N64-ROX

@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.

Fine with me, I only want to play in the original resolution anyway.

The menus are fine. You can always just press start and browse through a 2D menu.
And the framerate is fine too. The game is polished to typical Nintendo quality; I think some people just need to find something to be offended by.
Now is the game a bit of a tedious retread of typical Zelda places and faces, with its unique gameplay hook wasted on a decades-outdated 2D presentation? That's a matter of opinion.

Can you get two and plug the HDMI output of one into the HDMI input of the other to get crisp 8K?
Or maybe it will make Minecraft stop looking so blocky.

I bloody well hope that I'll be able to redownload this on the Switch 2 when it comes out.

Played the original game on PC back in the day. I'd possibly say it was the game which finally made it clear to me that FPS games aren't for me. The graphics were droolworthy for the time (those trees!). The atmosphere was brilliant. The wide-open freedom was like nothing I'd ever seen. And it was the absolute talk of the town in all of the gaming magazines. But the enemies just wrecked me, over and over and over again. I came away from it with nothing but praise for the game itself; just humbled as to my own capabilities.

I really enjoyed this article. It's a great look into a series which I always had an eye on but never played.
However it would have been nice to see some screenshots from the actual games here, as opposed to all the funky remakes.

@Spider-Kev Why haven't you been playing with this dude this whole time! ;-p

Yeah you can either have unbreakable weapons or a million weapons, but not both. At least, not in a balanced way. I eventually grew to accept it in both BOTW and TOTK but I can't help but play the hoarding game. As soon as I got my hands on the master sword, everything else became my downtime fallback weapons; and that was only if I was unable to avoid combat entirely for those 5 or 10 minutes. Unlimited bombs in BOTW were my friends! Probably got more kills with them than anything else.

For me, I don't think I ever really felt that Banjo-Tooie and DK64 had too many collectibles. In fact one of my little peeves with Banjo-Tooie was that the musical notes were often just bunches of 5 or 10 as opposed to individual notes, so although the number was rising high, it was all just a trick; you weren't actually picking up anywhere near that many collectibles. No, the thing that frustrated me at the time was the mini-games. In DK64 you spend half the game inside that silly barrel dimension playing carnival sideshow games. In Banjo-Tooie it's more impressively integrated, but still, first person shooting, soccer, roller coaster target practice etc is not what I wanted from a 3D platform game. Running and jumping around and feeling part of a coherent world with consistent mechanics is what it's all about for me.
Oh, and the pads! Those were the other killer. BT and DK64 are just chock full of pads and switches with specific characters' faces on them, or their musical instruments, or their fruit gun or egg type. All sense of being in a real place just floats away, and you're left with naked skinner box game mechanics. Take character A to the picture of character A performing action B, and perform action B to get a reward.
Not that I hate these games though, I have a lot of nostalgia for them. But Banjo-Kazooie was so much more subtle and clever. How do I fit into that small hole, or get up that steep incline, or reach that high platform, or get through those whirling blades of death, or knock down those things in my way? It's not rocket science but it's so much more rewarding than finding a guitar pad, switching to Diddy and then pressing the "guitar" button.

@PineappleLake funny how that can happen! Sounds like sacrilege to me but I guess it all goes to show how personal and subjective people's gaming experiences are.

For me the important part of this story is the fact that there exists an organisation called The Otaku Research Institute. I can just picture the place now. Rows upon rows of scientists and academics, gathered around anime superfans. Some with microscopes and specimen jars, others just there to watch, learn, and theorise. But all with the unshaking faith that the next world-changing breakthrough is just around the corner.

I'll always remember Banjo-Tooie as a borrowed game: a friend bought it while I bought Majora's Mask, and we swapped for a couple of months to let each other play to completion. Perhaps because of that, it never stuck with me and always felt like a weird bizarro version of B-K, where you're always warping or shortcutting to get anywhere in the gigantic sprawling worlds, instead of learning them like the back of your hand.
And now we have it on Switch Online, another glorified rental situation. A proper Rare Replay would be so sweet, especially if it supported the N64 Online controller. But I'll definitely fire it up and give it an hour or two.

Grand Mountain Adventure looks like a snow version of Lonely Mountains: Downhill. I've learned not to trust Microids but I might have to give it a shot.
And +1 to About An Elf, that game is pure nonsense but the main character is very appealing in an uncanny valley kind of way.

Those screenshots are brutal. Kudos for sharing the true depths of the problem and not just the eShop-worthy moments.

Ha ha, I thought FIFA were going to make their own video game! With blackjack, and... you know.
Instead they are scrambling to latch on to any existing platform they can.

Caravan Sandwitch was a breakout hit for me. I picked up Zelda on release day but made a point of keeping it on ice until I'd finished that wonderful and ambitious indie open world exploration experience. It's a real treat and I'd recommend it to anyone.

@Steven_the_2nd The Switch Lite is half of a Switch. It can't even switch! Just spend the extra money to get something with OLED and an HDMI dock right in the box!
Its whole selling point is "save $100 by sacrificing half of the features"... and then people spend big and void their warranty just to backyard-hack some of those features back in!