nintendoknife

@Darkyoshi98 "I came from 80s gaming when you played what you wanted not based on someone else's opinion."

Then what were all of those video game magazines with reviews for a million games for?

@Rob3008 Some things I found:
"Xenoblade Chronicles 3D (Nintendo, 04/02/15) – 56,932 (New)"
"Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country (Nintendo, 09/21/18) – 5,697 (New)"
"Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Limited Edition Included) (Nintendo, 12/01/17) – 97,732 (New)"
"Xenoblade Chronicles X (Nintendo, 04/30/15) – 85,586 (New)"

The selection of games is outstanding, and I absolutely love how they also minified the bulky accessories like they did with the Mega Drive Mini. However, €50 for only four games is ridiculous. It doesn't even have a rechargeable battery.

Looks like a great game! The graphical style looks like a blend between Paper Mario and Okami.

I thoroughly recommend both Revelations games. Their story modes are proper spooky stuff, and their raid modes are lots of fun, especially in multiplayer. This is especially true for Revelations 2, where obtaining all of the unlockables is actually humanly possible (with the exception of one particular costume that's virtually impossible to get, and completely impossible if you don't have Nintendo Online). They look extremely good, too - Revelations 2 even looks better than it does on the PS4, but the downside is that it has really, really long loading times. In the story mode, this doesn't matter, but in raid mode it can get frustrating.

However, if you want to play more Resident Evil, you should probably play the Revelations games last. In my experience, at least, they make you take lots of things for granted that the other games simply don't have - moving around whilst aiming/attacking, for one.

@Damo "But XC ran at 480p on the Wii, so how could it possibly look "stunning" with such a low resolution?"

Hey, no fair. But anyway, thanks for replying, it's nice to know you guys are people, too, and not just names attached to articles.

@Damo "The visuals in XC are no way as blurry as those in MK11"

But that's not true (unless this DLC has worse visuals than the original release, which isn't entirely clear from the way it's worded in the review, as @Henmii also touched upon above). The docked visuals are the same: 720p max, 540p min. The undocked visuals are almost the same: 378p min for XC, 384p min for MK, 540p max for XC and 480p max for MK. The difference here is that MK runs at 60fps, double the framerate of XC's 30fps - if MK ran at 30fps, it'd be able to reach a higher pixel count. Another difference is that MK was made for significantly more powerful systems and then ported to the Switch. XC was made for a significantly weaker system.

If reviewers and customers (in general, not just here) were harsher on the flaws of Nintendo-exclusive games, perhaps Nintendo would say "we should increase Monolith Soft's budget, so they can hire graphics wizards to fix their engine problems". Now, they see reviews showering their games in praise and barely mentioning the flaws, so they think "looks like people don't mind low resolutions, there's no need to increase Monolith Soft's budget, they can keep on being forced to cut corners". Wouldn't you agree that the Xenoblade remaster would have been better if it ran at around 900p docked, 720p portable, so it'd really look stunning the way the original game did on the Wii? Wouldn't the person who wrote the Xenoblade review agree?

A fun article, it's nice to receive a little blast from someone else's past.

As to framerate, I think Wild World's was wildly unstable and even went down to 15fps.

Well, seeing as the whole thread has been derailed anyway...

@nimnio The pros and cons are still meant to convey a sense of how the final score came to be, so completely disregarding them doesn't work. Now that @Eddster mentioned it, Animal Crossing got a perfect 10 (and not just on this site) because it's cute and lots of effort went into the graphics. On the other hand, there's very little to do in the game once you've put every building where you want it to be and decorated your island a bit. There's nothing to work towards unlocking. The game is incomplete and is effectively a full-price demo that probably won't be 'completed' until 2022. This is not mentioned in any reviews because it's a Nintendo game. Reviewers don't even have to be paid by Nintendo to do this, it's just the way it works. If Animal Crossing had been made by EA, Microsoft or Sony, it'd get a 7/10 and be lambasted for being all fluff and no substance.

@Damo "As for the blurry visuals, it makes sense to mention them for a multiplatform title like MK11 because, for the same price, you could buy a version for PS4 or XB1 that DOESN'T have blurry visuals. There is no alternative version of XC on another modern system to make a comparison with."
I fully agree that it makes sense to mention the visuals for multiplatform titles, but really, why shouldn't you mention it for platform exclusives? Is a problem no longer a problem if there is no alternative?

Great news, there aren't nearly enough local co-op games out there. Hopefully they'll make some new games in the series after this, too, although perhaps they'll (first) remake/remaster all games in the series. I can barely remember anything from the DS games, but I do recall they were also pretty fun.

@kukabuksilaks That's sad to hear, man. At least you'll be able to relive times gone by and recall the great time you had together. I'm sure he'd have wanted you guys to enjoy it all over again, too.

@RPGamer "But you DON’T HAVE TO BUY THE GAME. And even worse, YOU DON’T HAVE TO ACCUSE PEOPLE OF WANTING TO BUY THE GAME."

You don't have to shout, but who here is accusing others of wanting to buy the game? You can do whatever you want, it's your money. It's just an incredible shame that the game doesn't look that good, considering one of the main reasons people buy remasters in the first place is because they want a better looking version of an older game. Especially when something is called 'definitive edition', you'd expect it to be pretty excellent in every regard. People voice their complaints because they care.

(Of course, there's always some bad apples who will nitpick everything because that makes them feel good.)

@nimnio That's the thing: this game was made just recently for more powerful consoles and then ported to the Switch, so it's to be expected that it won't look as good. It's fair to list it as a con but it's also something that goes without saying, it's more exceptional to mention when a current-gen port doesn't (have to) sacrifice graphical fidelity. Xenoblade, on the other hand, was made 10 years ago and got higher quality textures (and a reworked UI), yet it barely runs at a higher resolution when docked and even drops below the original Wii game's resolution when undocked, and that doesn't dock a point off the score or even get mentioned as a con. There is no reason why Nintendo-exclusive/-published games shouldn't be judged as harshly as third-party multiplatform titles.

Edit: but I'm going completely offtopic here, so I'll leave it at this.

Also, to the people saying other Switch titles don't hit 1080p at 60fps either: there's a pretty stark difference between running at 900p, 30fps, and running at 540p, 30fps - especially when it's simply a remaster of a game released two console generations ago. The Witcher 3 was and is lauded for being an extremely good looking game. It was developed for the strongest possible hardware at the time, and its Switch port runs at a higher resolution than Xenoblade, which was developed for the weakest possible hardware at the time.

Xenoblade ran near-perfectly on the 3DS. Why can't it run near-perfectly on the Switch?

@JR150 "Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is 720p. Nobody said anything. Yoshi's Crafted World runs between 576p and 675p docked and 396-495p handheld. (...) Kirby Star Allies runs consistently below 900p with a less than stellar frame rate. (...) And again. Nobody said anything."

Perhaps that's just because no one cared about those games, Yoshi's Crafted World in particular.

@RPGamer "you guys are complaining because the graphics were slightly lower than what you thought they would be"

'Slightly lower' is a bit of an understatement, considering 540p is a quarter of 1080p. If the game were letterboxed instead of blown up, you'd have to squint to see anything. See this diagram:

https://cdn.write.corbpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/YouTubeVideoSizes.png

@RPGamer One has to wonder how much you actually care about starving children in Africa, when the only reason you mention them is to appear superior to others when you have nothing of value to say.
Did the bus not arrive on time? What are you complaining about, there are children starving in Africa!
Did your wallet get stolen? What are you complaining about, there are children starving in Africa!
Did someone break into your house? What are you complaining about, there are children starving in Africa!
Did your family get kidnapped? What are you complaining about, there are children starving in Africa!
Are you a starving child in Africa? What are you complaining about, here's another reason why I am the superior adult and you are all pathetic children complaining over nothing!

@Zeldafan79 Games on older consoles are almost all 2D. 2D holds up over time, 3D doesn't, which is why (virtually) all of the games getting remade are 3D games. I'm also pretty sure there aren't many SNES games that drop back to 80p (not a typo) because they were very poorly optimised for the system. I use a 720p TV to play games, so to me personally it doesn't even matter whether a game is a mere 720p or a full 1080p (or higher), but if they're going this drastically below 720p where even I can tell the difference, I can't imagine how absolutely disgusting it must look to people with more modern TVs. It must be like watching analog TV on a 4k screen, truly horrifying.

A bit odd that this game gets 'blurry visuals' as a con, but Xenoblade doesn't get anything of the sort. Could it be because this game is a multiplatform title, and the other is a Nintendo exclusive game which cannot do anything wrong? (I know different reviewers have different priorities, but some consistency would be nice.)

@Grot Nice strawman.

@StevenH Don't forget that those are the maximum values, and the resolution in particular is almost constantly far below that.

@Zeldafan79 Games on older consoles are almost all 2D. 2D holds up over time, 3D doesn't, which is why (virtually) all of the games getting remade are 3D games. I'm also pretty sure there aren't many SNES games that drop back to 80p (not a typo) because they were very poorly optimised for the system. I use a 720p TV to play games, so to me personally it doesn't even matter whether a game is a mere 720p or a full 1080p (or higher), but if they're going this drastically below 720p where even I can tell the difference, I can't imagine how absolutely disgusting it must look to people with more modern TVs. It must be like watching analog TV on a 4k screen, truly horrifying.

"Most importantly, Xenoblade Chronicles looks great whether you’re playing docked or handheld, running at 30fps in both modes."

Are we looking at the same game? Half of the screenshots I genuinely wouldn't be able to tell whether it was the 3DS version at a slightly higher resolution or the Switch game, if it weren't for the HUD. The game is extremely impressive on the 3DS (enormous environments, stable frame rate even in 3D, no drops in resolution, loading a new environment takes a whole second and fast travelling in an environment is instant, etc), but the Switch version is basically all blur with a bit of game mixed in. The Witcher 3 runs at a higher resolution!

The improvements to the UI and questing system seem to be really great and exactly what the game needed, but these graphics are just really ugly, and I can't believe that it doesn't detract a point from the score. It goes well below 720p in docked mode (and 720p is the maximum it can ever reach!), which is absolutely ridiculous. Handheld it goes below 480p! Let me rephrase that: the remaster of a 480p Wii game for a much more powerful console runs at a lower resolution than it originally did!

@rjc-32 "a 256gb usb drive is not equal to a 256gb 980 pro SSD" Of course, but anything flash memory related that's produced nowadays is much more reliable than the flash memory of two decades ago, and how many people even ran into problems with bad blocks on their Wii (or PSP, DSi, etc) back then? In fact, most Wiis were shipped with the cheapo faulty chips you mentioned in order to get the price down as much as possible, Nintendo just told the OS to skip over those blocks, and everything was fine. My thirteen year old Wii has seen a lot of use over the years, and the only bad blocks it has are those it came with out of the box. If that old technology still works flawlessly years later (the Wii's flash memory is from the early 2000s), there really is nothing to worry about with the newer, improved technology.

Expensive SSDs are also mostly expensive because they aren't sold in great numbers yet, and because they're much, much faster than any removable flash storage. A top-of-the-line modern SSD can read and write at 6GB/s, a decent USB stick or SD card tops out at 100MB/s. Even a cheapo 250GB SSD is still an order of magnitude faster than a USB stick or SD card, and hey, it's priced only slightly higher than its 256GB USB/SD counterpart.

It's a bit ridiculous that Nintendo would tell people to steer clear of flash memory on the Wii U, yet encourage them to use flash memory on every other console of theirs. Why they did it, I have no idea, but the hypothetical risk of bad blocks cannot be the reason.

@LEGOSuperDKong @rjc-32 That notion really stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what read-write cycles actually are. To actually hit this limit, you'd have to completely overwrite the entire drive non-stop for months on end. Compare this to what you're actually going to do with it: you write your games to them once (let's say you almost completely fill up the memory with all of those games, that's not even 1 cycle), and you write a bit of save data to them whenever you save your game. By the time you hit the write limit, especially on a large drive (on a 256GB drive, you'd have to write 256GB of data about a hundred thousand times), they'll be building the third colony on Mars. Even on a normal computer, where data is basically being written 24/7, an HDD will fail from some mechanical failure long before flash memory (like an SSD, an SD card or a USB stick) will fail from hitting the write limit. Reading doesn't have any significant impact.

If flash memory were actually a problem, surely Nintendo wouldn't have used it in the Wii, DSi, 3DS, Wii U and Switch? Surely Sony wouldn't have used it in the PSP and the PS Vita, and wouldn't be using it in the PS5? Surely (the more expensive) modern computers wouldn't all be using SSDs? Surely mobile phones wouldn't all be using flash memory?

Of course you shouldn't use cheapo USB sticks from a nameless Chinese brand (which often fake their storage capacity), but there's nothing wrong with the big brands' memory sticks.

@Wolfcreek897 You're connected to the European eShop, so it won't affect you.

@LEGOSuperDKong I think a good old USB stick is nicer than an external hard drive, because you can just plug it in and forget about it. I've got a 256GB Sandisk 'Ultra Fit' in my Wii U and it's brilliant, if you don't know it's there you don't even notice.

@Giygas_95 I definitely agree that for movies you're best off watching them in their original language with subs, because they were made specifically with those exact actors' voices in mind. Maybe animated movies are the exception, because I don't think it really matters whether you watch e.g. Pokémon in Japanese or Spongebob in German. And yeah, if a game is explicitly placed in some real-world location and was made by people from that location, the original voice acting will always be the best fit, no doubt about it. Now I'm curious if the Japanese dubs for western-made games like The Witcher 3 are popular in Japan.

@Giygas_95 Oh, I feel the same way about voice acting. If it isn't in a language you speak, it's pointless, and in that regard I really don't understand people who don't speak a lick of Japanese but still want to hear Japanese voices in their otherwise completely translated games. They always claim that the English (or any other language) dubs are 'bad' or 'poorly done', but I think if they understood what the Japanese voices were saying they'd realise the grass isn't greener on the other side.

@Giygas_95 Yeah, the US suffers from a lot of "not invented here", sadly. Even happy little Kirby was "not invented here" and made angry instead.

@Giygas_95 Yeah, our light switches are pressed up or down, not flicked. Nowadays buttons are also increasing in popularity, especially in newly built or renovated homes, because a single button panel can conveniently control 4-8 light sources without taking up any additional space.

Personally, it annoys me to no end that instead of a normal light switch, they used the stupid American light switch. No way am I going to let my nice interior be ruined by such an abomination.

@MortalKombat2007 "You probably can also turn the lights on, off, or dim with it as well"
No, you can't, that's what @echoplex was trying to say. It doesn't do anything except flick the switch up or down, which feels like a strange oversight.

Nice article! I'd like to take this opportunity to mention that for anyone wanting to play Majora's Mask again (or for the first time), there's a 'restoration patch' for Majora's Mask 3D. For those not in the know, Majora's Mask 3D sadly suffers from a slew of problems that weren't present in the original game on the N64. 'Project Restoration' (successfully) attempts to fix these issues. You'll have to install homebrew on your 3DS if you haven't done so already (if you have a New 3DS, you really should either way because you can force the N3DS's higher clock speeds on older games to improve performance), but it's absolutely worth it (remember that 'homebrew' is not the same thing as 'piracy', and the patch is designed to work with a legitimately obtained copy of the game). The difference between the normal and the 'restored' Majora's Mask 3D is night and day, and it really makes Majora's Mask 3D the best version of the game.

You can find more information about the patch here:
https://restoration.zora.re/

If you just want to watch a video explaining the issues in detail, here's a good one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=653wuaP0wzs

Thanks for this guide, it's nice, clean and useful. Luckily I've managed to catch this month's critters already, looking forward to the extra bugs next month.

Hopefully he's right and this'll make more people look at their games, because the Renegade Kid guys really know how to create good games.

Well, today I got the Twinkling Painting and a non-smiling rock-head statue, so unless there's another fake version of the rock-head statue, I can confirm that in this game, Redd can sell more than one genuine piece of art.

@Wexter They aren't doing it 'for free'. Even if you don't pay for the DLC, someone else still has to, but even if they were available at no monetary cost whatsoever, that's just a simple marketing ploy. Imagine if Nintendo had released Breath of the Wild at full price, but you could only explore the plateau and the rest of the world map was released piece by piece over the course of the following year, that's not 'adding stuff in for free', that's just readding the content they took out on purpose. Hey, that sounds a bit like Animal Crossing New Horizons.

Also, all games are made for children (even and especially those with lots of 'pew pew' weapons and naked people).

'More of the same' is actually a pro when it comes to games like Picross.

@Silly_G Some other Picross games (not those by Jupiter) use a zoom function for huge puzzles. It isn't ideal, but they could make it work if they want to.

Nintendo Online isn't even a service, it's an entry fee. You aren't allowed to use your own internet connection unless you pay up. Imagine paying to be allowed to enter a fancy restaurant, but when you go inside it turns out there's no food, no plates, no waiters and not even a chef, you're supposed to bring all of those yourself and cook your own meal.

Great, so far I've only encountered one Atlas moth and it was right when my net had broke so I couldn't catch it, and now its spawn rate has halved. Seriously, what are they thinking? Who benefits from making rare critters, who often already have a whole slew of conditions to spawn, even rarer?

@arekdougy New Leaf is still the easiest one to make money in, because you can travel to the island at any time to catch big bugs and sharks, and on top of that the interest rates are much lower compared to those in New Horizons. On the other hand, there are a lot more things you can buy in New Leaf.

@Batty5 You're putting a whole lot of words into my mouth. All I said was that you were wrong, and after being presented with facts you could have easily looked up yourself before posting multiple witty yet baseless comebacks, all you can do is insult me and say that I'm a horrible person and should probably die, when again all I ever said was that other countries' laws don't follow American law. Note that I didn't make a single statement on whether the way copyright law works outside of the USA is good or bad. You're once again acting out the American stereotype: getting furious after being presented with facts, also known as shooting the messenger.

Nice, another platinum trophy coming up... Oh wait, wrong platform, Nintendo doesn't do achievements because they'd need to invest in a server, and they wouldn't be able to make any money from that. Xbox has had achievements since 2005, Steam since 2007, PlayStation since 2008, Apple since 2011, ...

Before anyone asks, achievement hunting is silly, but many (most?) Nintendo games already include some type of internal achievements, and being able to share and compare them with other players is always nice.

@Batty5 If you have no idea what other countries' laws are like, you shouldn't talk about them as though you know, because you just make yourself look like a fool, and you continue to make your fellow countrymen look bad by spreading the "stoopid American" stereotype. Look up the phrase "Here are some of the main countries where it's illegal to pirate" (use quotation marks so it looks for the exact phrase) and click on the first result. You could have found this, as I did, just by looking up "list of countries where downloading is legal", i.e. the bare minimum effort. You'll also want to take a look at some of the comments, because the list isn't accurate and many of the countries that are in the 'illegal and you get fined' category belong in the 'illegal but not enforced' category.

I'd also like to think I know more of my own country's laws than some random commenter from across the planet who lives in an information bubble.

@Ogbert Fair enough, I don't think a bar would be a necessity either if they'd at least include visual deterioration. It's really surprising that instead of making all tools visibly deteriorate instead of only the axe, they actually took that visual indicator away from the axe.

You're right about New Leaf's tool problem. Luckily the golden axe is pretty easy to obtain, and if there's no axe in the Nooklings' store you can still check out the island shop in case they have a silver axe in stock, but if you get unlucky it can definitely become really annoying.

@Batty5 I don't think you know anything about how conventions and laws work if you think the Berne Convention has any relevance to 'the law'. A convention is what a country('s government) tells other countries(' governments) it will do. A law is what it tells its citizens it will do. Then, if there is a law, whether said law is actually enforced is yet another matter. For example, in many European countries you're entirely free to download whatever copyrighted material you want (this is either relatively explicitly written in the law, or the law is stricter but not enforced), you just can't share it.

@Mountain_Man Basically, you're saying "never improve".

@CairiB If you make lots of wishes you should get lots of star fragments. It doesn't have to be the exact number of wishes you've made (it can be slightly less or even slightly more), but if, like me and several other commenters here, you get about 15 fragments for making several hundred wishes, and you would've also received 15 fragments for making a mere 15 wishes, it's a bit ridiculous.

@Batty5 "there is no question you are breaking the law"

Which one? Which country? Is it the worldwide American copyright law?

Animal Crossing is a game that's at its best when you don't rush through it, but a slow game doesn't need to be tedious.

@Ogbert Previous Animal Crossing games have always visibly shown pieces of your axe slowly breaking off until it broke completely. Even if you were blind, there was a sound effect every time another piece broke off.

@Ooccoo_Jr If you move away from a rare spawn, it despawns, so you have to stand close to or always carry a crafting bench with you. If your shovel breaks whilst you're hitting the money rock, you lose all of the Bells still in the rock. If any hardwood item breaks, you need hardwood, which you need a stone axe for, but if you don't have an axe, you first need to craft a flimsy axe, for which you first need to shake a tree a bunch of times to get five branches, and get a stone, but if all of your tools that can hit rocks are broken, the only way to get more stones is to fish a lot and hope for a stone, but if your fishing rod is broken you need to craft a new one, and it just goes on and on. It's a nice mechanic at the start, but after a while you should be able to craft tools that don't break. Like the golden axe in all previous Animal Crossing games.

I think a major problem is that any Nintendo game always gets 10% added to the 'real' score, by which I mean the score the exact same game would get if it were developed/published by a different developer on a non-Nintendo platform. So many Nintendo games on the Switch get scores of 10/10 or 100% or 5/5 stars or whatever. If they'd been Sony or Microsoft games published on PlayStation or Xbox, they'd have received 9/10, 90% or 4,5/5 stars. The perfect recent example: Animal Crossing is a fun game, but it has some really glaring flaws (crafting tools gets extremely tedious extremely quickly; you can't use the touch screen for several actions that would really benefit from it, which was mentioned as a negative in the Nintendo Life review but in subsequent articles was already described as something that "wouldn't work well anyway"; so many things have been cut just so they can add them in byte-size updates for the next year to make it look as though they keep supporting their games - right now there's far less to do in New Horizons than in even the GameCube game, basically once you've caught all of this month's critters there's nothing to do, no projects to fund other than a couple of expansions to your own home). The thing is, this site (as well as any other Nintendo review site) lets people who already adore those kinds of games review them, which combined with the rush to get reviews out leads to honeymoon-inflated scores. If you play a game in a series or genre you really like for the first time, unless it's really bad you're always going to think "wow, this is the best thing ever" until you've been playing it for some time and start to notice and get frustrated by its flaws. For some reason, reviews for Nintendo games never take this honeymoon period into account. Reviews for any other game, especially if published on any other platform, do. Even this site's original sister site, Push Square, factors the honeymoon period into its review scores (most of the time). Looking at the latest reviews for some important games: Final Fantasy VII Remake gets an 8/10, Resident Evil gets a 7/10 and Doom Eternal gets a 9/10. If Nintendo had developed the exact same game, published on a Nintendo console, they would have received 9/10, 8/10 and 10/10 respectively.

All of this considered, it's easy to see how Nintendo dominates those "best games of all time" lists.

Why doesn't the Switch do this automatically when it detects that the firmware of a connected joycon is lower than that of the Switch itself? I'm absolutely sure 99% of all Switch owners don't even know joycons can be updated in the first place. Then again, what do these joycon updates even do? Joycons that were bought at launch and never updated still communicate perfectly with a fully up to date Switch.

Does anyone else remember Pokémon on the Game Boy?