N64-ROX

@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
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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.

@Athropos he won't own that driving school for much longer! Thanks a lot, you know that Nintendo reads these comments sections.

Man we are in the cold months here at the moment. Silksong may still exist one day. Random dev thinks Banjo-Kazooie is pretty cool. Daily articles on what we know about Switch 2 (absolutely nothing) and Mario Kart 9 (Nintendo have never even put those words together). Even the cadence of new shovelware releases on the e-shop has slowed down (although the non-shovelware releases have slowed down even more). Basically everyone is in stasis waiting for April. It's enough to drive a person nuts!

@the_beaver Back in my day, demos would cost more than the full game! They'd take 10 hours to install and 20 hours to uninstall! And if we stopped playing before completing the whole thing, they'd beat us! And we were grateful.

Also I am well and truly sick of Mario Kart so if that's their big launch title then it better be something gigantic like an open world. MK 8 keeps selling because it is perennially a good stopgap to keep the 6-year-olds entertained. It's just a good value game to have on your console. But in my opinion, putting around courses on rails like a theme park rollercoaster is not something which sells too many consoles on its own.

Well that was the biggest load of nothing that I've ever seen.
Essentially they promised to announce the successor to the Switch before April, and now they have said "OK here you go: it will be called the Switch 2".
No words, no specs, no games, no functionalities. The most unimportant thing about it is the way it looks, and that is literally the only thing they have revealed here. Even people saying "magnetic joy cons" are just joining their own dots. What an anticlimax.

Crazy, you guys actually went ahead and built something! If this is a real thing with real purchases, is there any chance it could get more regions? The Australian eShop, for example.
Also the idea of filtering out shovelware is kind of neat but I find that some kinds of shovelware bring joy just to see existing (and yes, occasionally purchase for a couple of bucks if I'm in a spendthrift mood). Keyword-bingo titles, low-effort ripoffs, cheap meme games etc are all hilarious in their own way. It's the dodgy mobile-style "kebab tycoons" and "big-eyed kid or animal looks directly into the camera" or 200x "this month's edition" version of the same games which I'd love to make disappear.

Nintendo is doing things the way I do! They promised that they'd have something to show before April, so you'd best believe that they'll be up all night on March 30th making the trailer.

Just picked up Cavern of Dreams yesterday for the sale, and wow it's a nice game. It controls as an odd combination of clunky and slick, and the tone is an odd combination of soothing and off-putting. More than anything though, it's been made with love, full of unnecessary extras and little rewards for your curiosity. I've played a few Banjo-Kazooie inspired games over the past couple of years, and this one more than any other is able to capture the air of mystery you got on your first runthrough of B-K. Hidden passages behind hidden passages behind hidden passages. All the polygons you see are real and can be stood on if you can find your way up there. It's a wonderful way to spend a couple of evenings.

That giant barbarian in the NA box art is definitely not Ryu!
On the other hand, that is some quintessential mid-90s artwork right there. If I'd have seen these side by side back in the day, I'd have definitely chosen the manly one.

I spent more hours finishing off Tears of the Kingdom this year than I did clocking Echoes of Wisdom. I'm Zelda'd out. From now on it will be mainly indies and Rocket League until the Switch 2 comes to shake things up again.

I own this game physical on PS2, PS3, and Switch; buying from overseas when necessary. Such an amazing game. It's main problem though is its super slow opening - what feels like 2-3 hours of storytime and heavily-restricted tutorial makes it a hard one to dust off for a replay...

Yeah, a weird comparison since Okami is a PS2 game, the ports came years later. The PS2 cover plays up the ink gimmick by being mostly white and black, with the same Amaterasu illustration as the NA/EU Wii one here. Definitely the most memorable and iconic version for me.

If this nightmare fuel isn't AI generated then somewhere out there is a team of 3D animators who spent months building, rigging, and animating these monstrosities, all the while thinking to themselves "these cute kitties are going to be a smash hit!"

@Kestrel I betcha they meant "modus operandi". I get those two mixed up all the time too whenever I'm trying to sound smart ;-p

Wait, you haven't reviewed Caravan Sandwitch?
That's a travesty. And now nobody's going to vote for it. Definitely my GOTY out of the new releases on Switch this year.

The fact that so much of the collection appears to be custom-made means that, in theory, a similar Waluigi collection could be possible...

You know, youngsters, back in the 90s our biggest problem was excessive monkey swapping.

Seems pretty obvious to me. They don't want to impact xmas Switch sales by announcing the Switch 2. And there's not many more exciting Switch 1 titles left to come. So they just release some of the stuff they have in the vault.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the eShop slop would be 1000% more tolerable if the eShop itself wasn't so horrible performance-wise.
OK so you need to scroll through 30 crap games to see last week's new releases. But should it really take like 5 minutes to scroll through 30 games?? These things are just jpegs with a price on them - a web browser could scroll through hundreds of them in a split second. Why does it feel like I'm torturing my Switch whenever I want to browse through their shop?

Nothing wrong with early 2000s polyphonic ringtones! Better than Crazy Frog at least!
I'd be more impressed if they were Floppotron renditions though.

@Matroska don't forget it the next time you're at the ATM machine.

This is really amazing stuff, especially since he's been bringing us along for the ride with videos every step of the way. I think the first one was just the outside of the castle, with no interactive objects aside from Mario himself and running at about 10fps. With every new video my jaw hits the floor!

It's all fun and games but there are some base-level features that the Switch 2 will need to have in order to make any significant sales at all in today's market:

• LEDs
• slide-out cup holder
• soldering-iron-con
• bubble dome over the screen
• asbestos
• you know those little anime models on a string that people would plug into their headphone jack back when phones had headphone jacks? They should be on every Switch 2.

The problem is that, while the Switch has a touch screen, it doesn't have a good touch screen. In fact from my experiences typing on its on-screen keyboard I'd say it's the worst I've ever seen aside from airline in-flight entertainment systems and old Chinese knock-off iPads. Plus the stylus touch technology itself is just way way way more accurate than even the best capacitive touch screens.

I agree that MP 2&3 would be too big to shadow drop, especially in close proximity to MP 4. It would be a complete waste from a commercial perspective, and also (in my opinion) a bit of overkill and "Metriod Fatigue" from players' perspective. To be honest I feel like they have already gone a bit too far with Zelda: TOTK was a monster game, one which takes months to complete and then years to get over. Playing Echoes of Wisdom so soon afterwards definitely brought on some Zelda fatigue for me: if they were to finally release Wind Waker & Twilight Princess now, I'd definitely buy them but there's no way I'd want to play them for quite a while.

@DoctorFunfrock I just went back and read the review of Dreadrock 1. It said that the game initially didn't support the pro controller? How is that even possible? Isn't it just exactly the same as a pair of joycons but in a different physical form factor?

I really enjoyed the first game. It's an excellent blend of simplicity and cleverness. Each room is a bite-sized puzzle that you can exercise your brain with when you don't have time or inclination for a longer, heavier game. And yet it does have enough of a story to it to keep you wanting to pop back and see it through. The self-contained screens let you focus on the challenge at hand, while the ability to backtrack makes it truly feel like an actual place that you're exploring, as opposed to just a series of stages. I'll definitely be looking to pick up this sequel.

It feels like Grant Kirkhope has been freelancing for decades at this point. What an exciting place for him to end up. I hope he makes some good bank and that this studio produces some great games.

@Pipulitoch ha ha, to be honest it wouldn't surprise me if that were actually the case!

In Europe, of course, you probably just get a QR code for a PDF download.

@naxuu I have to say, I feel the opposite.
For me it was always the visuals which made this game so hypnotizing in the 90s (and so nostalgic today) and the controls which made it utterly unenjoyable. I wish that they had changed the controls but left the cheesy CGI visuals. Or even better: real-time-3D-ified them to match what was pre-rendered in the 90s. This just looks like a completely different game.

We'll see how this ends up selling. I always felt that the first couple of Tomb Raider games had this iconic timeless PS1 charm, in the same way as Metal Gear Solid and Tony Hawk. But while those other two just got better and better on the PS2, Tomb Raider just seemed to get lamer and lamer. But I'm not sure if that's just my own preferences talking or the general consensus.

I've always said that the 64DD was a silly idea and a waste of time from day 1. But dear god those photos are droolworthy.