OmnitronVariant

@johnedwin Oh ok so 1m on Switch 2 in five days then. That’s more than most first party games.

@ShadLink They do not run the NSO emulator, as evidenced by the way they handle scaling and use sub-pixel scrolling.

These are not lazy ports, but I don't expect game journalists to really dig into things anymore. For one thing, the emulator uses sub-pixel scrolling, something that you wouldn't get on NSO — or any other emulator out there that I know of, not without specific hacks. What I mean by this is that it scrolls tiles per pixel of the output display, not just the rendered upscaled pixels. I've done this for some of my own 2D games, but to implement it for an existing ROM like this is quite different. It makes this so much more nice to play on big displays.

@MARNY Then buy digital?

Pre-ordered digital, I want to play this regardless of reviews. But seeing as they're all positive is great.

This looks absolutely amazing. Finally a killer app for Switch 2.

Even with the best DLSS out there on high end GPU’s, 360p to 1080p will have significant artefacts, shimmer and image blurriness issues I personally can’t stand.

It’s commendable that it runs on a 10w handheld at all at decent framerates but I would vastly prefer a game made specifically for the hardware. I won’t buy this in Switch 2 and will just wait until I one day have better hardware to play it on.

This looks really janky. Which might have its charms but it's certainly not what I expect from a NIS game

@weisske Z-A was not broken on release. I played it. And it was a 70+ hour game before the DLC.

@beltmenot I sat on the fence on this game for years and years because I foolishly let myself get turned off originally due to online hyperbole. When I finally played it a few years ago on PC I absolutely loved it. Played 100+ hours vanilla, then hundreds more modded over the years since. Equally glad people with only a Switch 2 get to play it now, even if I don't have a reason to buy it here myself.

@RoboCube Like Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue. You cannot compete with free in pricing, but you can in ease of access and use, and quality.

I gladly pay $20 for a tested and fully functional emulated standalone copy of Fire Red on Switch even though I could (illegally) play it for free on my phone. Because I don’t want random minor emulation issues with sound, for example, and because I prefer the controls. And to me the game is worth it.

@Filthy Hard disagree. In my opinion, slop are things like Call of Duty that barely innovate in anything but graphics. Pokemon games try a lot of different and new things with each generation, and particularly with their spin-offs. That also means they won't please the same audience with every release, but I vastly prefer that. I didn't like Moon or Sword much at all personally, but Violet, Arceus and Z-A were all fantastic and very different experiences. Just because they're not up there with the best of the best in graphics doesn't matter much to me if the gameplay is solid.

@JohnnyMind It's only a tiny tiny minority of people that even bother commenting on sites such as this. I didn't for years, and I frequently regret it. I have a lot of friends who play a lot of games and just never interact with any forums, comment fields, or social media surrounding games. They just buy what they think looks cool and play their games.

The comments we get here are the extremes from all angles. That is to say, people who feel strongly enough to be either against or for something. Most don't. The game is too expensive? They buy something else. The game doesn't work to their liking? They get a refund (on Steam) or get miffed and spend less money for a while.

I intend to get Fire Red, but why do people pre-order digital games that are a few dozen megabytes in size..? There’s no benefit in preloading then, and you lose the benefit of first impressions pointing out potential technical issues.

@mikegamer People need to grow up for using their handheld hybrid console in handheld mode..? If my aim with Switch 2 was to use it exclusively docked, I personally would've bought a PS5.

@DennisReynolds It fares the worst in handheld. So no.

@Strictlystyles The way it looks in handheld on Switch 2 is absolutely crippled. There's no nice way to put it; it's an awful upscaling method that looks objectively bad.

I got called crazy for calling out how bad it looks in handheld. Well well well.

@Max_the_German How about you actually learn Japanese before you claim the man isn't communicating properly!? The article is featuring a machine mistranslation... What he's actually writing is "these people are the worst of the worst". That's the correct reading of the idiomatic expression he used.

@Olliemar28 See my comment, he isn’t. It’s an idiomatic expression, it means «these people are the worst of the worst» in context.

You know, I get translating Japanese isn't easy and going with Google Translate's very literal translation is what most journalists do, but it's worth pointing this out:

Kamiya writes: 万死に値する -> ba n shi ni a ta i su ru (split up into vowels for clarity)

This is an expression that has the following two (common) meanings:

to be the worst of the worst / to deserve to die ten thousand deaths

It is an idiomatic expression. In this context one would assume the former meaning. What he is saying is "these people are the worst of the worst, and they deserve to never play games again".

I'm still learning Japanese, but even at my limited knowledge, the amount of sloppy translations being passed around is really annoying. No wonder Kamiya refuses to speak with most western journalists at this point: Over and over again they've mistranslated or misrepresented his statements like this.

@Jeronan Base NSO is significantly cheaper than NSO+. Most people won’t bother with + I reckon, and it’s a lot cheaper buying a few individual games you’re interested in than subscribing for NSO+ in perpetuity with a price that will inevitable increase over time

I don't remember any of them from this gen at this point other than Greninja, but I'm not a big fan of the super anthropomorphised designs.

While I intend to get Fire Red, I’m gonna wait for first impressions in case there’s issues. For example if we can’t choose scaling of the image I might have to skip.

How is there not even a tweet celebrating this..? Nintendo is weird sometimes.

Sad if true. I’d much rather buy individual games I'm interested in.

What does it take for a Nintendo product to get a 5/10? Hospitalisation?

@Eek132 No not everyone. I’m very happy about this being a separate one-time purchase. There’s multiple different viewpoints on this.

@Krlozgod Good. Having cheats a button press away ruin games on NSO for me. Same with the Rayman collection released recently. I accidentally pressed ZL and rewound a missed jump, and lost all interest in playing. It's absolutely a "me" problem, but having cheats integrated into the game like that breaks them for me.

@Torakaka They're standalone releases, not on NSO. I will assume by all previous examples that they won't have rewind nor save states. They've never had this on any previous release, virtual console or not.

Them dropping this a week in advance of the Presents makes me think that thing might be a chonky one

I get to actually buy them. Holy *****. That makes me so happy.

youtube.com/watch?v=2XtUBojjZAk

This looks atrocious in handheld. What have they done with the upscaler here? It looks almost like those early-2000's "painter" filters for photo editor software.

And they're charging money for this..?

@Discostew If you look at side by side comparisons by GameXplain (youtu.be/EQsvNDIN1I0) it's pretty obvious the increased fidelity is just a higher render target + upscaling. There might be slightly longer draw distance of the highest resolution for textures (like on cliffs and large monsters), and there's improvements to texture filtering. All of these are configuration changes.

The reason the filesize difference is large might be because the patch replaces distant textures with their higher res counterpart copies lazily, to avoid having to make larger changes to the engine. The download is 4mb per Nintendo's eShop.

Maybe I'm wrong and it really is 1gb, but if so, there's not any improvement to the textures overall, it doesn't change that, as evidenced by comparison footage.

@DennisReynolds There’s no better textures, and the framerate and res boost is just a config change + using DLSS.

@YorkshireNed They didn’t fix that..? Man. I guess that’d be another five bucks down the road for the Definitive Plus Edition.

This doesn’t run well on current gen home console hardware. It was never fixed because it’s fundamentally flawed. This port is going to be a disaster, much like MHS3.

@Indielink Not true. Most PC games get updates for years when new innovations in hardware occur, and the expectation and norm is they're all free. Things like ray tracing support, highres textures, ultrawide support, and on and on. I have been playing games on PC for decades; this is very much a console thing, and even more so a Nintendo thing.

But hey, as long as people are willing to pay, it's the cheapest money out there.

Paid upgrade. No thanks. Didn’t really enjoy the game’s design anyway so while reduced input lag and nicer framerate would entice me to give it another go, not when it’s paid. It’s just a settings file unlock…

Now where’s XC2 and 3 upgrades? They deserve it so much more

I presume this has to do with some regional age ratings boards needing to be notified of updates?

Skyrim is a very CPU intensive game. You can't compare it to something like Resident Evil or Pragmata with limited NPC logic and set pieces. The Switch 2 has a very anemic CPU setup — this is why Skyrim runs significantly better on a Steam Deck, which has an inferior GPU. People are comparing apples to oranges. That the game is 13 years old is irrelevant.

Even if I wanted to try these games, the accessory isn't even available for purchase in northern Europe. Nintendo won't even sell it here. No I haven't voted because of that, I simply won't be able to have an opinion anyway.

60fps mode seems to run really smooth from my brief testing. And the crashes I experienced so far seem to be fixed as mentioned, as well. And perhaps even more importantly, input latency in 60fps mode is practically on par with PC/Steam Deck now. Good stuff!

I'd thrown mine in the dumpster a few weeks before the announcement. And although I wasn't going to buy the plastic thingy anyway, it's not even available to buy in my region.

Nintendo really cooking with this one.

@cvrator Wasn't aware of that (my Wii's been in storage for a long time), but that's good to know. Sets a nice precedent as well.

@PinderSchloss You can still redownload your 3DS games from the eShop.

@Cakefish Unless they count those MKW bundles to retailers as a MKW world sale as well? Or is that actual sell-through? Forgive me if I seem overly skeptical, but it's just very hard to believe they've sold consoles to 14m people. Perhaps there's just some extreme difference between regions because here in northern Europe, this thing just isn't selling much at all from what I can tell.

@phartsy The numbers are estimated sell-through, based on sales of units to retailers. They haven't shared actual player activations of the consoles, only their "estimated sell-through". That can include N amount of consoles sitting on retailer shelves.

I bought this digital. To my eye on Switch 2 it renders natively 1080p in handheld, I can’t see the usual upscaling side-effects on things like the game selection menu fonts. I suspect it does what some Switch games like Pokemon Violet does; detect it’s Switch 2 without a dedicated version.

I also haven’t noticed any slowdown on S2 in any of the games, and I’m also one to notice input lag, but not here.

I did notice the music being weird or cut off though… That really sucks.

My worry is how this will run on S2 in these larger more detailed areas. It's already struggling a little bit in handheld occasionally in the super simple demo areas. And seeing how badly MHS3 performs with this engine in its large open areas, I'm not too optimistic Capcom can optimise this properly.