ramu-chan

Death Stranding is superb, it should be number one. It's that rarest of things - genuinely AAA production values married to an original idea.

I just want them to address and fix the awful frame rate in the monastery sections. It boggles the mind how something so shoddy could get past Nintendo QA.

The game is fairly accessible on Easy mode. Anyone should make it through the first 3 stages or so without much trouble.

The game is really fun and plays well, and the MD version is great too if you have the hardware.

720p on Switch?

Just play Blazing Chrome people. It's the game Konami should have made instead of this garbage.

Bizarre that this omits the SNES Aladdin game, which was far superior to the MD version.

I guess this patch doesn't fix the annoying beeping noise when you're running low on health.

@Ralizah That will be up to the Art Director. Character modellers, just like everyone else on the art team do what they are told to do.

@KitsuneNight Ah I see. So porting from a desktop GPU with 8gb of RAM to a mobile GPU with 4Gb is easy?

Try working in game development. Then apologise.

@KitsuneNight If you think moden game dev is "lazy", you should try working in it. There's nothing lazy about months of crunch.

@farcry007 Okay, whatever. I thought the hair modelling was rather well done, aside from the lack of animation on it. You try modelling hair cards and see if you can do better.

The character modelling is perfectly competent. They're not scans but I wouldn't expect them to be - they have to make hundreds of characters. And the material work on the characters is really nicely done.

Of course it can be ported, there's nothing in there which is inherently out of reach. The question is how much downgrading will people accept?

Even on a PC on Ultra there is a lot of LOD and texture pop-in. This will be far, far worse on the Switch. There are also a lot of loading screens, which are pretty quick on PC due to the SSD and insanely quick CPU, but on the Switch, expect those loading screens to feel painfully long. I expect the interior lighting, which is baked, to take a big hit too due to memory issues.

In short, just play it on Game Pass. The game is a well put together Fallout clone which is essentially free on both PC and Xbox.

Solid enough game but I'm getting rather tired of the same old games being wheeled out time and time again.

Come on Sega, give us some classics which have never (or rarely) seen a home release. Golden Axe The Revenge of Death Adder is such a blatantly obvious one to do. No licensing to worry about and a sequel to one of the most popular Sega series which has never come home.

@Mountain_Man
Your loss. Gamepass is an absurdly good deal.

This is on Gamepass on PC and Xbox, so you can play it now if you like. It's a solid 60fps on PC with everything on Very High or Ultra, although even then there's a lot of object pop and texture pop in.

This can be summed up as Fallout set in the world of No Man's Sky with bits of Bioshock thrown in. It's massively derivative and essentially devoid of any ideas of its own. That said, it's also much more polished than any Bethesda game, so if you want Fallout without the bugs and a more colourful (which is to say, often purple) world, then give this a go.

Looks like a student project using a generic character model grabbed from Turbosquid and a couple of low poly building models.

It looks abysmal.

Nintendo really should institute some quality control on the eShop. Quantity over quality is not sensible. The place is a cesspit. It's nearly as bad as Steam.

@Heavyarms55 This is fairly common in JRPGs and I agree it's rather irritating. Supposedly this allows the player to project themselves onto the protagonist, but I think in reality it makes them feel like a passenger.

@sixrings It really, really isn't.

Such an odd art style. I see this a lot in indie games where they mix resolutions and it never, ever works. Choose a resolution, 320*240 perhaps, then author EVERYTHING to that resolution. It's really not a difficult thing to pull off. See games like Blazing Chrome and Ninja Saviors for examples of pixel perfection.

@Bart_T Interesting. I have it on PS4 (where I played through it) and on PC. It looks a little nicer on PC of course (especially the frame rate) but found it next to unplayable with a mouse and keyboard. The game is clearly designed around a pad. For me the mouse makes sense for any kind of shooter, as well as pointy games (strategy etc), but for everything else, I've got to go with a pad.

My favourite game this generation. Also a masterclass in how to make DLC.

Whilst I appreciate the technical achievement of getting this running on the Switch, this game is too beautiful to play in such a state. Unless you really, really need portable play, then go for literally any other version.

I was surprised at just how terrible this is. It barely works as a game, the controls are utterly broken, simplified to the point of barely existing. And visually, squeezing it into an incredibly narrow portrait ratio feels terrible and makes the already middling visuals even worse. There's virtually no spacial awareness as you can't see beyond the sides of your kart.

It lasted about 10 minutes on my phone before being deleted. Even by the low standards of mobile games, this is abysmal. It's garbage.

A racing game uncomfortably squeezed into portrait mode with no physical controls and loaded with micro transactions.

Well that sounds about as appealing as a plate of vomit. I think I'll stick to Astral Chain, Link's Awakening, Dragon Quest 11, and Fire Emblem.

I realise this garbage generates money, but it's destroying the brand. Nintendo used to be better than this.

I tried the Switch version of Bloodstained at launch (KS backer) and it was an unplayable mess. Terrible frame rate, mushy low res visuals, and masses upon masses of input latency. I haven't gone back to it since.

The PS4 version on the other hand is pretty good.

@Zeldafan79 Be careful what you wish for. Look at the new Contra on the Switch.

Konami isn't the dev it used to be. I'd much sooner we got the likes of Blazing Chrome and Bloodstained (the latter on PS4/XO/PC) than the type of dreck Konami put out now.

Better than the sequel and an overall great RPG, but it's also a seriously grindy one. The score is also a thing of wonder. (it's by Joe Hisaishi)

It's beyond terrible. If you want a new Contra game, play Blazing Chrome.

If anyone is tempted by this but hasn't pulled the trigger - it's awesome and worth every penny. Looks beautiful, sounds great and once you get used to the controls (this is more Street Fighter than Streets of Rage) it plays superbly. It's a must own. One of the best on the Switch in my opinion.

@XAHydra Music rights. Some of the music in Sonic 3 was composed by Michael Jackson.

@QuickSilver88 It's far too small in handheld mode. It's as if the devs never tested it on anything other than a decent sized TV.

It's a fun game but a really unpolished one. Unusual for a second party title. It feels unfinished.

No mention of performance improvements. The frame rate in the school sections is truly terrible and I'm amazed it ever got the through cert.

@MsJubilee It's a 2D game. Is rather more difficult to get a UE4 3D title to run well on old mobile hardware.

@Ryu_Niiyama

It's a bit of a shame it doesn't look or sound like a Kunio game.

The soundtrack to this is pretty poor and rather spoils things. Such an odd choice to pair retro inspired visuals with a bland modern score which is completly unmemorable. If only Jake Kaufman had been involved.

@Mountain_Man There's an option to do that on the title screen options menu.

@CorvoRevo And yet you cared enough to come into this article and whinge. Why?

@Barbara001
Such an odd, illogical comment.

DF commented on the lack of 5.1 audio because a) the Switch supports 5.1, and b) it's been standard in AAA games for well over a decade. It's mentioned because it's a genuinely odd omission.

As for it being good for a Switch game, again, what did you expect? The Switch is extremely weak hardware. That Astral Chain manages to look as it does is impressive, for the hardware. Had this game been on the PS4 it would have looked far superior.

This was a pretty fun re-boot back in the day. Visually a bit of a mess but the soundtrack (by Jake Kaufman no less) was insanely good. It's on Jake's bandcamp if anyone wants to listen to it.

@Silly_G Blimey I thought Mario Run was next to impossible due to the portrait screen. Everything had to be reduced to such a small size to fit and there was a ton of wasted space above and below.

I'd struggle to think of any video game which works at all in portrait. We see in widescreen. Portrait just feels claustrophobic, cramped, forced, and unnatural.

@kepsux

How long does it take to rotate a phone? Under a second. And to save people that terrible inconvenience they force games into incredibly narrow screens and make any sort of comfortable controls (an oxymoron on a touch screen admittedly) totally impossible.

I tried their telephone version of Animal Crossing and found the screen ratio so irritating I deleted it after 5 minutes. I won't even bother downloading this.

Visually it looks like a Wii era title, and why on earth do Nintendo insist on making their telephone games in portrait mode? We see in widescreen. Portrait is useful for one thing - lists. It's absurd for gaming, especially games as inherently wide in scope as racing games. Nintendo really should be better than this, they're not Zynga, or at least they shouldn't be.

Saying all of that, this will inevitably be "free" to play and absolutely loaded with pay walls, begging screens, and gambling, so it's probably for the best that it's so unappealing.

Japan gets the best box art pretty much 100% of the time.

@BlackenedHalo It's an excellent port, much better than I expected. Yes it's blurry, especially in handheld, but other than that, it's very impressive and a solid 30fps.

The original was a 30fps 1700p PS4 UA4 game so I expected this to be garbage. Well it turned out pretty well. It's a very solid 30fps so far with nice even frame pacing, and visually it's fairly close to the PS4 original, albeit at 720p and with very noticeable draw in on grass, trees, and NPCs. It's low resolution for sure, but better looking than the lumpen, jaggy, spluttery mess that is Fire Emblem.

The real win for me is the audio. Whilst it's annoyingly not in 5.1 the upgraded music is a game changer. The PS4's music was so terrible it ruined the game for me, plus there was no voice acting. The Switch version has an orchestral score played by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and a fair amount of VO.

The addition of the 2D mode (which isn't in the demo unfortunately) is a nice bonus.

It does however look seriously fuzzy in handheld mode. This is one for docked play.

Such a great game, my personal favourite this gen. But... unless you really desperately need to play it on the toilet/plane/train, then please do yourself a favour and buy the PC version instead. It's a beautiful game, it shouldn't been seen through Switch super low-res mush.

I'm still not a fan of the art style but it's great that they've got Yuzo Koshiro back on board.

As for The Switch, it's guaranteed to be on it. It'll be on everything.

@Blizzia The characters aren't animated in the traditional sense. They're not a series of hand drawn frames, as you would get in a game like Cuphead. Instead they're simply limbs detached from the body and rotated on a pivot on the GPU. The effect looks very mechanical and lacking in character. It's a common technique now simply because it's incredibly cheap.

Not a pretty game. It doesn't seem to have any real art direction, it looks thrown together. Horrible "animation" too. I really dislike this type of marionette limb animation. Either animate your characters frame by frame in 2D, or use polys, skeletons and mo-cap. This half way house stuff looks terrible.

It's overdue, and I hope they don't just spend the first 6 months putting out all the obvious stuff - Mario World, Metroid, Zelda etc. the SFC library is huge, they should explore it fully.

This looks nice enough but I kind of wish they'd kept the classic Kunio art style. It looks like any other blocky indie game now, but it could have really had its own style.