N64-ROX

Never played this on PS4/5 but this is a spectacular-looking game on the Switch. If I didn't know better I'd swear that it was built natively for the Switch from the very beginning. I've been a happy camper after gifting it to myself for xmas.

I agree that these android devices are pointless when everybody already has a phone. What we need is a solid suite of Steam Deck rivals to really get competition going.

I think this article is a little misguided: in Perfect Dark there is a secret alien war - even Joanna (who is Carrington's star agent) is surprised to discover the existence of the aliens. For all we plebs know, 2023 is going exactly as predicted.

The year of Waluigi is the only choice. Imagine Waluigi's Mansion (think the playboy mansion), Waluigi Bros (like... two or three Waluigis), Waluigi Party (where he's the DJ), Super Waluigi Sunshine (where Waluigi is the sun)... Look into your heart Nintendo, you know it must be done.

In my opinion the problem is that we've all just gotten used to the Switch's success. Remember when we were all going ga-ga over the classic Final Fantasies (7-12) coming to switch? Or Skyrim, Wolfenstein, and Doom? Or iconic indies such as Hyper Light Drifter, Fez, Thumper, Undertale, Stardew Valley, etc? This stuff is is just expected now. We get a Nintendo Direct chock full of JRPGs (with a side of farming games, I admit) and it becomes a joke in itself. We used to be port begging, now we're almost begging companies not to port their games to switch if they can't squeeze out sufficient performance or have to go the cloud route.
We got what we wanted; we're just a fickle bunch. To me the Switch has wildly exceeded all my expectations overall, and if I'm not interested in Kirby or Switch Sports or Pokemon then I have a backlog of hundreds of fantastic games to play, and a hundred more on my eShop wishlist.

What I want to know is: how did EA get Burnout Paradise running at 60fps 1080/720p on Switch? This stuff can be done, people. Sure BP is a 15 year old game but these WRCs are uninspiring graphically even on powerful hardware. Like another poster said, racing game graphics plateaued ages ago (unless you're talking about the shinyest of the shiny franchises) and have even gotten worse on the Switch as publishers care less and less about what they put out.
All I'm saying is that beautiful performant racing games can be done on the Switch. It's just a matter of actually making them. The whole 5-metre shadow distance and copy-paste lying e-shop description just makes the neglect totally clear.

A Codemasters rally game on the Switch... A man can dream...

@Itakiteacher it wasn't on the list at all - I was surprised because there's usually plenty of people in the comments section saying it's fantastic, don't listen to the haters.

As with Timesplitters, I'll give the US props for showing off the polygons. But in no universe does that look anywhere near as cool as the proper artwork on the JP/EU version.

Best "the sheer audacity of publishing this on the e-shop" game: Animals Transport Simulator.
Seriously, start it up, wait for it to load to the menu, push the buttons... Nothing happens! They literally took a dodgy no-effort asset flip tablet game, and ported it to Switch as-is with no support for controllers at all! And woe betide you if you pull your switch out of the dock and play it in tablet mode; even if you got the game for free you will feel ripped off for your time, it's so pathetic. But at the same time you have to admire the chutzpah... These guys have realised that Nintendo asserts no minimum quality restrictions, and are determined to see how low that bar can be pushed.

Also (dis)honourable mentions go to these exercises in SEO-cynicism which were overlooked for longest title:

• World War Battle Heroes Field Armies Call Of Prison Duty Simulator
• Car Parking Madness School Drive Mechanic Car Games Simulator 2023
• Drone race Simulator Pilot Flight School Airplane Games Jet 2023
• Infected run to Survive: Zombie Apocalypse Survival Story Shooter Dead Cry
• Farming Real Simulation Tractor, Combine Trucks Farmer Land Game
• Monster Impossible Truck No Limit Adventure Drive Simulator Sport 3D

Man I was waiting to see how high the diehard apologists had managed to push Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. I know that it's widely hated, but nowhere in the top 50? I smell shenanigans...

What a snub on Olli Olli World, how did that get overlooked! A funky, genius, transcendent sequel and a flawless port. Get out of here with your pokemans and your roguelikes!

I must have bought 100 games this year but in the end I just kept returning to Rocket League and Minecraft. I'm beyond help!
But also in my top 3 was The Talos Principle, which was an amazing ride from start to finish. I committed to 100%ing both the base game and the DLC without using walkthroughs... It was a long hard slog but so incredibly rewarding.

The Australian one only displays 3 for each category. Seems a bit arbitrary. But my 3 for "played right after release" includes both my GOTY (Olli Olli World) and the game which opened my eyes to the fact that there is literally zero quality control on the e-shop (Super Clown 2). Now that I think about it, I'm disappointed that it didn't include the absolute worst game of the year (Animals Transport Simulator, for which the controller doesn't even work).

I'm not usually one to advocate for strict parenting, but this is pathetic. Parents, take responsibility. If you don't want your kid to spend 80 hours a week playing Fortnite, don't let them. You are basically suing Epic for making a good desirable product. You don't let them eat KFC every night do you? This is exactly the same thing.

@AverageGamer I'd love it if you're right, mate. A truly powerful console from Nintendo would be fantastic.

Oh yeah and the text itself is wonderfully mysterious and inspiring, in my opinion.

The problem with the end text in Minecraft is that it speeds by way too quickly to read it properly, at least on the Switch. I ended up hammering the screenshot button and capturing pretty much all of it because it took me 3 years to kill that dragon on my own terms, and I'd be damned if I was going to loop back onto YouTube or Wikipedia in order to experience my reward.

@Duffman92 not sure about a pirate exactly, but I believe he is somewhat responsible for Winamp, which was used for many an early-00's "totally legitimate" MP3 collection

Everyone knows that the Switch 2 (whenever it does arrive) will still be 2 generations behind the latest Xbox / PS as far as power is concerned. There is no way that they'll bring COD across with all the trimmings; I'd wager an EA FIFA style scenario with yearly heartbreak and frustration. And there ain't nobody going to play twitchy online-first COD in a cloud version.

Cool review, I love games like these. Probably the wildest experience was Frog Fractions, but then I played its sequel Glittermitten Grove and had to give up after about 2 hours of straightforward fairy farming with seemingly no twist forthcoming. Perhaps the joke was on me for expecting my expectations to be subverted, only to get those expectations subverted? One thing is for sure, as the reviewer mentioned, it can't be easy to follow up a genuinely surprising work. Try too hard and eventually you'll turn into M Night Shamalayan.

For me it was the little things which made me excitedly pre-order a day-one Switch whilst having had almost zero interest in the Wii U.
Region-free! Micro-SD card support! Consolidation of handheld and home console! (both functionally and, with time and the demise of the 3DS, library-wise). An actual new Zelda game! Massively ungated publishing rules so that indies and other PC-curios could flourish!

On the other hand, one other thing that I was looking forward to, after skipping the Wii U and developing a conscience about emulation, was the virtual console. Which never arrived, and even the NSO offerings (which defeat the purpose of wanting to finally pay money to own these classic titles for play on a modern platform) took 2 years to come; 4 years if you're talking about the N64...

If they had made a new Zelda or Mario for it, I would have bought one. But they didn't, so I didn't.

Good call on the forest temple, playing that was probably the most mysterious feeling I'd ever had.

And while many people don't like it, I have to give a shout out to OOT's water temple and its boss. And Majora's Mask's water temple too actually. Both masterpieces of creativity and abnormal movement.

This would have happened at exactly the point in history when the video game industry became bigger and more important than the movie industry. I have to say, my hat goes off to 00's-era Rockstar for truly understanding the zeitgeist.

I'm still baffled that so many people (and websites like this one) get joycon drift so wrong.
Drift is not a fact of life. I'm a lifetime heavy gamer and I've put dozens of analogue sticks through their paces, from N64 onwards with every stop in between. Never Ever have I experienced drift on any controller except for Joy Cons. I destroyed my N64 sticks with Mario Party and it just made it super hard to push them 100% in any given direction. I wore the rubber tops off of my PS2 sticks playing Katamari and it just meant that I had to use the bare plastic underneath. Maybe some people out there are dunking their controllers in cheetos or something but for me, drift just doesn't happen.
Except for Joy Cons. Multiple times I have bought them brand new, unboxed them and they immediately start drifting. It's an absolute scourge without a pro controller. This is a fundamental design flaw of this one particular product. And I am convinced that it is 100% due to a weak bluetooth component. Perhaps these things are just too small to house a strong enough radio? It just gets mixed up in the signal. There is certainly no way to "clean" or "fix" a brand new joy con which is drifting. Aside from connecting them back onto the machine and playing handheld, which usually works.
The fact is that there is no mystery to how Nintendo could fix this problem. Everyone else knows how to make sticks which don't drift like this. Nintendo themselves also know, as attested by the pro controller and every other controller they've ever made. Just... Use better components! Make the joy cons bigger if necessary. Maybe that's why they haven't been able to address this and are (hopefully) just waiting for the Switch 2.

I would love to see Rollerdrome on Switch! The devs did an unbelievable job with Olli Olli World. Sable would be an excellent fit too. But top of my wishlist is Vampire Survivors, that would be an absolute monster to have on the go.

Yes but what if you want to win?

This is so cool! I love racing games but one thing that always drives me crazy about "serious" racing games is that they dont let you do this. Like the auteurs and experts are all like: no that's cheap arcade stuff, in real life you would be spinning around in circles the second you leave the optimal racing line, actually scraping the walls should essentially forfeit the race right then and there.
Now it's a proven valid tactic!

For me without question it's Shadowman on the N64. That whole game is just a trip through hell from start to finish. But my worst memory is fighting Jack the Ripper. Wading through a dank subterranean labyrinth while Jack, possessed by the devil, is scuttling around like a cockroach on speed, popping up out of nowhere to attack you... And our man Shadowman is not the lightest on his feet, that's for sure.

I always find it cute when this site just does its darnedest to be fair: spends three quarters of a review talking about what it would be like to play the game in question, if it weren't the Switch version. The truth comes at the end, and it's already been spoiled by the subheadline: the product as reviewed is a pile of trash, don't buy it. It's nice to be nice, the original devs made a great game; but a garbage port, or a garbage cloud version, is the only thing that a player is going to take away from the experience, and it's just not acceptable. Even less, a cloud version of a garbage port: if they're just going to pipe video across to us for $60 then they should be running that thing on 4090s in the back end, essentially the PC version with everything perfectly tuned. There is absolutely no excuse.

This looks great! As long as it's not like $30 I'll be picking this up for sure. Never even played it on the 64 but watching that trailer, all the old magazine screenshots came flooding back.

Wow, this looks like a cut above Toree 1&2 judging by that trailer. And those were already excellent games at a similarly excellent price.

Would this be recommended to someone who found the combat in Astral Chain utterly painful and incomprehensible? I always wanted to try Bayonetta but after putting a few hours into Astral Chain I've been made really wary.

That American one looks absolutely terrible... But... On closer inspection it seems to be actually a character model from the game. You can see the polygons and everything! Anyone bold enough to put their polygon model on the front of the box is a winner in my book.

@Mjoen they're definitely playable now but "better than ever" is absolutely false. The definitive edition's sole reason for existing at all is so that we can play it on the Switch. Other than that though, the originals are by far the best. Cohesive graphical styles which fit the polygon count, full music track listing, low system requirements so you can play them at high resolution... These games never needed to be remastered; the new models and AI upscaled textures just make them weird.

I wonder what exactly is the deal with cross-play. At one point devs were saying that it's essentially just "tick a box" to implement but the platform holders weren't allowing it. And then it became allowed, and a few high-profile games rolled it out. But not all. Why? Is there some crazy fee involved? Is it more complicated technically than we give it credit for?

@BigE the only problem with Minecraft is that it cannibalizes one's interest in other games.
...and work, and relationships, and socialising...
Seriously I was scared of Minecraft for about 8 years; I could tell what it would do to me! Then I overcame some huge challenges in my life, including moving to a country where I don't speak the language, and getting married... As a personal reward, I bought myself Minecraft and gave myself permission to just enjoy the **** out of it. 3 years later and I've clocked thousands of hours on Switch and PC, it's just a game which keeps on giving. It's never too late to start; in some ways the first steps are the most exciting. I watch videos where people say "this is too overpowered" and "that is too easy to get in the early game" - these people have forgotten that the "early game" in Minecraft is not when you start a new world with nothing to your name; it's when you start playing entirely with no knowledge to your name. When you never know what's around the corner and how deep the game really goes. It's fun to be a master, and wiki up the exact programming of how something works in order to build or farm efficiently, but those first steps will be the ones that you remember forever.

Been playing this for over a year now on PC; still playing it in fact. It's a lovely, truly chill game. But it must be said that it pretty quickly funnels you into building the same thing every time: clomp all the trees off in one direction, all the houses in another, and all the fields in another. Then do your best to keep an unbroken network of rivers and an unbroken network of railway lines (just send them off in tangents of their own so that nothing else gets in their way) and that's the game. So you don't really find yourself building interesting towns. But as a game it is just the perfect amount of challenge; it's unbelievably chill.

One thing that annoys me is the way this site keeps mentioning the OLED switch as if it's some kind of game changer. "we used to wish for a bigger screen, at least before the OLED model came along". Guys, the OLED screen is like 2mm bigger than the OG model and everyone knows it. It's literally the same size machine with a slightly smaller bezel. Blatantly made-up statements like this make it clear that you're under some weird instruction to try to manufacture status for this thing. Half of the reviews say "looks fantastic on OLED" which is completely irrelevant. Just leave it alone, stop trying to make OLED-pride happen, it's the most minor hardware iteration in the history of Nintendo.

Looks really nice, I have impulse-bought MUCH worse games than this for a couple of bucks on the e-shop.

As a PSA, stay away from these like the plague:
Super Clown
Funny Truck
Lawnmower Mortal Race
Sky Ride
Animals Transport Simulator (this one doesn't even support buttons in the menus, you need to use the touch screen even in docked mode!)

In my opinion, one of the reasons why this is true is because Rockstar haven't made a new GTA game in 10 years. They are the kings of music licensing - at least they were - and trailblazers in general.
Another reason (if you'll forgive me for being old) is that pop music is boring, and modern pop music is a dead end when you consider how few people actually buy albums and how the internet age has torn down the monolith of "everybody is listening to this". If you play an EA game or an Epic game, they'll rotate you through a few utterly forgettable tunes on their "live service" offering which may be trending at any given time. But you need the GTAs and the Tony Hawks to say "blam, here's whole stations of curated punk, gangsta, hardcore, R&B, reggae, 80s pop, 80s metal, house, 2010s dance, 2000s indie, 90s alternative, etc." Music that is a selling point as opposed to background noise. I've put about 20 hours into Need For Speed Hot Pursuit on the Switch, and it is constantly playing licenced music, but it's essentially inaudible over the sound effects and if I change the mix they reveal themselves to be nothingburger tunes anyway. The game was clearly designed for you to not pay attention to this music. That focus and respect is what has really disappeared in my opinion.
In short, I am really interested to see what Rockstar finally end uo doing with GTA 6. The entertainment industry has moved on a lot from the times of GTA 4 & 5.

That's one schizophrenic product description. Unlimited inventory? Real Time Strategy? This is a game where you hold accelerate and go forward really fast, right?

Behold... Content!

How about WWF Warzone? There's a (surely better) sequel on the N64, and then there were those Smackdown games that everybody loved, but Warzone was the game that I spent months with my friends creating wrestlers and learning the subtle art of slowly advancing on a foe, making Jaws noises while swinging around a big-ass CRT TV.

@NESlover85 it also depends on how old/big your world file is, I think. For me it routinely takes 2 or three tries to start playing on Switch - it just tries for a minute or so and then fails and you have to start again. I assume it's because I've been playing the same world for 4 years and it's so big that the Switch won't even let me make a copy of it (there seems to be hard limit of 1gb save file per title on the Switch). I also have it on PC but being able to play on my portable buddy is priceless.

Wait, Rare Replay? Are you telling me that on the Xbox it's possible to buy this and not have it tied to a subscription service?

I always saw this as a casualty of the school shooting fiasco in the late 90s. However I'm starting to think that the functionality was just a little too lame, uncanny, and more importantly: unpolished (unpolishable?) for a Rareware N64 game.

Oh man I have zero time for more JRPGs in my life, but I'll simply have to get these!

Now I'm no Dragon Ball Z expert, but isn't power level 5 pretty weak? If you're not OVER 9000 then you're not even competing!