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I’d love to play these games and this was Nintendo’s chance to bring them to a wider audience. But no, they decided to lock them behind expensive hardware that’s not portable and will be in a landfill whenever Nintendo discontinues Switch Online in the future. Hard pass for me.

@floxi not really the case for this game, sadly. The pre-rendered video backgrounds looked awesome for the time and on a small screen with analogue signal, but look pretty rough on modern displays and there’s not a lot that can be done about it.

Still an awesome game though 😀

@N64-ROX Keep holding out hope - it's not in the UK eshop yet either, and we are (for a very limited time only) still slightly less prudish

One of my old faves, and an instant buy. This kind of rerelease (reasonable retro price-point, no unnecessary 5 year remake process) is what I’d like to see more of.

I kind of have second-hand embarrassment from how much more fun this is than Mario Kart World. It’s a jankier, low-budget feel for sure (as you’d expect), but the sense of excitement and wonder from warping from track to track during races is almost indisputably better than driving down a dull road in a straight line through a redundant semi-open world.

To my shame, I’m such a Sonic Adult that I pre-ordered this for Switch and PS5 just like every Sonic game this generation.

Even I am upset that there’s no upgrade path to the Switch 2 version and I’m voting with my wallet. It’ll be the first Sonic release I haven’t bought in many years.

I’m gonna be the annoying guy to say “yikes” at the glow of that screen that should be black with the Nintendo logo.

Everyone expected a downgrade from OLED but I think the “LED is better now” talk may be a bit overstated.

Still excited for next week though!

@Jeronan You are spreading misinformation. I've been familiar with this company for around seven years and have some insight into their development processes. While they manufacture in China like everyone else they are NOT dropshipping. Similar products on Temu/AliExpress are copies of Genki's products, as you could verify for yourself if you cared to do so.

I might be an OLED snob but it’s difficult to even entertain the benefits of HDR - a mode which is all about contrast - when the entire display is backlit and the blacks are not black

PSA: I own the most “premium” Anbernic device, and while it’s good in many ways the analogue sticks are the worst analogue sticks I have ever used. Anbernic have never really owned up to this issue or shown any interest in improving it.

The site rejected my auto-generated password even though it matched the criteria, then it rejected my valid UK phone number, then it rejected my valid UK postcode (country is of course set to UK). Probably needs some work guys.

Edit: it also doesn't work with Safari auto-fill for credit cards. Not really sure why you'd make it as difficult as possible to buy from you.

Edit 2: "Something went wrong" error after completing payment, even though my card was immediately charged. Bravo, guys.

Edit 3: For anyone interested/concerned, despite all the above, and having to remove the "0" from the beginning of my phone number and use a totally different, random US zip code, the code did in fact appear in "My Account" after all. Honestly for 5%, this is too sketchy to be worth it imo.

They should have delayed it to work on the actual quality of the game. I've been a Sonic fan for 30 years and Superstars was literally the first game (Shadow and Forces included) that I wasn't able to find one single thing to like about. The visuals, music, gameplay, all trash.

From the more detailed description, not sure it has anything to do with space?

Too bad - I was a fan of Burton’s YouTube channel until he turned it into some kind of strange bible bash. Ironic really.

@RushDawg except this is, to a large extent, a nostalgia cash-in on people who played the originals. Because they bought the originals. I owned most of these games new, and still have the cartridges in storage. I’m willing to pay something for the convenience of renting them to play on the Switch, even if the emulator is deplorable, but it shouldn’t necessarily be compared to the cost of buying these games outright.

Struggling to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound overly critical but… when claiming you have great wifi, specifying a type which doesn’t exist (“5G”) undermines your case somewhat.

Bought this with a friend because it looked like it could be a so-bad-it’s-good thing. In reality it’s like paying to see 90 mins of conversation between the most boring, socially awkward people imaginable. And I say that as a fairly boring, socially awkward person.

From Wikipedia:
“[DLC] is a form of video game monetization, enabling a publisher to gain additional revenue from a title after it has been purchased.”

If you check the article you’ll see the long history of this term and why it has come to mean what it means.

DLC can indeed be free, but it has clear implications of cost unless otherwise stated.

IAP just isn’t a term I’ve seen used in console or PC gaming.

“buying one is the only way of unlocking Mew in the game (the monster is 'trapped' within the ball and has to be transferred to the main game – a neat touch)”

Sorry NL, this is not a neat touch. It’s another example of Nintendo insisting we buy endless skip-fulls of plastic that we have no need for whatsoever, in order to unlock content in a premium game. It’s like horse armour, but with the added insult of adding to landfills.

Horribly confusing marketing aside, Super Mario Maker for 3DS is the most (in fact, maybe only?) disappointing first-party Nintendo game I've bought.

I don't know if it's because of the partially-shuttered online services or what, but there's just no way to find good levels from the community (most are trash), and no way to star or save the rare good level you can find. You also can't upload your own levels.

The Nintendo-made levels are good, but IIRC many of these are DLC purchases.

Sorry, got tired of waiting and bought from Japan eShop. It has full English, and (for those interested) the Japanese is, like most games of the time, mostly kana and therefore a massive PITA.

The original is just slightly before my time, and it shows its age, but the auto-mapping and higher-fi audio are nice inclusions and I’m looking forward to playing some more.

But Sega, for the love of Knuckles, please do something about the janky AGES menu system. Sensitivity is wrong on analogue sticks so you’re always changing options when trying to scroll vertically, and “no background” should mean no background, not “please give me a dark gradient in the background that makes the Switch’s black-level look even worse than it is”.

Also what’s with the delay in releasing in other regions? Didn’t Sega just say they’re going to focus on simultaneous releases across markets?

I guess I’m moaning a lot =/ ... just a longtime Sega fan, enthused about these releases but wish there was a little more attention to detail.

@In_Ex_Fan Thank you for the info, but unfortunately it’s been reported they’ll only for work seven days, then you need to activate again with the models. So no good for travelling.

Interested in the game, but not at all interested in buying physical chunks of plastic to play it (and lose the ability to play the full game if I travel without them).

Also not interested in paying substantially more for a “standard” digital edition than any first party Nintendo game, or any other game on Switch for that matter. It’s not a matter of choosing between this and another game, it’s choosing between this and 3-4 other more worthy games.

The reviews make it clear that the content included in the game is what you’d expect from a game at the £40 level, maybe £50 at a stretch. But with all the Ubisoft grinding mechanics, I’d struggle to pay more than £30.

Honestly every time I think about this game I think I must have imagined the part where, in 2018, we’re still buying bits of near-future landfill-inhabiting plastic junk to augment a digital gameplay experience. It’s like Ubi and Nintendo are operating on a plane of existence entirely separate from the one where we’re having these conversations about sustainability and reducing waste. Amazingly (or predictably?) the plastic junk strapped to the controller is actually one of the most negative comments about the game in reviews, so it seems like it was not worth it.

Props to Ubi for at least making the extra content available digitally, though this shows it up for what it was all along - expensive DLC (of the unlock variety, not the post-release extra content variety) in what’s already a full-priced game.

Unfortunately I had to delete the game since the "Country/Region" select doesn't seem to list my country as an option. My country is Taiwan but the list only states China (Taiwan).

The lack of button mapping is a problem for people who are accustomed to using Y & B to play Mario from SNES days. I know it’s super-difficult to understand an issue you yourself don’t experience as genuine, but surely this makes sense?

And the border is straight up insanity. Why do the controls need to be at the bottom of the screen the whole time?

Presumably you realise that by asking people to share secrets they’ve found in Hollow Knight in a public comments forum you’re kind of spoiling the exact kind of finding-a-hidden-secret joy that the devs are quoted as describing in your article.

I actually loved the story for this one. Just like some of the old Sega CD platformers - the writing and acting were just bad enough to be a lot of fun, without being cringe inducing. I think it was a self-aware choice, well made by the dev.

Ah. I was excited about this until I realised it involves producing and selling more plastic junk.

Let people who want plastic figurines buy them. Let those who want to play a game, play it. Not only does this go against the portability of the Switch, it will result in the production of unnecessary plastic landfill-fodder.

Another important thing which I haven't seen mentioned here is that in the vast majority of cases you don't need to defeat all the enemies to continue. You can jump on an enemy to hold them in place, and you can use this strategy to shuffle enemies out of bottlenecks and then run through.

Also, there were several occasions where I was wondering how I can possibly beat the enemies in a certain section, and ended up finding a super-powerful weapon hidden nearby (electric axes, fire swords etc).

I realise this goes against consensus here, but I found the game pretty fair in its difficulty, and there were only a couple of occasions where I really started to feel like I couldn't continue – mostly the boss battles.

One thing I'd like to mention @7Levels is that it took a while to notice that the blue pickups extend the health bar as it happens so rarely – is this mentioned anywhere in-game? For those who are dying on later levels it's probably worth replaying some earlier levels to build up their health meter.

I understand what people are saying about floaty physics, but I was actually surprised how accurate and responsive the controls were for platforming, considering how floaty it looks in videos.

Overall I think (without measuring precisely) I completed the game in about 6 hours, which for the price point (and given the slight replayability factor due to the collectables) seems ok. Any easier, and it would have been too short imo. For the record, I don't consider myself a hardcore player, or that I'm particularly good at this kind of game.

@Nincompoop "no web browser"
Luckily that's not true

L.A. Noire is awesome on Switch. Not too impressed with the release time - having pre-ordered I was kind of expecting the game to unlock at midnight, but it didn't unlock until over 14 hours later. Not a big deal, but it seems kind of pointless to allow people to preload the game, only to have it unlock at a totally random time the following day.

@phamster From a sustainability point of view it would be far preferable to sell DLC to those that want it, and toys to those that want them, instead of frittering away resources on manufacturing and distributing bits of plastic that people buy to flip a bit from 0 to 1 in a game they’ve already purchased.

The expansion pass requires the downloading of additional content that was created after the release of the original game. As far as I know all amiibo unlocks just unlock stuff that’s already in the game files, aka “the worst norms of DLC” that EA got so much flack for in the late 00s.

Nintendo have already taken the worst industry DLC norms and made it one step worse. It's called amiibo.

@Ervex_109 well to be fair all the promo shots for the game used the stretch mode too, so it seems to be the preference of the publisher. I agree this is a crazy decision.

In other news, this game is currently free (as in £0.00) on gog.com for 48 hours. Kind of puts the Switch pricing in perspective.

@Nintendoforlife I can't speak for the Xbox One version, only that the Switch version lives up to similar standards as similar 3rd party Switch titles (IMO, obviously).

@Snaplocket The excuse, or reason, is that the Switch is a lower-spec console than other current-gen consoles. Still, the Switch version works well and is technically about on par with other current 3rd party Switch titles.

I had been planning to double-dip but I'm pretty satisfied with how it runs on the Switch. The game itself is okay. Slightly less disappointing than I expected, but it strays well into generic-land, with plenty of cheap platforming deaths and a story and general theme that takes itself way too seriously. Even the feel and music of the title screen would feel more natural in a COD game...

I’ll buy it on day one, maybe even on PS4 for 60fps and Switch for portability, because I still like to throw Sega as many bones as I can. But I’m bracing myself for bitter, bitter disappointment.

Sucks to be someone who likes the 3D effect on 3DS.

So is anyone who owns the game able to ballpark a percentage improvement on the load times? Like, 5%, 50%, 80%?

This talk of providing an option for people on a budget is coming out of nowhere. What happened to “we offer fewer and lesser discounts than our competitors because we think it’s important to maintain the value of our property”.

I’m not saying either position is wrong, but they sure are contradictory.

I despair over amiibo. It's like Nintendo realised how much gamers hate IAPs to unlock content already in the game files, and decided manufacturing a bunch of cheap plastic toys was the answer.

A lose for gamers who end up paying for content in premium games, and have space taken up frivolously with NFC chips in their handheld console, and a lose for Earth from the resources to make and transport all this plastic junk that will end up in landfills.

Now you're giving me second thoughts about this game. I hated the movie so much I wasn't excited to begin with, then the screenshots look about as generic as a game can possibly get, and I'm not hearing much new or interested regarding gameplay either. This is probably one I'd need a demo to consider.

What makes you think the cutscenes are intentionally jerky? Looks like a clear technical issue to me, and I was disappointed that the same cutscene that plays smoothly in the eShop trailer is stilted and jerky in the actual game.

Aside from that, I'm really enjoying this. There'll always be people who want to moan about graphics, but the graphics here provide just enough detail and leave just enough to the imagination (for those who have one!) for a really creepy vibe, not superior or inferior to AAA horror titles, but uniquely compelling.

Right, so where's the option to disable the video recording? There's no way it doesn't impact battery life, and many people like me probably have no interest in using it.

@FX102A couldn't agree more. One of my favourite things about the Switch is how quickly you can get from power-on to gameplay, and I'm glad to see this philosophy extended to the eShop, skipping the convoluted UI, useless animations and music of the 3DS and co.

I realise I may get in trouble for saying this here but I'm kind of glad Nintendo have moved away from music in their system UIs.

It's a relic of how every Nintendo system UI until Switch worked - i.e., ignore common sense + tried and tested UI conventions and throw together something that looks cute but is slow, bloated and confusing for first-time users. Another classic example would be the download progress indicator on the 3DS eShop.

As for why they've made these changes, I presume they've stopped trying to make special considerations for "kid friendliness", since nowadays every kid has a phone/tablet know and knows what a MB/GB is, and how to use a portable device.

@impurekind Probably £15.99, same as all the others in the range (not sure about EUR price)