nhSnork

Among Switch ambitions, the familiar TBD mix of Xenoblades, Ateliers, Personas, Rune Factories and Castlevanias, more RPGs from Fuga, Crisis Core and Borderlands 2 to Cyber Sleuth, Minstrel Song and KotOR plus more possible sessions in yet other genres from Civilization 6, Tallowmere 2 and Mudrunner to Twilight Survivors, PowerWash and TerraTech. The handhelds may see more Dishonored, FFXIII, God of War, Valentia and Eternia while PS4 was set for a sampling of multiple fresh Catalogue additions before I faced the need to hook it up elsewhere, further from the router and beyond the already lengthy LAN cable procured back in January. Now the streaming process might become more tedious (although FWIW a brief shot at GoW'18 did get to the title screen without issues), and I'm reluctant to manage more storage this weekend, so perhaps the allocated time will end up revolving around the installed stuff like Hundred Knight, Crew 2 and Sakura Wars. I will also try resuming my GTA V Epic playthrough on the laptop but the game's long-term presence there depends entirely on the frequency of 50-60 Gb patches (then again, with GTA VI ever closer, the devs may not focus on new Online content to past extents anyway).

@John_Deacon none in my experience so far, be it exploration or combat.

I don't expect to need these charismatic difficulties anytime soon, even the standard one proving to be the umpteenth case of fandom-downplayed RPG combat that will wipe the floor with you if you heed the allegations, but no looking the gift horse in the mouth here. The game is easily one of this year's abundant JRPG highlights overall, and one of its franchise's, too.

Alexa, play Mambo Number 5.

Nobody sane would confuse this for generative AI. Same reason my eyeball muscles get a workout at the sight of neural network "creations" while my lips praise titles like SuperMash. A human-controlled environment and a pool of dedicated original resources to generate combinations of is pretty much what everyone expected AI to continue evolving as a handy tool in before things went south. As with all computers in general, the whole point is to facilitate the act of creation by taking over select routines, not to substitute said act with an unauthorizedly digested and unconsciously regurgitated database.

Survival Kids alone would make this update... or half the lineup, for that matter. One of THE handheld Gen 5 classics in my book - a codifier of many things in what would become a partly eponymous genre and still a somewhat Zelda-flavoured actventure at its core, the predecessor to Lost in Blue games and own upcoming NS2 sequel (which likely factored in with the emergence here)... I got several endings while emulating the game way back when, but this will be a good prompt to revisit it for the rest. The Game Boy additions are also neat, especially the relative deep cut that is Kemco's Sword of Hope (hopefully the sequel, already revisited on 3DS VC westside once, is also in the cards).

@HammerGaladeBro Kid Clown series itself is part of the aforementioned rabbit hole since Night Mayor's World was basically dolled-up for lack of a regional Disney license Kemco had procured for some of its home turf output. My post-Soviet bootleg childhood being packed with Japanese exotics of the era (Battle City alone was arguably bigger than Mario here in Belarus, and quite possibly an inspirational contribution to the eventual existence of World of Tanks series), I had the original Mickey Mouse Yume Fuusen (Dream Balloon) in my own "Subor" library, and what heck of a platformer it remains to this day! Fingers crossed either incarnation may also join the NSO ranks sometime.

"There's every chance that a port proved too beefy for Switch 1"

A PS4 game proved too beefy for the console boasting Witcher 3, NieR Automata, No Man's Sky and Saints Row 4, not to mention all the Gen 9 contemporaries?🤔 Anyhoo, I'd rather have the previous two first, their absence even more conspicuous. Or, obviously better yet, all three.

"You know, so you can cash in all those gold coins in Super Mario Bros. in real life. (Not really... but it'd be funny, right?)"

Well, people poking digital hamsters seem to take this subject quite seriously. But seriously, it's an awesome factoid indeed, in sync with what I've read in Wikipedia about Famicom being briefly envisioned as a more literal computer out the gate before Nintendo opted for a more affordable and more accessible approach. Looks like not everything about the former idea was scrapped, then!

@Galaxy2IsTheGOAT I sure own one, but it got buried under the accidentally knocked-over pyramid of all the Virtual Boys I also own, and my procrastination still prevents the cleanup.

@GrailUK and before that, they also called MK3 "Super Circuit" to tout the... checks notes ...super circuits? Huh. Or perhaps that was just another way to tout the hardware's aptitude for fully SNES-like experiences after two generations of 8 bit handhelds.😄

It's not unreasonable to hypothesize a return of a SNES mouse showcase title on another console with mouselike functionality, but then again, Hey You Pikachu never made a comeback on the mic-equipped dualscreeners.

""It was also important that you could play with higher frame rates than the Nintendo Switch system," Hayashi added, "We were able to achieve that with this game"

Someone's really been hanging out with Nvidia a bit too much.🙄 At least the other discussed goals like increased enemy density make for more pragmatic spec bump usage.

Considering the frequency of Take-Two sales, the question sounded pretty tone-deaf (or hypocritically clueless) in itself. When did all these "concerned" fan derrières last buy a Borderlands game at full price to begin with?

Besides the usual franchise-wide itches like Xenoblades, Ateliers and Castlevanias, potential Switch sessions may come to include stuff like Crisis Core and FFXII, PowerWash and Minstrel Song, Crime O'Clock and Baten Kaitos, Assassin's Creed 2 and Mudrunner, Saints Row 4 and Resident Evil 0... Ministry of Broadcast might also elbow in if I pull the trigger on it before Monday AND clear the 2 Gb required for it. The handheld moods revolve around Strange Journey, God of War, Eternia and Dishonored while the [comparatively] more stationary ones beckon with GTA V in the continuing wait for its hybrid incarnation (I stuffed the thing back on PS4 where its updates can be downloaded in rest mode, though I do also ponder the return of the EGS version which housed my latest and relatively longest playthrough before it stopped cooperating with my Deck and still has the benefit of user tracks), but other backlog items from Witcher or Port Royale on the laptop to NFS2015 or Witch & Hundred Knight on PS4 aren't improbable either.

Well, it suggests they have enough confidence in the studio's current state and capability - amen to that. As for Tribe Nine, it's not even region-locked on Belarusian Steam (although it is on Google Play)... and this is still the first I've heard of it, padre.😅 Then again, freemiums reportedly have complicated relationships with Deck's Linux-based SteamOS, so no telling if I'd even have much of a chance with it.

@Burning_Spear oh, it's just the garage now? What happened to the 8-year-long gamer buzz about most people primarily buying Switches for the Nintendo games?😜

As someone still waiting for the friggen Dragon Quest Heroes pack in the west (the title whose Japanese demo was my first Switch playtime back in April 2017!), I can see where he's coming from. Of course, you'd think a digital release would suffice in place of a plastic DRM piece like it has widely done this gen, but in the case of the aforementioned DQH it clearly didn't, so publishers clearly work in mysterious ways.[/salt]

Oh, COME ON, not the very same article link I just regretted humouring on Reddit. /)_-)

Indeed, for such teams, more income from the existing ports means more money for additional ones. And the viability is a no-brainer - pretty much all genres benefit from portability, but few to the sheer extent of RPGs.

Personally, no. Although I do find it a more interesting new feature than the frixel fluff. Like I said elsewhere, it seems like Nintendo's take on bringing the online multiplayer sessions closer to the vibes of local ones.

I'm probably not the first humanitarian to ask, but if there's a charge value close to full yet below increased deterioration thresholds, why not just set it as the default limit and measure it as "100%" in the system UI?

St Dominic, you shall not be forgotten.😎

Sounds like a missed opportunity to call it Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 Royal.

@jsty3105 and from what I've seen, same seemingly goes for Square Enix, too - some titles hitting 85-90% while others almost never go past half. Heck, The Last Remnant on Switch has yet to get any discount after almost seven years (although the default $20 for its amount of content could be argued a steal in itself).

This weekend's whims are spread among the familiar time sinks (Xenoblades and Ateliers, Rune Factories and Personas, Castlevanias and Zeldas, survivors and warriors) and another motley bunch of moods ranging from Langrisser, Momodora and Windbound to Downwell, Crisis Core and Assassin's Creed 2. Some NSO stuff like Yoshi's Island and Zero Mission is possible, too. Other itches include a general racing one looking to translate into varied sessions like Wreckfest, Super Mario Kart, NFS2015/Payback, Grid 2, Gran Turismo PSP and even its eponymous progenitor (which I put on Deck instead of Vita for lack of confidence in how many buttons a home console simcade might require), and then another whim even led me to install God of War Collection at long last. A nerd's mind works in mysterious ways.

@Vyacheslav333 the majority of my gargantuan library is owed to eShop sales as well, and I was talking third party discounts on Switch in my first comment here, so that's no news and a practice that arguably stems from the same Steam environment as well. But 30% being lower than 90% doesn't make it remotely insignificant within a given range of 100 either. There are many third party games that barely even see that big a sale for most of their shelf life, and select ones like Factorio even consciously rule out any discounts at all. Comparisons can be multifaceted like that.

@Alcea "ripped off" as in, forced to buy an entertainment experience they don't need for a living and only seek on the basis of crippling hedonistic addictions?

@Vyacheslav333 mostly those that were delisted before ever they had time to get a sale, from what I've seen. Most of the rest eventually hits the double threes, and a fair lot boasts technically on-demand discounts courtesy of NSO vouchers, too. In itself, a third of the price is only "a joke" for someone spoiled by other platforms like Steam, but those platforms come with varied fine print from a TV-shaped ball'n'chain to the joys of streaming to the fluctuating whims and mercy of Linuxoid handhelds.

@tiakai92 I bought the first game around launch at full price and certainly wouldn't trade the resulting fun and memories for the reputation of a so-called "sane man" with other fans. I've completed almost everything in that "nightmare" (except for a couple DLC sidequests including Crawmerax) and have been having as much of a blast with the second one. I like my nightmares natively portable and gyro-equipped.😏

PS. Borderlands 3 originally came out in 2019, so it's a literally current-gen "old game".😅

@tektite_captain and Steam-spoiled fans are infamous for treating Nintendo's traditional 33% off as a non-discount, but you'd think 2K's history of eShop sales would at least leave a different impression. I'm still neck deep in B2 myself, and even B3 has come to recurrently lose more than half its launch price in the meantime. Is the "Nintendo tax" in the room with us right now?

Congratulations, folks, Poe's law (or a yet unnamed analogue thereof) now covers artistic creations as well.

Unless it's just millennials like myself, don't people modding their consoles seldom plan to use them in any [official] online capacity? That wasn't even a topic with my NDS and PSP (both procured late enough to lack compatibility with the newer WPA encryption options at the time), but one of the reasons I got separate respective 3DS/Vita units to sail the high seas on later - both of those pretty much spending most of their days in flight mode since. Switch, on the other hand, still has very limited hacking/emulation incentives in the first place as both delisted and unlocalized stuff remains comparatively sparse and retains vague odds of getting another chance on NS2.

Seriously, though, what's with this seeming overnight 3DS amnesia these days?🤔 I'm not even touching SNES or Game Boy Color, but we have a Gen 8 case from the very Iwata era people are unfavourably comparing NS2 to.

@1UP_MARIO and walks around with a kid he addresses solely as "boy"?

$9.99 for some whole extra game(s) elsewhere now or for/towards this very game's own inevitable expansion packs later... OR for 60 fps in a turn-based strategy? Decisions, decisions...

No coulds here - with NS2 forecast to amass barely 10% of the current gen's userbase, it WILL be a while before next gen is in full swing. And with backward compatibility at play, upcoming releases will have the added appeal of a longtime investment, too.

@HammerGalladeBro all the richer when you look over to PS4 which didn't even need Don Mattricks - just the new hardware to be barely procurable at first and then its specs to be barely utilized beyond DF fodder afterwards.

@somnambulance exactly. Some say that Japanese VG industry has a truckload of most basic traits patented since arcade days and companies simply don't bother enforcing any of those patents in the modern era. This whole brouhaha really looks like Nintendo watching Pocketpair redtape/loophole their way out of a different contention point and saying, "mmmkay, we can do it the hard way". The dev scrambling to counter the onslaught with laments for creativity (apparently endangered by the company who has hosted and sometimes outright published a metric ton of other collect-a-mon games on their platforms) and awkward ripostes (what lack of defense statement proofreading got Pikmin 3 involved in the whole topic is for medium historians to estimate) only fuels the impression.

@Glasso ah yes, the old argument that willingly ignores a whole bunch of other genre representatives boasting city population numbers for audiences and, when faced with a reminder of those, knows no better than to try and downplay their impact and popularity in response. I'm afraid this one got old fast.

Q4 of eighth year, with the backward compatible successor announced and still with no price cuts in sight... and "just" 1.26 million sales? Sounds like one of the most enviable halts in history to grind to. Switch is less than 3 million units away from the lifetime sales top now, and even Nintendo's own cautious forecasts put the latter milestone well within the current fiscal year. The lower price and the controllers remaining at least partly compatible with next gen only seem to grease these wheels further.

confused gamer noises

@vincentgoodwin all in all, it sure sounds like Nintendo to come up with virtual game cards and then triumphantly raise a finger and follow up with essentially non-virtual virtual game cards.😆 They certainly seemed redundant until further clarification of having an upper hand over code-in-a-box options (the latter thus remaining nonpareil in the physical game market redundancy), and only time will tell if they catch on. As a digital buyer, I don't have a horse in this race anyway.

Pretty neat, although as far as Koeimo hunting RPGs go, I'd be more in the market for the Toukiden series first, the latter's Vita presence notwithstanding.

And all of that on top of the reputational consequences of showcasing an accessory line for a load of- accessing publicly appropriate vocabulary database -hearsay. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

@Potimarron sure, right after they finish suing themselves for 3DS being "the mockup of NDS". Seriously, fan down a skosh.

@larryisaman no sane company would waste money on the aforesaid. Genki's sanity has been questioned since they announced the woeful "showcase" in the first place.

Another expected streak of available hobby time arrives with the expectedly inflated appetites even by my standards and coincides with what might be my last notable Switch splurge until summer... although the bulk of this splurge, being the Guardians of Azuma deluxe preorder, will be literally unplayable for just as long.😭😆 Still, the next several days of hybrid sessions are likely to tap into the other new recruits like Crisis Core, Star Wars KotOR, Digimon Cyber Sleuth and Ruvato. Beyond that, there are NMS and Speedstorm events to wrap up, Aionios, Mira and Aladiss to explore, Sharance, Rigbarth and Portia to develop, Scandinavian tracks and Siberian wilderness to traverse, palaces and tartaruses to sneak through, vampires and twilights to survive, variably cooked hyrules and irreparably cooked raptures to endure, some railways to go from rags to riches on and others to beware demon trains along... as well as Crime O'Clock, Borderlands, Rorona, Langrisser, Minstrel Song, Skyrim, Symphonia/Graces, Circle/Aria, GTA trilogy, RE0, Void Terrarium and Civ 6. I knew I'd run out of fancy descriptions before running out of playthrough whims.

Elsewhere, I'm also hoping for an increased variety of stuff to tend to from this weekend to the next one, but the [relative] usuals like Endless Frontier, Valentia, God Eater, Eternia, Death Stranding, Nioh, NFS2015 and Sakura Wars might still eat up the bulk of respective opportunities for all I know. Then again...

There are now reports of the translator being in the witness protection program.

Everything Watch Dogs and The Crew 2/Motorfest (especially since they're already developing an offline mode for the latter two... and yes, I habitually tried to shorten Motorfest here but reconsidered😅). And while we're on the driving stuff associated with them... maybe even the return of Emergency Heroes and Emergency Mayhem? Or the Driver series which even got a 3DS entry? More Assassin's Creed (particularly Unity and Syndicate; the side-scrolling Chronicles trilogy's absence from Switch itself after getting a Vita port can be mystifying as well), other open-worlders like Far Cry series, Wildlands and the formerly short-lived promise of Steep, other blasts from the past (Prince of Persia games, Might & Magic stuff... not digging much deeper because they used to publish a mountain of content and it might take time parsing what's still under them or long under someone else these days) - you name it. I have many hours invested across various Ubisoft games on Switch and they're relatively frequent in Nintendo's release calendars, not to mention the collabs like Mario + Rabbids and Starlink, so wishful thinking dares run rampant here.

Not like I particularly hunger for it with the bulk of V's campaign still ahead of me (no Cyberpunk pun intended). In fact, salty over losing my Deck playthrough to launcher hijinks after all the effort of unlocking the submarine almost out the gate, I'm more in the market for the Switch port than ever.

With the situational exception of Witcher 3, I haven't even bought any Switch cards with full games thereon; the only physical copies I look up once in a blue moon are delisted pastgens like Project X Zone for 3DS (which I miraculously managed to procure from someone who had just as miraculously negotiated an eBay import prior) or Gran Turismo Sport and Driveclub for PS4. Game-key cards? The overwhelming majority of my games are digital, and I don't see myself ever wanting a piece of DRM plastic to go with them.

I might make use of the new stuff when distributing the BC backlog between the two generations (after all, if I'm motivated to load a Switch game on NS2, it should be typically because I have neither room for it nor time/desire for storage juggling on NS1 anyway). The alternative's offline aspect may also come in handy even though I habitually hook my portables up to a phone hotspot by default. But I'm also glad all this stuff os mostly separate from the All Software screen... except for the latter's icons now loading slightly slower as they're modified to show a VGC icon beside the title when highlighted. Then again, we're talking my 1800+ icons, so it may well be an exceptional and, for all I know, still patchable sort of experience.

@Dfua82 it's been spelled in this article and beyond that enabling Online Licenses pretty much shapes the whole thing back into ye olde way - playing the game on both consoles but never at the same time and, short of the aforedescribed workarounds (which may or may not survive future system updates), always mandatorily online.

"Tremblay teases that there are "a lot of ways to experience the game" with the new controllers, which sounds pretty promising"

Indeed, "a lot" is just the number of control features to dare expect decent gyro use among, and the hybrid ports have a generally better track record with it than the PlayStation stuff.

@Spider-Kev alongside Namco x Capcom and both Endless Frontier games while we're at it.😃

Well, if the poll only allows one pick, it goes to Xenoblade by default, but there are also series like Fire Emblem, Pokemon (specifically the return of Pinball, especially after my wishes for more Snap came true) and Project X Zone in case it ends up skipping current gen after all. With the respective franchise binge queues, I don't particularly crave any more Mario or Zelda announcements except for more where Showtime and Echoes came from. However, I'd definitely be in the market for comebacks of other formerly Nintendo-published gems like The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, as well as more Tokyo Mirage Sessions although it's already under the aforementioned Fire Emblem's banner (or perhaps Atlus might explore similar crossovers with stuff other stuff like Xenoblade, too? In some aspects, a hypothetical one with the lore and gameplay traits of Alrest and/or Aionios practically writes itself).

Bummer, the recent TV mode hijinks on my part (tested to rule out multiple flatscreens/cables yet extending to another used dock in a weird way where the signal can hold on for minutes or hours on end and immediately come back or go poof until console reinsertion - with a stable charge maintained through it all on the one hand and the malfunctions typically offset by fully unplugging the charger for a while on the other hand🤔🤔🤔 ...but I digress😅) led me to entertain the thought versus the perspective of buying a whole brand new dock bundle with separate official chargers tricky to find in local retail. Guess I'll have to make do for now since my general gaming habits still make portable arsenal expansion a higher priority than smoothing out the proverbially sporadic TV experiences with the already owned hybrid.