N64-ROX

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 Pokemon was kids' stuff in tone, and its black & white sprites were ridiculously outdated technically compared to the 3D games we'd play at home.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.

I've fiddled around with shaders and ray tracing on the PC; they can make Minecraft look gorgeous, but there's one big problem which keeps making me switch them off.
You'll note that it says the new lighting doesn't impact the gameplay or the mechanics. What this means is: the gameplay and mechanics no longer match what you're seeing on screen. If I'm going through caves, placing torches to prevent mobs from spawning, or heck even just mob-proofing my base, the light and shadow that I see on screen becomes completely misleading. You pretty much have to toggle it back off to get any important work done.
If Mojang are able to come up with some way to avoid that problem - e.g. if we can somehow see both the "real" lighting and "fake" lighting at the same time, that would be a game changer. I always assumed that was the reason why they never did this before officially. Otherwise this is just them catching up to 10-year-old mods.
(To be honest though just being able to get shader-style visuals while staying on the latest release and not having to wait for mods to get updated will be pretty sweet as it is...)

Let's be real, this is 2025. If it doesn't have tomatosensory function, I'm not buying it.

I prefer the original which is easily available on Steam, but it's wonderful to see games like this given the opportunity to find a new audience.
As everyone has said, it's a dark game where you're pretty much playing through pure misery so you've got to be in the right mindset for it. But there's always a new generation of edgelords!

@John_Deacon You'll have to remember to take with a grain of salt what the other commenters have said in their replies to you here.
Nothing at all is currently known about how the Switch 2 will work, especially regarding backwards compatibility.
My point of reference is always the N64 expansion pak. It doubled the amount of RAM on the machine. And it had absolutely zero effect on any of the previously-released games for the system. No frame rate increase, no resolution bump, no reducing of fog, nothing. This is because the games were coded to make use of the original machine's resources, so that's all they were ever able to do.
Of course, these days games can get patched, but that's the question that you were asking in the first place. The only safe assumption right now is that we'll have to hope that the developers/publishers release patches to make their Switch 1 games perform any better on the Switch 2.
It is possible that Nintendo have something up their sleeve that will magically do it automatically for all/most games. But that's something that we'll have to wait to find out.

Man, no love for Hentai Waifus 1 through 4?
Where all the true OGs at?

So cool that she was able to release this. Games get cancelled all the time but usually it means that everyone's hard work just gets buried.

This article and the "butchered" THPS4 article are both on point. THPS4 is objectively being butchered as they're cutting out the entire heart of the game. THPS3 may subjectively not recapture the early 00s zeitgeist in the same way the original did, depending on your needs and taste. I personally agree with both. I definitely missed the wobbly low poly presentation of the real THPS 1&2 (especially since the graphics on the Switch version were muddy and ugly) even though the gameplay was sublime. Likewise it will be hard to avoid 3+4 getting the same "updated for the kidz" feel, especially since it's now clear that they're not going to be putting any actual effort into it, just switching out the 1+2 levels with the 3+4 levels.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that this means they're just taking the THPS 1+2 game and switching the levels out for the 3+4 levels.
All you stans parroting the line that "they're streamlining the experience" - yes, streamlining the development experience by not bothering to implement the most important gameplay feature of THPS4. In no way is this of benefit to the actual players, it's pure negative and pure laziness.
Let's not forget that Career Mode in Tony Hawk's is not "a mode", its "the game". They have decided not to implement the game for THPS4. But hey we can tootle around the levels taking in the scenery if we want.

@Cheez I was just about to say the same thing. Midway, now there's a dead publisher from the era with a tantalising back catalogue. SF Rush will forever be my white whale, and yeah I enjoyed Rekt for a few weeks there but it's ultimately just a quick and dirty indie version of a bonus feature of the Rush games. Bring back the true king of arcade gameplay, I say.

To address a whole bunch of the comments above:

• Yes it is a slow Nintendo news day. Every day since the Switch 2 teaser has been just treading water; the Nintendo fan world is in absolute stasis just waiting for the clock to tick over until we can find out some actual facts about the specs and the launch titles.
• Obviously plenty of people would buy these games; plenty of people bought the Virtual Console games. The point from Nintendo's perspective is not that selling individual retro titles doesn't work (its effectively free money) it's that locking people into paying forever is much more profitable. The article says this very well.
• Anyone saying that we're better off with NSO than the days of buying the game again with every machine is using false math. To begin with, most of us are only really interested in a couple of old favourites here. If I could buy 15 N64 games at $5 each that would cost less than 1 year of NSO and I could keep them for the life of the Switch. And let's not forget that the Switch 2 is backwards compatible, so that's like 16 years worth of uptime even if the Switch 3 isn't backwards compatible.

I'm not sure if people just forget that these retro games aren't what we're paying for: we're paying for access to online multiplayer and cloud saves. The retro games are just the carrot that they dangle over it. If I just want to be able to play Ocarina and Majora and Banjo on the same handheld that I play BOTW on, I gotta pay like $70 or $80 per year. Most of the rest of NSO is stuff I don't need and/or idle museum curiosities.

I'm under no illusion that a digital purchase will last forever (my steam version of 17-year-old GTA4 seems to update every month, likely removing music tracks whose license has expired) but the value of buying what I want over being forced to pay eternally for a smorgasbord of stuff I don't want is just obvious.

@swoose honestly I don't think anyone from Nintendo does look at them. I picked up Funny Truck back when $1 Switch games were still a novelty, booted it up and was immediately stuck on the opening welcome screen. Not a single button did anything. Eventually I realised that it was such a lazy mobile port that they hadn't bothered to add support for controllers! I had to get up and take the Switch out of the dock and tap the "start game" button on the screen in order to get anywhere.
That was the moment when I realised that there must be literally zero quality control by Nintendo over what gets published. Sure they have bureaucracy - I've read indie devs complaining about their games somehow getting denied or delayed approval - but as long as you have your paperwork in order I'm pretty sure you can publish absolutely whatever you want.

Amazing art style but I'm just not interested in 2D platformers.

In my opinion there are two potential problems with an "iterative" Mario Kart 9.
The first one only applies if MK9 is to serve as the marquee first party launch title for the Switch 2. Mario Kart just doesn't have enough meat on its bones. When you get down to it, it's a pretty hollow rollercoaster game whose quick thrills aren't enough to prop up a new platform all on its own. That's unless they do something new and exciting with it... But if they release it alongside a new hero single-player game like Mario or Zelda then "just more Mario Kart" will probably be fine.
The other reason why "just more Mario Kart" might not be fine is the fact that MK8 had so many courses and has stuck around for so long that surely anyone who is big on Mario Kart has kind of satisfied their cravings already, if they're not going to get any new kinds of gameplay. How exciting could it be to get what would essentially just be 20-odd new MK8 tracks to add to the 100-odd we already have? But as my first point shows, I'm not exactly the target audience for Mario Kart so what would I know...

HO
LEE
COW

The Samurai Pizza Cats

Even if the game gets 0/10 review scores I'm under moral obligation to buy it. And if it's only physical in select regions then I guess I'm paying extra to import it.

Millions of people constantly buying the physical version of Minecraft is just a hilarious joke. I can guarantee that not a single line of code stored on that cartridge is getting executed, other than the ones used to validate the license and kick off the download for the update which is bigger than the cart itself.

Aw man, I really loved the gold points. Never ever used them for a discount; it worked best to save them up until I had l a few dollars' worth and grab an "impulse buy" for completely free. Be it to celebrate the luck of finding a heavily-discounted quality game, or give in to curiosity on an eSlop asset flip that ticks all my lizard-brain boxes, there's nothing quite so satisfying as getting a new game for free.

#1: Star Fox is not a "space outlaw"! He's one of the good guys!
#2: I never truly forgave Nintendo for the insane decision to rename it to Lylat Wars. The SNES game was called Star Fox. Everyone knew it was Star Fox. What were they thinking!? It felt like when your grandparents sent you a "Hero Turtles" T-Shirt; like what is this!?

Is Garo's Mask a new one for the 3DS? I only ever play the N64 version but it's been quite a while since I even did that.

I cannot believe that we live in a world where this piece of filth Kotick is getting interviewed on podcasts. And is getting defended by people in a Nintendo Life comments section! The whole world has gone down the toilet.

Funny Truck is hands down the worst game I've ever wasted my money on. But they can pry Gran Carismo out of my cold dead hands!

Seeing some odd criticisms of the Switch port here; I played the demo and the graphics looked crisp and the performance seemed rock solid. I'm not a boomer shooter guy but I was hopping and sliding about on medium difficulty feeling like master of the domain, at no point feeling as though I was playing some inferior version of something better. If these games are your thing and the Switch is your thing then you won't go wrong with this one.

I'd still take that trade off, to be part of the creation of something so special. There are many other games that he can play just to enjoy himself. Not arguing that it wasn't a big sacrifice though.

Anyone looking to preorder the physical copy should double and triple check beforehand whether it ends up being a code in a box.

@KingMike Wayne's World, ha ha, that would have been a FMV extravaganza. Probably would have ended up being a terrible flop at the time, eventually blossoming into a retrospective masterpiece for both retro players and collectors/speculators alike.

This is cool, I honestly always thought the SNES Playstation was a bit of a white elephant since there weren't ever any games made for it. But yeah, just because they weren't released doesn't mean that nothing was made at all. Would be exceedingly interesting if stuff like this ever made it out of the vault and into the public sphere.

Ha ha, not even close. That's the most weaksauce Japanese cover I've ever seen in my life.

Can't blame them for trying, I guess. But the thing that some people on ebay don't realise is: when you read about rare videogames getting sold for like a million dollars, that's usually some dude selling it to himself, or to his business partner, in order to drum up speculation on rare games in general. I suspect that 100k for a hollow shell will be a bit rich for any real person no matter how interesting a talking point it will make.