N64-ROX

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".

This was a prime opportunity for one of those shovelware "Call of honor battle gta theft royale simulator" publishers to enter a bunch of their churned-out Switch games and steal the show!

@TYRANACLES the console versions definitely have the trident, I used one to make a ridiculously simple gold farm on my Switch about 3 years ago. There are some weird differences between the console versions (Bedrock) and the PC version (Java) but essentially no missing content, just some of the rules work differently. For example some redstone contraptions and mob farms will need to be built differently. The main two things that Bedrock players miss out on, in my opinion, are:
1. No custom player skins using simple jpegs. Microsoft wants you to buy cosmetics from the store.
2. No way to build on the nether roof. That was never intended anyway (the only way to get up there at all is by exploiting glitches) but it would cause an outrage if they removed it from Java.
(3. Oh and mods of course.)
Both of those are disappointing not to have but content-wise both versions have parity. If anything, Microsoft would probably prefer to deprecate the Java version and only update Bedrock moving forward if they could get away with it.

I agree with the company here. Pandora's box has been open for a long time now and they are just being upfront about it. This same technique is used often in archaeology and in the fine art world, not just medically - we have these machines which can build a slice-by-slice 3D reconstruction of the inner secrets of any object. Of course it can be used to peek inside packaging, that's its entire function. And if it can, it will.

There's some untapped gold in them thar hills. I already have Shadow Man (it's exquisite) but perhaps it's time I bit the bullet on Turok 2 or Powerslave. I've been patiently waiting for a good deal on the Jeff Minter retrospective but 20% off isn't exactly setting off the alarm bells. I will probably also need someone to remind me why I shouldn't buy the Blade Runner remaster too. I cherish my GOG copy of the original version so they must have made some GTA-Trilogy-level blunders to ruin that one.

Note to self for future gamedev ideas: a game where the enemies air-combo themselves.

Looks really good, exactly the kind of ambitious indie game that we tend to miss out on on the Switch (thinking Sable, Pacific Drive, Dungeons of Hinterberg, etc). I'll be putting this on the wishlist for sure.

I'm impressed with how thorough the game list is in this; especially with that question about the most regretted purchase. You're going to get thousands of different responses to that one; all of them the most forgettable dregs of the eShop which nobody wants to acknowledge the existence of...

Played the original on DS with the stylus - now that was a game+hardware pairing made in heaven.

To be honest, the thing I keep waiting for is the day that I can walk into an EB Games and browse through giant trays of random Switch games at cheap prices - trade ins, hard-to-move niche titles, fun-enough AAs that I might have missed, etc. Of course they still do the big trays of games, but it seems to be just a psychological game now, with everything just at normal prices. I don't know if like nobody who buys physical these days is trading them in anymore, or what. But some of my fondest memories from back in the day was finding stuff like Suikoden 4 and Burnout 3 and Tomb Raider 2013 for $20 a pop, and I don't see that happening anymore.

Wait, doesn't the Switch support USB mice? Has anyone tried that?

@HeadPirate I definitely won't disagree that YouTube ads are heinous, and getting worse all the time. Once I discovered ad-blocking, I never looked back.

@HeadPirate that's not it at all, and you know it. Free games like this aren't like cat videos, they are like a gambling slot machine where the first pull every 10 minutes is free. They are predatory endeavours, purposefully designed to hide how much you're spending and to be frustrating and un-fun to play unless you pay up over and over again. And the main reason why gamers like us get so mad about them is that they exist in "our" sphere and bring the art form down by association. Imagine playing Zelda and getting stuck in a dungeon and then Navi pops up to say "give Miyamoto $5 and you we'll upgrade your Master Sword for the next 20 minutes!" It would sure make you feel different about Zelda, Nintendo, and gaming in general. And that's exactly what these F2P games do, just not actually Zelda. This practice is taking our art form and twisting it into the worst kind of infinite cash squeeze.
And finally, nobody in the history of the world has had to make a choice of "F2P game or no game at all". Everyone has real games they own, either old favourites or in their backlog; not to mention that there is a functionally infinite amount of games out there which are actually free: app stores, itch.io, giveaways; hell there are even good F2Ps which only charge for cosmetics and don't gate content or ruin the play experience.

What's the current word on this game? I was really looking forward to it (alongside everyone else) but then after it released it seemed to get universally panned. There have been lots of patches though. I'm still wondering if perhaps it's redeemed itself and is actually worth getting...

You're right, I am crying.

I wanna see a review of the recent eShop crapware title Gran Carismo. Yes it really exists!

I wish that I had save states for Metroid Prime Remastered, just because of that final boss who sits on the other side of the most painful, infinite-metroid-spawning platform room in the whole game. Getting wrecked by the boss over and over again, only to be faced with that room again every time, is the epitome of disheartening. It's one of only a few games in my life where I've essentially 100%ed it only to give up on the final boss. Supremely frustrating.

@hippydave it took like an hour, but I did it! Veni vedi veci!

@hippydave ha ha, VVVVVV without dying, I remember seeing that listed as an achievement and laughing, just laughing myself out of the room and switching the computer off.
I love that game and have 100%ed it 4 times (including once on mobile with touchscreen controls!) but doing so with anything less than one million deaths is a joke.

This was a fun article, and if you've done something as crazy as this then it's definitely worth writing about it. But the headline and thesis were not fulfilled in the slightest.
How does your personality affect your gaming habits?
The competition described here is not your gaming habits. It's a bonding exercise with your brothers. The output of the competition would be more telling - i.e. What games did you prefer as opposed to your brothers, and why. But we barely scratched the surface of this. Right at the end you briefly mention that you're a sucker for tactical strategy games and that you always try to 100% every game you play. But that didn't seem to be part of the competition, and in the end the classic most goated game won in Super Mario World.
I think this thesis question is really interesting and it's something that I've struggled with for a long time. Growing up in the 90s, I always felt that gaming was a wonderful shared hobby which helped me make friends and connect with people. But as an adult I have realised that gaming has become so broad that it can be a double-edged sword to even bring it up in conversation. Here is a bunch of personality types which which I've either lost contact due to them just being too different to me, or failed out of the gate to make a connection in the first place:

• People for whom gaming means almost exclusively basketball or football games.
• People who have an unhealthy obsession with shooters.
• MMORPG lifers
• Gamer Gate types
• F2P addicts who spend hand over fist on things such as War Thunder and other gatcha games.
• "Dad modes" who play only what they can share with their kids; kart racers and stuff like that.
• Alternatively, "too cool for school" types who will outright laugh at the idea of playing Minecraft, calling it a kid's game.
• "I played a game once" types who will reminisce and name-drop games from the 90s but are completely uninterested in newer games and actually aren't interested in replaying those older ones either.
• LED-headsetted Modern Gamerz who aspire to esports glory.
  Basically one's gaming tastes can be incredibly unique and divisive. I haven't even mentioned my own, here - that would take another thousand-word comment. I don't mean that I dislike the kinds of people mentioned above, just that bringing up the topic of gaming often achieves the opposite effect to breaking the ice: raising a big wall which makes it clear that you don't actually have shared interests and experiences in this area. It's like getting halfway through a conversation and then realising that someone is on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum to you.

Half of these trailers don't have a single moment of gameplay in them whatsoever! What purpose do videos like this serve?

OMG, what kind of no-life busybody is taking time out of their day to alert Nintendo's hounds to harmless stuff like this and ruining the day for other game-lovers?
It could do real damage to our beloved Mario.
What a sickening, Helen Lovejoy-esque statement. Yeah sure guy, an N64 romhack is going to bring down the empire.

Wow, it looks like you might get to actually drive in this game, as opposed to just sliding left and right in the original (which turned out to be a bog standard mobile auto-runner). I'll stay cautiously optimistic on this one for now.

The Switch library has not disappointed by any definition. But my final wishes would be:

• Wind Waker / Twilight Princess
• GTA 4
• Burnout 3

Something tells me that Kong the Kong might not have made it through that lawsuit.

Having this on the Switch NSO is worth it for the music alone.

Heed my advice people! Buying a physical release of something like this is a mistake. I've learned my lesson after the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection. Sure it feels good to have it on your shelf, but that's where it's going to stay. When you get the urge to throw some hadoukens, you want to be able to just press a button and get going. Are you really going to get up and remove the half-finished Zelda or Persona or Witcher cartridge from your machine? Alternately, are you really going to leave the Street Fighter cart sitting in there ready, for long stretches of time? Do yourself a favour and pick this one up digitally, it will make a world of difference.

But yeah Marvel vs Capcom was the star of the show for me. Zelda looks fantastic though.