N64-ROX

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.

@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.