RadioHedgeFund

The biggest problem the WiiU had was a terrible USP coupled with even worse marketing.

The Switch 2 needs to be more along the lines of the 3DS or the SNES than the WiiU: the same but better.

Honestly all they really need to do is improve the build quality of the Joycons, redesign the analog sticks (maybe use 3DS style sliders?) add analog triggers and up the internal guts and resolution.

Make it 100% backwards compatible with the Switch library and people will upgrade.

Crucially it doesn't need any bloody gimmicks.

Nintendo must still have a few years of solid software support in the bag together with all the unreleased WiiU ports. If push comes to shove they've only ever ported 2 GameCube title into the modern era.

They also have 2-3 hardware revisions in the pipeline: an OLED Lite model with larger screen, a reduction in price of the Lite model to £99 and the opposite: a box that plays Switch titles that comes bundled with a Pro Controller.

With any luck the next 2 years will get the Switch to outsell the PS2!

Nintendo are being daft because nobody, and I mean nobody is going to be offended by them releasing Advance Wars.

If they're that bothered why not just donate all profits to the Ukraine like Epic did?

I quite liked it. It was something different and despite the early PS2-era plotting and dialog the setting and gameplay weren't that bad.

The other marines should have all been redshirts to service the horror elements rather than hamfisted friends of Samus.

And those that haven't played it don't really care.

@Asaki I imagine if you come in fresh its a bit easier to swallow. My problem will forever be comparing it to the original which is wonderfully streamlined.

Which is strange because I enjoy my time dipping in-and-out of FFXIV which is arguably just as complicated, but I find strangely familiar because the battle mechanics aren't too dissimilar to Xenoblade 1.

I'd take PSOBB but with an endless list of sega-themed cosmetics to purchase. They'd rake it in with something like that.

@Asaki I think Sega have an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft on PSO2.

TBH I found PSO2 to be a lot more bewildering than FFXIV and a hard game to get into.

One great thing about PSO1 was its simplicity. It wasn't full of F2P mechanics and finding people to just dungeon with was easy.

I must have finished Okami on all its platforms and I never knew about that mini game!

I'd also like to nominate the sparkle screen from PSO that you could move around the screen and the Teleporter loading animation which you could change direction with the left stick but alter the speed with the right.

Im sure the data is sound but some of those release dates are off.

I distinctly recall PSO, Metroid Prime and Resi 0 all launching on the same day in the UK.

I reckon Nintendo is sat on a pile of Wii U ports all done and dusted and is just dishing them out when the schedule demands it.

Wind Waker, TP and maybe Xenoblade X were probably backended ages ago.

@RubyCarbuncle It's the internet in 2022. It's either a heated debate people believe is a replacement for physical discourse (it's not. It doesn't count) or shameless self promotion.

I call fake. Nobody is that stupid. They did this for the publicity and can afford a new TV.

@Dav Nope, I finished the game. I found Pyra and Mythra my biggest concern with the game as deep down the 2 are depicted more on the basis of sexual fantasy tropes than actual, well defined characters. Pyra is depicted as a shy subservient and Mythra a petulant domineering bitch.

You could argue that the shy/petulant are 2 sides of the same coin but that character is also hyper sexualised.

Compared to the arcs Melia and Sharla got in the original it is night and day.

Ah, yes. As if Pyra's character couldn't be written as any more subservient she is literally a slave to the main character.

Hopefully they will get rid of some of the regression from Xenoblade 2 like having to go back to NPCs for fetch quests.

Charge your Switch at work and use their electricity instead!

The lack of training modes is a shame. Wii Sports actually had a lot of depth and replayability to it if you used the 'fitness age' of the training and played them daily as an exercise routine. The punchbag mode for boxing was especially tiring.

Resort got past this with the sheer volume of content.

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.