N64-ROX

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game a bit of a tedious retread of typical Zelda places and faces, with its unique gameplay hook wasted on a decades-outdated 2D presentation?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".

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?