protocol_penguin

It’s not going to cost under £400, unless Nintendo are planning on a cost-reduced, feature reduced smaller model. £450 for the console and £70 each for the games is about what you should be budgeting for if you’re planning on getting the system at launch later in the year.

No, not Sky Rogue! It’s awful. Unless it’s been heavily overhauled by patches during the last 6 years, it felt like unfinished code, really shonky and amateurish.

I haven’t bought anything from Game in years (every new game is usually £10-15 more expensive in Game than at other retailers, well, Argos), and since Electronics Boutique bought them out, they started doing pressure upselling. BUT! I think it’s sad to see the end of games being a visible part of the typical high street. Someone who’d time travelled to today from 1984, 1994 or 2004 would assume that games are extinct as a pastime, given their complete lack of visibility at regular retail.

Anyway, yes, ban zero hours contracts! Horrible exploitative anti-worker arrangements.

Utter bollocks. Of course it should be backwards compatible. Plus it won’t be a situation where it’s completely impractical or impossible to add that feature, like it would’ve been to let the Switch play Wii U game discs.

This column is just a repeat of when all
The PlayStation magazine rallied against the PlayStation 2 being backward compatible with the PlayStation 1.

Oracle of Ages is a superior game to Seasons, to be honest. If you only play one, play Ages. Always enjoyed it as (loosely speaking) a de-make of Ocarina of Time.

@RiasGremory Nintendo won’t want to lose access to a market of 500 million people, for obvious profit-seeking reasons.

@YANDMAN Devastation is the only really decent Transformers game ever, really, isn’t it ? (I still like the one on the Game Boy Color, mind – it’s good for what it is. Probably would like the PS2 Transformers Armada too if the difficulty wasn’t ridiculously high.)

I still regret buying a PAL GameCube on UK launch day (from Woolworths bundled with Rogue Leader and Luigi’s Mansion). Should’ve bought an NTSC GameCube, cheaper and available months before.

Love hand-drawn maps of games. Takes me back to reading the tips sections in Crash and Your Sinclair…

Give us one of the Parodius games, Nintendo, you cowards.

I could probably accept the meagre, drip-fed selection of games if the emulation was any good. Unfortunately, it’s not. Yet, anyway…

I’ll be massively interested in buying this come release, well, as long as Russia hasn’t murdered us all by then.

@Spider-Kev only the NTSC-US and NTSC-J GameCube consoles had S-video output.

@uptownsoul possibly, but knowing Nintendo, it’s just as likely that they’ll replace the Switch with something completely incompatible, and even conceptually different. (FWIW, I think Nintendo will keep the Switch going as long as possible, like the classic Game Boy or DS. By the time there’s a successor, it might not even be recognisable as anything we’d associate with the Switch concept. Possibly. We’ll see.)

@Silly_G I think that’s just how (non-Nintendo) consoles will be from now on, incrementally improved hardware specs playing the same games as previous systems with marginally improved graphics and features.

I bought my Wii U on launch day and won’t part with it, but… It wasn’t a great system as the fundamental design of the system (its gimmick, if you will) was just terrible. It almost could’ve been salvaged had it been relaunched with a standard controller at a cheaper price, but that sort of u-turn isn’t Nintendo’s style.

Well, at least one of the otters is returning…

@BionicDodo I think the HG101 books are somewhere between a collected fanzine and a professional publication – which isn’t a diss, because they have the enthusiasm and always do the research. Their book on the Famicom Disk System was the most exhaustive English language source on the source I’ve ever read, and like most of their books well worth any retro fan’s time and money.

It’s a terrible game. At least they weren’t able to use the Sensi name, and thus desecrate the memory of that great game series.

@Zach realistically I think the chances of Tetris appearing on a Game Boy NSO service are between zero and minus figures. Would be a shame that a service representing the Game Boy would lack the system’s most iconic game, but that’s rights issues related nightmares for you.

I’d flippin’ love for Game Boy games to appear on Switch Online… But concede that we’d be given simpler, older games like Alleyway, Tennis and Radar Mission. (I doubt we’d even get Super Mario Land, given that Nintendo have spent a long time pretending it doesn’t exist.)

@mr_benn depressingly, you may be correct! Liquid Kids was meant to be on AA already, as were several other Taito classics.

I’m still waiting for the Taito games to appear on Arcade Archives…

The NLife mods seem perfectly fine with leaving far-right, white nationalist comments up on its site. #thisisfine

I see the creepy Incels and the Hitlerjugend are both out in force again today.

Bugger it, these ridiculous design restrictions essentially rule out HD remakes of Paper Mario 64 or Paper Mario TTYD...

KI Uprising would be considered a classic of that generation if not for the clumsy and obtuse control scheme. (Seriously, I hadn’t struggled with a control system that much since Virus on the Amiga.)

I love Reggie’s ‘diplomatic’ euphemistic allusion to Nintendo’s many marketing mess-ups.

Persona Q and Persona Q2 remastered please, Atlus...

@Kyranosaurus the more expensive gaming becomes, the lower the demand will be for gaming products and services. Games already are more expensive relatively speaking due to the collapse of the Pound in June 2016, and that situation will get worse when the currency sinks lower + imposition of tariffs and restrictions on imported products in future. I’m afraid that anything Game (the company) does is merely rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, so to speak, as a retailer dedicated solely to non-essential imported goods is going to be doomed when Brexit fully bites and drags down living standards in this country – people struggling to pay for food in a collapsing economy aren’t going to be buying the PS5 or Switch Pro en masse.

The Brexit effect rolls onwards. Just wait until we have to pay additional tariffs on games products because we’re out of the single market and customs union...

Good. The vile man deserves nothing else. And kudos to Microsoft for distancing themselves from far-right political views.

Bit of a lazy list – relies so much on listing multiple entities of certain games series to fill up space (how many Mega Man games?!) at the expense of recognising oddities and classics like Monster Max, Trip World, Solomon’s Club, etc...

The smart money is on the NX being a handheld (or tablet?) that can beam its display onto televisions for TV-based play. Think of a box that has the features of both the PS Vita and PlayStation TV, but Nintendo.

I doubt that the NX is a 'hybrid' device, or if it is, that functionality is being overstated. It'll be a successor to the Wii U, while mobile phones (iOS and Android) will be the de facto 'new' Nintendo handheld format.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the upcoming Zelda game was quietly cancelled for the Wii U and moved over to the NX.

NX is going to be Nintendo's next home console; their next 'handheld' by default will be mobile phones, with there being no successor to the 3DS. That's pretty much how it seems.

Announcement for another free-to-play game for the 3DS, I imagine.

"Broad audience"? What, the couple of dozen people still actively using their Wii U consoles?

@jkirchgessner07 the only way that the NX will be backwards compatible is if Nintendo stick with the technological dead-end which is the PowerPC processor family. I'd rather they dropped BC next time round, if only because it would enable a switch to future-proof (and developer friendly) x86 or ARM architecture.

Again, I'm thankful for our superior EU consumer legislation.