N64-ROX

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!

Where's the review for this, NintendoLife?

I hope this is that janky catastrophe that Let's Game It Out played, that was a masterpiece.
Edit: double-checked, and yes it is! Watch this video and you'll probably find yourself much more interested in this weird game than you ever thought you would be:

What is this, a Dragon Quest protagonist with a personality?!?

Am I going crazy? I was absolutely sure that this had been out on Switch for 2-3 years already. I thought it was already in my eShop wishlist but no... Must have been some kind of Mandela Effect situation...

Not to mention, I got pretty darn excited when I read 05/12 on screen. Bit of a let down when I realised it was the North American stream.

And yeah in a Direct filled with 20 farming games and 20 anime-style RPGs, for the main headline to be "that Zelda game we've been talking about for 4 years, is still over half a year away. But we've given it a name at least" is a bit disappointing.

Once again the jackasses who continuously cite insider knowledge that Wind Waker and Twilight Princess remasters are coming, are proven to be the clickbait fakers that they are.

Even though it didn't come out of nowhere, seeing that title screen and hearing that music just put a huge smile on my face.

@Crockin @nimnio yeah I do agree as well, I was just surprised and amused by such polar opposite opinion coming from my two favourite review sites. I'd definitely say that Ars's review sounded a lot more like someone enjoying themselves while writing, as opposed to not enjoying themselves while playing.

@nimnio yeah it is Ars's thing to not give scores. But I read Ars (and Sam Machkovech in particular) because I like their style and insight. They're usually an excellent source of journalism and opinion, aside from that whole Wata Games thing which is still an anomaly to me.
Anyway to each their own; there's a certain degree of jadedness there and a certain degree of fanboyism here, it comes with the territory.

I can't imagine that anyone would do any of this crazy stuff in order to use it to play the game. This is glitching as performance art. It's done for its own sake. Let's not forget that BOTW is still a wonderful game to play normally, with solid physics and rewarding balance even if you're not stasis launching yourself miles into the air or duplicating items just to show off.

I just read a review on Ars Technica which absolutely savages this game as a complete cash grab with nothing to recommend it over Splatoon 2 at all. It's quite shocking to compare these two takes on the same game.

If I was younger and poorer I'd feel differently, but in my opinion Splatoon 3 is a fair counterpoint to free-to-play live service games. You can play Fortnite and Rocket League and it's technically the same game for like 10 years. They're not asking you to buy Fortnite 2 for $80, and having to justify that with enormous new features. But on the other hand, Splatoon isn't microtransactioning its players to death. If Nintendo were to just let you play Splatoon 2 for 10 years without a sequel, at some point they're just providing a service out of the goodness of their heart.

(edit: I forgot about the Switch Online fee... That does change the maths a bit from the consumer's perspective. Probably not much from Nintendo's perspective though)

I think this whole chapters thing was a terrible idea. I played chapter 1 when it released, really got into it, then it ended. That was 3 years ago now and I don't remember anything other than broad strokes. When chapter 2 dropped I knew that it would be pointless to play. I'd have had to replay the whole chapter 1 again to get back into it; then wait a few years for chapter 3 at which point I'd need to replay #1 & #2 again. Who out there actually enjoys a delivery setup like this?
Edit: I guess even Toby Fox realises it if he is planning to release the rest all at once. Kudos to him.

I'd love to play these games on the Switch. But I had to vote for the Backwards Compatibility / Virtual Console option (which I assume would include the ability to purchase these Gamecube games digitally since we ain't gonna be jamming disks into this thing).
I never played the Wii U version of Wind Waker but the screenshots had me shocked that they had changed the cell shaded art style. Definitely the best way to play any classic games like these is to do so as accurately as possible to the original.

That would be just too much. This machine is getting close to having pretty much every great classic game ever made. What kind of hedonistic timeline is this!

@frogopus Yeah those three are excellent also. Lucasarts were the absolute kings of the genre. Grim Fandango has the control scheme that I don't like, but it's an all-time classic for sure and it was really unique at the time.

@Mortenb nah I still disagree: with today's decades of tricks and tools and power there are indeed lots of ways to do things like this (I once implemented twinkling stars in the sky by having two cameras with different draw distances, for example) but back in the 90s there were serious constraints if they wanted to get any kind of realistic performance at all. And the proof is in the pudding: this unintuitive solution is what Nintendo chose to do. Nintendo, who knew the limitations of their own machine better than anyone.