chefgon

In the Japanese box, X is aiming his blaster away from every single bad guy in the game. In the NA box he’s also firing off screen, but at least there’s the possibility that there’s a bad guy there since we can’t confirm that every single one of them is in the opposite direction.

@daveMcFlave Okami

I went out on release day to pick it up and everyone was sold out already. It’s already selling for more than double MSRP on eBay.

Yoshi’s Story (a game that is wonderful) ranked below Yoshi’s Island DS (a game that is bad). What a shame.

Touch-and-Go is super underrated too. I get that it’s not what people wanted from a Yoshi game, but lots of really excellent 80s arcade classics have similar variety and depth and they’re considered among the best games ever made. Touch-and-Go isn’t exactly Donkey Kong, but it ain’t bad either.

The N64 app has a pretty stellar collection of infinitely replayable games. I’ve logged more time into some individual N64 games than I have into a lot of real Switch games I paid $60 for.

It was the first 3D Sonic game that I’ve ever liked. I loved the Genesis games but I thought Sonic Adventure was a disaster and this was the first time they really moved on from that game’s deeply flawed DNA.

Did the colorblind modes help you? I tried them and they actually made the problem worse because they all crush the yellows and whites really close together.

They’re all great, but N64 is untouchable in this category.

I stuck with the Worm Light on my original pink GBA because I hated the shallow clicky buttons and hard-to-reach shoulders of the SP.

I had brothers growing up so had no choice but to put my own name on the save file to claim my turf on the cartridge. I guess it became a habit and I just kept doing it.

I didn’t think I had a strong opinion until BotW removed the ability to rename the hero and it was BIZARRE. Characters in the game kept calling me Link, which was a new experience and made it feel less like Zelda to me.

@NintendoWife I think you have your generations misaligned here. Game Boy launched in 1989, six years after the Famicom and just one year before the Super Famicom, spending the majority of its life coexisting with the 16-bit home console. Game Boy Color didn’t coexist with the Super Nintendo at all, launching in 1998, two years after the N64 hit the market.

Since this is the first generation where they’ve sold only one system, it’s notable that the Switch has also outsold some past generations in their entirety. While probably nothing will ever touch Wii + DS, the Switch has handily outsold GameCube + GBA and Wii U + 3DS, which is a nice confirmation that combining their handheld and console efforts was a good move.

Have you ever played Donkey Kong with an 8-way joystick? It’s like 10 times harder. Any accidental diagonal input will cause Mario to stop moving.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. The video was irrefutably recorded on MAME. That’s the beginning and end of the story. It doesn’t matter if he’s good at Donkey Kong. It doesn’t matter what joystick he used. It doesn’t matter if he cheated. He misrepresented the score. That’s cause for disqualification and cause to reject all his scores because he’s proven himself untrustworthy.

@MyNameIsAtticus I know everyone is going to have personal preferences for controllers but I never got used to the size and weight of my Deck. It's still kind of a chore to hold and interact with after several months. It's not unusable by any means, but I'd much rather have something smaller and cozier. I'd jump on a Deck Lite if they made one closer to Switch size without the touchpads (which take up a ton of space for a feature I virtually never use) and removed the giant handles on the back.

@MyNameIsAtticus It's been a while now so I don't remember all the details, but I do remember for sure that Wolfenstein 3D was listed as Playable and I couldn't control it no matter what I did. I tried a dozen different things in the settings - mapping to gamepad, mapping to keyboard, half a dozen different proton versions - nothing worked. I suspect it worked when they verified it and then something changed in a system update and it didn't work anymore but nobody noticed.

The single biggest Pro of physical games on Switch is missing from your list - you can share it among multiple people. Since everyone in my house has their own Switch, buying digital sometimes means buying three copies of the same game.

Dual controllers is a novelty at best. If you really want modern FPS controls in Goldeneye, set the controls to 1.2 and hold the left and middle handles. You lose analog input on your left hand, but any WASD PC player will confirm that’s entirely optional.

Everyone: graphics don’t matter

Also Everyone: graphics look bad I’m not buying this

@Zequio They brought over a bunch of Mario 2 concepts for Mario 3D World and Captain Toad. And Kensuke Tanabe cited Mario 2 as an inspiration for some of the new gameplay ideas in Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze. They even bet the GBA launch on a Mario 2 remake back in the day. I’d say Nintendo’s designers are well aware that Mario 2 is a masterpiece worth bringing back ideas from.

This reminds me of Godzilla for the Game Gear. Except in that one you could choose whether to play as G-Force or the monsters, so of course I always played as the monsters because that’s cooler.

I bought a Steam Deck to compliment my Switch and I’ve been pretty surprised by how little I’m enjoying it. I don’t have a gaming PC so I’m not one of those people walking into the Deck with hundreds of games ready to play, and I’ve had a bad time navigating the Steam Deck’s store (because there is no Steam Deck store, only a Steam store where half the games aren’t compatible with your console) and that has proven to be enough of a headache that I’m having a hard time forming a bond with the thing. I continue to reach for the Switch every time because I like it. I’ve formed an emotional bond with it because it shows me cool games I can play and then enables me to play them. The Deck demands tinkering and research (which are things I enjoy sometimes but not when they’re standing between me and playing games) and it feels like it’s fighting against me instead of enabling cool experiences for me.

If you have a huge Steam library (and equally enormous hands and forearms) then I’m sure it’s a great accessory for your gaming PC, but as a console it’s really lacking that plug-and-play experience. The system itself never fades into the background and I just don’t enjoy thinking about how to maximize my battery life or researching how to make an unsupported game work.

Any time there’s a game available on both I’m happy to pay twice as much for the Switch version with half the performance because I’d just rather be playing on the Switch.

This game was so good I put up with Stadia to play it. If that’s not high praise nothing is.

@Fizza The Pixel Remasters are the best entry point to the 2D Final Fantasies. The soundtracks are incredible, the graphics are beautiful, and they’re faithful to the original versions while having some nice new features like in-game maps and diagonal movement that make them more approachable for beginners without spoiling anything about the experience.

I don’t understand this “trapped on the Wii U” thing. The Wii U isn’t a prison, it’s an old console. There are plenty of good games still exclusive to the NES, Super NES, N64, GameCube, and Wii. They’re not trapped, they’re just part of that console’s library. That’s always been normal until Wii U when everyone suddenly started demanding that 100% of its library must be forward-ported to Switch in order to be valid for some reason.

That trailer shows so many things but I don’t have the slightest idea what kind of game it is

Sony is lying. They aren’t worried about losing Call of Duty. They’ve been offered a TEN YEAR contract, which is more than enough time to find an alternative (or for CoD to jump the shark and become irrelevant). Sony’s true fear is that Microsoft will offer true consumer choice by making CoD available on subscription services.

Sony is desperately trying to create the illusion that subscriptions are for lower-tier games and $70 price tags are for AAA games, which is why they pay so many publishers to keep their top tier games off of Game Pass.

Sony’s real goal here is to double-charge their customers: convince them to pay for both a subscription and full price for games at the same time. Microsoft is in danger of proving that this model is a ripoff by offering too much value for $10/month.

@Roz1281 You could technically play Doom using a mouse as your input device (which wasn't even new then, you could do the same in Wolfenstein) but that experience isn't remotely the same thing as what people consider to be mouse-and-keyboard FPS controls today.

Of course the whole point appears to be moot, as somewhere in the last year the article was updated to remove the sentence I was even replying to in the first place, lol.

Punchout as the underlying basis for a combat system is so interesting. I had never thought about its mechanics as part of something bigger where you can, like, move around and stuff.

I own this game and I didn’t even realize it had an online mode. I just play it when people come over.

I’m willing to accept that the Castlevania games must be good because so many people love them, but I just don’t get it. I didn’t care for the NES or Super Nintendo games when they were new, and then SotN just felt like an uninspired Super Metroid clone that aped the basics but failed to recapture even a hint of the mysterious atmosphere that made Samus’s adventures so engaging.

I don't understand the appeal of any team-based shooter, Splatoon included, but I can recognize that they're very popular and Splatoon has a lot more personality than most of them.

@mazzel “Game Boy” and “Play Boy” are both plays on the name “Walk Man,” which was the dominant handheld entertainment device of the era.

I first learned about this trick when I was looking at VR emulators for these old games. Sky being rendered really close to the camera is a common bug when they add automatic depth, so the emulators have a built-in hack to change the depth of objects sitting at the exact center point of the camera.

You guys might think I’m strange, but I’ve never had any complaints about Star Fox’s framerate. Same with 20fps N64 games. They all just look correct to me, like I can’t even perceive that the frame rate is lower than normal.

@Znake lol wut? Star Fox Zero is built from the ground up as a dual screen game. There’s no way to port it to the Switch without rebuilding and rebalancing it into a totally different game. Maybe that would be possible, but it certainly wouldn’t be simple, and that’s a lot of effort to commit to a game that was poorly received the first time around.

Quake 2 with the N64 level pack included, please!

I have so many things that I love, it’s probably a 20-way tie for second place. But there is one item that rises above the rest and that’s a Donkey Kong Junior coin-op cabinet from 1982. Serial number 20, covered in battle scars from decades entertaining players in an arcade.

DK Jr is my all-time favorite game and having that piece of history in my home is something that never gets old. There’s just something special about dropping in a quarter, hearing that plunking sound, and going head-to-head against this massive orange manifestation of one of the world’s most challenging games in an attempt at a new high score. I love it.

And I’ll toss in an honorable mention for the items with my favorite story: when my local rental place was clearing out their SNES carts to make room on the shelves for PSX and N64 games (1997ish), I paid $10 each for their boxed copies of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III, Dracula X, Mega Man X3, Secret of Evermore, and Mario RPG. They probably thought I was a huge sucker for paying real money for literal trash they were about to throw away.

@Serpenterror According to the press release there’s a Mode button on the shoulder. I don’t remember playing many games that used it. Shadow Squadron on 32X used it to change the camera view, but most games just ignored it.

I always thought the 6-button controller was way more comfortable than the original. Especially the North American version, which is slightly larger.

@Maulbert In this case I meant compelling as in interesting. They’re trying something very different.

I’m not here to defend Sonic Team or anything. I consider the vast majority of their products to be borderline unplayable. But that’s exactly why this very different thing is intriguing.

What I see in the IGN videos is the ability to go in any direction instead of being stuck on a set path, which in turn transforms Sonic’s standard moveset from glorified quick time events into options for getting around the world. I’d rather see anything new and adventurous over the same old uninspired junk they’ve been churning out since 1999.

I genuinely don’t understand what everyone’s upset about. I thought the reveal was intriguing and this is the first 3D Sonic game that I’m actually excited to play. This series has been so bad for so long, how could a compelling attempt at something new possibly be unwelcome?

@Ralizah “It's deeply weird to me that Microsoft never greenlit a third mainline entry. A new Banjo-Kazooie game would go a long way toward filling the mascot platformer hole that ecosystem has.”

Lol, Microsoft absolutely greenlit and funded a third mainline Banjo game. Nuts & Bolts is the third game that Rare, the Stampers, and the original team came up with. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it wasn’t intended to be the third game in the series.

As for why they haven’t taken the IP away from Rare and given it to someone else to make a fourth entry (since Rare is apparently content to focus on new IP), they probably just haven’t had anyone else to give it to. Maybe that’ll change when they gain ownership of Toys For Bob and Vicarious Visions, but Xbox’s first party problem has always been too much IP and not enough talented studios to do anything with it.

@SteamEngenius What makes an N64 controller awkward to hold? It’s always been perfectly comfortable to me, and it’s different enough from the Pro controller layout that any possible mapping is a compromise.

The entire draw of this game for me was the ability to combine powerups. Describing it as 35 different abilities, while accurate, doesn’t really capture how exciting and fun it is to discover them all. It’s so fun to see the creative applications of the elements. What happens when you combine ice and electricity? A refrigerator, of course!

That makes this a unique Kirby experience for me, as I’m constantly switching out powerups to experiment. In most Kirby games it’s about finding the best power and then keeping it as long as possible. In Kirby 64 I’m constantly throwing them away to try out new ones. It’s a playground to experiment in.

Any of those parent companies would spend five years destroying EA’s business and then spin it off as an independent company again.

@Rykdrew I know you can use Xbox controllers. I’m saying there’s no controller that matches the capabilities and layout of the Deck’s built-in controls. The Steam controller gets close, but it has no d-pad or right stick, and also isn’t available to buy anymore.

So if you’re using a binding on the Deck that uses the touchpads, you have to switch to a totally different binding to continue playing on the TV with an Xbox controller. To me, that makes the docking experience incomplete.

I have a Steam Deck reservation and I’m excited to try it when it’s my turn.

One thing that I don’t understand about Steam Deck that I never see mentioned is how there’s no controller available for docked mode. I get that you could use any Bluetooth controller or keyboard, but there’s no way to drop it in the dock and keep playing with the same dual analog + dual thumbpad + gyro controls that are available in handheld mode. On Switch, whether you’re using Joycons or a Pro Controller, the exact same control options are available in both handheld and docked modes.

I’m glad to see Nintendo calling out online play in the trailer. It’s been there since launch on every NSO game but that feature is weirdly undervalued and never mentioned in any discussions about whether or not NSO is worth the price. I think people just don’t realize it’s there. I personally use it to play Mario Kart 64 with the same people I played with in high school, and that’s easily worth the asking price because it’s the only practical way for me to do that.

Return of the Joker on Game Boy is a legitimate classic as far as I’m concerned. Great soundtrack, perfect challenge, makes you feel like Batman.

These developer comments absolutely confirm that it's a port and not a cloud version. There wouldn't be Switch-specific technical problems to solve for a cloud version.

Besides, No Man's Sky has been available as a cloud game on phones and tablets for two years already on Game Pass.