a sea of links to recognisable classic game titles. What a kooky name! Japanese, no doubt. What in the world could it be about? A salaryman trying to make it in company life? An entrepreneur or stock market maven, building up fat bank? A teenage boy trying to woo the girls around town? This could be the hidden gold I've been waiting for, I've got to try it out!
And then yeah, the actual game.