Polvasti

@SteveDaSteve Thank you for explaining what this Garry's Mod is. Nintendo Life really should've put a similar explanation in the actual article, it's not like everyone knows about these things.

So Bonnie is supposed to be a cop chasing a criminal, yet judging by the screenshots she's dressed more like she's about enter a bikini fitness contest. Is there some in-story explanation for her attire, or is it just your typical JRPG fanservice?

Like some other commenters here, I'll wait for the reviews to tell how well it runs before buying the game. The idea of a relaxing diving game is appealing, but it really needs to have good performance for the immersion to work. Also, I'm not so keen on online multiplayer, which seems to be a big part of this game, so I want to know how substantial the single player experience is before making the decision.

The blatant fanservice and hormonal objectification of the main character was the main reason I never played the original Tomb Raider games back in the day. It's nice to hear they're toning it down and taking into consideration that a lot of players are turned off by pointless sexism in video games. Maybe I'll finally check these games out now.

@Broosh The 8bitdo Pro 2 controller costs 50 dollars, and it has rumble and motion control. It has everything the official Switch Pro controller has, except no Amiibo support and the rumble is just a regular one, not HD... But on the other hand, it comes with hall effect joysticks (so no drift ever), remappable back buttons and and a way better D-pad than with the official Pro controller, so I'd say at that price point it's the best controller you can get for the Switch.

This was by far the most interesting game they showed in the Indie Showcase, I'm definitely gonna check it out. Cool visual style too.

The footage seen in the Switch trailer already looked kinda rough with some muddy, low-res textures... So if that's the best they could come up for the trailer, I'm sure most of the game will look even worse – this won't be one of those miracle ports. If I ever want to play the game, I'll do it on PC where it'll perform much better.

@AG_Awesome Yes, you can.

The Switch version of this game looks pretty rough graphically even in the trailer, so I think I'll get it for the PC if I ever want to play it.

@XandertheWise It's specifically said in the article that this sale is in Europe, so they probably didn't put prices in dollars because some of these same games are likely not on sale in the US. Not everything revolves around your country.

@AstroTheGamosian The difference between this dude and Peter Jackson is that Jackson had already done several really good movies before LotR. Heavenly Creatures was one of my favourite movies of the 1990s, Meet the Feebles was a really funny satire, and Bad Taste, Braindead, and even The Frighteners were all enjoyable horror romps. So having seen all of them, when it was announced Jackson was gonna direct a LotR adaptation, I had confidence he could pull it off. With Ball, I'm not so sure.

I like good deck-building games, but besides the card play they need to have at least some kind of plot and characters to keep me interested. Apparently this has neither, so it's not for me. But good for them for selling so many copies of a modest-looking indie game.

That's nice! Here in Finland the national post office celebrated the most famous Finnish video game, Angry Birds, by giving them their own set of stamps back in 2013:

https://www.amusa.fi/sites/default/files/news/angry_birds_postimerkit.jpg

Sadly, they haven't done the same honours for Alan Wake or any other Remedy game.

Zinogre is cool, but my absolute favourite is the soap-bubble generating purple fox-like monster, whatever that was called. It looks so sleek and graceful.

This is incredibly stupid, especially since the original physical version of Stories 2 is still in print and often goes on sale. Why would anyone want to pay 60 euros for a physical collection that doesn't include the second game on the cartridge, when you can get a proper physical version of Stories 2 for 25 euros? Just give us the first game as a stand-alone release.

@Sisilly_G There's already a red stage curtain framing the characters within the image proper. Adding an extra red frame to the cover to frame the red curtains feels a bit odd and superfluous.

This is probably the first ever Nintendo game with naked boobs on the cover? 😄

That's nice, but it would be nicer to get some brand new Nintendo games, not just remakes and remasters. I guess Princess Peach will be their swansong for the Switch, and the next new title will have to wait until Switch 2.

Edit: forgot about Endless Ocean, that one is also a first-party game, right?

I don't think Super Mario Land is underrated, it just isn't that good for a Mario platformer. They did much better with the sequels.

I haven't played the first Super Mario Land since 1991 or so, but IIRC it wasn't particularly good? SML 2 was a huge step upwards in quality. Though Nintendo has put many worse games in the NSO library, so I guess that wouldn't stop them from including it.

I already preordered Princess Peach last year after the first trailer, so I'm gonna skip the demo. It'll be nicer to play the full game fresh from the start when it comes out.

@IronMan30

ironically, devices like the Steam Deck pretty much killed the chance of official PC ports of Nintendo games.

AFAIK there have never been official PC ports of first-party Nintendo games except maybe for some old Mario titles decades ago. Nintendo simply has never been interested in porting their own games to other platforms, since keeping them exclusive has helped them sell a whole lot of their consoles. I don't think this would've changed anytime soon even if the Steam Deck and other portable PCs wouldn't have entered the market.

Awesome game, I hope they'll make a sequel some day.

My current top 10 would be:

Arcade Spirits
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Hollow Knight
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
Nier: Automata
Snipperclips Plus
Steamworld Dig 2
Xenoblade Chronicles

@Dramlin Thanks for the clearing that up. The lack of any story or end goal makes me skip this one, since an infinite plotless deck builder doesn't sound that appealing. They really should've mentioned these things in the review.

So, does this game have any kind of plot or endpoint, or do you just keep playing it endlessly like Tetris?

@Truegamer79 Isn't the exact point of demos to let you judge whether you want to invest money in the final product? If the demo makes the game look bad, either the full game is bad, or they failed to make the demo do what it's supposed to do.

@Crono1973 I play more indie games than AA/AAA games, the majority of my games collection is not available in physical format at all, so reselling is not an option. And even with games that have a physical version, often you can get a digital version with a high enough discount that buying and reselling games the same game as a physical version would not save me that much more money, so it's not worth the hassle.

Dunno if I'm in the minority here, but I buy games to play them, not to own them for the rest of my life. With 95 % of the games I've played through, I know I'll never have the time or energy to play through them a second time, so a hypothetical situation where they might disappear from my digital collection 10 or 20 years later doesn't really bother me that much.

Certainly if digital is significantly cheaper than physical I'll go for that option. This is often the case with third-party games but very rarely with Nintendo's own games, which is why I've bought all of them as physical cartridges.

@rushiosan Most of the cutscenes in the trailer make it look like a look like 20 year old game because of the low-polygon models and crude animation. For example, just look at Krang at 0:42 in the trailer, no way does that look like scene from a game published in 2017.

If this game is originally from 2017, why do the graphics and animations in the trailer look like they're from 2002?

So the game has a sleep theme and the main character is a kid called Nemo? It's probably a reference to the early 1900s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland then, not the Pixar movie. I think the comic is quite popular in France, and IIRC there was also NES platformer game based on it.

@GrailUK

Now why is a notoriously conservative, Japanese company conducting so much business down in Brazil all of a sudden? Seems to be where all the inside gossip is happening!

You know the internet exists in Brazil too? Nothing's stopping a Brazilian journalist contacting sources all around the world! The modern world is amazing, I know!

Yeah, the NMS updates have typically arrived to Switch much later than on other platforms, but this time Hello Games surprised us, and the new update (including the expedition) launched on Switch too today. I already played Omega for a while, it seems cool though not that different from previous ones. The new ability to start the expedition with your regular save file and your regular character is much appreciated, I didn't like having to create a new one for each of the previous expeditions.

I agree that it's pretty ugly. And the pedestal it's sitting on kinda looks like a big turd.

A life-size Sheikah slate would make sense as a toy, but why would you want something you're supposed to use with your hands as a statue? 🤔

@jedgamesguy Are those kind of front-loaded sales figures that different from most other hotly anticipated sequel games? Unlike with the first installment (which Breath of the Wild is in practice, since it completely changed the Zelda formula), with the second game most people already know in advance what they're going to get. So it makes sense they're more likely to buy the game right away instead of waiting for word-of-mouth information on whether it's any good.

@UltimateOtaku91 According to Wikipedia, the top 3 best-selling video games of all time are Minecraft, Tetris, and Grand Theft Auto V. Mario Kart 8 is currently sixth on the list.

@jedgamesguy How is selling 20 million copies in 8 months "falling off a cliff"?

@RupeeClock The article says that replacing the Switch Lite screen with an OLED screen would cost 25-50 dollars. So if you have the skills to do it and you want a purely handheld device with an OLED screen, it would still be way cheaper than buying an OLED Switch.

Rainbow Islands definitely, what a classic!

It's weird that Nintendo Life gave The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood a (deserved) 9/10 score, yet it's missing from the list even though some 8/10 games are included. What's up with that? Maybe the deckbuilding elements in TCWS made someone think it's not a visual novel, but it absolutely is. All VN and narrative game fans should definitely check it out, it was my favourite video game of 2023 alongside Baldur's Gate III.

@Bobb

And what about the !exclamation mark! At the beginning of the sentence?

Presumably they put it there so that if anyone is browsing games alphabetically, !Super Marty! would show at the top of the list.

Definitely Nier: Automata. The final ending (Ending E) was such a jaw-dropping and beautiful conclusion to an awesome game, I was wiping tears from my eyes. It would be great if I could go through that whole emotional roller-coaster ride again without knowing anything about it in advance.

I already pre-ordered this a couple of months ago, can't wait to play it. Hope they poured as much creativity into it as into Super Mario Wonder, the gameplay concept with Peach's different roles certainly sounds very promising.

My top 5:

1. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood
2. Octopath Traveller II
3. Fire Emblem Engage
4. Astral Ascent
5. Tears of the Kingdom

Not a big deal to me. If I cared about realistic shooting/violence games like GTA, I would've bought some other console than the Switch or the hypothetical Switch 2. These kind of games are a better fit for other consoles' profiles than a Nintendo one.

The Western cover is way too busy with all the various logos and ads hogging up so much space. And since the image itself is "zoomed" so close to the characters, it has no breathing space, just a cluttered mess. The Japanese cover looks much better, with the generous green space giving the cover a more relaxed and peaceful vibe, fitting for a simulation like this.

To everyone who says a new Zelda game needs to have Link and Zelda in their conventional roles (and therefore playable Zelda wouldn't work), remember that Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask had only Link and no Zelda, and they're considered among the best games in the series. They could easily make a new game with Zelda as the sole protagonist and give some explanation for Link's absence, just like there was an explanation for Zelda's absence in LA and MM. I would prefer that to Nintendo repeating the same, tired "damsel in distress" plot again and again for decades.