TheRealKyleHyde

I played Super Mario Odyssey during lockdown and it was wonderful to explore all these inventive, brightly coloured worlds at my own pace while being stuck inside in real life. The simple pleasure of jumping around finding Moons in such delightful locales really put a smile on my face.

This might be a controversial opinion, but for me, Odyssey is the best 3D Mario game. It's not as revolutionary as Super Mario 64 and is perhaps too easy for some players, but I found that the replacement of lives with losing coins meant I approached levels with less stress and a greater willingness to try out risky manoeuvres, which is surely part of the point of playing games!

I fear I may not be of the requisite vintage to fully appreciate the era that this game evokes, though it does look very intriguing. Does anyone remember an old browser-based game called Forumwarz? The 'fake Internet' idea here reminds me of that game.

I've only played the North American SNES version of IV (II) on the Wii Virtual Console, which is apparently very different from the DS remake, so no votes from me.

This almost looks more like a typical Japanese weekly sales chart than a British one. Congratulations, Nintendo!

@Averagewriter It was all sorted between me and Dunning by the time I left Hotel Dusk. Saw him once at a petrol station years later. He'd let himself go a bit. Gave each other an awkward nod and a half-smile. Wish Mila would call me back, though.

@Kev_Morrison From what I can work out from Wikipedia, it's pronounced like 'V2', with the V standing for 'victory', though I'm happy to stand corrected by anyone who's played the game.

@Waluigifan I seem to recall a similar game-breaking bug being discovered in Super Paper Mario on the Wii shortly after its release. If I remember correctly, you could send your disc to Nintendo and get it replaced.

That German one is my favourite. Everything looks more or less like it does in the game, and it has a more epic and less cluttered feel than the Japanese one.

Gambling platforms in the UK are rampant and badly need sorting out. You can't watch a football match on TV without seeing dozens of gambling promotions in some shape or form, whether it's adverts during breaks, billboards or shirt sponsors. Once upon a time, going to the bookies or betting on the races was seen as a niche and morally questionable activity, but thanks to the proliferation of websites and apps, especially related to football, gambling has become normalised, and loot boxes in games (especially FIFA) are just adding to its ubiquity. A crack-down on this industry is long overdue.

@Laoak Sword and Shield have to accommodate the combat, items, NPCs, interactivity, menus, world map, Dynamaxing, curries, battle animations, etc. If the gameplay to this simply boils down to taking photos of Pokémon while on rails (just like the original N64 game), then they will have a lot more space to add nicer-looking graphics. I would hope and expect that New Pokémon Snap will look better than Sword and Shield.

Typo in the headline - it should be 'even if you haven't beaten the main game'.

A Nintendo-exclusive JRPG top of the UK charts? Am I dreaming?

That name's Strash as far as I'm concerned.

When was the last time Nintendo exclusives held both top two positions in the UK chart? Especially two non-Pokémon games?

@KoopaTheQuick Agreed. In years gone by it would also have only been done with a 'realistic', officially-licensed sports title, rather than those 'kiddy' Mario sports games.

You know that gaming has become mainstream when this happens. Sports stars? Celebrities? Facebook? If Nintendo aren't involved in this, they must be very pleased with the free publicity.

If football still isn't happening by the time the 2021 edition of FIFA is released in the autumn, do you think it will affect sales of the game? On the one hand, people will be desperate to get their football fix, and FIFA gives them that even in the absence of the real thing. On the other hand, if not much transfer activity happens over the summer and there are no real-world equivalent leagues happening at the same time, why bother buying a new game?

An excellent game, but similarly to others above, I've never got round to finishing it. The time limits and repetition just make the game feel exhausting to play and I'm never motivated to get back to it. Yet there was a time, when I first played it in about 2007, when I preferred it over Ocarina of Time. The atmosphere is amazing and the characters' mundane problems in the face of impending doom make the world feel more real than other Zelda titles.

This game more than any other makes me feel conflicting emotions; the depth of the story and the complexity of the world are so satisfying, yet the thought of going back to another of those lengthy dungeons or getting a guide out to complete some side-quests just puts me off. A flawed masterpiece.

Er, it is possible to enjoy both Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokémon Sword and Shield, you know! You're even allowed to prefer the former and still be happy about the latter's good sales! Sword and Shield may not be game-changing in the way that New Horizons seems to be, but they're not bad games at all. Animal Crossing isn't my kind of game and I have no plans to buy it, but I'm delighted that it has been so successful (even if that success might partly be down to the world's current plight).

The Independent was, once upon a time, a well-regarded quality newspaper. Sadly, it has now joined the race to the bottom that has characterised news in the digital age. It's now little better than the likes of Buzzfeed and, at times, reads almost like a left-wing version of the Daily Mail.

Rather than jumping on the rage train regarding this article, we should be pleased that Animal Crossing has now become so popular that even mainstream publications are talking about it. Chances are that articles like this will do little to damage this popularity, either. I remember at the height of the Wii craze in the late 2000s, every other week there seemed to be some drivel in the likes of the Sun about broken TVs and injuries caused by careless Wii Remote waggling. You know what they say - any publicity is better than no publicity...

That blue sky and sea combo on the North American version resembles that Microsoft PowerPoint slide background that everyone used in the early 2000s.

Maybe change the strapline for the article, as it suggests that the people abusing the guy responsible are representative of 'Nintendo fans' in general. That's not a good look for those of us who would consider ourselves Nintendo fans, which presumably applies to most of the people who visit this website...

@Kitchener It's been confirmed that the music for Bravely Default II is composed by Revo, who did the score for the first game!

That Japanese cover just screams '1990s'. It's the multi-coloured scribbles and shapes on a white background, and the 'zany' way that the SONIC letters are flying all over the place. You see those scribbles everywhere these days thanks to the current obsession with 90s nostalgia in fashion and design.

Interesting that the European cover has the game's title spelt as Ghost 'n Goblins (i.e. singular Ghost). If you go on Wikipedia, the poster they use for the cover art there (from North America, supposedly) is the same.

This may be a poor week by Switch's high standards but to see two Nintendo exclusives released quite some time ago still in the top ten is impressive. I noticed Ring Fit Adventure got gobbled up within hours of its stock replenishment on Amazon UK.

I would be interested but £30 is a bit steep.

Typo in the article: 'The campaign appears to have took the world by storm' should be 'The campaign appears to have taken the world by storm'.

Super Crash Bros. Ultimate...

This might well be the last week we see a 3DS game in the charts. Almost everywhere on the UK high street has stopped selling new 3DS / 2DS consoles within the last few weeks. Go into the likes of GAME, Smyths, supermarkets and even the Nintendo UK Online Store and there's nothing. It would seem that the Switch Lite is now the only choice for budget Nintendo gaming without going into the second-hand market or finding a rare gem somewhere.

This sounds really good but even with a 20% discount, it seems a bit over-priced at £8.63 for a game from 2011 that only lasts for four or five hours. I'm tempted, but will it get a better discount in a future sale...?

An impressive seven-place jump for Brain Training in its second week as well.

@scully1888 What have you done to deserve the 'honour' of reviewing three terrible kart racing games in a matter of weeks? At least it means we get more of your excellent and punbelievably funny reviews, so it's not all bad. I've been reading your critiques of games since the ONM days and for me, you're one of the best in the business.

As a professional phonetician / linguist, I could talk about this for hours and would happily advise Nintendo Life on this topic in future. In a way it would be good if The Pokémon Company could provide official pronunciations for all Pokémon names using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but these would no doubt be based on an American accent that many fans with other accents would pronounce differently, thus leading to more arguments. So maybe it's best that they don't give an official pronunciation beyond those heard on the anime (which as others have noted, sometimes change over time).

One example in particular is quite interesting. As others have said, the pun in Arceus' name comes partly from the Latin word 'deus' (god), which would suggest that it was originally supposed to rhyme with 'ay-us' rather than 'ee-us'. I remember reading somewhere that the 'c' in Arceus was supposed to be pronounced as a /s/ sound in English (as in its Japanese name), but they changed it to a /k/ in the English dub of the anime as 'Arse-ee-us' sounds like a rude word in British English. I haven't watched the anime for a long time so I can't remember if this is actually the case. The 'arc' part of its name is supposed to come from words like 'arch', 'arcane', etc, which have a /k/, so it's weird that this turned into a /s/ in Japanese in the first place.

Similar deals can be found at GAME, Argos, Smyths and Curry's, but sadly I don't have any affiliate links for those...

I glossed over this initially but the Majora's Mask 3D deal is actually quite good. You can't even find second-hand copies on eBay for that price in Europe as it was sadly never added to the Nintendo Selects line (unlike in North America).

How does this compare to Corpse Party? The premise sounds similar.

For me, Corpse Party was compelling but went too far with the gore and had a generally misanthropic world-view that made the story somewhat depressing to experience.

I just wanted to express my appreciation for the choice of music in the video. That song is one of the best tracks from Pokémon Battle Revolution on the Wii.

This was my first home console and so I have very happy memories of many of the games on this list.

I know some people don't like it because of the disruptive Power Moves, but I really like Mario Power Tennis. There's a really good game of tennis underpinning it all in a lovely and wacky Mario universe.

Alas, none of my friends had any of the TimeSplitters games, so our main multiplayer FPS was 007: Nightfire. I didn't think all that much of it, but maybe that's because I was rubbish and lost every time...

I'd be surprised if 3DS and Wii U games disappear from the European My Nintendo service anytime soon. Only a few weeks ago they added some more 3DS discounts and extended the deadline for the last batch of Wii U ones until 1st March 2020.

@FantasiaWHT Using the standard alphabet to represent specific pronunciation is often very challenging but the difference between the two variants for Yoshi is in the 'o' vowel. Some people pronounce it so that the 'o' sounds like the vowel in 'go' or 'yo' ('yo-shee') and others say it so that the 'o' sounds like the vowel in 'gosh' or 'mosh' ('yosh-ee').

As a professional academic linguist specialising in phonetics (pronunciation) and language variation, and also as a life-long Nintendo fan, I find this kind of stuff fascinating and could talk about it till the cows come home. This article's commitment to linguistic diversity and descriptivism is very impressive and is almost never seen in any popular media - clearly someone on the team has studied linguistics! If Nintendo Life ever want to get the view of an 'expert' to explain some of these phenomena, I'd happily oblige.

@Kitchener It's not often I have strong opinions on character designs but the protagonist for Dragon Quest XI is, in my view, one of the most appalling I have ever come across. The hair-do is ugly and has been irrelevant in the fashion world for decades. The weird purple and grey outfit is so bland and uninspired. It just looks like it took five minutes to come up with. I realise Akira Toriyama is a top mangaka and the whole series is supposed to be conservative with minimal innovation but he has been doing Dragon Quest artwork for donkey's years now and it might be time to hand over the reins or at least look for some fresh inspiration from somewhere.

Thankfully in SSBU you can change the Hero's appearance to one of the more interesting aesthetics from previous DQ games but I'm not sure how much, if any, character customisation there is in DQXI itself to alleviate the offending design.

It's coming home!

Exciting stuff! I hope this means one day the UK will gets its very own permanent, physical official Nintendo / Pokémon shop (beyond the online one, of course).

It would have been even better if they'd changed the spelling to 'Pokémon Centre' to reflect British English.

Wow! Seriously impressive stuff from Fire Emblem.

I'm surprised there are enough NFL fans in the UK to get Madden to number 5.

Who comes up with these meaningless and unpronounceable game titles and how are they allowed to get past the brainstorming stage? It only takes minutes to check with someone who can speak English fluently.

Looks like they're phasing Wii U games out from My Nintendo as the last batch of discounts disappeared the other day. Shame - there'll probably never be any first-party Wii U eShop sales or discounts again now.

As for the 3DS, they're just rotating the same old offers round and round. They're certainly better than nothing but what a pity considering the potential this service has.

EDIT: Happy days! The last set of Wii U discounts have been extended until 2020!

I like Nintendo Life but why is the site so obsessed with proclaiming the 'death' of the 3DS? As a Nintendo fan site, you should be celebrating as much of the company's output as possible, especially the fact that they are still supporting high-quality hardware from the previous generation (even if that has now slowed down to a minimum). Imagine if they'd unceremoniously dropped the 3DS the moment the Switch came out like they did with the Wii U - everyone would be moaning that Nintendo had forgotten their loyal fans and those on a budget.

Not everyone has hundreds of pounds to spend on a new console every few years and the latest titles every few weeks. Sometimes the website's attitude strikes me as very dismissive of anything older than what whatever the current fad is, and it makes me think it's all just another form of advertising to get us to throw money at the latest shiny thing.

When was the last time GTA V wasn't in the top 10? I certainly can't remember.

My prediction for Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a top-3 finish.