N64-ROX

Just like with many other reasons, that was such an interesting time in gaming. Trends were changing and Nintendo could no longer rule with an iron fist. By the end of the 64 we had Conker drinking straight from the barrel and urinating on people in the club. Back then we couldn't believe what we were seeing!

The demo gameplay looks pretty simplistic, but the graphics look super nice. Really bold and bright for the era. Reminds me of Super Mario Sunshine, but not many developers were pulling off that kind of thing back then. Lots of nicely rounded, cartoony curves.

Vampire Survivors on Switch is the most perfect pairing in history. Thanks Poncle for giving me a reason to get back into this game.

@RetroGames definitely a missed opportunity with Labo VR.

From what I can see, more people are playing Drifting With Maxwell Cat than would like to admit! Including me!

after about 12 hours with the game

I'm assuming that's 12 hours straight!

Sweet! I've had this in my Steam wishlist for ages but if it's coming to Switch that's a must-buy!

If this were a remaster or a remake it wouldn't be running at 30 fps on the Switch, if at all.
The Switch is a golden opportunity to play PS360 era games (and earlier) on a portable Nintendo funbox. It is not an Unreal Engine 4/5 machine. Both developers and players alike should just enjoy and embrace the things that work well on the platform, rather than delivering (or wishing for) a blurry, muddy, low-performing mess that's worse than the original.
For me this is a 180 turnaround from the GTA Definitive Edition and reason to have faith in Rockstar again.

I was pretty stoked when Zero Wing came to the Switch Online Megadrive subscription. Booted it up and basked in its glorious intro for a minute or two, screenshot button working overtime.
Then the gameplay started and I was out of there pretty quickly. I'd gotten what I wanted.

Great article, this topic really deserves proper discussion.
I'm usually of the opinion that open is better, and the less the e-shop is moderated the more interesting indie/adult content will make it through.
However these SEO games do put me in mind of a story from earlier this year where a science fiction journal had to suspend all public submissions entirely because people were using Chat GPT to bombard them with effectively infinite low-quality content. We're not quite at that point yet with the Switch e-Shop but one might predict that it's only a matter of time...

"The original game, as is, but running on the Switch" is exactly what the GTA trilogy should have been.

I'm holding out hope that Rockstar have indeed taken the simplest path here.

@Bunkerneath Remasters are overrated. Being able to play classic games on the Switch, as they actually were, is the best way to play.

Pathetic and childish by Sony. That game has as much right to exist as all of its other paragraph-length-keyword-stuffed-title crapware asset-flipped stablemates. Good for a laugh in my opinion.

I'll be buying 3 of these (the 3 most hyped ones) but to be honest TOTK is going to take me all year to get through.

No joke after BOTW I was seeing paraglider opportunities everywhere. The affliction is real.

I received this one as a gift and gave it a solid go out of principle. But it was far too much like "soulless un-fun corporation tries to rip off BOTW" that I couldn't stand it. I quit at exactly the point where they introduced (I think) Hermes and his one-stop-pavilion to buy all your upgrades through charmless menus and DLC/microtransactions.

I would prefer to tell them that they're Link. Run wild and free! Let no barrier or advice restrict you!

I really wish these Arcade Archives were a bit cheaper. In Australia they're over $10 each which pushes them way out of impulse buy territory. If they were $5 I would have bought about 40 of them by now. It's these kinds of kooky games which end up not making the cut: I know that I could get about 1 hour of fun out of them, which is worth the gamble at a few bucks apiece but hard to justify at $10.50

Excited to hear about this! I really enjoyed Super Kiwi 64 but it did feel like it was missing something at the end. A little bit of extra content would be really cool.

Remember before FF7 was on the Switch. For about a year or so, the only thing on the minds of retro heads was the missing virtual console. I still have several off-brand indie homages to 16 and 32 bit platformers/rpgs lingering around on my wishlist from back when I thought that might be the best we were going to get. Then when that FF7 & FF8 trailer dropped on a Nintendo Direct, I was almost in tears of joy, I never would have imagined it.

@rallydefault maybe I'm just annoyed at the headline. "Free Nintendo Switch games!" Come on, it's just blatant advertising copy and I expect more from NL.

It probably shouldn't need to be said, but most people do not normally buy 3x $60 video games at a time. This is textbook retail manipulation to make you spend $170 when you were only planning on spending $60.

Get this ad off of the news feed.

Something about the way those words sit together, always turns me temporarily dyslexic.
In my mind it will always be pronounced "Bait 'n Chaos"

Cool, the 4-wrestler limit was literally one of the "cons" called out in the review as making the royal rumble mode pointless. Great to see that they're adding the things that the fans want.
(Edit after watching the video) wait, this is Fortnite-style battle royale, not WWE-style royal rumble... What is this chaos?!

@cammers1995 I always get a kick out of seeing this trash on the eShop. My current favourite is this one:
Hooligan Simulator San Gangster Andreas Fight For City, Battle Gangs, Shooter, Police
Another one with "Not really gameplay footage" on every second of its trailer.
But hey, it's 91% off! And the real GTA is a trainwreck anyway!

What about that game development studio Wales Interactive? They seem to have released about 20 games on the Switch eShop and more or less own the FMV game genre at the moment.

You know, the people who complain about the Switch Online presentation are not complaining about black bars preserving the aspect ratio. They are complaining about the user icon that's constantly displayed, and the button hints which pop up over the screen at arbitrary times & can't be dismissed.
Oh and the awful N64 button mapping, can't forget that.

Lord I hope they let us bring our libraries. Otherwise my monumental backlog will transition into an inarguable waste of money.

Tony Hawk's 1 + 2 on Switch is passable but not spectacular technically. If this is the same team, be prepared for low resolutions and low detail in order to target that 30fps, rather than code wizardry. Especially if they are pushing out 3 games at once...

1.4 GB for a couple of MSX games which were probably originally less than 1.4 MB! What a time to be alive.

I'm just glad that epic has kept the core Rocket League experience unchanged throughout the same period. Sure there are wacky modes but normal Rocket League is still normal Rocket League.

I don't really understand why they had so much riding on that third party IP stuff anyway. They own pretty much 50% of all gaming IP and studios in the entire world; just get to work, make & release some of these titles that everyone wants to see, and your cashflow problems will be history.

I thought Roller Champions had died already?

Oof, that Japanese box is hideous. Somehow all the 3D in that picture has aged poorly and looks like a budget windows 95 edutainment app. Even though it's the same 3D models as in our kickass NA/EU box!

That Sham Hatwich wiki article is pure gold!

Similar swine:
Ham shamwitch
Hat hamwitch
Sham hamwitch

They really took that wordplay and ran with it. And in Japanese it's just bigguhatto, I'm dying!

Truly the SUV of Wiis. Just wait, in 5 years most Wiis will be this size because nobody wants to be the guy operating a small Wii amongst a sea of big, safe, manly ones. And what are you, some hippie environmentalist?

Great write up! This reminds me of the kind of game I would occasionally find on old computers of the day; I never thought that kind of thing would filter through to consoles but in retrospect why not?
One point that I'd like to make on your closing paragraph though: this doesn't seem to be an Elon Musk simulator. For all his faults (and I'm certainly sick of the guy) Elon Musk is a person who buys a company for what it is, and rides that train publicly for a long time. This game seems to be about the nameless wallstreeters who are out there every day flipping portfolios based purely on the graphs, and that's the kind of thing which is even more aspirational now than ever. It's already gamified in the real world with Forex and bots and microtrading, and even things like Fantasy Football and FIFA Ultimate Team trying to scratch a similar itch.

@Poodlestargenerica All these "X Simulator" games with the same logo font... I can't figure out if they are all somehow related or whether it's just impossible to trademark a font and the word simulator so there's just a million random shovelware companies (and a few half decent ones) who jumped on the bandwagon 15 years ago and never got off...

I think some people are missing the point. Perhaps intentionally?
First, imagine a Gamecube emulation box the same size and shape as this. That's pretty cool on its own.
Now, instead of like an FPGA or a Snapdragon Android SOC, imagine it was using the actual chips from a real Gamecube (or Wii).
Bam, real hardware. Flawless accuracy to the original experience. And SD cards instead of discs makes it even better than the original experience. This is the Gamecube mini that people are asking for!

Thanks for the review, I was really waiting for it!
I'm stubborn enough to ignore microtransactions and the idea of an open world customisable racer on the Switch is something that I've been dreaming about. But for me it's crummy visuals and crummy performance which make me say no.
We can sing the praises of Mario Kart's gameplay all we want but the truth is that having it run at 1080p60 is a big part of its world-conquering popularity. When you fire that up for some friends or yourself it's obvious that it's a class act. I already have a dozen blurry, grimy, choppy racing games that take 5 minutes to load on the Switch. All they do is remind me that the publisher has no respect for Switch players and no pride in their own output. And that I need to show more restraint when purchasing.

Man I got a comment removed into oblivion once just for mentioning that a game was included in the itch.io bundle to support U******. Since then I've been terrified of mentioning the U word or the R word on this site in any capacity; nice to see that it's now allowed for some people at least.

None of those reviews were of the Switch version. You're letting us down here NintendoLife, this is the closest we're going to get to a Forza Horizons type of experience on Switch - it's either going to be an ugly choppy mess or the best racer on the platform. We need this review!

Man I wish we could start from the beginning with the Trails series on the Switch.

I would have jumped at this without hesitation if it were a free to play live service game. On the other hand, I never buy season passes or microtransactions so I guess they're not crying into their beer over losing me as a customer.

I reckon that must have happened to many kids who got an action replay. Perhaps its heyday was earlier in history, when games were cruel and unforgiving. You'd get 3 or 4 lives to finish the game and that was it. I remember as a 10 year old, having played little more than Alex Kidd and Double Dragon, imagining what my dream game would be, and it was "five lives, plus a zero life. And continues!"
By the time I started seeing cracked trainers on emulated copies of FF7, offering max stats from the get go etc, luckily I was old enough to guess how that would hollow out the soul of it, even though I started my JRPG career treating battles as a complete nuisance.

I'm really enjoying this PS1 retro wave. I hope they port Hypnagogia to the Switch, I really enjoyed it on PC, and it's got real meat on its bones as opposed to some other itch titles which can sometimes be little more than demos.

I completely agree that a dungeon maker can never be a Zelda maker. Zelda is all about adventure and exploration and story; the dungeons are just a meaty bonus. Of course the elephant in the room is the fact that BOTW doesn't even have dungeons at all. Mario is a different beast, it's pure gameplay; any story is just a distraction. To be honest with the 2D Zelda games I often feel the dungeons just get in the way of the real fun.

What a strange review. "one of the best looking games of the year" but the 3 screenshots show absolutely nothing. Empty rooms of about 10 square metres apiece, comprised of one or two textures of N64 quality. Very confusing...

@Serpenterror @romanista that's the point I guess - Minecraft is such a good "forever game" that, even after 13 years, it's pretty much impossible for Mojang to release any kind of follow-up game without it being essentially useless. But (at least under Microsoft) they have to try... And let's be real, plenty of kids will buy this regardless of its reviews; enough to make it worthwhile.