RBRTMNZ

@Workcomesfirst I wouldn’t go that far at all. I think the Mario movie is really fun and charming. It’s exactly what I wanted and it made me cry from pure joy. For me it’s not that Mario is bad it’s that Spider-Man is the best movie I watched this year.

Mario movie < Spider-Man movie
Mario game > Spider-Man game

@sonofskywalker3 I loved chasing pigeons. I think my favorite part of the Spider-Man games are the various swinging challenges. I'm with you on the forced stealth. It really breaks the pacing.

@Debbiee I have spent a lot of time searching for gaming communities that are free from incel aggression. Of couple of suggestions are the subreddits GirlGamers, TrueGirlGamers, Gamingcirclejerk, Patientgamers, and lesbiangamers. I aso enjoy the Discord channels for the Triple Click and Game Mess Decides podcasts.

@sketchturner Raven Beak is so much fun to fight. It might be my favorite boss fight in a 2D game.

Mario Kart 8 has too many item blocks and it takes too long to recover from being hit. Playing online if I am between 3rd and 9th place it can feel more like destruction derby than a race.

The only reason I want MK9 is that I hope for a game that is a little more balanced towards racing than items but based on the Tour and new levels introduced in MK8 it seems like they are moving in a direction of adding even more mayhem. Oh well, it will still instantly become one of my favorite games.

@Eggolor It's not that I do not like story but more that it is not something I tend to look for from Nintendo games. That all sounds interesting and it's a bummer that they dropped it and couldn't at least come up with a story mechanism that allowed for both a reset and previous lore to continue.

I hear you on being done with the experience but I really think, as a Pikmin fan, you could have had a different and better experience if you met the game where its at rather than focusing on all the ways it is not past games. If you ever get the urge to give it another go play the challenges with a fully leveled up Otachi. I was a 7/10 on this game before doing all the platinum medals and a solid 9.5/10 afterward. I definitely had some unfair deaths due to the controls but that is very true of every Pikmin game. Overall it is masterpiece level RTS in my opinion.

Also, I think that video you linked is an outlier that could easily be patched out by moving that final platform like 3 pixels further away but it's Nintendo so that will not happen.

Nintendo Life and it's sister sites are amazing. I tend to enjoy and get more out of your work than I do from bigger gaming websites. Thanks for everything!

@Eggolor I do appreciate the thoughtful and reasoned response but I disagree with a lot of it.

I don't play Nintendo games for the overarching story and never expected or wanted much for this but I can understand how it might suck to lose it if you're invested but in any event I think the games does a good job of story telling within the game.

I liked the silly goofy cast and thought that Colin in particular with his anti-work comments was a gem. I personally got as much enjoyment out of their funny little quips than I do from most AAA games with expansive narratives.

Olimar never really resonated with me and was fine playing a blank slate though I do agree that Louie was handled in a very silly manner.

Yes Nintendo games have too much tutorial but after 60 hours of Pikmin 4 that complaint largely faded away for me and I even found myself checking up on a couple of tutorials later in the game when I needed to improve for platinum rankings.

Overall I thought just passing the Dandori challenges was very easy. I don't think I failed even one of them so I doubt they were much of a difficulty spike for casual gamers but I am very good at games so perhaps I am being a bit self centered. In any event I did think that the rankings made for a super fun challenge to perfect my Dandori skills and I was never bored and always charmed by the mellow collectathon outside of those challenges. I did have the occasional issue with the targeting but again as far as quality of life and controlling the Pikim is concerned Pikin 4 is easily best in class.

I thought the game did some really smart things with level design regarding Otachi and how his considerable power changes the game balance. Several of the Dandori challenges, especially the post game cave, absolutely required you to be very smart about how you used Otachi to get the platinum. You needed to be very smart about how you split Pikmin between the player avatar and Otachi and you needed to be very thoughtful about the tasks you assigned Otachi. You couldn't just overpower the course with Otachi nor could you just assign him to any big task. You had to be very thoughtful about where you used Otachi. That is what I love in video games and especially RTS games. I love when I need to make smart mission critical decisions in real time. Your analysis of Otachi actually makes me wonder if you bothered with getting platinum on everything because of how necessary his power is for those challenges. If you have not I highly recommend it and think it could change your feelings about the game.

Nothing about the music stands out to me besides how incredibly similar and unremarkable it is within the series. It's often very similar or even exactly the same as previous games.

@somnambulance Mario Odyssey feels like it is somehow overlooked. I think it is the best Nintendo game.

@Eggolor Counterpoint: As a dedicated long term fan I thought 4 was easily the best game in the series.

I think it is inarguable that the 4 has massive quality of life and AI improvements over previous titles. What it loses in removing the overall time counter it more than makes up for with the Dandori challenges. It created a game that can be played by everyone and allows the cuteness of the game to shine while allowing more experienced players to be challenged. I was able to create a perfectly paced experience for myself where I could enjoy exploring the cute colorful world and then step it up with the Dandori challenges when I wanted something more. Plus getting platinum for all the Dandori levels was significantly more challenging and fun than the overall counter in previous games.

I am enjoying this game and I think the missions are better than the first game but it’s just not hitting the same. It’s somehow a bit less charming than the first game.

This game sucks ass. I really regret buying it and can’t comprehend how it got good reviews.

@Cashews Dude for two years economist here used this same belittling tone you're using now, to tell people that greed causing higher prices is a silly concept. Now that it has slowed down prominent economist are all admitting that yes most of the inflation went to corporate profits not increased costs.

This is not a theory. Corporate profits and balance sheets are public information. We can literally look at their finances and see that +70% of increased prices paid for increased profits NOT increased costs. Additionally, dozens of CEOs are on record telling investors that they are raising prices to take advantage of the perception of inflation. They are openly robbing us and goofy marks like you are carrying water for them.

Y'all make fun of this but Americans would eat this ***** up. I mean people here believed that we just went through two years of insanely bad inflation while businesses continued to announce record profits. A third of this country would be more than happy to blame it all on a black woman and foreign video games.

That and the swordsman is weirdly terrible at swordplay.

This guy is a loser who needs to learn to set work life boundaries.

It has some platforming sure. It accounts for like <5% of the gameplay. Would you consider Returnal, Jedi Survivor, or Spiderman to be platformers because the platforming in all of those is more frequent and essential to completing the main path.

@sketchturner I agree that Ratchet is considered an action platformer but those games, especially the most recent, are straight up third person shooters with a tiny bit of mid platforming tacked on. It just gets called a platformer because of its cartoon aesthetic.

Oh no, the Mario movie has a Mario plot.

@Ogbert No I get that. Having personally been stunned by the trailer I am being similarly pedantic both to assert that I do find the trailer to be stunning and to point out that you're being needlessly harsh towards the author.

@Ogbert Hey man if you've been jaded by playing other games that have this type of fast action puzzle solving platformering I would love to know about them because this seems incredibly unique and interesting to me.

@Ogbert I took stunning as a reference to the game play which was quite stunning.

@8bit4Life I feel like Sony is moving towards the Nintendo model. Some of their recent games have been slow to go on sale. Ghost, Miles, and Returnal all took over a year to get deep discounts.

Did Jim Ryan make this list?

@CharlieGirl the most annoying type of internet commentary is "actually you're wrong to care about your heritage" especially when that message comes from other POC.

I really fail to see how this war is any different than the United States' wars of aggression that have been happening for decades. I mean I am not naive I do know why this is treated differently but it still sucks to see how much the reaction to war is dependant on what the victims looks like.

@KateGray totally. I'm not being critical at all. I enjoyed this article and am commenting on the method for the sake of discussing the method. It's fun for me to exam how process effects results.

I think we can officially say that squid games style, while a fun concept, is not a super great way to make a top games list.

@somebread I'm definitely being unfair. A lot of people liked it so I guess it must be good even if it felt awful to me but I stand by saying that it feels nothing like a Mario game. I think of Meatboy and Ori as modern games that feel like Mario. SK is stiffer and much more like Megaman.

Shovel Knight does not "feel" anything like the original Mario games amazing movement. It feels like you're trying to jump out of three feet of mud.

This looks amazing.

@Meteoroid please explain where I made a bad faith argument? I very clearly laid out how your argument was a straw man so please explain how anything I said was in bad faith.

@Meteoroid are you seriously asking "but what if someone sets out to make a game that is boring and succeeds is that still a 10?" That is an impressive straw man you've built to argue against. Non I'm not imply that a perfectly developed boring game deserves a high rating but I'm sure you already knew that and were just making a bad faith argument to support your bad stance.

@Meteoroid Right?! How dare they rate these fun games highly. Gaming is not about fun!

What you're referring to as simple I would refer to as refined. Indie games are typically super fun and worth being rated highly specifically because they don't have the often boring and obtuse systems and padding included in nearly all AAA games.

But even beyond that every game should be graded on how closely it does what it set out to achieve. Celeste may not have all the content and technical achievement of something like RDR2 but that is not what Celeste set out to do. The developer wanted to create a retro inspired platformer and they did a perfect job. It is a 10/10 just as much as any AAA masterpiece.

And yet most Americans are more upset about poor people receiving a pittance so they stay alive.

@Darlinfan There is not a magic quota. Latinos make up 18% of the US but only account for 4.5% of acting roles. That is a very specific and equitable quota that will never be met because anytime someone points out that POC are underrepresented people like you are ready to tell us that no actually we're the one being racist for advocating for our community.

So what I am hearing from Nintendo Life is that this uppity Latino should just be happy that there are a couple of Black actors on the cast.

@Therelon No I didn't do those things. I didn't make blanket statements. I spoke of a specific type of gamer that absolutely exists and makes up a loud toxic portion of the gaming discourse and who typically thinks Nintendo games and anything less than bleeding edge tech are for babies. You don't need to get defensive if you're not that person. Though if you are that person you suck and should change. And also don't worry if you built your personality around being a fan of one of the above mentioned games. I like all of them so no need to be defensive about that also.

@TheFrenchiestFry I never spoke in absolutes. I did not say all gamers or every IGN fan. Nor did I say all the games are dark. I hope for your sake that you're being intentionally obtuse as a bad faith form of debate because otherwise... Either way you're not having a discussion, you're being weirdly defensive towards me and others for reasons I do not understand, so I'm done here. Also Witcher is a very mature and violent game.

@TheFrenchiestFry Why so literal? I knew I would get this needlessly pedantic response and I still did not reword my comment so it is my own fault. These may not all be shooters but you know what I meant. I meant violent and shooters tend to be among the most violent games. To be more clear, IGN followers mostly like dark brooding violent games and not the type of colorful happy games made by Nintendo.

I was certain I would hate the results from the beginning. A lot IGN's followers are The type of gamers that give us all a bad name and hate everything that Isn't dark and doesn't go pew pew.

This might be the second year in a row where my pic for Switch game of the year is something I did not and will not play because they are not genres I enjoy but I appreciate them because so many people loved them. 2020 was ACNH.

This year so far my pick is Monster Hunter Rise.

You mean besides SMB 1-1? It's almost certainly a Mario Kart 64 course. Probably Koopa Troopa Beach.

LOL Ninja glidin'

@commentlife I'm not normally a big graphics person but after a week of looking at shiny 4k trailers this presentation was startling.

I would not recommend playing this game unless you LOVE super hard platformers. The platforming is truly amazing but they make you jump though a lot of hoops to get to it. (I know what I did there) You're punished for failure by losing progress and often needing to sit through multiple long loading screens to return to the place you died. Plus the combat, outside of boss battles which are mostly great, and Zelda like elements are not really well designed so they also end up being something to get through to get to the amazing platforming.

The game would probably have been better if it were linear and focused on the voids.

@sketchturner I have not had any issues at all since the patch but I also only had a couple of small issues prior to the patch so hard to say how much of a difference it made.

I love this game but I’m disappointed by it also. A couple of changes here and there and it’s an all time favorite for me.

@Kevember LOL okay. Can you provide an example of a male voice actor being harassed by gamers? I can provide other examples of women being harassed by gamers. If you cannot see that women in gaming get way more abuse from the incel crowd then you're at best not paying attention but most likely being intentionally obtuse.