dsparil

I got the variety kit hoping that some parts would get third party use, but I was disappointed at how meager that ended up being.

The eShop hit a good stride in the middle of the Switch's life, but it has become such a dump in the last few years. It's like there used to be some super basic minimum rules that don't exist anymore.

The extra bonus at the end is a 10/10. The actual game is worse than the other two FDC games and shockingly boring. 5/10

$500 is more than likely DOA. Adjusted for US inflation, $300 in 2017 is $387 now. It's all psychological, and I doubt they could even go to $400 for a base model without being pilloried. $350 is probably where it'll be at.

I played through everything in the collection recently, and it was fine. Whatever genuine issues existed at launched are fixed now.

The video is really misleading because it says that there's only one new area and one new dungeon. Considering that the total length per path is the same (and an overestimate from my experience), I assume that the third area is being directly replaced so about 75% is the same.

@deecas Oninaki was definitely a game where you could tell if a reviewer finished it or not!

8 for me. It does some things better, but some things worse.

@JR150 Shovelware had a higher bar to clear when a publisher had to at least take the risk on physical media. There's so much junk these days that it drowns out genuinely good micro-indie games.

The opening village in Twilight Princess. I've beaten repeatedly, and still get confused every time. I've known people that gave up on it because of how unclear it is.

The boots have always been what makes the Water Temple awful and nothing else.

I'm hoping that "Fixed UI bugs in Colosseum" is an understatement. There's a part where you have to select a specific character for the colosseum, and this particular person did not appear as one of the selectable pilots. Stopped things completely for me.

First three, no question although 2 and 3 are arguably two parts of the same issue.

The JoyCon sticks are tissue paper held together with hopes and dreams. I went through four sets before giving up on using it portable at all and went dock-only with a Pro Controller.

Lumping 2 and 3 together, the eShop is terrible on Switch. Performance is awful and the filtering options are not good. Going from the very curated early eShop to what it is now is just sad. It was too restrictive at the beginning, but it is way too far in the other direction now. It's like there was a policy change within the last few years that really started letting all the junk in.

I miss themes and the good play logs they had for a decade. There's just less fun and function at the system level. The lack of a real play log is especially inexplicable because they're still collecting this info and just showing it in such a worse way.

Ditto on the WiFi antenna. For me, it usually isn't too bad but sometimes it needs to be less than ten feet away from the router for downloads to move faster than a crawl.

@Paraka There's also statutory damages which only requires infringement, and it's a given that they'd pursue at least a preliminary injunction to stop it entirely. Realistically, I doubt Nintendo would do anything but the N64 was made with SGI's involvement and that's the wildcard. The current owner of SGI's remains, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has zero involvement in consumer markets. They wouldn't have anything to lose by suing and could drown Analogue in legal fees.

Buying up rights from dying companies for pennies on the dollar like they did originally is at least a relatively safe business strategy. Racking up billions of dollars of debt buying major companies less so.

Pointing was also great for stuff like Netflix where the Wii version was the best even now and that includes the "update" that made it worse. The worse accelerometers than the Motion+ is a killer though. Nintendo cheaped out on literal pennies and it made Skyward Sword with the proper control garbage to play. That was something that legitimately got out of sync every few minutes for me.

I just want to point out that there's a world of difference between the MSX and the MSX2 because they usually get lumped together. Games for the 2 have aged decently, but games for the original spec are headache inducing if they have any amount of scrolling.

The first two Gothics are great especially II with the expansion.

@Bomberman64 It was originally for PlayStation.

They never had good game use outside of Smash, but they're a good first party line of figures. On the other hand, I haven't bought one since the BotW set.

@GamingFan4Lyf Same for me although I did end up beating the whole game solo; not by choice, I saw a grand total of 1 player summon sign the entire game. The trick is that Ornstein is weak to fire and the second stage Smough gains it too. Quelaag's Furysword tears through them like tissue paper once you get the basic Ornstein avoidance down. I'm not sure how many hours I spent before I saw that tip.

I voted XIII trilogy, but I think Crisis Core might point towards VII Remake getting a Switch port.

@Horace Sports Story is self published. Everything is 100% on them. Golf Story did have a publisher, Fly High Works.

I've finished it, and it's a truly awful game. Even if you set aside all the awful bugs which are constant and range from embarrassing e.g. random camera zoom ins to crippling (scripting errors leading to soft locks some of which are from simply loading the game, random save game deletion), most of the "sports" are simple mini-games not fleshed out events. The game is mostly fetch quest by volume, and it seems like the final quarter to third of the game got cut at the last minute. The final tournament has story elements that come from nowhere and seems like a barely developed placeholder.

For as long as Nintendo has done these year end reviews, the playtimes I've gotten has always been wrong. This year the order is right at least.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (120 hours, actually 108)
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (92 hours, actually 80 to 85)
Dark Souls Remastered (82 hours, actually 72)

I always thought it'd be nice if some of the classic text adventures got updated versions, but turning Colossal Cave Adventure into an action adventure game troubles me unless that's really just referring to the small bit of "combat" that's already in the original.

I just finished this one, and it is a bit more unpolished than the others that saw Switch releases. I don't think that a commentary on anything. It just could have used some work especially on the camera.

@WhiteTrashGuy Takahashi has said that cost was an issue in the past, but I think Monolith might have mentioned some unspecified technical issue too. Since the series is a bigger seller these days, it might not be off the table anymore. Maybe on a Switch successor though.

The score is probably too low considering the positives, but not being able to target specific parts is an issue in the first three games. 4 and 5 add in a skill that allows for targeting, but it's a bizarre omission in general that does make battles drag on.

I thought this was a reference to the room the final battle is in. It's the same shape.

I liked the new Lego Star Wars, but that's a top 20 game at best. How a piece of short DLC is some how better than it is also puzzling.

From a purely gameplay perspective, it's one of the best maybe even the single best. There are technical issues, but they've been overblown online. The terrain does look like garbage sometimes though. I still went 8 because it is really fun overall, and the parts that need improvement don't actually impact my enjoyment at all.

@Takoda Zero Time Dilemma is awful for many reasons. On a technical level, it performs poorly, looks worse than VLR and the line skip doesn't work properly. It also has fewer adventure sections and it sometimes retreads VLR. The story is a complete mess with twists that make no sense and sometimes rely on outright lying to the player.

@contractcooker In my experience, once for every 30 hours is typical even for games that get good testing like Nintendo's. Skyrim was a buggy mess in general though. On top of general crash happiness, it also crashed so hard I thought it bricked my Switch. I got a weird full screen error message I had never seen before and haven't since, and the physical power button didn't even work at first. Plus, there were all the well known and documented scripting errors that still weren't fixed in official patches even after a decade.

@ArchRex They also flopped very hard. I wouldn't be surprised if residual spite is the real reason and he's struggling to come up with a cogent excuse.

Small correction on the article, Sushee was the original developer but went out of business a few years ago. The game is being developed by MegaPixel Studio now. Their logo is at the end of the trailer too, but the text with their name is hard to see.

I don't mind if it's a comparison that actually makes sense or is legitimate. Like Daemon X Machina is a spiritual successor to the Armored Core series because they share staff and From is probably never making another one anyway. It's more annoying for example when games get compared to Dark Souls either in their own marketing or reviews just because it's a little hard especially when it's a side scrolling game.

The irony of the expansion pack is that a fairly substantial portion of the price is rumored to be from licensing the Sega side which no one talks about.

The first two Might and Magics also have enhanced ports for NES and SNES respectively and III has a roughly PC equivalent SNES port. Those would be easy to throw on NSO.

@CANOEberry There's actually 8 total including spinoffs! They're not all worth playing though. Runes of Virtue on GB is pretty good, but it's more of a puzzle based Zelda clone than a proper part of the series.

Supposedly Tomato (Clyde Mandelin) got an unofficial okay from Nintendo to do Mother 3 because they had zero intention of ever bringing it over so that one seems like it's never going to happen.

Before the last Direct, I didn't have high hopes for Panzer Dragoon Saga actually getting remade. Considering that Forever is doing Front Mission that makes me more hopeful that they manage a remake of that size. PDS is ridiculously expensive used, and it relies on properties of a CRT for its graphics so it's tricky to look just right emulated.

I give NSMB2 a little bit of a pass because I get the impression that it was basically a testing ground for what became Super Mario Maker. I don't have any proof of this, but an Iwata Asks does focus on how people that don't normally make stages where given the opportunity to do so.

Sunshine is my least favorite by far. One of the nice things about 64 is that you have a certain amount of leeway to skip stars and stages which does not exist in Sunshine. It's also very buggy in ways Mario games generally aren't.

Phantom Hourglass is easily my least favorite Zelda because of the awful recurring dungeon. The two DS games are so-so, but the Temple of the Ocean King is so bad it drags it down.

I love the broom, but Cleaning in Star Allies is different and better because it's an homage to the new animal friends from Dream Land 3. That elevates it highly.

The problem with the EMMIs is that they originate from one of the much earlier versions where they probably would have made sense in context. They're basically grafted onto the released game.

@nessisonett I thought so too, but one of the weird things is that Star Fox 64 had too much fog!

Don't other systems generally require an installation with updates being forced? I could see physical sales being a lower proportion on platforms where you can't just pop in a cartridge and ignore any updates that may have been released until you're ready to install them.

What's not captured in these numbers is arcade revenue which hurts Street Fighter's ranking. The SF II sub-series is estimated to have had close to an $5.5 billion dollars (not adjusted for inflation) in coin-op spending. SF would 100% be #1 if this wasn't a listing by units sold. That's around 100 million "equivalent sales" that aren't counted. MK was very popular in arcades but it's still only a small fraction of SFII so it isn't hurt as much.

@cmbaum Microsoft owns the developer now. With the studios they've bought in recent years, MS has honored already announced ports. Switch was never in the pipeline, and didn't even exist when the sequel was announced. They're trying to build out Gamepass with exclusives so it's very unlikely any new ports are going to be created.

Zelda II is a great game and worth pushing through the difficult early parts. It takes a little bit of time to learn, but it's worth it.

Worst one for me is Phantom Hourglass. The Temple of the Ocean King is so tedious for a dungeon you have to constantly revisit. The "midpoint" warp barely even helps because the levels after it are so much larger than the ones before.

Portal based rendering isn't necessarily for literal portals. The Build engine for example is based around them. A door or a window is a portal from a rendering perspective. It does allow for some neat tricks like the endless corridor in the GIF, but it's less suitable for outdoor locations. Nintendo probably didn't want to go with separate engines for indoor and outdoor locations.