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@Poco_Lypso It's Assassin's Creed. You can bro-hug Leonardo da Vinci, accompany Paul Revere along his infamous Midnight Ride, upgrade your Revolutionary War-era warship with iron siding (not in use in the Americas until the Civil War), and shoot a man in the face with a spring-loaded wrist cannon in 13th Century Syria, among other things.

@-wc- The answer: a lot of sequels. Netherrealm Studios and the Mortal Kombat franchise are among the few sectors of Warner Bros. Games that aren't financially imploding, so the executives have announced their intention to focus on MK/Batman/Harry Potter for the foreseeable future.

I still collect Amiibo figurines, and I'm glad Amiibo fever has cooled to its current level, which is just right. Enough to douse the mad rush and speculation (except for Pyra/Mythra and Noah/Mio — bully for Xenoblade), but not so much that the Amiibo line follows Skylanders and Disney Infinity into the graveyard.

I liked the EO version of Capcom vs. SNK 2. Seeing a horde of Blankas and Sagats roll-spam their way into supremacy got old fast. That having been said, I'm glad there are options for the original and EO versions. Choice is good.

Reminds me of Nintendo of America being reluctant to localize the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64, thinking it wouldn't be much of a hit here.

I'm guessing that this is what they "outsource" the Battle Frontier post-game to, much like Pokémon Home obviated the need for individual games to have a comprehensive National Pokédex.

@RiasGremory Dragon Quest XI S wasn't just a port of the vanilla DQXI. It was an entirely different SKU, recompiled from the ground up to run on Switch hardware. It was advertised as a timed Nintendo exclusive and thus subject to all of Nintendo's strictures regarding exclusives (Nintendo controlled the pricing, dictated if/when it could come to other platforms, published the game, etc.)

A "slightly revamped" version? That's doing it a disservice. They added so much stuff and redid the whole game from the ground up. The additions and fixings were so extensive, it was impossible to just add a "Definitive Edition" DLC to the original SKU.

Switch copy here. I also have it as a gifted copy on my PC, but I never touched it there because I found it better for on-the-go gaming.

A needed W for Square-Enix. And right on the heels of yet another of its Games-as-a-Service (Foamstars) ventures being prematurely taken off of life support.

Seems almost quaint to have Kyo on a cover again instead of Terry.

The Wii U's graphics plus the 3DS's balance changes and extra stages. I probably won't get it Day 1, but I'll pick it up eventually.

What in the world did they do to Goldlewis? What kind of evil person on ArcSys's balancing team decided that this already good character could use the ability to chain three Behemoth Typhoons together?

I like the idea of horror movie characters fighting each other, but I kind of wish they were their own discrete game instead of DLC for Mortal Kombat games.

This is the UK. Anything Nintendo that isn't a Mario EAD/EPD platformer, Mario Kart, or Zelda isn't staying on the charts for long anyway.

It depends on which arm of The Sony Group is doing the purchasing.
Sony Music has historically done well with Nintendo collabs. They've published soundtracks for series like Zelda and Mother and have advertised things like the Switch port of Fate/Extella through Fate/Grand Order. Sony Pictures will be working with Nintendo and Arad Productions to distribute the upcoming live-action Zelda movie.

If it's Sony Interactive Entertainment (the division that owns the PlayStation brand), however, that's a wrap. Part of the reason why Nintendo pulled Smash out of the EVO fighting game tournament lineup was because of EVO being bought out by Sony Interactive.

@Zeebor15 I feel as if I'm being gaslit whenever someone mentions the Gamecube era and its games as "Nintendo's golden age". Back when I was a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, the Gamecube was "the kiddie purple lunchbox" and the cool kids on the block got themselves a PS2 or Microsoft's newfangled XBOX machine. I'm glad people realize how great the Gamecube and its games are now, but where was all this love when the system was on the market?

Probably not Day 1, but I'm definitely getting this.

My character's going to be a rusty old man as always, so I don't really have a dog in this fight.

People always did say that Switch firmware patches introducing more stability was boring. Now we have one that introduces INSTABILITY.

Wonder had its flaws, and I certainly won't disagree with anyone who was sorely disappointed. But it was the most fan I personally had with a Mario platformer in a long time.

Disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. It was a good, but not stellar, game.

Being outsold by the great new RPG hit from the people behind Persona, the long-anticipated remake of a classic horror game, and DBZ doesn't seem all that bad.

@LavenderShroud If it was anything Soul Calibur, it would have been a port of VI rather than VII. My guess is it's a new IP that didn't quite make it off of the drawing board.

I'd say yes, but the effect wasn't as pronounced on me since it was on the same developer, same engine, and same aesthetic as Link's Awakening (Switch). I had a good idea of what I was in for and adjusted my expectations accordingly.

This is for the best. Rollback on Wi-Fi is a mind screw and a half.

@Dr_Corndog Sakurai and Nintendo have different balance metrics than everyone else. Who knows? Maybe Steve tends to get smacked around harder and beaten earlier than the rest in, say, full 4-Player Free for Alls. We know that heavies like Ganondorf and King Dedede do much better in FFAs than in one-on-one fights because they can rush in, swing wide, and score bunches of kills with relative ease.

I know the Internet's all afire about Cyrax and Sektor being girls. But I don't care about that. I'm just annoyed that it looks like things are settling right back into the old status quo despite the massive superficial changes, making the reboot pointless.

Shang Tsung and Quan Chi have become evil and formed a Deadly Alliance™. Again.
Bi Han is going to be killed and become Noob Saibot. Again.
And it looks like they're going to revisit the whole thing of Cyrax and Kuai Liang fighting Sektor to determine the direction of the Lin Kuei. Again.

Then again, Mortal Kombat 1 is hardly alone in being guilty of this. Street Fighter and Tekken are resurrecting their iconic big bads, M. Bison and Heihachi, despite the previous games in both series making a big show of killing them off and going out of their way to make everyone believe they were out of the game for good.

I know people are probably going to be disappointed that The Thousand-Year Door isn't on track to overtake Origami King, but here's how I look at it. In just one month and a week, it has closed in on its lifetime Gamecube sales. I view that as a good thing.

It's probably mobile or non-video game related. Anyone remember that arcade battler that Pokémon showed off at Marvelous's direct stream earlier this year?

What I want is for the option to be there to change between the original chiptunes and the Sugiyama Kobo orchestral soundtrack I know they're itching to put in there. Nothing wrong with the orchestrals; they're among the best in the video game business. It's just a little straining on the ears to constantly hear them. Variety is the spice of life, and choice is always good.

@dskatter Longtime TYPE-MOON fan here. Mahoyo's localization wasn't the best. They had to give it another pass when they released the PC version, and they promised to backport the updated localization of the PC version to the existing PS4 and Switch versions. As of today, they have yet to do so.

So some skepticism of Tsukihime's localization was warranted. Thankfully, I've heard only good things about this one.

I'd hope so. The biggest game in that collection by far, and the only one that could possibly require more than a gigabyte of space, is Marvel vs. Capcom 2. If there was a forced digital download, that would mean Capcom paid for the cheapest possible cartridge, which would make me wonder what other corners they could have possibly cut.

@Kirbyo The real reason, of course, is that it barely runs on mid-spec machines like the XBOX Series S and the Steam Deck. The optimization needed to pare this game down to the Switch's specs would be too much trouble.

Nothing else. As a note to the more conspiratorial-minded, it's worth noting that neither Nintendo nor The Pokémon Company had any trouble with games like Nexomon, YO-KAI Watch, or TemTem coming to the Switch.

@KBuckley27 That's why I mentioned the in-house EPD specifically. That team mainly does Mario, Mario Kart, Splatoon, and Zelda. Everything else is up to other teams or affiliates.

In any case, no modern console as of late has really flown out of the gate frontloaded with their best IPs in the first year. Development time simply doesn't allow for that.

@KBuckley27 I'm pretty sure we're getting a lot of that. Practically everything from the June 2024 Direct for the Switch was from third-party studios or former third-party studios like Retro. It's a safe assumption that the in-house Nintendo EPD is cooking up something for the successor, but we won't know what it is until closer to the official announcement. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, for example, took only four months from announcement to release.

@Snatcher There were musings to that end, yes. At least one person even outright alleged that Nintendo never confirmed MP4 would remain on the current Switch. Despite the Switch logo at the beginning and the end. Despite Nintendo repeatedly stressing that there was going to be nothing on whatever succeeded the Switch going into the June 2024 Direct.

To protect the LIFE CYCLE...

OK, it's nice to have this game back for another go-around, but when is someone going to rescue Scarlet Dawn from the arcades?

Personally, I don't think creatures have to necessarily show their inspiration on their sleeves to be popular. One of my favorites in the modern era, Comfey, is literally just a lei with a face drawn onto one of the flowers.

I bought the game shortly after its launch, played through it, beat it 100%. It could have been made by a sweet baby or a sour grandpa, for all I care.

It was, to turn a phrase used today, "mid". Not terrible, but not great. There were some glaring flaws that brought down the end product, and I told Nintendo as such in the survey E-mailed to me. The worst part by far was the mandatory escape sequence near the end of the game, after the penultimate boss. It was much more difficult than any of the actual fights, requiring precision platforming and usage of all the tools in the game, but a lot of the difficulty in that was due to the game eating inputs and the ridiculous rubber-banding of the lava rendering it near-impossible to gain a sufficient lead on it. There was only one checkpoint, meaning that you had to go through the brunt of it again if you made one simple mistake (or, more often, if the game refused to recognize a button press). Tweaking the difficulty made no effect on this, as the hazards were lava or spikes and thus instant death. Difficulty like this was fine with the optional platform segments that awarded you Trinkets, but it should not have been on a mandatory sequence right after a boss fight in order to finish the game.

I also objected to the main character being lauded as "selfless" when he was clearly just undergoing his odyssey for the very self-serving reason that he was unable to accept that his father had passed on. Anyone he helped on his journey was just an incidental side-effect of this. He was courageous and resourceful, certainly, but his goals were less than noble; and I felt the game took a little longer than I cared for him or the narrative to acknowledge that.

Next, the presentation. If the game zoomed out enough and you were playing on a large enough screen, Zau's outline could blur into the background and made it hard to pinpoint his presence, which made things unnecessarily hard during tense fights or platforming sequences.

Finally, and this is likely exclusive to the Switch version (hadn't played the other platforms), the frame rate was passable normally but slowed to a crawl during moments like the Spirit Dance fight gauntlets or the aforementioned escape scene.

I, for one, hope they cast their net a little wide. The next main line from Game Freak is a safe bet, but how about some offerings from Spike Chunsoft? HAL Labs? Namco-Bandai? Maybe even Capcom?

"Finally, the crown will come to me."

@Greatluigi For all the noise it makes on social media, "censorship" boycotts don't move the needle in sales either way nearly as much as one would think, especially for AAA-funded games like this.

To wit, games like Fire Emblem Fates or Xenoblade Chronicles X would have succeeded with or without their respective censorship debacles. On the other side of the coin, you have games like Tokyo Mirage Sessions, which released on the Japanese Wii U one year prior to its Western debut and still underperformed in that year well before there was a localization to take issue with.

It's entirely possible that Nintendo just decided the API fees were too high to pay for too little gain and it has nothing to do with Musk or his personal or political quirks. Sony cut Twitter/X out of its ecosystem as well.

@BrazillianCara That makes two of us. The "turn it green" variant of Shiny is my second least favorite, ranking right down there with "barely any differentiation from the original" (here's looking at you, Tandemaus).

I remember as a child playing Sonic R on a computer with a 100mhz processor at 5 seconds per frame (not frames per second) and still somehow having fun. This not having 60 is an annoyance, but I'll live.

The game could be developed, funded, and marketed by flesh-eating Jovian lizards, for all I care. Is it fun to play?

I see a decent, inexpensive Metroidvania with middling-to-good reviews from a developer who clearly poured their heart and soul into it. And it runs well on the Switch with few compromises, unlike many other of its multiplatform contemporaries. That's all I could ask for.

If Mavado has to come back, I'm glad it's just as an Assist. Seriously, does anyone actually like the Red Dragon characters (Mavado, Hsu Hao, Daegon)?

I didn't get the Mario & Luigi survey, but Nintendo sent me one of these surveys back in November of last year. The topic? Pokémon.

I kind of let them have it on how buggy and badly programmed Scarlet and Violet were in the comment section of the survey. Respectfully, of course, but forcefully. I hope others did the same.

Calling it now — this has nothing to do with the games and is another multimedia arm.