Zaruboggan

I feel for these devs. Indies have been launching in early access for $30 pretty successfully. I don't think Team Cherry is fundamentally resetting expectations, per se, but people will question "why is this so expensive when Silksong was $20", especially in the same genre.
Even indie devs are doing math. If their sales expectations only put them in the green if their price is at $40, then a nice, beautifully generous $20 Silksong would feel threatening.
That being said, since I'm not an indie dev, you won't see me complaining lol

@sketchturner 50k copies is actually good for an indie game. The million sellers have kinda distorted our expectations for what turns a profit.

I enjoyed Call of the Sea on Gamepass a while back. I think they just announced it was getting a sequel at Gamescon?

Nothing for me this week, mostly because I'm headed into the mountains where no technology will follow. Otherwise, I'm tentatively interested in Daemon X Machina and Silksong.

007 First Light certainly looks like a fun game, but it's kind of what I worried it would be: more Hitman, less 007 Agent Under Fire.
Hopefully someone in the future will make a 007 FPS with throwback split screen MP just for lil old me.

I'm always watching out for the spiritual successor to Super Swing Golf on Wii. I guess until then, I'll fire up Mario Golf 64.

Hm. The story killed my enjoyment of the first game. For that, I only really did the side missions in co-op until my pilot was maxed out. It was fun enough.
Finding out that the story hasn't gotten any better (not really) is too bad, but not surprising.
I want to support games on cart, but there are also too many games coming out to pick up something lacking in any area at $70.
Hm. Might pick it up when the release schedules die down, just to enjoy the co-op.

Out and about for work this weekend, with no console to speak of. I will still be playing some games--I tried The Rabbit Haul (farming and tower defense crossover) and Royalty Free-for-all (smash with royalty free characters like Oliver twist and Frankenstein) so far. Next is co-op roguelike boss rush Nullpoint Protocol. Hoping to get some time to see what Shueisha is up to, too.
Yep, I'm at PAX West.

This article was written for me. Thank you.
I will always pronounce it "eks." Spy Eks Family, Hunter Eks Hunter, Drag Eks Drive, Xenoblade Chronicles Eks--always. No cross, no and, no silence. I don't care if it makes me wrong, because it actually makes me right.
Time for an eksecution of this horrible naming trend.

I'll be beating the absolutely stunning Sword of the Sea, the new game by Giant Squid, the makers of Abzu and Pathless. Thanks to the unparalleled art and another beautiful score by Austin Wintory, it has filled me with all manner of emotions--but mostly awe.

Still continuing our Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough, and getting up to more trouble than we know what to do with.

I'd like to wrap up DK Bananza before my early September trips, too, but that might be too ambitious.

The demo on steam was so fun. I'm super excited to play this whole thing in co-op. Glad it's coming out on Switch at launch.

I enjoyed the side missions in DXM, but the story, and the way it was told, were so dreadfully boring that completing the campaign never appealed to me.
The game's use of color was awesome, and the title screen theme is an all-timer. I also really liked the leveling systems and how it impacted the way my character looked.
But yeah, awful, boring story. If NL is reviewing the game, please kindly let us know how the sequel's plot compares to the original!

It's time to stop being bothered by people complaining, gang. Complaining is the #1 way to instigate change. And it's not into an empty void: this kind of feedback does reach game companies.
Some of them are hoping for what the letter writer is hoping for: that the discontent will just disappear in time. But the feedback, in combination with lower sales, DOES work. It DOES make a difference.
I welcome complainers. They're the ones who make things happen.

Hoping to beat Midnight Walk. We're progressing apace in Baldur's Gate 3, mostly embarrassing ourselves with bad rolls.
I'm hoping to get back to DK Bananza this weekend, too, after a decently long hiatus while I wrapped up some of my other 2025 games.
Who knows what else!

Always wanted to give it a try. Twenty years ago, my parents didn't want me playing M games, so we never picked it up.
Hopefully Nintendo will put it on the Gamecube app so that my brothers and cousins and I can play the splitscreen MP we never did!

Love the heck out of UFO 50. Like the review says, not every game is for every gamer, but when one clicks, it's worth the admission alone.
It's got some fun, thoughtful multiplayer games, if you like pitting your brain against your friend!

This one's a skip for me. I had some fun playing it on PS3, but the devolution of dungeons and grating plot + characters were part of the beginning of Tales of's downward trend.
Guess I'm still holding out hope for Tales of the Abyss to get a multiplayer port. Co-op ToA is as yet a prisoner of the PS2.

Loved this back on GameCube. I'm definitely gonna revisit, just for the warm fuzzies.

I've got a busy weekend ahead, so I'm glad I already managed to polish off Urban Myth Dissolution Center during the week. I like all of its ending twists individually, but maybe not together...
We're continuing through Baldur's Gate 3 and someone just committed to one side of a war I'm not sure I want to be involved in, but that's the fun of multiplayer!
I'm hoping to start Midnight Walk, and I'm likely to hop in for a little more Donkey Kong Bananza. And I know I said I'm going to be short of gaming time, but the console launch of UFO 50 does make me want to get back to that, too...
We'll see!

OPUS: Prism Peak and Tiny Bookshop both look like they're up my alley. I'm excited to play the Mina The Hollower demo, since I missed that on steam, and I'm glad UFO 50 is making the jump--absolutely excellent game.
It was a nice, brisk 15 minutes, so no complaints from me.

Always looking for new surprises, but in the spirit of things, it'd be great to see the following confirmed and/or dated for Switch(2):

Beastieball: Pokemon meets turn-taking volleyball RPG
My Familiar: Pixel noir RPG starring a duck, a goblin, and a sick sick soundtrack.
The Big Catch: Super fun retro 3D platformer I tried out at Pax last year.
Eco Breaker: Mech JRPG throwback.
Agent 64: Spies Never Die: Goldeneye, but made now.
Petal Runner: Adventure with a, let's call it bubble-gum pixel aesthetic.
Threads of Time: Beautiful pseudo HD2D time-jumping JRPG.
Alabaster Dawn: Action RPG from the CrossCode dev.
Absolum: Streets of Rage 4 devs make a beautiful beat-em-up co-op roguelike for 2.
Gecko Gods: Just give my lizard a release date!
And it'd be nice if Mina the Hollower was on S(2) for Halloween. And is the Elechead team's new game (Öoo) (out this week on Steam) coming to Switch?

Hoping to see some sweet indies get dated! There are some really cool projects on the horizon, and I hope they make it to my Switch 2.

Started up Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time. The three of us are having a ball. I'm a huge Larian Studios fan thanks to the Original Sin games, and this one seems only more par for the course.

Making steady progress in Donkey Kong Bananza. I'm on 902 and doing pretty much everything as I go.

I'm hoping to finally get back to Urban Myth Dissolution Center. Now that I've wrapped up reading Memories of Ice, I'm hoping to use the time to knock out more 2025 games. Could start The Midnight Walk but hoping to be good and wrap some stuff up first.

I put Dear Me on the wishlist. Not that the price is too high, just that I am pretty busy with other games right now. I mean, it's only 45 minutes, but still...
I could see the fireside game being fun with the right friend group. I just don't think I'm in that friend group lol

Curious about the new square action RPG. Since I already have P3R, I'm probably skipping everything out of this showing. Which is too bad, but not a huge issue--we're starting Baldur's Gate 3 for the first time tonight, and that'll probably take me until Metroid/Pokemon.
Hopefully a first-party direct comes sooner rather than later.

Maybe Shinobi. My August game will likely just be Sword of the Sea, though.

I expect we'll get a lot of ports. I have other consoles, so those ports will unfortunately be of middling interest to me. Unless I happened to miss out on them when they first came around--in that case, I might be more tempted to have it for my Switch 2!

I hope we'll get some surprises. The Switch got more than its fair share of exclusive games (at least at launch). TWEWY: NEO was switch 1 exclusive at one time, right? SMTV. Monster Hunter Rise. I want to see more of that kind of stuff!

I'd also like for my steam wishlist games to come to Switch 2, so that I can get them on my preferred platform. Absolum, Monsterpatch, Erenshor, Alabaster Dawn, Tako no Himitsu: Ocean of Secrets, Isle of Reveries, Threads of Time, Petal Runner, Agent 64: Spies Never Die...

It's a big list, and I'm sure a lot of them have already been confirmed for Switch 1.

When can Pokemon spinoffs be good again?

The end result and the mess it took to get there are too damn bad.

JP Logo, NA/EU box art.
The JP logo feels unbalanced to me.

More Donkey Kong Bananza, and so far that's the only guarantee, since I'm in the last 150 pages of Memories of Ice and reading that's all I've been wanting to do.
Otherwise, there's always the possibility of some MP gaming--Windblown or Nightreign, probably.
I did try out a few steam demos, of which Absolum is a definite winner. I think it's by the Streets of Rage 4 guys, a 2-player co-op beat-em-up rogue like.
I'm also installing several hundred feet of Ethernet cables and wiring into a new construction, whee.

I would love a Donkey Konga Trilogy! I'm a little surprised by how many DK games there are that I love. Jungle Beat, Konga, Tropical Freeze...
Also, you can't mention DK64 without mentioning its multiplayer! For shame!
I'm having a lot of fun with Bananza so far. Looking forward to playing more!

Do you expect I beat it in a weekend?
Please consider putting these off at least another week. I promise people will still click the article.

Absolutely love this game. We fired it up last year for a revisit. I get a simple joy from the fact that your team composition affects your team name, and how your batting line-up and fielding are affected by the order and placement of your characters. If they like each other, they'll throw faster to each other, etc.
There was so much depth to the team building process, beyond just "I like the way this guy pitches."

Why, DK Bananza, of course! It's actually my brother's copy (physical), so when he needs a break, I'll be trying to sneak in some playtime of my own.
Otherwise, I'm sequestering myself in a separate room so that I don't see everything before I get to it myself. That means I'll be making some progress on reading Memories of Ice (I'm about halfway through--the siege has begun in earnest!).
If both of us need a DK break at the same time, we'll probably play either Nightreign or Windblown. Oh, and I'll be doing a little Xenoblade Chronicles X this morning with my cousin.

Planning to pick this up. 8ing's done right by me in the past with their anime fighters, and I do have every volume of Hunter x Hunter on my bookshelf.

Mario Kart World, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and some more Ruffy and the Riverside.
Lots of family in town so we're all getting together for some good old Smash.
Otherwise, I'll mostly be reading Erikson's Memories of Ice and Hyuuga's Apothecary Diaries.

Disappointing to hear. I'm not some sort of modding hardcore enthusiast, but I've opened up controllers across generations to repair them. Gamecube? Supremely easy. Effortless. I'd open, clean, repair, and close those things for sport. PlayStation 3 starts getting rough. I still have an open one that I can't get to close properly, but that's presumably because I am bad (seriously, anyone is welcome to give it a try...).
Drift is real, and if you've been lucky enough not to deal with it, good for you. My first pair of joycons had it. My pro controller got it. Two of our PS5 controllers have it. The pro controller cost me $30-40 to get repaired. Gamecube controllers cost me what, like a couple bucks for the screwdriver?

Tldr being able to repair is good; why would you want to blow another $40-90 to fix drift?

"oh no it's not commercially viable"
It's not commercially viable for us to pay $80 for a game that gets yanked after a year, either.

Fast Fusion is a single player's hardcore racing game only. Not getting money to unlock stuff when playing Multiplayer is such an aggressive oversight that it's crushed my spirit and plumbed my enjoyment of the game.

Ruffy and the Riverside is fun!

I think the console's too iterative to be exciting in itself (as far as launches go). The line-up, as someone who has a PS5, Xbox Series X, and Steam Deck, really only has Mario Kart World, Fast Fusion, and Switch games.
It's a far cry from the exciting line-up of the Wii (Zelda, Wii Sports, Red Steel, Excite Truck, plus the Virtual Console) or the Switch (Zelda, Snipper Clips, 1-2 Switch, Fast RMX).
That being said, I like the console. I'm excited for DK, and the games that are coming eventually.

Mario Kart World, Eldin Ring Nightreign, and Windblown.
I may also do some more Ruffy and the Riverside.

We've played for around 35 hours, doing a combination of co-op ? hunting and offline grand prix/knockout. Played once online with a friend.
I never have and never will play MK online with randos, so at least I managed to avoid being personally affected by the patch (as far as I've understood the issues).

I stand by my previous comment!

XCXDE and Mario Kart World, I'd say.

More ? Blocks and Grand Prix in Mario Kart World, for sure, plus some Eldin Ring Nightreign (beat the fancy centaur last night; just gotta finish the crater and figure out how to get to the top of the center castle) and Windblown (huge new update!) with the brothers.
I also picked up Ruffy and the Riverside, so I'm looking forward to that!

Great fun when it came out. I had fun revisiting it, but since Charged surpasses it in every way, it now feels like a first draft.

No thanks, bye

A couple of people have already hit on a key point: blue shells are necessary because otherwise first place is easy street.

I like it just being Mario stuff. I'm getting a little tired of everything being a crossover.

This'll be the first MK that I don't have a go-to, since they're all so great. Conkdor, Swimsuit Baby Mario, Racer Toad, All-Terrain Koopa, and the Peach Suite are my current favorites. I also like Parabiddy and Waluigi, and am excited to unlock Cataquak and Fish Bones.
My brother's been rolling Pinata, Cheep Cheep, the Mole, Rosalina, and Daisy.

Fast Fusion doesn't let you earn coins while playing multiplayer, which is really, colossally stupid. I didn't really want to do an hour of homework just to have every track available for friends. And forget the cars. Big sigh. Otherwise fun.
Mario Kart World is much more multiplayer friendly, so it's getting the bulk of my day-to-day playtime. We've almost finished every mirror cup on my brother's switch, so next we'll be doing it on mine. We also unlocked every kart on his, though we're still waiting on kamek and costumes. In the meantime, we've had a lot of fun just looking for ? Panels and peach coins together.
Uh, otherwise our weekly Monster Hunter Generations U and, if I have my way, a whole lot of Eldin Ring Nightreign.