RadioHedgeFund

The only thing that bothered me about XC2 was how terrible the female characters were compared to the original. Pyra is almost a subordinate slave whereas Mythra is a petulant child. Their proportions then played off these sexist stereotypes.

Sharla and Meliá in the original are very strong, independent characters who are not defined by the men in their lives. You want to dress them in underwear or something tactical then it's entirely down to the player but you also crucially get to have Reyn show off his pecs for the whole game too. It has equality in the undressing.

The fact that Arsehole appears in the script means another game full of British-isms!

Canoeing?!? Getting 4 players to sit in a line and manually row a boat around is one of gamings greatest IRL moments, particularly if inibriated.

The worst in WSR are easily the plane ones. Holding the remote like a paper aeroplane? Not fun.

NSS better have the 100 pin bowling back.

Looks like a decent, fast-paced shooter.

Halo Infinite spiked last year because people are bored of the relatively ploddy pace of battle royale games and wanted something more akin to a skill-based shooter.

Here's hoping that Splatoon 3 proves to be another shot in the arm for arena shooters.

I wouldn't mind seeing a list of 'best portable games on the switch'.

I know thats a misnomer because every game on the console can be played portable but I want to see a list of the games built specifically for the format, with bite-sized chunks of gameplay.

What many gamers and sites will have glossed over is how well BOTW sits in this catagory. It doesn't have any tasks that take more than half an hour (bar maybe Eventide Island and the DLC) and yet you can lose yourself in the game for hours if you want to.

Its a fine balancing act few developers have mastered.

It would be nice, for once to get something different that hasn't been rereleased a thousand times before. How about B.O.B? Or seminal RPG Crusader of Centy/Soleil which is, whisper it, better than Link to the Past.

@MH4 Its the playground fantasies brought to life.

If you had told me as a 10 year old in 1992 that I could one day play a videogame with my friends where we could team up Terminator, Ripley, Predator and the Xenomorph and take on squads of strangers dressed as the X-Men I think my mind would have exploded.

I don't mind a flute so long as we can skip the terrible guitar rock from XCX.

That list almost looks too suss but damn if every single one of those games isn’t a stone cold classic I’d play in a heartbeat.

My assumption is GBA games will get added to the premium sub but GBC titles (here’s hoping for MGS) will be with the base sub.

Id expect GBA games to be locked behind the expansion pass but GBC games to be regular additions.

We'd all buy Wind Waker again. It's wonderful ❤️

But what I'd really like to see is a remake of Minish Cap done in the style of Link's Awakening but with the cel shaded Link.

If history has taught us anything it is that Nintendo can squeeze projects out of its hardware other developers can only dream of.

I reckon we will get it on current hardware without performance issues.

Like it or not but it was the Wii. The console saved Nintendo from becoming dangerously irrelevant in an industry that needs them around. Within the first year we had a brand new Zelda, Mario and Metroid. The Virtual Console was brill.

Although Nintendo went a little too far towards the mass market circa 2008 they managed to pull things back towards 2010 with brand new instalments of GoldenEye, Sin and Punishment and the brilliant Wii Sports Resort whilst their rivals were trying to copy them.

In 2011 we got Skyward Sword, a brave attempt to do something different with the Zelda template. We also got Xenoblade and The Last Story, 2 of the greatest JRPGs ever made.

@Splodge It’s the first film in a long time where what happens in the third act actually met my expectations. I’m one of those “why didn’t the hero just do that?” people who spoils his own enjoyment of things far too often by overthinking.

As soon as Knuckles mentioned ‘whoever holds the Master Emerald gains godly powers’ or words to that effect it was fairly obvious where the film was going but I’ve been burned so many times it was so satisfying to see it actually happen.

Normally Nintendolife are pretty good at this sort of thing but half these theories fall apart when you realise the screenshots seem to show leftie Link but Nintendo’s own video show him as a rightie.

He obviously heard it from his Uncle who works for Nintendo….

It’s a little slow for my tastes but the co-op is brilliant fun.

The best Mario Kart is still the SNES one if only because the 2-player battle mode has never been beaten.

This is why the copyright laws are outdated. Whilst that is Nintendo’s physical rights they also do not provide an outlet for players to buy this 26 year old players guide.

If Nintendo lost no money from the upload then the law has not been broken.

What a nice interview! And going to the old Nintendo HQ in Japan? Now thats some credentials!

4 years of plot and updates isn't too shabby. Its more than most console games get.

I think there is too much negative press surrounding the closure of service games. Even if you could keep playing them for decades at a time (Say Hi, Final Fantasy XI) the community often moves on leaving you with memories of the people you played with and a shell of a game.

I used to love playing Phantasy Star Online with the same group of people but aside from the game they were complete strangers and I'd never find them now. I have the memories and thats enough for me.

@RadioHedgeFund UPDATE: I actually found one today sealed for £40!

It seems the problem is reusing the code from the PS4 version rather than just porting the original Xbox 360 version which should run 1:1 on the Switch.

@Tobiaku Well a line has to be drawn somewhere. Maybe it’s about time we started encouraging people to go out and interact with real people instead of staying in with something like this.

Someone might come out with ‘well if gaming is an art form there are plenty of paintings of naked people’ and they would miss the point completely.

This isn’t a celebration of the female form, there are no dudes in it (I am sure there is a subset of gamers who would enjoy stripping the clothes off virtual guys) and, like most adult material of this nature it is quite clearly abusive.

The Games Industry: “We have grown up. We are no longer the horny teenager of the 1990’s. We make more money than Hollywood and Music. We are the defacto entertainment standard. Take us seriously as an art form.”

Developers: “New one handed mode!”

Sigh.

System level rebinds are a fudge. Sometimes you want different control options for different games and having to swap them over in the menu is a hassle.

The article is right: every game should have key rebinds on the same level as, say Fortnite. A control layout that works on one console doesn’t work on another. A good example of this is Final Fantasy XV which has important controls on R1 on the PS4 and this is an easy key to hit but an absolute pain in the ass on the Xbox One.

I have a friend (we are both 40) who is well into this sort of thing. We were in the pub once and he pulls a silver toolbox-style case out of his bag and unfolded it. Inside was an LCD screen, QWERTY keyboard and a Raspberry Pi-powered emulator stacked with ROMs. Just to show off his nerd cred he went on to demonstrate how to play N64 Perfect Dark with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk!

MAR10 day, much like Star Wars day is another useful reminder on how America needs to modernise its calendar system to the DDMMYY the rest of the world uses and, for smegs sake adopt the metric system.

Amazingly FFXI is still up and running on PC on official Squaresoft servers!

I would argue that you never truly finish a good game. Instead you come back to it just to live in that world for a bit. Great gameplay mechanics on their own can be quite cathartic.

I must have finished Secret of Mana over a dozen times and yet I will happy just dally around the Ice Country or Upper Land just because I like the music and game mechanics.

BOTW has a wonderful roleplay aspect where you can move in to Hateno Village and just go out gathering resources for the village. In many ways it becomes a Hyrulian Animal Crossing!

The entire racing genre is based on the idea of chasing better lap times in a never ending cycle. I often boot up Forza Horizon 1 on the 360 just to have a drive around the map.

Given you can’t drop Korok seeds, how is this supposed to work?

Why not just have a blank slate and come up with 150 new Pokémon and leave out all the old ones? This would require less balancing work and leave more time to work on battle animations. It would also put a stop to all ‘but you didn’t include my favourite’ whining from a minority of fans.

I thought all the new mon in S/S were really good but there were too many old faces for me to bother with them.

There is a place in the market for both devices just as the Switch coexists with the PS5 and Xbox Series.

But let’s be real here: this thing is a behemoth and really just for playing games around the house.

Are you really going to get that thing out on the train or a flight? It does scream ‘nerd’ at the top of its lungs and whilst I’m not self conscious enough that it would bother me what other people think, the OLED Switch has a better screen and the ability to offer a stranger a controller to play a spot of Mario Kart which could lead who knows where.

Before I fell out with Nintendo for having such shoddy controllers and a save corruption bug in ACNH they still refuse to patch or refund me for many a family train journey was enlivened by 4 joycons and some Mario Party.

Our skeletons might be soft but our grandparents fought tyranny so that we wouldn't have to know war and violence ever again.

Capt. Blondin and her generation haven't done a very good job keeping the world that way.

Even with all the bells and whistles of Valhalla, AC2 is still the best in the series. One could argue that the combat has gotten more grindy as the games have gone on. The straightforward 'counter' mechanics from AC2 are brilliantly cinematic.

AC2 has just the right amount of open world nonsense in terms of the collectables and the assassin tombs are like well-designed Zelda shrines.

For the exact same reason any extra Switch consoles you buy and log into so your kids can share your purchases has to connect to the internet to do a licence check before you can play a game.

Connect to the internet. On a portable console. Every. Single. Time.

Because it’s Nintendo. They’re like an abusive partner that we constantly convince ourselves loves us because the shiny things they give us paper over the cracks.

1. Buy a regular 3DS
2. Hack the firmware
3. Install the VC games you cannot buy as ROMs. You’re not depriving Nintendo of profit because you cannot buy said games in this country anyway.

@HenHiro The only pro I’ve seen use an analog stick is JigglyNorris.

Also I don’t use anything but: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hori-Fighting-Commander-Controller-PlayStation/dp/B01GVOFIAA

@HenHiro

1. The controls in Arcades were just d-pads with a huge stick on them. They have no analog functionality and do not drift, unlike every Joycon ever made.

2. Fighting games are a lot better with a d-pad than an analog stick. Its a lot easier to combo, double taps are fractionally quicker and you can react faster.

I’m not sure they are Mario: the outfits are £8.99 and then they jump up to £16.

My money is on Animal Crossing. That’s such an obvious idea for a range.

And surely Zelda is on the cards?

That is the greatest subtitle your website will ever produce.

Honestly the Sonic Advance trilogy is not only much better classic sonic platforming but also overlooked in just about every compilation and rerelease they bring out.

There is 3 games I wouldn’t mind seeing remastered. The ability to download Chao from the GameCube and take them with you was a neat little VMU nod.

Fantasy in general has always had a relationship with medieval England: you don’t hear anybody speaking in an American accent in Lord of the Rings do you?

I actually found the accents directly improved my love for the original XC. At the time very few RPGs had a mix of British voices and so as a Saxon myself it was nice to hear.

I’ve sheas assumed America equates Fantasy to England because our country has 2000 years of history that is still visible all around us. People literally dig up old Roman coins in they gardens and the amount of churches and castles we still have surviving from the time of King Alfred is incredible.

Compare this to America where the majority of people are descended from colonists and therefore do not have links to the ancient cities of central and South America. Their own National history only stretches back 350 years.

Not that it plays badly but I was always disappointed that Mario Strikers never stuck with the art style from its artwork and defaults to the usual.

A cel-shaded style almost like Okami but with the overly sketched outlines would look amazing as a game.

Nothing humanises a celebrity more than telling us their favourite video games.

NFT games are a terrible idea because you cannot recode a token on the blockchain and the network itself is crap for actually storing data. This is why current NFT purchases amount to a link to a webpage with a piece of artwork (or whatever) on it. Of course if said link expires or some sod like me just makes a screenshot of said artwork your NFT link is worthless but I digress.

Thus if you tokenise a load of data and then discover a bug you cannot reopen the original tokens to fix them (non-fungible remember?) you have to make a load of new tokens with the bugs fixed. Owners of the original, bug-ridden tokens will either have to repurchase the bug-fixed tokens or be given the new ones for free and leave a footnote on their original tokens so they do not get resold as there are now 2 (or more) of their supposed 'collectable thing' floating around, one bug-ridden, one not.

Given the state of the current games industry and the day-one patches released for software do you really trust any company to release a game directly onto the blockchain completely bug and glitch-free? Creating some sort of backend blockchain where you can recode or recreate tokens completely defeats the point of using it in the first place and you're back to square one: the networks we have now where things can be changed at a moments notice.

@Grumblevolcano Animal Crossing has always had this sort of gameplay though. If anything Nintendo deliberately launched it feature incomplete to both prevent cheating and to keep players coming back. City Folk has ongoing DLC updates.

For all its levels of customisation the core game I felt just wasn’t as good as New Leaf. The Amiibo update for that was a huge shot in the arm. That’s how you keep a game interesting over time.

It’s always nice to see Nintendo doing well. Even if you’re not a fan I think they are encapsulate everything right about the games industry and prove that you don’t need some sort of ‘live service’ game to keep players engaged for years; you just need good ones.

This is precisely why Microsoft's acquisition of Activision can be seen as protectionist rather than capitalist.

MS won't stop releasing gam,es on PlayStation because they know that there is still money to be made there but equally Microsoft do not want some unknwon chinese company, a foreign power or a rival tech firm like Amazon or Google coming in sweeping things up.

But an NFT is in effect a serial number proving ownership, not the art itself which any idiot can screenshot if they wish.

That is to say if Konami wants to ‘preserve’ digital art it just has to make it a free download.