SuperBro64

Japanese version is nice, but went for the US / EU version as it's framed really well with Wario in the center and his treasure surrounding him.

Also a great game to play.

Since they started making them, I ignored Nintendo's mobile games for the longest time. I just wasn't really interested. But I finally decided to give Super Mario Run a shot a few years ago, knowing that it was only a one-time fee.

I'm glad I did, because I think Super Mario Run is very underrated. Even outside of it being great for a mobile game, I also think it can stand among the mainline console Mario games. Being forced to keep running the entire time so that you have to focus on jumping properly and carefully is a nice change of pace from the other games in the series with more traditional platforming.

@VHSGREMLIN @Mirastrix Super Mario Run doesn't have predatory pricing. You only have to pay one modest fee to unlock everything the game has to offer, and then there are no more monetary transactions at any point after that.

That being their first mobile game, if only they kept that pricing system with all of their following games...

@Twilite9 Those additions would be great, yeah. For me, I'm personally hoping for a Mirror Ace League, just to have consistency with the other three Leagues.

@PinderSchloss I haven't played it myself, so you can take my recommendation with a grain of salt, but I've seen a lot of praise about Stardew Valley.

IMO 3D Land and 3D World are both great in their own ways. I do think I prefer 3D World overall, though I'd say 3D Land has a better main theme song than 3D World does.

@Bolt_Strike Yeah, thinking about it more, GBA Treetop Tumble is fine in those other stages, and other than that, that's really the only musical dissonance I remember in the GBA version.

My main problem with the GBA soundtrack is as I said above how many of the tracks have "empty" sections of ambient noise, at least six of them:

• Stilt Village
• Frosty Frolics
• Enchanted Riverbank (Ground)
• Rockface Rumble
• Cavern Caprice
• Jungle Jitter

Ambient noise isn't inherently a bad thing, to be clear. It just happens a little too frequently in the soundtrack for my tastes, especially since you hear these level themes multiple times throughout the game.

But I agree with you that various other songs in the GBA version do sound better, like Mill Fever, Water World and Cascade Capers. Honestly, I'm about half and half on it.

P.S. I hope you don't think you're being attacked here for your opinions, you have every right to them. Just trying to have friendly discourse about it. =)

@Bolt_Strike Well, perhaps "infinitely" was a bit much, but at the very least the GBA Treetop Tumble being cheerful and bouncy does not really fit a stage where you are being chased by a giant tree-cutting saw IMO.

@Bolt_Strike Having listened to both versions, I like some of the GBA tracks better, like Stilt Village, Mill Fever, and Water World. But too many of the other tracks have long sections of nothing but ambient sounds, which the SNES tracks did not have.

Also, Treetop Tumble fits the treetop stages infinitely better in the SNES version compared to the GBA version, especially in the level Ripsaw Rage.

I love these kind of ambitious fan projects, especially when they are able to come to full fruition. Good luck to the devs.

Awesome! I can get the rewards from last year's Frozen Knight League event that I missed! I'm so thrilled about that! 😀

I played the "fake gambling" casino games in Super Mario 64 DS quite a lot when I was younger.

It never gave me the desire to gamble for real.

So I don't think Balatro should be rated 18+ just for featuring a game (poker) that is associated with gambling if the actual game (Balatro) features no monetary transactions of any kind, just like the casino games in Mario.

Very cool. Congrats to the Switch!

@CJD87 @Zaphod42 You might already know, but the Ship of Harkinian devs already released a PC port of Majora's Mask earlier this year. It's called 2 Ship 2 Harkinian.

For those interested, there's a fan hack of DK64 out there called Donkey Kong 64: Tag Anywhere, which lets you instantly switch between any character you've unlocked at any time using the D-Pad. It's a really nice way to mitigate the frustration with the character-specific collectibles.

Pretty cool, though my first time playing this game was a really good colorization fan hack, so it would likely be hard for me to go back to the original monochrome version.

@batmanbud2 Glad to see another person's support of DKC3. It's my favorite of the original trilogy.

The US cover is nice and simple in my opinion. The Japan cover is too overly gaudy and colorful by comparison.

Really enjoyed the remake. The aesthetic changes alone, like the new character talking noises and animations, really made the game feel more alive than the original. Very happy with it.

@LadyCharlie I would argue Donkey Kong 64 is relatively better as a collect-a-thon, because once you unlock all of the playable characters in the first few levels of that game, each level afterward can be fully completed in one go, since they are distinct and unconnected from one another, similar to Banjo-Kazooie.

It's not like in Banjo-Tooie where the multitude of interconnections between all the levels can make completing every objective very confusing.

@LXP8 That's a good question. Didn't really think about that.

I think I'll say that, yes, Four Swords Anniversary Edition was a DSi game, but it was not a completely new game in the series, so I wouldn't count it as a DS game in the same way as Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

Similarly, Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury was a Switch game, but not a completely new Mario game like Super Mario Odyssey or Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

That's my take on it.

@Samalik @obijuankanoobie It was rereleased on DSi and 3DS, but I'd still call Four Swords a GBA game, since it first released as part of the GBA port of A Link to the Past.

Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks would be the official DS Zelda games.

Unfortunately, the issue with the limited-time challenges being off by one week for a while has not been fixed, so I'm stuck without one of the spin colors that I was never given any chance to get, all because one of the limited-time challenges from weeks ago incorrectly lasted for 2 weeks instead of 1 for some reason... 😮‍💨

From what I recently learned in a podcast I listened to, the people who made this also made Snipperclips! (https://interactive.libsyn.com/from-nintendos-snipperclips-to-crow-country-with-adam-tom-vian)

I'm legit getting a little tired of these super-generic patch notes. I'd sure like it if Nintendo would be a little more specific.

I mean, just compare this with the patch notes for F-Zero 99: (https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/10/f-zero-99-update-version-1-5-0-adds-five-new-tracks-satellaview-content-and-much-more)

Proof that improper translations of a different language can seriously impact the response to it. Not to mention selectively clipping a piece of the dialogue out of context.

@Gamepro500 My pronouns are "he/him", in fact. 😐

F-Zero 99 continues to be my favorite of all of the Battle Royale games on the Switch. It's grown so much since it first premiered a year ago.

Very exciting to see them acknowledge the long-lost BS F-Zero tracks!

Not everyone who engages in emulation just wants to play games for free.

I consider this unfortunate. I used this emulator not to play games for free but to play mods for games I already bought, because I didn't want to hack my Switch.

I wish that more people would understand that just because a video game has more inclusive options for players, it does not mean that the developers have gone "woke" or are "pushing an agenda".

People come in many different types. It should only be fair to let everyone be able to have something they can better relate to when playing games.

Unfortunate, considering the costs of air travel. It seems pretty cool.

As a U.S. resident, I guess the closest I could get would be to visit Super Nintendo World in California some time.

@JohnnyMind Just curious, do you pre-prepare your weekly "What are you playing" comments? They're always impressively comprehensive for being posted so soon after the article drops lol. 😉

In preparation for the release of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, I've been playing Zelda: Spirit Tracks for the first time, since it's a previous game in the series heavily featuring Zelda. Enjoying it so far! I think it's really underrated. The relationship between Link and Zelda in the game is great. 🙂

Also, to enhance my playing experience, I'm playing the game on my phone using the Android DS emulator DraStic, because the emulator has the option to double the standard resolution of the DS. For DS games that heavily use 3D models like Spirit Tracks, the doubled resolution makes the generally highly-pixelated models much nicer to look at.

Below are before-and-after screenshots of the game on my phone, with the top being the standard resolution and the bottom being the doubled resolution. 👍

@FrowardCoast440 If that's true then that's unfortunate. I guess they wouldn't want to acknowledge that in the patch notes. The fact that the notes label it as improving the gameplay experience is also rather frustrating...

As much as we like to joke about Nintendo and stability concerning their software and hardware updates, it is in all honesty a little irritating how vague their patch notes can be.

Can't they be at least a little more specific about what is actually being fixed/changed? 🤔

Based on what I've seen, the world map layout seems to heavily resemble A Link to the Past in some places, but is completely different or extends further out in others.

What about New Hyrule from Spirit Tracks?

Most likely won't be playing this as being a completionist I'd probably go crazy trying to 101% complete it, but cool that it's on Switch now. I've watched videos of people playing it very well and it's mesmerizing.

@abbyhitter I don't know much about it myself but as I understand it there was a very recently released unpopular Sony-published game called "Concord" that was just shut down after like only 2 weeks.

Glad for other people who like it, but I've never been a fan of Hero Modes in the Zelda franchise. Completely removing recovery hearts just doesn't sound like any fun at all to me.

If the cards in a pack are stacked on top of each other, meaning the upper cards are covering the lower cards, how do x-rays help identify which cards are in a pack? Or am I misunderstanding?

@Yoshi3 Thanks for the reply! You raise some great points there about how special it can feel to discover new Heart Pieces. One Piece of Heart I always really enjoy getting is the one in The Wind Waker where you need to bid for it. That auctioning minigame stands out to me as one of the series' most interesting minigames.

For me, while I can't currently speak for Tears of the Kingdom because I haven't gotten around to playing it yet, I enjoyed Breath of the Wild enough that there were some shrine quests I found quite memorable, like the one for surviving as a castaway on Eventide Island, the one for saving the malice-infested dragon Naydra on Mount Lanayru, and the one hidden within the pitch-black Thyphlo Ruins.

And as for the shrines themselves, beyond the simpler ones that had just one quick challenge, there were some that also really stood out to me. I particularly loved the electricity-based puzzles in the shrines around Gerudo Desert, but the best shrine in my view was the one called Trial of Power near Hryule Field's tower. That one wasn't just one simple puzzle but felt like a complete mini-dungeon, with a cohesive theme of knocking open giant doors in various ways. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sk0-0mUpHE) More of the shrines should have been like that.

@Yoshi3 I think I've seen you mention in a previous article that you are glad that Pieces of Heart are back. I'm glad for that too; I've always liked the idea of finding and assembling broken fragments of a Heart Container back into one.

Still, mechanically speaking, finding four shrines in BoTW/ToTK, completing their challenges, and getting four Spirit Orbs/Lights of Blessing to exchange for a Heart Container isn't too different from completing various challenges in other games to get four Pieces of Heart for the same outcome. Basically just four of a different item collect.

I'm curious to know, if you want to explain, what entices you to Pieces of Heart more?

Hopefully that didn't come across as argumentative. I just like discussing about what is also one of my favorite series. =)

If it has a screen, it can run DOOM.

I find the hostility here towards vtubers particularly odd, and that's coming from someone who's only watched a few clips of them here and there.

From what I understand, one reason some people use vtuber models is not for weird parasocial relationships or anything but because they are camera shy and don't want people commenting on their real appearance.

That specific image behind the new logo is NOT Super Mario World, yet it has been used so many times across the Internet to represent the game.

I also agree that the eShop is way too slow, especially when trying to load a new page.

@stevenw45 Yeah, a glitch was discovered in the remake that allows you to duplicate badges if you have a full badge inventory. And unlike what you said about the original, it doesn't corrupt the save data.