N64-ROX

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.

I whine about joy cons all the time but the fact is that joy cons make the Switch. Hell I even like its version of the d-pad (separate buttons for the win, ever since PS1, thanks very much). It took me years to get a pro controller; those tiny things have seen me through BOTW, Mario Odyssey, Celeste, and much more besides. For controls on a portable they are spectacular, and really hit home the fact that this thing in your hands is 100% a full-fat console.

When they were creating a pixel remaster, it boggles the mind that they just slapped on that lazy, standard-Unity, non-pixel font.
That was laziness and lack of care.
But then for them to say "my bad" and put in the effort to develop a brand new pixel font, in the wrong resolution and wrong style, that demonstrates utter cluelessness.
This is supposed to be a celebration of FF, a labour of love. FF's font is as much an iconic part of it as anything else. Not to mention, it's a cardinal sin (and an amateur one) to make a game whose hook is nostalgic pixel art and then play fast and loose with what a "pixel" is. They really should have kept/added the classic font.

Any retro release that is locked to an awful stretched 16:9 should be given a zero, end of story.

When I look at the store pages it looks like all of the games now have mode 7 overworlds... Weird disconnects in resolution between the sprites and the backgrounds... HD-3D in some bits... And that pixel font is still weird. Call me an old fogie but I wish they had just kept the graphics exactly as they were originally.

For some reason when I clicked on this article I was hoping it would be news about FIFA's new game. That's the interesting wildcard in this story. We all know that EA Sports FC is essentially going to be more of what we're used to from them, but the new FIFA? It could be a hilariously amateur trainwreck. It could be a high quality partnership with a AAA dev which brings real competition into the market. It could be something that shoots for a different angle, like NFL Blitz or Mario Strikers. Or (more likely) the opposite direction: something so completely unimaginative while blandly competent that we all get the joy of seeing our suspicions realised.

So cool I always wanted to explore these games, even if it doesn't come to the west I'll check it out with my Japanese account. By the way, if anyone wants to try a super cool modern homage to PC-88 I can strongly recommend Vengeful Heart on Switch.

Now do it on the Switch, you'll be out a million dollars.

I wonder if this horse breeding tweak is going to remove that bedrock glitch/feature where you can breed them while they're enchanted with speed 2, and it will stick, over and over again until you have a superhorse. Would be a shame...

What a dream! A real track would need to lock you in to a set path of course, as opposed to being essentially a test of whether or not you know exactly what the developer intended you to do, but that's the wonderful thing about mods! Get a couple of likeminded people to race with and this would be spectacular.

No Minecraft, not even an honourable mention?

As someone who never played the original, the Switch version seems A-OK to me. Just switch to the original graphics and it's a pretty pretty game. Wouldn't want it to look non-PS1-y anyway.

There are so many terrible, zero effort, rip-off and/or mobile-style games on the e-shop, seeing some legitimate (licensed!) retro console games made available without needing to pay a subscription always makes me happy, regardless of the worthiness of the titles themselves.

Never had a GBA SP myself. Got a 2nd hand OG unit for cheap, mainly to see what it did when I plugged it into Wind Waker on the Gamecube.
One year, three wacky lightbulb attachments, and one flash cart later, I finally reached the conclusion that dinky handheld gaming was just not for me. The N64 had changed the game: by the 2000s, if you weren't pushing polygons then you were living in the past, and it wasn't powerful enough to emulate the SNES so it couldn't scratch the retro itch either.

Later I got some mileage out of a DS, mostly thanks to Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick, but really it was only the Switch that could ever gave me a portable gaming experience where it didn't feel like I was slumming it with crummy pretend-games.

Utterly ridiculous. I hope that 2mm extra bag space saved your life, my fanciful friend.

Screen Resolution: TV Mode at 1920x1080 (*works at up to 2K resolution)

What is this nonsense? The Switch only outputs 1K (i.e. 1920x1080) and TVs with higher resolutions can do anything they want with that signal.

Or are they saying that if you plug it into a 4K TV it will explode?

Picked this up for PC back when Tony Hawk's 1+2 was (initially) cancelled for Switch and still locked behind Epic exclusivity on PC. You'd best believe, Tony Hawk's this ain't.
THPS was a game that convinced non-skaters that they should become skaters. Session is a game to give those non-skaters a reality check: skating is hard, you will never do a real kickflip in your life.

I too have been purposefully un-zeldaing my mind in preparation for BOTW2. And that includes all the BOTW-a-likes that have popped up over the last few years. The way things are going, we could almost start calling the release of a new Zelda game a once-in-a-decade event; the last thing I want is for it to feel like just more of the same.
Enjoyed this little quiz though!

I highly recommend EmperorLemon's YouTube videos for an explanation to an outsider how Nascar can actually be fun.

@antisumo if you already have Minecraft on Switch, you already own this. It is literally a bundle of Minecraft (the same SKU you already have installed) and the Mario Mash Up Pack (which already came with it). The e-shop won't let you buy it because it is literally already the thing that you have. There isn't even any kind of patch update to add "deluxe edition" to the title screen. It is a strange, mind-bogglingly useless release, my only guess is that there was some contractual reason why they had to re-release the game again.

With the N64 pad, it does take quite a bit of adjusting if you (like me) haven't played this in years. Thinking especially about the way the camera auto tilts when you're on an angle like in Statue Park.
With the standard switch joy cons or pro controller it's pretty much unplayable since you need those discrete C buttons to do anything other than spin around in a drunken mess.
But with an N64 pad it's great fun, especially playing on agent and mopping up every goon with one or two auto-aimed shots, truly feels like being a super spy as opposed to the intimidation that I felt back then as a teenager.

Co op is just not for me. I live overseas to my oldest friend, and last year we started playing Minecraft together. I say "together", by which I mean we are technically on the same server. We spawned together, he and his wife started building a base... And then as soon as I had the core inventory I needed, I set sail for 10,000 blocks away to build my own base.
Sometimes we visit each other, it's fun!

Where is the Nintendo Life review of the original game?!?

Man, I need to get one of these for sure.

It drove me crazy. Whenever I found something really cool I essentially just never used it since I wanted to keep it. I spent half the game trying to fight with bombs only, and it was super painful. This also meant that my inventory was always full. Every treasure chest and mob drop was a fraught Sophie's Choice decision what to throw away. I can understand its gameplay purpose but it really was like they put the worst thing about western RPGs into my beloved Zelda.

Here's a real teeth-grinder from my recent memory.

I was sick for a week and threw myself into Bowser's Fury as I heard that it was a hidden gem open world Mario. But every 5 minutes all the pretty colours go black and you have to abandon the platforming challenge you're trying to do because Bowser is having a hissy fit and ruining everything. What's even worse is when you get to the end of the game and you're just trying to 100% all the moons, and you've already seen the credits, and Bowser keeps coming back even more frequently than before, and there is nothing you can do anymore: you can't ring the bell because that just triggers the final end boss fight again, you can't hide because he no longer gives up after a while, the only possible thing to do is to purposefully die. That Nintendo put such outrageously bad game design in a Mario game is mind-boggling.

Good point about that grinding trophy in Rayman. It reminds me that there are dozens of unattainable online achievements in Tony Hawks 1+2 remake.

• Create a skate park that gets 100 likes! Sure, I'll just go become a famous youtuber and tell my followers to check it out then will I.
• Like a skate park that a million other people have liked! Yeah too bad the Switch online community for this game is a barren wasteland, and there's no cross play.

While I'm at it I'll also call out content that's locked behind amibo. I wouldn't fill my house with that plastic junk even if it was free. But sure, give lonely Link a wolf companion only if I run out and buy a dolly.

@Jiggies my friend always insists that Waluigi is clever because Warui means "strange" in Japanese. I maintain that he's in denial about something that's simply a lazy (but so-bad-it's-good) naming exercise.

@CornflakeCookie that's the point, in my opinion. Wario is pure genius in concept and execution; Waluigi is "so bad it's good" cult favourite material.

Probably for the best. There's no way that Nintendo's PG reputation would survive Walupeach.

They're both gorgeous, but the Japanese one is better if you want to focus on the big scary Dracula himself.

Never been a Pokemon guy at all myself, but I'll always love Magikarp. First for his hilarious jumping minigame in Pokemon Stadium, and then for his even-more-tongue-in-cheek smartphone game Magikarp Jump, which was essentially a spin-off of the Pokemon Stadium minigame.
Someone at the Pokemon Company has their humour bolts screwed on just right, I'll tell you that. In the future, we won't be capturing a menagerie of animals to watch them fight using magical powers. Oh no, we will be capturing just one specific type of fish so that we can plonk them onto dry land and watch them flop about impotently.

@DJDM true! If Overwatch is a "no" then Super Mario 3D All-Stars also has to be a "no"...

Curse you and your trick questions. Abe's Oddysee is not the same thing as New n Tasty! But the Overwatch one, well... That was smart, I have to give you that.