N64-ROX

For me it was a real reminder of just how many first-party games Nintendo is working on at any given time. And the news the other month was that they want to buy more studios!
All these new games and remasters popping up, and you can absolutely bet that they are working on a few huge ones for the Switch 2.
I had very low expectations for this direct, and I was incredibly impressed.

This reminds me of how we got that cliff's-notes, chibi mobile version of Final Fantasy 15 instead of the real thing. I guess there's probably some kind of market for this, and the real game is probably a bit too much to ever truly expect on the Switch. But it still feels like a lame consolation prize to me. Or a buyable advertisement for a real game.
On the other hand, I felt like that about all handheld gaming up until around the DS era, and millions of people loved their Game Boys. So it's probably just me...

"So many games" = 6 games; one of them is just a DLC, and one of them has already been covered extensively. And then we have Donkey Kong Country wannabe #35, Stardew Valley wannabe #598, and a couple other genericos. The future!

I have to say, I'm very impressed by this trailer given how much this game relies on FMV of real people. Did the original studio keep all of their original video masters from before they were crunched down to 3DO quality! If so then kudos not only to Nightdive but also to the original Studio 3DO.

If you want to see what this actually looked like on the 3DO, alongside a humorous write-up, I highly recommend Mecha-Neko's playthrough of this on Super Adventures in Gaming:
https://superadventuresingaming.blogspot.com/2011/04/killing-time-3do.html

I can play Rocket League all day and the non-free stuff is just sitting there in lists and menus which I don't even have to look at. It's great! The closest I ever come to purchasing anything is when I see someone in-game rocking some especially cool cosmetic. That's the way you get people to feel comfortable in this space you've created, and open to thoughts of investing their cash into it. Pop up ads would nope me out of there very very quickly.

Switch 2 in general? Of course!
Nintendo's games in particular? No. They would never do it anyway, and if I had a magic wand I wouldn't want them to change a thing about their own games.
A lot has been said about performance on the Switch, but you have to admit that the one company which gets that right every time is Nintendo. The article calls out TOTK but that is really reaching. It may not be 60fps but it's an utterly flawless experience technically.
Nintendo's attitude is that if you can't achieve a good balance of unimpeachable performance and best-possible visuals on a single locked-down hardware target, you're not trying hard enough. That's an approach that I can only applaud, and wish that competitors took as much pride in. If you're giving us two options, you're admitting that both of them are flawed.

Very good question. The reason this is so hard to answer these days is that game consumption habits have changed. Minecraft, Fortnite, and GTA5 should be retro. In the 90s and early 2000s, if you were playing anything that wasn't released on the most recent hardware it was laughably out of date with the zeitgeist and you were clearly either a retro enthusiast or too poor and frantically saving up to move up in the world. I remember that odd feeling in the PS2 generation whenever I would indulge myself by re-playing FF8 or Banjo Kazooie; like it was some kind of kink to be able to still enjoy these minuscule polygon counts. And 2D pixel graphics? I wouldn't sink that low.
Now of course the landscape has completely changed. We have:

• A flattening curve of improvements gen-on-gen, e.g. with PS5 games being essentially PS4 games with shinier reflections. PS3 games still look pretty swish.
• The PC (which has no delineation between generations) getting almost every console game, and the Steam model of having a big ol' flat game library sitting there waiting for you. My backlog includes Bastion, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of Doubt; they are all vying for my attention and must each make their own claim on my free time.
• Indies have changed the definition of what a great game can be. AAA graphics (which of course are linked to hardware) are no longer necessary for a game to be fresh, fun, or even best-in-class.
• Likewise the conversation about "games as art" is no longer even really a conversation. You used to have to do some real mental leaps to claim that Pac-man was art, or even worth playing outside of a smoky arcade. But The Stanley Parable? Okami? Braid? Ocarina of Time? These should be on high school curriculums! And if people are still playing OOT then suddenly Wind Waker and Twilight Princess don't seem quite so old.
• And of course we have "forever games" such as Minecraft, live service games, etc. These are able to thrive now due to the reasons above: changes in perception, 10 year old games still looking great, etc. But also because AAA game development has become so expensive (and games haven't really increased in price) that publishers want or need their games to have a long period of time in the revenue-making limelight. People still play Fortnite because Epic never released a Fortnite 2. Ditto with Minecraft.

Anyway there are a hundred other reasons why old games mean something very different now to back when it meant "pretty lame" to most people. Personally I would only use "retro" to refer to an aesthetic now, e.g. anything which looks like a PS2 game or earlier (which of course actual 20-year-old games tend to do).

I remember when I had a Sony Ericsson feature phone that could play Java games. Could browse the web too.
The experience for both was utterly miserable, mind you. And the games themselves were straight-up lame. Getting a JRPG on that thing was just a crazy dream. I should have known that in Japan people were living large with stuff like this!

There's no way I was ever going to buy a $100+ Lego set anyway, but I am incredibly impressed that they made it work for both OOT and BOTW/TOTK. What a lovely set.

If you're talking about QOL features and Secret of Mana, what I hope to see is a game which avoids leading you down 10 floors into a dungeon only to hit you with a boss which mops the floor with you unless you spend 3 hours grinding for levels in the screens between the save point and the boss room. Man that game is one of the most beautiful ever (and the music!) and holds fond childhood memories but every time I try to play it I hit the same bloody walls and tend to give up...
I'm currently playing Sea of Stars and it's definitely "how your nostalgia goggles idealise Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger to have been".

I also bounced off of Hollow Knight even though I wanted like anything to get into it. For me I think it was mainly the combat, and the harsh punishment for death. My first heartbreak came when I amassed a huge amount of currency over a solid few hours, died and it was all gone. Then was the section where every platform seemed to be occupied by some big enemy who can pretty much one-shot kill you. Then it was a boss which I plowed away at for hours and hours, unable to make any progress on whatsoever. There's just something about the combat in that game which I just don't get. Perhaps it was my flaky joy-cons? Anyway, that's where I left it; I realised that it was causing me nothing but misery, and the dark bleak miserable setting wasn't helping.
In the years since, I've religiously embraced the Pro Controller and also gotten more experience with metroidvanias in general. Perhaps it's time for me to give it that second chance...

@KeeperBvK yes, you're right, it's Aero Gauge. Seems like my memory didn't serve me well after all!

@Takoda it's definitely gotten slower and buggier... although my world has gotten bigger and more complex so it's hard to say for sure. Plus I've now gotten used to playing Java on a gaming PC so expectations have shifted. But at the end of the day it's still full-fat bedrock Minecraft on the Switch and it's a great time.

I hate to be a party pooper, but in the space of one and a half sentences they pretty much gave the whole thing away.
After 30 in-game days, your save is deleted. However, in Overmorrow, things are rarely as they seem on the surface
I'd gamble 100 to 1 that it doesn't delete your save. More like Majora's Mask or perhaps Undertale but instead of shocking you with a twist it's pretty much saying it upfront in the e-shop description.

@Poodlestargenerica

I only gave him a real go after I'd finished all the shrines, all the lightroots, and as many of the other sidequests as I could possibly do without looking up a walkthrough. Took me almost the whole year, but I did it.
Then went into "polish off the list" mode, sure that some of the most aggravating mysteries had been blocked off as post game content, but no! Everything so far seems to have been sitting there waiting for me to approach it from the right angle or the right time of day or after talking to the right person. No post game content that I can see so far...
I was so, so happy to be finished with it though. Almost an entire year of being unable to commit to any other AAA game had me going crazy...

Looks fantastic!
(reads comments)
Okay then!

I'm not surprised at the conclusion here. I'm a huge fan of Papers Please and what it did to gaming as a medium, but in practice I couldn't play it any longer than about an hour or so. I really got the feeling that there was something interesting brewing there, with the black market stuff and the terrorists. But I'll never know where the game ultimately ends up going. It's just an utter misery to play; every day the rules change under your feet, too many layers of complexity and your family get sick and starve. Sounds like this is similar.

Yeah I can't imagine this ever happening. Nintendo giving the public the "keys to the kingdom" with 2D Mario (as articles put it at the time) is one thing. It's so retro it might as well be public domain; 2D Mario functions essentially as an advertisement for "real" new Nintendo games. But doing it in 3D would be pretty much building Unity with a hundred QOL plugins and priceless licensed assets and selling it for $50 a pop. That truly would be undermining the value of Mario games, in my opinion; giving away the magic. Mario Maker 1 & 2 were complete anomalies in history; at best we'll get more of the same one day, but I wouldn't be surprised if we never see it happen again at all from Nintendo.

That shiny pink men's jacket is amazing but I could never pull it off like the model does!

OOT's water temple was always one of my favourites of all time. This was a great list, so many gems! I would add the following:

• Level 1 in Alex Kidd in Miracle World. This was my first ever game, classic "blue sky" Sega, and the first level pulled a crazy trick where you spend half of it progressing downwards on standard platforms until you drop down into a beautiful left-to-right scrolling ocean, all within a single level. Unforgettable.
• I'd also have to give a shout out to Minecraft here. Oceans are beautiful and truly endless. Explore a coral reef, conquer a monument, or set up a conduit to explore around to your heart's content. Maybe collect tropical fish for your aquarium, or build an underwater home out of glass. And don't get me started on the Java version, with its shaders and mods to add even more life down there. It's probably my favourite part of Minecraft.

Mechanically though I'd love to see a love letter to Burnout 3. Or Shadow of the Colossus (but Solar Ash is interesting in that regard).

There's a moving target when it comes to the indie throwback genre. The first wave was love letters to 8/16 bit pixel art; this current wave is obviously people who always dreamed about making a PS1 or N64 game and now have the 3D capability (and the shaders) to do so.
The expected next step would be the PS2 / Gamecube era... but I wonder how (or even if) that will shake out. I can't think of any particular aesthetic or limitation which would define that era and stoke the nostalgia fires. Perhaps GTA3-quality character models? Licenced soundtracks with song title and artist sliding on screen from the side? Otherwise I feel that generation was the tipping point where games really started going for realism... or, with games like Okami or Wind Waker, a strong aesthetic of their own which wasn't a direct result of the technical limitations of the hardware. The kinds of games where you could just up-rez them as-is and they would look great, as opposed to the N64 and PS1 where that would bring their flaws into stark relief. Maybe we're hitting the end of the line for this kind of thing and there'll never be an indie throwback love letter to Ratchet amd Clank? We'll see I guess; I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

@Ogre84 I think it was a year or two ago when resident NL commenter @60frames-please changed his name to @120frames-please !

Wow, what a review!
I was super interested in getting this, it's one of those intriguing titles from the PS3 era which I never took the plunge on.
When it was announced for Switch, I read a bunch of reviews of the Steam version and they all followed the same refrain: come for the visuals, but leave for the gameplay.
But this review has got me super hyped again. An iconic classic with amazing visuals and an excellent port to Switch is already selling me. But it sounds like actually playing the thing might be enjoyable too! Back to the top of the "to buy" list!

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Games of this calibre were running perfectly fine on Switch back in 2017 and 2018. The only explanation for performance like this is laziness and a lack of care.

@Bratwurst35

• The extra A is for "As good as if it were built by AAI"!
• What's that extra A for?
• It's a typo.

@TotalHenshin perhaps it's just me, but I'm looking at the subheadline "my library's in ruins" and the only thing I can possibly think of is "my roast is ruined!"
But then again I'm a Steamed Hams tragic who still loves this meme in 2024, I'm probably just seeing it everywhere...

Nice stealth Steamed Hams reference there!

Ah Extreme G. If memory serves, one of the vehicles you can play as is a literal N64 controller. That alone makes it worth playing, seeing as I've already paid for the service anyway.

Here's a stressful game on Switch that I discovered recently: Family Man.
It's a bit of an "open-town" sandbox where the developers just got a little too clever for their own good. Every day you have to earn a certain amount of money (so the mob don't kill you) and keep your spouse and child happy (so they don't leave you) and healthy (so they don't die of a cold) and fed (so they don't die of starvation) all the while balancing your karma within the town itself (so that it remains a place where you'd want to live)... It's just too much, there's not enough hours in the day and the punishment for failure is absolute. If it were Papers Please you could appreciate the bleak message of the whole thing, give it an hour of your time and move on; but here on the surface it's a bright bustling explorable town full of characters and quests. Just don't spend too long actually exploring and doing those quests, otherwise your family will die/leave you and it's game over.

What's it like actually recruiting the hundred characters? I only ever played Suikoden 4 on PS2, but one thing I remember is that I met plenty of characters who hinted that they'd be interested in joining my party, but by the end of the game I probably only had about 20 and a tantalising number of them had just walked away never to be seen again. And I'm a "breadth first" player who will try to do every possible sidequest before moving on in a game. Is this the kind of thing where you need to follow a walkthrough to avoid missing half of the content?

I've had the exact same experience, but with Nidhogg. Really there's nothing quite like it. Really makes you miss home when you get that taste.

Wait, I just realised that Neodori Forever is from Qubic games. I can highly recommend that one. It's a perfect mix of Outrun and modern retro 90s aesthetic.

Yes Qubic is a long way away from the really shady publishers, like the ones who put out "Call of Honor War Shoot Royale Battle Simulator", or the ones who put out "AAA Clock arbitrary monthly new edition #58". There are publishers on the eShop who put out brazen asset flips, mobile ports so lazy that they don't even recognise controller input, zero-effort games so amateur that the collision doesn't work and you just fall through the floor. Qubic Games are like Wii-era shovelware in my opinion: pretty lame but at least they're legitimately trying.
I did enjoy Rekt back before we had better stuff like Rocket League, Tony Hawk, Descenders etc on the system.

I'm not much of a fan of colons either, to be honest (the punctuation, not the vital organ). Even Legend of Zelda finds a way to work without them, and those games have been eschewing numerical sequels for over 30 years. A title with a colon basically means that they couldn't make up their mind what they wanted it to be, so they chose to keep both options (and sometimes more than two!)

Sands of Time is just too perfect in its movement, puzzles, tech, and sense of adventure not to win this one. After that for me it would be POP 2008 for its combination of gorgeous cell shaded visuals and almost-nonexistent combat. And then there's the original, which is a groundbreaking nostalgic classic but too old-school to really enjoy playing anymore, for me at least.

@JayJ I don't care if people don't like it, or aren't interested in it. But it's the people who act as though its very existence is an insult to everything they hold dear in this world - these are the people for whom I really have to wonder what their true problem with it is. It is just a game after all.
Perhaps I did word my previous comment too aggressively. So I'll put it like this: I wonder what would be the venn diagram of people who hate Gone Home and people who use "woke" as an insult.

I agree that Super Kiwi 64 and Macbat 64 were very easy, but I didn't mind that. As cheap games they act as more of a palate refresher, an easily digestible dose of nostalgia and a reminder of how great the real Banjo Kazooie is. Still I'd enjoy playing something more meaty in this vein, and Corn Kidz 64 looks pretty sweet regardless of which way it ends up swinging.

The venn diagram of people who hate Gone Home and people who are bigots is an interesting one.
That game did nothing especially wrong (walking simulator is an entire genre, people) but it did a lot of things very, very right (tension, environmental storytelling, graphics, sense of place) and it delivered a type of story which which was at the time not seen before in video games. There is absolutely nothing controversial in the game, except for the fact that it's about a certain type of person. A type of person which hate groups wish didn't exist, or at least didn't have a voice. And to a certain extent that could even boil down to "a female person".

Does anyone else find it sus that the eshop page for this doesn't include any screenshots or videos? Like it's trying to lure in a purchase without letting people consider "wait a minute, this is what I'm spending my $38 (Australian) on?"

Write the review you cowards! If the game doesn't work, give it a zero. No need to revise it down the line.

@Semudara sounds like it has a good sense of humour at least!

@Nontendo_4DS I will say though that I like your username. I always dreamed of calling myself N65-Rox.

@Nontendo_4DS I disagree. If I see a headline about Miyamoto and click on it, that doesn't mean that I have an insatiable appetite for Miyamoto articles and that paparazzi should follow him home and try to dig up a scandal. I read Switch firmware patch note articles for goodness sake; anything vaguely in my area of interest will do. As a reader I'm not telling people what to write.

we, the hungry customers, may be somewhat to blame. We struggle to remember the last big game that was released without some kind of leak or slip-up to sully its otherwise watertight launch.
I will never not get annoyed at statements like this.
1. Are we, the customers, the ones hacking into developers' servers? No. Those are attention-seeking hackers.
2. Are we, the customers, demanding to know every minute detail of the development process, spurring on the hackers and scaring the publishers? No. It is the people and organisations who write gaming news who decide what to write about in an endless bid for audience attention. We're not screaming at journos to tell us what colour socks Miyamoto is wearing, we're just opening up NintendoLife or Twitter or whatever and seeing what you've got for us today.
Regardless of the topic of the actual article, I just really wish journos would stop trying to tell us that consumers are responsible for the ills of the world. We're the last link in the chain.

I will never trust anyone who writes a professional text including the words "bomb diffusal". They literally don't have any clue about what they're doing (writing English) nor what they're describing (the act of defusing a bomb)

Yes thanks for this review, the screenshots on the eshop look awesome but without a video there's no clue what kind of game it is. Rhythm based platformer sounds perfect - I thought it might be a twin stick shooter which really don't do anything for me. This was already on my wishlist; definitely going to get it now.

That's a pretty funny video. But it's a distant second to the amazingness of that subheadline!