Ralizah

DLSS can look absolutely phenomenal, and is a great way for a small hybrid device to punch above its weight class in terms of image quality.

Incredible game that was ported well across multiple platforms. Not shocked it continues to perform well.

@Idiocrates That would actually be a fantastic joke if one of the writers bit the bullet and made a list full of "Hentai" games released on Switch that year.

There should be written transcripts of these videos posted on the site. I'd just follow the youtube channel if I wanted to watch a video.

@rushiosan Take my upvote, king/queen/gender-neutral royalty of some sort

@Gofixmeaplate Not everyone's going to like Balatro. I didn't even try it. No interest whatsoever in poker.

Perfect. I have the feeling this game will be a lot more enjoyable the the gameplay and presentation improvements.

I think the visual style can be stunning when done right, but it has certainly lost its... uniqueness. I'd prefer to see HD-2D-esque styles like in the recent Star Ocean remake. Experiment with new ways of presenting classic pixel art with modern effects.

Favorite game in this style? Triangle Strategy, easily. Absolutely incredible game. I felt like I was a kid playing on my PS1 again.

They're a top three Nintendo studio for me. Xenoblade 3 was an INCREDIBLE game, and even their most flawed older releases are still ambitious and imaginative as heck.

Definitely one of the best acquisitions in the industry to date, given how well they work together.

Danganronpa Tactics, basically. Not a chance I miss out on this.

My nearsightedness makes text difficult to read on even big TVs. Handheld mode is always fine.

Games overall need options for adjustable subtitle/text sizes. Maybe spend a tiny bit of dev time on something that'll make your game more playable for so many people.

They had the opportunity to evolve the Lego formula and chose not to, I guess. Disappointing.

Stuff like this this used to happen prior to release, not months after.

Just saying.

Nintendo Switch and performance issues. Name a more iconic duo.

@Akibiyori For real. I do think Square had a golden era back in the 90s, but people allow emotion about childhood favorites and misplaced cynicism about modern releases to cloud their judgment in some frankly baffling ways.

A lot of earlier millennials are hitting middle age and becoming 'olds' themselves, with everything that tends to imply.

@PluckyRicky Triangle Strategy blew me away. Very much a top three SRPG for me. It 'feels' like a masterpiece from the PS1 era, but with a ton of enhancements that games from back then would have never had.

I'll probably give the Mario soundtracks another listen, but it won't get heavy use until Xenoblade shows up.

Looking forward to eventually playing Nordics, but Ys VIII and Felghana are really hard to top. Easily the best representative examples of classic and modern Ys.

Felt this way for a long time. Fully plugged into other aspects of popular culture. But music? You could be making up the names of popular artists and I wouldn't know any better.

So the Mario + Rabbids guy is gone. Now the Rayman Legends team is gone.

I believe that seals it. Never buying an Ubisoft game again. They're officially dead to me.

Didn't like the original B-K at all when I played through it on NSO. That said, I've heard there are considerable differences in the sequel, which makes me curious to see how they impact the experience for me.

Extremely happy with how well Metaphor is selling worldwide. It improves on the Persona formula in all the right ways (a cast that's diverse in age; a far more balanced combat system; tighter pacing; etc.) without sacrificing the elements that make the modern Persona games so enjoyable in the first place.

@BlublacMH I meant more distinguishable as a gameplay experience, not distinguishable because a portion of the gaming community loses its mind any time they see a black person in a game.

Ultimately it didn't review all that well, and failed to set itself apart in the genre most oversaturated with up-and-coming indie developers.

Not quite the Keijo game I still want to be made.

@PharoneTheGnome I think it depends on your priorities. The price seems nuts for a console, yes, but you'd be paying a lot more for comparable power on PC if you were just building one. Just an equivalent GPU would cost around $500+ on its own.

Then again, that would also make PC cheaper to upgrade, which is the benefit of a modular design.

I'll probably never own a PS5 myself, since Sony is porting their games to PC anyway, but if you're a console person or don't already have a rig set up, there's a ton of stuff to play.

Publishers aren't charities set up for the benefit of artists to realize their dreams. They're always going to look for stuff that will sell, first and foremost.

The best ones will find passionate teams whose work is excellent and also marketable.

The real issue with the trendchasing from big corporations is that games take so long to develop now that they often miss the boat entirely with such releases. Suicide Squad and Concord were great examples of this in 2024.

Anyway, if this developer wants their next game to sell better, they should look at finding a way to distinguish it from about 50,000 other similar games in that genre also being released by other indie devs. The indies that make it big now are ones creative enough to be distinguishable and/or create new genres.

Nice numbers for Silent Hill 2. Would be curious to see if Bloober is able to make an original entry that's decent now that they've had experience with remaking one of the classic entries.

Would've liked to have seen them remake the entire trilogy, but that would just seem weird after starting with SH2.

Wish Metaphor was higher, but honestly, it's selling so well overall it doesn't really matter in this instance.

PS5 is swimming in good games atm.

Aww, that's a shame. I really liked the look of this one.

@Milk_ tfw you discover your experience with the law offices of Wright and co. means nothing in real world courts.

@RetroGames Representing oneself in court is almost always a bad idea, lol. Let alone against an entity like Nintendo that likely has some of the best lawyers in the world on tap.

Hope it sells well. The more incentivized Sony is to put its games on other platforms, the less need there is to actually buy their consoles.

Were the comments mistranslated, or were they "localized?"

So did almost everyone else. The PS1 was a hot little number in the mid-to-late 90s. Quite the homewrecker.

@Yoshi3 Err, blaming fans for what, exactly?

And wait... Rian Johnson, the director? What's he got to do with any of this?

I think we're rapidly approaching the point where we won't be seeing Miyamoto's name appear in almost any game credit sequences.

The man is old, and has left behind an incredible legacy. Everyone sails off into the sunset at some point.

@Yoshi3 You realize Aonuma has helped direct or produce every 3D Zelda game, right? Including most of the ones you probably like?

About time. Was amazed it didn't launch on Switch alongside PC, considering how big the platform is for indies.

Heard it's excellent.

As usual, the best strategy with new releases is to just wait for the major patches to release.

LOL Xbox can't even come closer to 1000 units between two models per week now.

PS5 sales also collapsed, unsurprisingly, after the price hikes. I guess Sony figures they'll do better in Japan by milking their small established market than trying to expand it.

Good. Glad Layton's Mystery Journey seems to be a thing of the past now.

I've really missed this series. Azran Legacy was such a long time ago now.

@Anti-Matter Don't worry, Nintendo can't remove the muscular Mario pictures from your hard drive.

Day one. Happy to see this getting a sequel!

@the_beaver It's fantastic as a Gal*Gun spinoff and above average for a Castlevania-like (especially in coop). Go for it.

I love these games. I still have my complete PS1 copies. I still even wear Lucia's pendant sometimes.

These have been so neglected over the years.

FINALLY

Good.

There absolutely should be a happy medium in Zelda between freeform puzzle solving and some structure. I was fine with the Divine Beasts in BotW, since that whole game was meant to shake up the series and the 'dungeons' themselves were thematically and conceptually unique, but the Temples in TotK were just... disappointing. Why make them like Divine Beasts? The whole point of the Divine Beasts is that they were enormous machines. If you're gonna have dungeons, make them puzzle-filled gauntlets like previous Zelda dungeons.

@Yoshi3 TotK was an interesting experience, but yeah, I'm ready for future open world Zeldas to actually have meaty dungeons and setpieces to structure them a bit. Something like Elden Ring is honestly closer to where I wish that game had gone, but with actual puzzles.

@johnedwin Really hope so. It'll make Sony a lot looser in terms of console exclusivity for their smaller games, since they don't really seem to regard Nintendo as a threat to their market position.

One of my favorite NDS game covers. VERY striking composition. The Japanese cover just looks really weird in comparison.

Still a top three Contra game, by the way. Simply fantastic.

@TotalHenshin "The only thing I don’t like about the NA cover is the strange streams of light forming an X over Bill Rizer’s crotch. If someone could explain that, I’d be grateful."

Bill Rizer is clearly too much man to escape censorship on the cover.

@Ryan_Again

"The NA cover is over-the-top in a good way. Those look like tough dudes that bang chicks. The JP cover looks like sensitive Emo-boys."

I dunno, man. The North American box has them showing off their chests, and Lance is gripping that rather phallic rocket launcher pretty confidently. Definitely screams masculine, but I'm not so sure about how heterosexual it all is.

You play third-party games on Switch because you like the hybrid freedom and/or have no other options. If 60fps is important to you, you're probably not playing multiplats on a current gen platform that's significantly weaker than the competition's last gen platforms.

Sony has largely written the region off, I think. They probably had their analysts calculate how much they could jack up prices to maximize revenue. Otherwise, their sights are firmly set on wooing and cozying up to China.

@Anti-Matter No worries. PS5 may or may not outsell the PS4, but it has already outsold the Wii U many times over.

I've almost pulled the trigger on the Steam version of this a few times.

Absolutely criminal how many utterly wonderful looking Western indies I've been leaving neglected in my wishlist.

@Ulysses I can only imagine how stressful it is trying to consider every factor when launching a new console. Especially when your old one is as successful as Switch is. And, frankly, especially when you no longer have an alternative device to fall back on.

The good thing about the inevitable transition period is that the new software should hopefully all run on the new device, unlike that last batch of 3DS games that launched after the Switch dropped.

@Ulysses Well, I believe the Lite launched in 2019. That wasn't "later in the console's life" to any meaningful degree. I do think they'll probably launch one device at release, though. Nintendo traditionally releases revisions 2 - 3 after that to maintain momentum with its portable consoles.

Anyway, I don't disagree that they'll obviously want to transition people to new hardware. I just question whether they'll have a budget SKU that'll be cheap enough to hit the demographic they're aiming for, in that regard. Even with inflation, $400 isn't really 'cheap handheld range' for most people.

A lot of it really depends on how they approach the new hardware generation in terms of marketing and software compatibility. This is solidly Furukawa's Nintendo now, so I'm curious to see how it differs from their 'concept era' launches.

Nintendo's long-term play will likely be, as with Switch, to have multiple systems per family.

So $399.99 seems like the reasonable price for a next-gen hybrid Nintendo console. Possibly with a somewhat more expensive premium model as well.

I could see them opting against a Switch 2 Lite and selling the original Switch as their budget/small child SKU instead.

@johnedwin Base PS5 hasn't really come down in price. If anything, prices went up for the digital model and Dualsense controllers. Considering the Pro is likely to be a high-margin, low-volume sorta product, I wouldn't expect any deals on it.

I mean, it's not like Nintendo's own games haven't drawn from other sources as well.

Sony looked to Mario for inspiration and created one of the best platformers of the generation. I don't see the issue.

This is something a lot of young professionals raised on social media need to internalize, especially. Your words are out there forever, and you never know what bridges that your burned in the past will suddenly turn up in your path. Dunking on that annoying coworker or boss isn't going to be worth it when you encounter them down the road and you life is more complicated as a result.

More generally, the better you treat people in life, the more you maximize your odds of beneficial outcomes in all areas. Whether it's someone vouching for you on something unrelated, or someone whose life you improved doing things to help others, which might also go around to benefit you indirectly.

Even from a purely selfish, egoistic perspective, there's every reason to be a nice person most of the time. Sometimes you have to let people have it, of course, but you want to pick those battles carefully.

@Lizuka I liked Book of Shadows. It's not a classic like BC:RF's many versions, but it maintained much of the atmosphere of that game.

Shame how Blood Drive turned out.