Polvasti

@Moistnado Agreed. That's one of the reasons why I think the Mobapad M6 are the best Switch controllers, because they have a really, really good D-pad. Playing 2D platformers and action games is such a joy with that D-pad.

So these have pretty much the same features as the Mobapad M6 HD, except with the Mobapads you get HD rumble and an NFC reader for the same price (80 bucks)? Can't imagine they'll replace the Mobapads as the best Joycon alternatives then, unless you really want to have some shiny LED lights in your controller.

Out of these options, I gotta go for "Amnesia" in Nier: Automata. Like the article says, it really is emotionally devastating, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome either – the quest ends before you get bored of it. (In fact, I think one of the reasons why the sidequests in Nier: Automata are so highly rated is that almost none of them are overtly long.)

Also, "Amnesia" is an ideal sidequest in that while it isn't mandatory, completing it gives you a better grasp of the main characters and the larger plot of the game. It's not some completely trivial busywork that only rewards with you XP and items, the real reward is a deeper understanding of the game's central themes. That's how all good sidequests should be.

I gotta say Kasumi's confidant quest in Persona 5 Royal. The way they introduce a fairly stereotypical "genki girl" character and then manage to make her way more interesting and complex than you'd initially expected is a total tearjerker of a sidequest. Especially since the unexpected turns her story takes feel organic and justified; it's not like they put some shocking plot twists there just to surprise the player.

Why do the thumbnails for these videos have the people holding five games that are not actually on their top 5 list?

Agreed, Tetris Effect is really the only true answer here. Such an amazing, synaesthetic ride!

@Olliemar28 Does this game really adapt the whole plot of Horizon Zero Dawn? I found the story to be the strongest part of HZD, but it had such bleak twists (such as the revelations of what actually happened to Earth and humanity in the past), I can't imagine they would've included those in a Lego game.

Interesting characters and character development are the number one thing for me in RPGs, so if this game doesn't have that, I'll be skipping it then.

Also, finally a chance to see how the beautiful Switch-exclusive red-and-blue starship looks like in 4k resolution. 😎

Awesome, this is what I've been waiting for since the game came out on Switch two years ago. Now I can play it on the go on the Switch and continue playing on the telly with my PC. The cross-save website doesn't yet allow you to register your Nintendo account yet, but hopefully they'll add it soon.

@SBandy1 Vangelis listening to this soundtrack now would be quite a feat considering he's dead. 😁

I really hope Nintendo will release remastered editions of Metroid Prime 2 and 3 before releasing 4. I'm sure there are a lot of people like myself who don't own a Gamecube nor a Wii, so I don't really see the point of getting 4 if I can't play the earlier games in the series before that.

@Lebest Every game review is based on the reviewer's "thoughts and feelings towards a game", that's how reviews work. Your thoughts and feelings may differ, but there is no objective truth about any game which the reviewer could somehow put into words and make everyone agree with it. What a good reviewer does is explain what the game is about and give us some clear justifications for why they had those thoughts and feelings about it, so we may then consider whether we might still like the game even the reviewer didn't. This review does exactly that, and even if you disagree with it, that doesn't make it a bad one.

@Lebest You understand how reviews work, right? Just because you feel differently about the game and flood the comment section with your gushing isn't gonna make them change the review.

So it's a farming sim/RPG where you can't customise your main character or even choose their gender, so you're forced to play as an edgy-looking manga dude? No thanks.

@JohnnyMind The app doesn't seem to have an offline mode, so presumably it checks your subscription every time you use it.

The app doesn't seem to support casting? That's a shame, since pretty much every other music app does. Having to plug my phone to the amp with a headphone chord in order to hear the music on speakers is terribly old-fashioned.

@JohnnyMind Those two things are not comparable, because it's a matter of what the content that was changed actually is. Positive depictions of trans people in video games and popular culture in general are still very rare, especially in media aimed at all age groups such as a Mario game, so having the original depiction of a trans character properly reinstated in the English remake is a great thing. Whereas popular media in general, and Japanese RPGs specifically, are chock full of fanservicey, sexist depictions of women, so losing one example of such is not a big thing. (And if you're against sexism, it's actually a positive thing.)

@Synthatron_Prime The difference is, obviously, that games like BG3 offer way more customisation options than just boob size and height, so you can create characters with realistically proportioned bodies instead of merely fanservicey ones. That's proper inclusivity.

@jamess You seem to constantly misread what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying there's a "right" way to do sex, what I'm saying is that it depends on the overall tone of the game/movie/series/etc. There is such a thing as internal consistency, and I much prefer stories that keep true to their vision all the way through rather than break it for cheap thrills. I'm similarly critical of, for example, movies with anti-war themes which nevertheless depict warfare as cool and thrilling.

@jamess "Is sex taboo now or something? And who are you or I to tell the developers / creators of the game what should be in their games - it’s up to them."

Sex should obviously not be a taboo, but sexuality can be depicted without being sexist or objectifying women. (XC 3 was actually mostly really good about this with just some minor misteps.) Of course the creators have the right to do whatever they want, just like I have the right to point out that sexism and objectification go against their themes of equality and personal autonomy.

@JohnnyMind "It's sad to see that so many people still don't realize where (self-)censorship will bring us if we don't go against it no matter if it starts with something small and/or that doesn't matter to us personally despite history repeatedly teaching us this lesson..."

What you call self-censorship is something that happens all the time in commercial art and entertainment. If you're making a commercial video game (or a movie or a TV series etc.), you're not like some artist freely painting whatever their subconscious tells them on a canvas, you're always gonna think about what your target audience might like and dislike and adjust your product accordingly. The inclusion of a boob slider in the original Japanese game was obviously a concession to the horny straight male demographic, just like the exclusion of it in the Western version was a concession to people who find such concepts stupid or offensive. So this kind of "censorship" is not gonna bring us to some awful dystopia, it's always been a part of commercial media.

@jamess "But in the real world a very large part of the target audience for video games are straight men who are (sometimes!) horny. And what’s wrong with making **fun** games targeted at them?"

I'm not saying making games with content targeted for them is a problem in every case, but it is problematic in this specific case. The XC games are serious, philosophical sci-fi RPGs that deal with issues of power, equality and personal autonomy, and sex and sexuality are not really important themes in them. So the inclucion of sexist objectification of women in them is at best extraneous and distracting, and at worse it contradicts with the actual themes of the games.

@MSaturn I'm a straight cis man, but I want to see explicitly erotic imagery, I'm not gonna look for it in a serious RPG with a serious plot. Personally, I find it distracting when I'm playing a well-written, dramatic video game, and all of a sudden it's disrupted with fanservice shots of comically large boobs, butts etc. that has nothing to do with the actual plot or characters. (Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the most notorious example of this in the series, but it's not absent from 1 in 3 either.)

Not to mention that such imagery can and will alienate many players who are not straight men, and/or who find the superficial objectification of female bodies to be sexist and offputting. I mean, if you wanna make a game just for horny straight guys, that's your prerogative, but I don't think that's what the XC makers were aiming for, so the fanservice elements in them just feel so stupid.

Breast size slider sounds like a really dumb fanservice concept, since obviously its main point is not to provide a larger scale of representation rather than to give straight male players bigger boobs to ogle at. There's a reason most RPGs with character customisation haven't included a slider like that. So it if it's not included in the remastered version, that's just a good thing.

@Spider-Kev You can play NMS offline, yes. As for events like this one, you need to download the latest update which includes the event, after that you can play it offline too. You'll miss out on buildings built and messages left by other players though, which can often be very helpful in completing the event.

@BiscuitCrumbsInMyBed I've been a feminist for decades, so if you think your strawmanning struck a nerve or something, you're wrong. Standing up for women doesn't mean that no woman can ever be wrong, nor that a woman can't ever be called out if she's propagating bigotry. All the feminists I know are strongly against Rowling's transphobia and hate the fact she's trying to use her supposed feminism as a shield against the criticism of her transphobic comments.

You say you stand up for women, but do you feel it's more important to stand up for a rich, powerful cis woman or for the marginalised trans women she's targeting?

@BiscuitCrumbsInMyBed Yes, obviously someone who is "in full support of trans community" would publically call trans women "cross dressing straight men" or try to deny the historical fact that trans people were targeted by Nazis in 1930s Germany. It seems you're the one who hasn't read what she's been saying if you truly believe she's not a transphobe.

@BiscuitCrumbsInMyBed Transgendered people are among the most vulnerable groups on the planet, with a lot of them facing harassment and violence on a regular basis. If NL doesn't want to promote a game which will profit Rowling, a celebrity who's decided to use her public platform to promote prejudice and baseless misconceptions against this group, thus helping to fuel the hatred against them, they are certainly allowed to make that decision. I for one am happy they haven't given any more coverage to such a hate-monger.

@SpaceboyScreams That kind of insinuation about someone else's neurodivergence just because you disagree with them about Zelda dungeons is completely out of line. Please stop it.

@N64-ROX Game publishing isn't something that happens automatically. I'm not that familiar with the industry, but presumably the people working for Annapurna did things like discovering new game projects they could potentially publish, negotiating deals with the developers of said projects, allocating resources so the games could be finished, overseeing the overall quality of the games in production so that it meets the Annapurna standard (which, as others have said in these comments, was consistently high), etc. Considering that Annapurna has been publishing several games a year since 2017, most of which have been well liked by both critics and gamers, it's not that surprising that they needed 25 employees to do all that.

So, it's a card battler, but the promo art prominently displays some ridiculous looking balloon boobs, because...?

Free-to-play and gacha? No thank you. I'll stick to paid RPGs which don't have microtransactions, as they are one of the most rotten parts of video games as an industry.

I was considering of getting this as a physical release, but I don't wanna wait 6 months or more still before I actually get to play it, so I guess I'll go for the digital version.

I gotta agree with Pillowpants: the resolution in these seems to be too high for them to be real Game Boy cutscenes. There's more pixels than what the GB screen could show. They're still nicely done, but what's the point of making faux Game Boy graphics, if the quality is too high for the actual Game Boy?

@AlanaHagues

Blackheart was a playable character in the crossover fighting games long before his adversary, Ghost Rider (who got a cameo in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter). But we're not here to talk about Johnny Blaze!

I'm sorry for being a pedant, but as a Marvel geek I feel I have to point out that Blackheart's main adversary wasn't Johnny Blaze. Back in the nineties, when Blackheart was a popular new villain, Johnny wasn't Ghost Rider anymore, as the mantle had been passed to Danny Ketch. Johnny was still a supporting character in the Ghost Rider comics, but you wouldn't really call him Blackheart's adversary as opposed to Danny.

@PinderSchloss I'm sure the game's copy mechanic works so that by pressing a face button you'll create a copy of the latest thing you have picked from the menu without having to go there every time. The trailer shows stuff like Zelda piling several blocks of water on top of each other, and no way would the developers make this kind of action needlessly cumbersome by forcing you to choose the same item from the menu every time. So if you've armed an offensive "spell" onto the wand, I'm sure you can just keep spamming it, and you'll only need to open the menu if you want to change it to something else. Just like in Link's Awakening.

It's not a bad cover, but as some people have pointed out, it's a bit awkwardly cropped from the larger horizontal image seen in the trailer. For example, it doesn't look very neat that you can see only two thirds of the heart container in the right, the cropping is badly done there. They should've just come up with a separate, vertical cover image instead of using a piece of a larger picture.

In the Direct presentation, they conveniently only mentioned it's coming next year, but didn't say "coming to Nintendo Switch" like with every other game in the Direct. I'm sure that means it's actually coming to Switch 2, they just didn't want to say that out loud, since the Direct was not supposed to mention Switch 2 at all.

I wish Ubisoft still made more games like Lost Crown instead of the bloated, micro-transaction riddled behemoths which have become their forte. If more of their games were like this one, great fun without needless extra fat, free updates instead of pay-to-win bullcrap or overpriced season passes, I might consider buying more of them.

The ports I'd most like to see on Switch 2 are Psychonauts 2, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, and Baldur's Gate 3. None of them are as demanding for the hardware as something like Elden Ring or Cyberpunk 2077, so I think the next console should be able to run them just fine. I'd double dip on any one of those right away if they're released on Switch 2.

A port of Horizon: Zero Dawn would be awesome as well, though that one seems less likely, being a Sony game. Still, they did eventually release both H:ZD and its sequel on PC, so one can hope. (The sequel would probably be too demanding for Switch 2, so that one seems even less likely to be ported.)

I don't think it's gonna happen with the movie, but I definitely hope we'd at least get a proper game with Zelda as the protagonist. Age of Calamity was kinda this, since Zelda is the character with the most story focus in it, but it was still more of an ensemble piece.

Personally I just find Zelda to be a way more interesting character than Link, especially in the last two games, where the focus on her fears and hopes and dreams makes her a well-rounded character with relatable flaws and strengths.

Link is too much of a Everyman Invincible Hero, the sort of a character who serves an understandable wish-fulfillment role in many fantasy stories, but who by definition shows few flaws and quirks and therefore is more bland than the characters who are allowed to have those quirks and flaws. As long as Nintendo insists on him being this Invincible Hero, as well as not having any proper speaking lines of his own, I don't think he's gonna grow out of this blandness.

Dead Cells is probably my favourite roguelite, but sadly the Switch version still has some performance issues, even though there's been plenty of updates since its initial release. For example, there's often slowdown in the frame rate when there's too many projectiles and other moving objects on the screen. It's not like it's game-breaking, and I still enjoy playing the game on the Switch, but it is quite noticeable compared to the PC version.

@Spider-Kev Just multiplying the number of Switches sold with 300 dollars doesn't tell us how much profit Nintendo made out of them though, since you have to reduce manufacturing and marketing costs, the retailer's share, taxes, etc. to get the profit margin.

@TheExile285 In superhero comics, "a cape" is a slang word for "a superhero", regardless of whether they wear an actual cape or not. So the title of the game merely reads as "Superheroes".

Mobapad makes great third-party controllers for the Switch (their M6 HD model is the best joycon alternative on the market, way better than the official joycons), but as far as I know they have no official business relationship with Nintendo at all... So why would they have this level of insider info on the Switch 2? The blog post doesn't mention anything about their supposed sources either, so I don't understand why anyone would take it at face value?

The Japanese one would win this if it didn't have so much text in it. As it is, it's way too cluttered, the text takes you attention away from the nice pic and colour design.

@Tobiaku Yes, but the whole idea that SBI, a small consultant company, is somehow forcing big game publishers to include characters who are not straight white men is merely an excuse for some people to complain when such characters appear in games as protagonists. These people are so used to having their privileged perspective being reflected in video games that it's impossible for them to accept that maybe game developers themselves have realised that the majority of humans are not straight white men, and maybe that fact should also be reflected in what sort main characters there are in video games.

But since these people who are somehow offended by black, women and queer people in video games don't want to openly admit that their reaction is caused by racism/sexism/homophobia, they come up with ridiculous conspiracy theories, for example that some small "woke" consultant firm is forcing billion dollar companies like Warner or Sony to change the games they publish in ways these people don't like. So they never have to admit or address their own prejudices, because they've found a scapegoat to blame for the fact that video games have gradually become somewhat better at addressing the real diversity of human experience.

@Thumbsofsteel Because these days it's apparently not possible to have video games with African protagonists without some people coming up with boneheaded theories how it's all part of some imagined "woke" conspiracy. Apparently some white hetero men are so fragile that the mere existence of games where the protagonist is not a straight white man is reason enough for them to come up with pointless boycott campaigns.

@Captain_Toad

But when looking closer, they do this to the point of bringing a changing an existing character's race and/or gender, have an existing/modded female and/or not white character to spout political issues current or past via crowbarring it into an existing story, and having said character mary sue the entire story to the point of have other males mainly whiteskinned to act stupid, do nothing and join other characters to cheerlead that character's accomplishments, or just act as a cheap Saturday morning cartoon villain to easily be felled by that character. And it's also been done via bullying to the point of, "Hey, that's a good game. Would sure be a shame if people on Twitter speak ill because there's no black/female character in there."

Do you have any evidence of the people involved actually doing any of the things you mention here, or are you just parroting conspiracy theories you read online because they fit your political agenda?