nhSnork

The article is interesting but feels incomplete without runner-ups in all categories.😉

I may celebrate in January, but as a bank holiday, today is usually something to look forward to regardless of traditions (unless it falls on a weekend, but you can't win them all).😆 And to everyone the occasion concerns now - merry Christmas!

Tools should be tools, "intelligent" or not. There's no talking robotic "creators" until we enter the actual age of artificial sentience - which I doubt my own generation ever will. And as far as human creations go, automation has been applied to authored asset pools for ages, so the line remains drawn at that. The core of the commotion around GenAI is its shamelessly paraded penchant for "training" on everything not nailed down and then trying to mishmash it into something hopefully legit in the prompter's eyes. If it's done for whatever "concepts" never leaving the studio's grounds, it can be "just" an eyebrow raiser; if it permeates the final product in the original work's stead, then we may well have a controversy of the same kind as any olde plagiarism suspicion, and "my tool stole from too many people to track down or single out the exact origins" doesn't necessarily sweeten that pill.

Not much free time this weekend, but you can't win them all and I'd be a douche to complain on the eve of what's been shaping up like an ideally hobbylicious half-WEEK (and, if the stars align, an even longer streak in early January afterwards). The preceding week has been fairly eventful on the nerd front as well - I've managed more eShop investments from the Arkham and Monster Hunter Stories packs to my second voucher pair (first one dating all the way back to early 2020 or so) which helped me overduly equip my Switch backlog with the two flagship Fire Emblems. Incidentally, Engage became the estimated 2000th item in my biggest single platform collection - a milestone only somewhat dampened by actually running into the long but vaguely rumoured "All Software" icon cap after all. The ones "pushed out" from the end of a currently sorted list (a different sorting doesn't reapply the "disappearances" to other stuff) won't even leave the affected icons in the arranged groups. FWIW pestering the support again reaffirmed that no, it's not how the All Software screen is officially supposed to behave, so it looks like a bug unaccounted for due to a likely low number of reports (read: of digital hoard maniacs insisting on archiving everything like myself😈😆). The very helpful support guy documented the case with a few photos I submitted, so perhaps we'll even live to see a hotfix of some sort; for now, besides obvious reliance on the VGC menu (thankfully handier for redownloads than eShop profile's title salad ever was), my solution in the light of a still humongous wishlist has been to clean out the icons for finished games and defunct freemiums, although if/when that stops being enough, I may just dedicate a separate folder to affected icons on NS2 - even if the latter faces the risk of a similar bug, it'll take a fair few years to bring its native game collection near the "trigger threshold" anyway.😏

Oh, and to share some game session plans before this comment qualifies as "unconstructive feedback" for the post's intent (none of the aforementioned acquisitions are compact enough to become such a plan in themselves just yet)... well, it's just the hybrids for now, so any combination from the oft-eyed stuff like Cyberpunk and Doom 3, PowerWash and Wreckfest, Xenoblades/RFs/Tales/Ateliers/Personas, Terraria, Little Noah and Tallowmere 2 to some finally initiated or finally revisited playthroughs like Athanasy, Don't Starve, Need a Packet, Shovel Knight and Retro City Rampage.

"Today is Bubble Trouble Adventures. Peculiar that they didn't start with the (seemingly) preceding trilogy unless the latter is the very three games we're getting on the last event day."

Can I channel some of that power into the next Direct day?😅

@Sambuc OK zoomer.😄 To me, 30 fps at 720p will be most sufficient and preferable over the bloatedly doubled respective numbers even in a 2030 non-stop action title, let alone in a 2026 game of Telltale's effective core genre and pedigree.

@syrupdash "but they only ever buy Maaaarioooo!"

Of course we can! At this point, Bethesda will clearly port everything but Dishonored. /jk

Seriously, though, we don't even know the exact date for the actually coming Fallout 4 yet.

Yes, please. I went through the main campaign back when the game hit PS+ and had a blast with it but predictably never invested in the DLC, all the platform specifics considered. This'll be a definite double-dip.

Switch has already treated me to some super management in Amazing Superhero Squad, but to have a similar game from someone with such a portfolio is definitely promising to be a doozy.

The comments are definitely rich. Nintendo's bad decisions are evident with NS2 being outsold by a "five-year-old console", but by a mystical coincidence it took several months and a steep discount on the five-year-old console in question (which, comparing the PS4 sales, not everyone had previously hurried to transition to after these five years either) for these bad decisions to take effect. The Nintendoom works in mysterious ways.😲

@Jeff2sayshi a legit complaint about one of these games? What portal did I fall through?

With my finger on the trigger for the discounted trilogy these holidays, I'm still finding Arkham Knight an ironic situation because I wouldn't be compelled to move it to NS2 for La Performance™ but its 26 Gb (the entirety of Borderlands 3 is barely 22, Carl😳) aren't the easiest to cram on the Gen 9 hybrid either - heck, if I found myself with so much freed up on the latter, I'd probably use it to do justice to guiltily shelved playthroughs like Astral Chain and FFXII. Then again, it may well be a bridge to cross when you get to it as the third game in the aforediscussed pack. Asylum is below 10 Gb, at least.😏

I don't believe getting pure technical upgrades even for free is reasonable, so the Switch version will remain in my wishlist instead. Then again, if the DLC never goes crossgen by the time I get around to buying it, I may eventually end up with a reason to upgrade indeed.

But I'm already playing Fire Emblem Shadows, you don't need to sell it to me further.

FWIW yesterday's title was Retro Drive Revamped, but I suppose everyone interested is keeping an eye on the NGG event page rather than this post anyway.

Today is Bubble Trouble Adventures. Peculiar that they didn't start with the (seemingly) preceding trilogy unless the latter is the very three games we're getting on the last event day.😄

Expecting to focus on Deck and the hybrids this weekend as the latter have soon-expiring Speedstorm and NMS events while the former just saw me finally replace Death Stranding with its Director's Cut (almost "bloodlessly" as well, but I did have to begrudgingly shelve Hand of Fate in the end) and even audaciously decide to restart the game rather than upgrade the previous save - that'll be some 16 hours of making deliveries and tiptoeing around explosive ghosts to regain.😄 The aforementioned Switch/NS2 "live services" won't necessary be the extent of my hybrid sessions either; various playthroughs from Skyrim, XCX, Yumia, P3P/P4G/P5R and Xillia to Ball x Pit, Dying Light, BotW, Little Noah and Smash Bros continue to beckon. The bottomless backlog itself gradually moves on (I recently finished JackQuest, although the insistent crashes drew me to forego the first chapter altogether, and I'm almost done with Little Inferno except for the DLC I've yet to procure and mop up the added combos in), but it continues to grow even faster, what with the ongoing NGG giveaways and two more recruits (Ala Mobile and Greak) that - knock on wood, folks - just saw the main account's eShop finally resume adding funds straight from my bank card again. A gamer with spending habits like mine probably can't talk much about thriftiness, but paying up to 50% extra for the gift cards wasn't the most enticing experience last month.😏 I still hope to invest in my second and last voucher pair before the end of January, so I also hope there won't be any such SNAFUs in the visible future.

Zombie apocalypse survivors needing brains to level up is a bit sus, but the overall description sounds like one of those genres you can never have too much of on portable hardware. Neat start.

Rare TGA W, as it seems fashionable to phrase these days. And while they didn't even nominate Bananza's Ingramlicious songs, at least even E33's music was acknowledged instead. If Keighley & Co can't resist the JRPG hype anymore, perhaps justice will be done to Xenoblade 4 among this bunch in due time as well?😏

As long as co-op is not obligatory (games like Secret of Mana, God Eater and Wolfenstein Youngblood have long proven it needn't be), shut up and take my money.

Capcom is really cooking with gas on the hybrids as of late. At this point, an Ace Attorney 7 trailer should be around the corner as well, right? And yes, I already want Hugh and Diana in Project X Zone 3 as well.

Localized mini spinoffs are certainly no horse to look in the mouth, but it's admittedly odd to be getting these two here before Baroque itself which has been on Japanese eShop for years and has already seen English releases in the past.

Shows what I know about Gamecube, Wario having any 3D platformers at all is news to me.😅 I even managed to overlook it in the upcoming line-up. And a Treasure work at that? Speaking of which, I still want to believe in an eventual Successor of the Stars port (a Wii NSO app would be a fatality move upon the console's storage space this side of affordable MSDE era).👀

@Lizuka confusing a collection of in-depth trivia for an instruction manual is a much more deserving idea in this regard, although it's not like the industry hasn't had other competition squashers this year.

More Rayman on Switch is always welcome, although I've yet to sink my teeth into the series (I don't even have Legends to this day, but what do you expect from a blasphemer who still doesn't have Mario Kart 8?😏), so it would be even neater to see the first game's port follow suit in the GBA app. Tonic Trouble went all the way below my radar (I only had so many N64 roms for years and wasn't enthused to dig for more because they were bulkier to pile up on memory cards AND almost impossible to emulate on most portables I've owned), so I'm curious about it as well.

I know that Nintendo seldom acquires third party studios, but given the situation and the possible alternatives...👀

"An obligatory peripheral for a Classics library launching in all regions is available in select regions"

Nominally including that of my main account, but what are the odds of NoA (or any other region like UK) shipping that stuff to Belarus? Yeah. Like I said before, seems like the one NSO retro emulation offering I'll skip, and not for lack of interest.

@TMG44 well, I reckon we'll know for sure by the time I finish the Ezio trilogy and AC3/Liberation.

@westman98 that's what I'm talking about. The "visual fidelity" of Assassin's Creed Shadows is of no value to me even in Assassin's Creed Shadows, especially when it results in 61 Gb of data to install. Rebel Collection is at least 19 Gb, which would probably leave half of that for Black Flag when you omit Freedom Cry and Rogue (before likely having to download them on top as "DLC" later on, but still). So why would I pay extra money just for 50 more gigabytes to try and cram on a different machine whose memory expansion options remain costly and limited? I might scratch my chin if some actual new gameplay, exploration space or story content got involved, but otherwise...

I've been avoiding even the base update that came alongside the first "Anniversary Edition" release whenever the game tries to download it on the home screen, and the upgrade itself, while wishlisted, has yet to indulge my gaming funds even on sales. This version doesn't sound like it will impact the situation much.

If that's another bunch of "enhanced visuals and improved framerates", I'll stick to the already owned Switch release in wait for portable Unity and Syndicate, bundled or otherwise (Origins onward would likely all be standalone ports, but I'm also in the market for the sidescroller Chronicles re-release).

"he "didn't consider the feelings of the users" at the time and wanted to provide his own vision for the sequel"

I get that a creator is their own biggest critic, but how is that remotely a bad thing, especially in the medium widely known for many standalone followups per franchise? Heck, as a user myself, I remain hopeful to see more of folks like Sherry as well, but I'd be haunted by the image of a monkey paw if I knew my feelings outright overwrote the creators' differing vision. I have enough imagination to fanfic up any desired followup in my head, but neither my brain nor those of my fellow no-names in the audience can supply me with what the creator wants to make. Although I can't deny it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand something so simple, too.🙄

According to eShop, they have 13 games not yet in my library and the event promises to focus on the stuff not featured in previous "Switchmases", so this should be interesting. And what would the local first world commenters do without an annual opportunity to publicly turn down "shovelware" giveaways?😄

So the Japanese voice option, not being in bold, isn't supposed to be the new edition's exclusive? But the previous one that I'm playing now has no separate voice settings to speak of - only the "language" one that insists on changing the voices AND all the text to Japanese.🤔

"he cares that Age of Imprisonment runs at a smooth 60fps, that the Switch 2 Edition of Breath of the Wild would look great in HDR mode on the upstairs TV"

Well, there goes another generation. Then again, he does still want a Switch 2 over a PS5 (unless the latter name shall not be uttered in a Nintendo Life staffer's household), so perhaps I'm not being entirely fair.😄

Unciv has been a mixed experience (I've really come to prefer the franchise with the physical cursor controls that allow highlighting a tile and the info about it without the game thinking that you went and selected the damn thing), but it has brought Civ 6 back on the backlog "disk tray"... and promptly kicked out both Baten Kaitos games off the latter after a mysterious update (seriously, I can't even google up the resulting version number🤔) asked for almost 8 Gb and then ate almost half of it with no visible changes or additions. Unless it really just downloaded some duplicate DLC, seeing as some of the packs are now displayed in "enabled"/"disabled" pairs, a predicament others have reported fixing with a full reinstall but persisting here even one.🤔😏 Or should I have reinstalled the base game separately first? Ugh, screw that for now, might as well cram Ghost Trick into the remaining storage space (and by "cram", I mean 19-Mb-left "cram"... I don't look forward to next week's scheduled Warframe update, boss.😞😅 FWP-influenced session possibilities aside, Switch may also see more Xenoblades, Personas, Tales, Rune Factories and Ateliers alongside high odds of more Train Life, Deliver Us the Moon, Bioshock 2, Ball x Pit, Great Ace Attorney, Metroid Zero Mission, Powerwash, Gnosia, Dying Light and Terraria.

NS2 will likely be in for more Cyberpunk and possibly NMS (if the next expedition rerun begins, although the hybrid port schedule seems to differ from the other platforms this year), with Immortals, Amalur and PoE on the table as well. Add some Gran Turismo and more Tales across Deck and Vita, more train rides in Resonance Solstice and perhaps even more Civilization stuff on 3DS (Civ 6 may be much meatier, but Revolutions spinoffs retain their own charm) on top of some Endless Frontier, Valentia or Chase Begins - and there you have another weekend guaranteed to leave its share of neat gaming memories regardless of what part of the aforelisted ambitions come to fruition.

I have yet to properly play the old Carmageddons, but the new entry is a definite headturner - coincidentally, I was just wondering about the odds of seeing more vehicular roguelites earlier this week, as it doesn't seem to be a particularly saturated niche. Starsand Island and Grave Matters are going to my wishlist as well - no matter the fandom snark, there unironically can never be enough farming sims on a portable console. Speaking of the fandom, how long till Nintendoomers on YouTube start counting down to a lawsuit upon the Tamer Town devs? That's allegedly how Nintendo rolls, after all.

Same Switchness/10 I rated it six months ago. Cyberpunk is a blast, NGC offerings (I'll never get used to the official abbreviation) are fun, the wishlist is growing steadily and the storage space awaiting investments in said wishlist is handily keeping a fair few Gen 9 backlog mammoths in use for the time being. Heck, that's where I stuffed the newly procured House of the Dead remake back in summer, and by now it's officially the first game I have finished on the new console!😄 Even though I don't care much for mouse controls and the increased screen size/resolution is a predictable liability (more gigabytes of data to find room for and nothing of practical or aesthetic value I'm gaining in return), but overall it's the expanded hybrid gaming goodness I've always been in the market for. Although Switch would have still kept me covered for many more years by itself (I went for the early adoption primarily for combined factors of having the funds and lacking confidence in the console's local availability down the road), so it's ironic how I'm enjoying the machine now while the loudmouths who spent half the last generation coughing and wheezing in wait for an added frixel injection inbetween their joycons have shifted to equally dramatic (and often equally monetized) sulking. Truly the My Little Pony Movie all over again.😆

If the "use case" is ye olde procedural generation from a dedicated original asset pool by the devs themselves, nobody has questioned these cases' appropriety for decades. It's up to the higher-ups to know the difference and not feign ignorance here, then.

@garfreek it's not just about "never enough", the main problem with investors (and the CEOs who embrace the same philosophy in their wake) is that they treat investments into commercial fiction as a "get rich quick" scheme. Nobody cares about the long term consequences for the given company and its output because nobody is there for the long haul. Après moi, les déluge.

@MatthewTaranto I look forward to playing MK8 (I mean, beyond a couple races I once tried at a local convention), but MKW is the only new entry I'm actually motivated to get and play beyond the franchise binge queue that already consists of purely stage-based racers. I even look foward to the intermission routes the notion of which partly sends me back to NFS The Run. I'm a sucker for free roam but don't mind linear races - it's going in circles that I like least about the genre. Video game driving feels best with a variable sense of travel.

We need a Direct, NL headlines are talking with themselves again.

The only question I had was about possibly added gyro in contrast to the Switch version. Alas, as reported elsewhere today, the answer is no, so that's yet another "upgrade" to skip on my end.

We can't air ride here. This is football country.

@OldGamer999 Nintendo has enough "AAA bangers" that tend to yield evergreen full price sales at that. A diverse portfolio matters in the big picture as well, and if you don't have money to fund a niche game from the guy behind one of your most prominent bangers, then what do you even have money for?

You know TV set makers are eating good when a gamer from a generation preceding my millennial own unironically dreams of things like 4K and 60fps (instead of, at least, some actual QoL tweaks like sorting by merc mission nodes on the blade deployment screen or footnoting field skill checks with a full requirement chain on the map), but personally, I'd rather see the studio resources going towards something new like XC4 or Project X Zone 3. For all their respective facelifts, XCDE and XCXDE were largely topical in their transitions to where they could be accessed more easily (and, in the recent years, purchased at all); "upgrading" Gen 9's native XC2 and XC3 can sound about as enticing as the infamous TLoU Remastered on PS5.

The familiar hybrid RPG salad (Xenoblade/Atelier/Tales/Persona/RF/Castlevania with decent odds of Skyrim, Cyberpunk, TWEWY, Kingsgrave and Void Terrarium mixed in), potentially accompanied by a variety of other playthroughs from Gnosia, Ball x Pit, Sakura Dungeon, Powerwash and Saints Row 4 to Wall World, Carto, Layers of Fear 2, Children of Morta and Train Life. Might "celebrate" MP4 release with more progress in Zero Mission as well, which always has a chance of extending the emulation session towards other runs like Yoshi's Island or Super Mario Kart.

On not so hybrid but still portable hardware, the weekend's itches include Horizon, Payback, Fallout 3, more Tales across Eternia/Innocence/Zestiria/Arise, Valentia, Pursuit Force and Gravity Rush. Mobiles like Resonance Solstice and Phantom X are also on the table with a chance of finally trying Unciv.

Neat to see one of my fave horror series packaged like this but, long done with Legacy and deep into the sequel I don't expect to share the save data, I'm on the fence about this collection myself. The "brand new chapters" do put it on the radar, though.

"As you defeat enemies that stand in your way and jump to jump, the pit will travel through a vast world."

Jokes aside, quite a lineup. Battletoads and Kid Icarus are largely left missing just the more modern entries on Switch, while having Ninja Gaiden 2 and at least one incarnation of Bionic Commando is pretty neat as well.

@judaspete Heat and Unbound aren't delisted to my knowledge; at worst, I could sail the high seas for them on Deck as well (and FWIW I actually own Heat on PS4, grabbed on a sale from my pile of salt over having missed out on the game's PS+ distribution prior), but I'd still rather access them properly AND on more dedicated portable hardware. If I cared for mods, I wouldn't still be playing my vanilla Skyrim on Switch either.😄

EA did dust off HP2010 and Burnout Paradise last gen and continues supplying the hybrid scene with neat stuff like Split Fiction, so hope springs eternal. All the easier money since the open world racing has never been overly crowded on Switch, the console coming out during a relative lull for the subgenre. Still waiting for Solar Crown and Resistor, by the way.😆

I had a blast with Most Wanted myself, but it only ranks among my faves in the series, not as the top one. I have yet to experience Unbound or properly play Heat, and the earliest stuff I've beaten so far is OG Hot Pursuit and the GBA version of Porsche Unleashed - but even inbetween, the Rockport saga shares its tier with The Run, Rivals (aka everything awesome about HP2010 but with proper free roam) and Payback, with MW2012 and the currently (but sporadically) attended NFS2015 not far behind. Carbon and Undercover were neat as well but marred the "See that icon? You can reach it" groove that had sold me on U2/MW with different interface oddities and left me just going through the event list like in U1. Thankfully, I regained the feeling with Criterion's oh so criminally eponymous 2012 game back on Vita, and it's been a fair share of similarly enjoyable experiences since. Payback particularly feels like a blend of many things I've liked about the respective Black Box and Criterion approaches, so I'm always in the market for more where that came from. But not in the right Steam region for it these days, so... #portbegging

I mean, I can't redownload my 3DS games at all, at least without changing the linked Switch account's region back to Europe.😅 And the only ones to redownload (outside long uninstalled double-dips like Xenoblade, VLR or RE Revelations) are a couple match-threes and item finder mysteries IIRC.