N64-ROX

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!

I definitely understand the appeal of hall effect joysticks, but the idea of modding a Switch Lite to put an OLED screen on it is hilarious. Like literally just buy a real Switch!

No way should Samus look so angular, not even on the N64. She looks like a Blast Corps vehicle as opposed to the main character of a AAA (for the time) franchise game.

@anoyonmus thanks for the link to the other article and comments from @HeadPirate. But that doesn't make things any clearer in my eyes. A patent on "mechanism for storing the details of a monster in a database" is not akin to Pocketpair copying MS Access, it's akin to Nintendo patenting the concept of saving your game. It's absurd and symptomatic of a very broken system.

Don't have time to check if someone has already said this here yet, but it should be noted that a patent suit is not a copyright suit. This isn't "that monster of yours sure looks a lot like Charizard," this would be more like "Nintendo has a patent on the concept of capturing monsters in a video game", which is outrageous. However we haven't been told what the specific patent here is yet, and bizarrely it seems that Pocketpair haven't either...

@Savage_Joe perhaps the sticks were actually damaged, like Mario Party on N64 damaged?
Joy Con sticks drift right out of the box brand new, I've never seen anything else like them in my life.

That is one horrible art style. Everyone looks like they're made of plastic. Like the worst of the pre-rendered CGI in old PS1 games.

I'm not sure where to put this comment, so I'll put it here: what happened to the NL summer survey? We got articles leading up to the cutoff deadline, articles saying that it was closed and the results were being tallied... But it's been months now and I havent seen any article saying here are the results. Did I just miss it? We didn't fill that thing out just for your internal database you know!

@Polvasti thanks for clarifying, and I fully agree. So it's bad news then, but still not quite the same as the Adult Swim Games situation, where the death of the publisher directly meant the death of development studios underneath them.
Man what a miserable time it must be to work in this industry.

Can anyone clarify this a bit more? If Annapurna is just a publisher then who are these people who are resigning, exactly? Or were they like a publisher who actually employed game developers?
A real shame as I too have come to see Annapurna as a seal of indie quality.

Not me of course, I'm a lifelong gaming tragic. But I know plenty of game-curious parents who will only ever buy physical for their kids, and are more than willing to throw the whole thing into the trash if they feel like they're being ripped off.

I have bought two "code in box" releases in my life, and both times it was a case of idly browsing the shelves of my local shop and not paying close enough attention to the bottom of the box.
I honestly believe that that's the entire business case for these releases: trickery. Not a single person in the world wants a code in a box. If you're the kind of person who is afraid of the eShop and for whom a physical store is your only option, this is no "happy medium". It's an incredibly short sighted strategy which is only going to destroy trust and make consumers less willing to make any future purchases.

Sandbox environments? Do they mean that white void with 10 square metres of grass which we see in the trailer?

My teenage party gaming was defined by hot seat Marvel vs Street Fighter and SF Alpha 3 on the PS1 (and Wayne Gretzky on the N64). So many great memories of these; I had no clue about depth and air cancels or whatever, but screen-filling energy beams with Ryu + Cyclops was what it was all about!

This is what I'd fantasise about:
Forza Horizon 5
Dirt Rally / EA Rally
Shadows of Doubt
Indiana Jones
GTA 4 (although this should be on the existing Switch, by all rights)
In all truth though, they're never going to be able to shock and awe us like they did with the original Switch reveal. The world had never seen anything like it, it was better than our wildest dreams. This time it's all we can do to try to temper our expectations and keep them semi-realistic.
Even if they delivered everything on these lists, a great many people would say "that's nice, but the Steam Deck already exists."

This was a great read!

@RygelXVIII Half Life 3 confirmed!

That hammer analogy is incredibly clumsy. You can tell that she's an actor as opposed to a writer!
I kid, I kid. But yeah AI is not a hammer being misused to smash someone's skin, it is like a factory being used for the exact purpose that it was built for: to remove humans (and their salaries) from the profit equation.

@TheStormGL well I guess in the end I can only speak for myself. To me, a real Mario game in a post SM64 world needs to be free roaming 3D, otherwise it's a spin off. I read the glowing reviews of 3D World back then in the same light as the Mario Wonder ones from last year. Fun for the faithful but a real Mario game is a generation defining experience. I happily bought 3D World when it was re-released on the Switch - a console which had already proved its worth a thousand times over by that point - but quickly found it painfully restrictive after the utter joy and generosity that was Oddysey. 3D World was top Nintendo quality but inarguably not Nintendo's "next greatest thing" from its A-team. It was a clear step down from what had come before; a clear stopgap to satisfy fans while the real project was still a long way away from completion. Similar to Echoes of Wisdom really. It looks cool and I can't wait for it, but regardless of what Nintendo says, anyone who claims that it is "the next mainline Zelda" after TOTK is willfully kidding themselves. It's an expansion to a remaster of a game boy game. Bring games like these on, I'm all for them! But they are the appetiser to the main course, and I don't visit a restaurant for the appetiser alone.

@AstroTheGamosian in my opinion the Wii U had one huge problem which far surpassed all others: Nintendo never made a proper Zelda or Mario game for it. It boggles the mind, really. No other company has the mindshare, the amount of die hard fans. They can release an underpowered gimmick based console with no initial third party support and I will still buy it for just those those two games alone. But they never did! I will never understand how they ever presented the Wii U as a real console without truly taking it seriously in that way.

@GrailUK some laws are bad and should be ignored.

@tseliot I wouldn't disagree, and it sounds like you have been closer to the edge than I have, that's for sure. But I didn't mean apocalypse like extreme danger and challenge, I meant like we are all going to die in a short X amount of time, nothing is going to change that and there is no such thing as long term consequences anymore. For sure though even in that scenario there would be a lot of grief and stress.

would you fall in love during the apocalypse?
I suspect the apocalypse would end up being a bit like that Netflix cartoon Carol & the End of the World. Everyone just drops trou and goes nuts.

@cwong15 which is a ridiculous cop-out of course. This is 2024, the industry is filled with people who are experts at making 3D look like beautiful 2D animation. Guilty Gear is gobsmacking. That Shin-Chan game does a wonderful job on a character whose proportions don't make sense from a 3D perspective. And just generally, new cell shaded anime games are released every month, each with tighter visual execution than the last. Even indie developers have cracked the Tintin style of cell shading with Sable and Rollerdrome. And let's not forget that most of Microids' catalogue is made up of truly C-tier games. The true version of their statement is "we don't know how to make Tintin 2D", or more accurately, "we're too cheap to make the effort to figure out how to make Tintin 2D".