Pandaman

@Mr_Muscle - There is bound to be a negative opinion of the game out there. Maybe it can be you if you’re lucky!

I fixed the typo on Neir, thank you to the 63,638,018 of you who pointed it out 👍

@Heavyarms55 - I'd love to talk to Pokemon and Splatoon competitors. I don't know any! Feel free to refer any of them to me on twitter.

@Tendogamerxxx Thanks for taking the time out to read. Now that we’ve got this sentiment out of the way early, feel free to discuss Melee, everyone.

@theabstractart All features are written ahead of time and scheduled out in advance. Just something to keep in mind, thanks for reading.

Every day I count my blessings that my NL teammates know so much about jrpgs so that I don’t have to. Great interview Zion and Austin!

@gergelyv YOU try writing 7 articles in like two days...

(That's a joke. Thanks for the catch!)

@Spoony_Tech - That's fair, but it's hard to convey just how good this game looks in motion. It's not like we haven't gotten this style in a game before, but it's rarely done so well. Maybe imagine if Killer 7 were to come out today, and that's sort of how this game comes across aesthetically.

@RazumikhinPG - This game is not a Switch exclusive, but when I spoke with the dev team, they were very upfront with the fact that Switch was a target console before development began. That matters because development has to accommodate the Switch's specs from the preliminary stages onward, as opposed to being scaled back and losing core features, like many ported games often do.

The more important thing is that Paradox has been in communication with Nintendo for a long time. They announced this game to the world through the Nintendo Direct, keep in mind. It's a big deal to them that it's on a Nintendo console and this is evident if only through them personally reaching out to Nintendo Life for PR. If you like strategy games you should look into this one.

@Yoshi You don’t walk square to square like in a grid, you just don’t have free movement. It’s kind of in the middle of the two, if that makes sense. If you take the stick and shake it really fast, the camera gets super confused and shakes the screen, which is why I say it’s not free roaming. It’s close, though.

@JonSpangler - I only read Nintendo Life for the articles.

@Blizzia I appreciate your passion against pull-quotes, but they truly are an industry wide practice. And I don’t mean gaming industry, I mean basically print journalism since the dawn of the printing press.

They’re really good for scannabilty!

@nuovian I purposefully used the word “roughly” when describing the namesake - what’s clear to anyone, whoever, is that all these events are nearly identical to one another, even when the branding differs very, very slightly.

@OorWullie This is my favorite picture of Reggie.

@DK-Fan

Do Ubisoft, Platinum, Bethesda and Blizzard, and countless indies not count? Did Reggie have the OPTION to boost the Western half of the company?

The ability to keep a revenue stream from the 3DS this long, correct course with the Switch (in a suspect market for console gaming), and to establish so much licensing in the west were all deeply influenced by, yes, Reggie.

Also, you are correct, the article is explicitly about Reggie being a PR spokesperson. Thanks for reading!

Fun fact: I do think that Tetris is the "best" video game ever made, in terms of curating a universal experience that is timeless. Meaning that it translates 100%, no matter the era. Even my favorite video game of all time, Mario Bros. 3, can't necessarily claim that it will withstand all aging and be 100% engaging without explanation forever and ever.

@AlienigenX - In order to get this DOWN to 3,000 words, yes, footnotes like how Street Smash was basically a nod to the series' origins were cut out. Good eye!

@ItalianBaptist - I love this footnote. The first place I had ever heard of Smash Bros. was that very issue of Nintendo Power, and my friends and I freaked the eff out.

(I also enjoyed Beetle Adventure Racing.)

@SonOfVon Dean Ayala said there were "no plans" to currently port Hearthstone a year ago. The key takeaway is that a lot has happened at the company since a year ago, not to mention that lead devs don't hand that kind of information out.

In this talking point, I argued how the financial shift left from Bungie's departure may light a fire at Activision-Blizzard to seek shorter-term projects to fill the financial hole, and that the results of that may have already been set in motion.

....not that Destiny is coming to Switch.

@datkoops It wasn't a comprehensive list, and I think I had CS:GO on a previous draft. Must have slipped off somehow. Regardless, there are technically more games that would "make" that list, but after culling around 20, I think the point was made. Good eye though!

If you guys like these sorts of features, let us know!

Please never forget my Waluigi cosplay. https://imgur.com/a/zOFmUuM

@Henmii - Unfortunately, reviews have come to mean "how to spend money". But critical analysis should ideally have no bearing on economics. We want to read reviews of a car before we buy one. Do we want to see a review of a painting before we pay to look at it?

If people think that's a false equivalency, it's only because gaming media has skewed what reviews were meant to be in the first place.

If you want games to "be art", we should treat them like art, not like consumer reviews where you add up all the pros and cons and deduce a cumulative score, like they were a device to purchase. Instead, tell us what they meant to you.

If you ever thought you shouldn't buy or even PLAY something because it said "7" at the end of a webpage, that is reason #1 to get rid of binary reviews.

I have a few empty 1st edition boxes I kept for posterity. People sometimes offer me money just for THAT.

@Mijzelffan - I thought someone might bring that up, but take that statement to mean more of how things are done in the modern Smash era, so to speak. It's true that Marth and Roy didn't have their "own" stage (they defaulted to the Hyrule stage), but this was largely due to the very unorthodox manner in which they were included into the game in the first place. Sakurai had to fight hard to put them in relatively last minute, to the point where they didn't even localize their voices into English. Roy almost wasn't even included overseas.

Since 2001, and largely before it too, the formula is as described, which is the most important thing when trying to make predictions.

@MeloMan Thanks for the kind words, and yeah, I've seen the speculation that third parties will get echos. It's very possible. (I think Shadow or Tails are the most likely.) But I don't think it's the MOST possible outcome, simply given licensing is such a strenuous and road blocking type of thing. Sakurai is on the record saying that even getting individual Pokemon licensed is a massive pain and takes a ton of the team's resources. With that logic in mind, I think it's less likely that the final stretch months will be a pletheora of licensed characters, but again, this is defnitely not outside the realm of possibility.

@LasermasterA I'll address that. The Golden Sun franchise has had next to zero action taken on it in over 8 years. Camelot has largely been Nintendo's sports game developer. It's fairly rare that a character becomes all the way playable under those conditions, and if anything, plenty of other periphery Nintendo characters like Dillon and Chibi-Robo would have had greater chances of "making it". Not to mention Ultimate is just a massive bumper crop of "DUDES WITH SWORDS" as is.

Yeah, ANYTHING is possible, but color me shocked if they saved Isaac, a fairly obscure character, as one of the very last things announced.

@SamuFinland Yes, I believe it's just called "Flat Zone X" now.

@Not_Soos That's a wire crossed typo, thanks for pointing it out!

@shani Thanks for the comment. A couple things.

First, the toy is surprisingly comfortable. It’s actually quite a feat that I didn’t notice it was there while playing. Take that into consideration.

Secondly, I’m not equating colors with youngness. (For my own tastes, I prefer wide palettes.) But my experience with the game really impresioned on me a preteen vibe. It’s hard to quantify but it just sort of exudes it through its characters and voice acting and more.

I constantly underestimate children and I am absolutely positive some 7 year olds will smoke this game. I imagine a larger amount will just take the toy off and play with that, versus negotiate intergalactic peace through a series of choice based dialogue trees.

HEY NOT ALL OF THE NL STAFF WILL MISS THIS GUYS

I freaked out and thought Tom had written something new

@Ooyah First a port, then a staggered release, then another port...Bethesda may be a strong supporter, but testing the waters one small release at a time is still a valid description, I think. It's also exactly what I would be doing if I were them too.

To be fair, I've lost a ton of hours to this game on PC...

Oh this is neat because I bought this DLC TEN YEARS AGO*

*approx.

This game's cover art and name aren't doing it any favors (Sorry, Jason.)

But the premise, execution, and all around imagination of this game is WELL worth your time and money. It's one of the most clever, cutest, and inventive games in some time, and reminds us what the medium of video games could do, if only game makers were more willing or able to experiment.

Seriously, buy this game.

If you're on the fence and also don't mind a little menu management, go for it. My girlfriend lost a week straight to this game - it's great!

@shani Well, the system was heavily tethered to a stand, so I couldnt easily move it around in my hands (even though I eventually did.) Nobody mentioned anything to me about motion controls, I dont remember the system moving anything on the screen by default, and I wasn't able to take the joy cons off the system. Sorry, that's as much as I know!

I should say this before this gets buried.

If this at all matters to anyone, I played the game on Switch for at least an hour straight, and literally it wasn't until the very end where it even occurred to me, "oh! I guess I should ask what the frame rate is." The game plays more than fine.

@polarbear That's a great question, and sadly I didn't think to ask that. We'll certainly make a note of that on our eventual review though!

I should note its possible this is already known via a treehouse interview or something, I just can't recall hearing anything about that. If anyone knows, feel free to comment.

Pictures are of me. If they were of Alex, you'd be able to see his British accent.

@Knuckles I blame writing at 1am.

Hear me out: the music in Sonic Mania wasn't "bad"...though to my ears they sounded a little bit like "muzak". A little too on the nose and not taking as bold of risks as the original titles did. Don't focus on that comment too hard.

It wasn't distracting, it just was a little bit cloying when held up to the standards of the original games, which this game obviously begs the player to constantly do.

@Kienda I love hearing stories like that. To this day, I remember with great detail having my parents play Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt with me. Maybe one day your son will similarly tell their friends of how they used to explore Hyrule with their family!

@The-Chosen-one Sorry you had to read this. Have you checked out your local library? There's plenty of better writers than me over there!

For a term that's existed for maybe a calendar year, there sure are some zealous defenders of the term...

Relax, people. Card Jockey was a low budget game with low budget marketing! It's Christmas!

@GammaPhonic Controller seemed normal length?

Door is completely shut, not able to be opened in anyway. Its just cosmetic.

The controller seemed 100% identical to the original NES controller.

@EXP If it were me, I wouldn't use the word "soulless". The special item animations were quite glorious, and if they came from, say, any indie game, that game would be heralded for its extreme inventiveness. I wouldn't argue, however, that the game takes Paper Mario to anyplace it hasn't been already, at least with my time with it.

PSA: I went hands on with this game recently too. It's not....bad!