swoose

Great nostalgia, now if only they would take a break from Pokemon ex. I'm a curmudgeon and can't really get into the Gym Heroes vibe when the power creep remains so high.

But I understand why they can't do that and fit it into the broader game.

I’ve been banging this drum for a while as for me, the Switch was already too big and consoles like the DS Lite and GBA were the ideal size/weight for handhelds. I revisit them regularly. But that ship has sailed as the whole market is trending towards bigger and heavier units.

I’ll take the good with the bad - bigger size, reportedly without much added weight will make it a little more comfortable to hold, and the magnet attachments will hopefully make the controls less shaky. I’ll never understand the refusal to add ergonomics to the flat joy-con however. And here’s hoping for a Lite revision that isn’t pointlessly prevented from docking again.

@Skoffo There’s no agreements between Nintendo and most accessory companies. These leaks are only possible because Nintendo chose to enter mass production on a console months before they reveal it or even announce its name. This made factory leaks to interested parties basically inevitable.

Nintendo’s strategy here is that only fandom weirdos like us will follow leaks from CES, while most of their audience will only hear about Switch 2 when ads for it are plastered on their TVs and phones. Leaks might not really matter, so they chose to focus on squeezing every last sale out of Switch 1.

Good gravy, there were TEN Nitro Blazes before this? I've been out of the loop.

I've been happily consuming every Switch 2 leak to this point but I gotta say, I didn't get a high from this one. Just no dopamine at all. I think I've developed a tolerance

Very cool and creative if this is true, but I find it funny everyone is hype for FPS games with such a narrow, makeshift mouse. For a shooting game, the Switch already has the best control scheme possible: gyroscope. Aiming in Splatoon is faster and more natural than any FPS I've ever played, and I grew up with classics like Quake and Unreal Tournament on mouse & keyboard.

Where mice ARE superior is being anywhere on screen and holding still there without any exertion, useful for games with lots of menuing like Mario Paint or Civilization.

Notably there’s a legible serial number on this unit which can be input to Nintendo’s support page, and it shows a valid warranty already. This is a final retail Switch 2 joycon.

And shocker: it perfectly matches the 100 other leaks and renders we’ve seen of it already, which users here were calling lies and frauds. I’ll wait patiently for the posts admitting they were mistaken, which surely are forthcoming.

The poor sales compared to other Next Level Games projects was probably the actual nail in the coffin. It’s the kind of series that will always be a legacy title but that doesn’t necessarily justify a brand new entry. And the 80s-90s stereotypes are part of the legacy.

The NES original holds up great as a lightning-fast single player arcade/puzzle experience, on CRT with zero input lag. To make it more accessible and multiplayer, the ARMS format makes way more sense.

I don’t care about 4k resolution. I DO care about input latency and ghosting effects from motion.

Hopefully the DLSS is conditional and not actually required to run the games.

As a lover of hilariously long game titles, thank you for putting that category in the lead where it belongs. I got more out of this listicle than out of The Game Awards.

Companies stay rent-seeking. The delisting of collections makes this extra gross.

Of course it's not much different from Nintendo closing the Wii/WiiU eshops full of Virtual Console games and then launching Switch Online. At least they waited until a generation changed over...

I don't really get the almost dogmatic hatred against leaks shown by some in these comments. Burned too much in the past? Some leaks are wrong, some are spot-on. The Switch 2 has had a notably consistent stream of leaks, shipping logs and the like, all corroborating each other, so fair to think it's a poorly kept secret at this point.

Whether or not the dock ends up having its own fan, I'd say feet on the back of the dock are a good idea. Some people have shelved setups where it's easier to fit things laid flat rather than standing up.

There's not really a good justification for it, so I wouldn't expect one from the developers. Wada may as well say something like "creative license" or "development reasons" and leave it at that.

I've been getting into the Rune Factory series and even a smaller team like Hakama have managed dual protagonists as of RF4 on the 3DS, and even that was long in coming... I can't imagine Atlus isn't capable.

The main things I still want confirmed:

• Hall Effect sticks. This feels very un-Nintendo in that it's like admitting something was wrong with the Switch's sticks in the first place, which they have never done, and adopting a solution that many other controller brands marketed first. I almost expect the Switch 2 to have some proprietary Nintendo stickbox that leaves it ambiguous whether or not drift is solved, since they won't acknowledge it existed.
• Joycon ergonomics. This one is less likely, and the CAD renders have been inconsistent about the back of the console, but they all showed the joycon still being flat on the back. Now all the peripheral leakers incorporate a grip on the back of the joycon more like a Wiimote or WiiU gamepad. That could just be part of their case designs though. They correctly identify that nobody wants to hold up a slate-thin console for hours in 2025. Ergonomics are a solved problem. I really hope Nintendo fixed it themselves and aren't just leaving the issue to 3rd parties.

There will always be a place for 2D characters on 3D backgrounds, but this "HD-2D" brand has gotten too formulaic. I prefer other looks featured in this article like Sea of Stars, or fully pixeled games like Tengo Project is making.

For me, there's too much shadow in all the games up to Dragon Quest III, the text sizes are always way too small, and the UIs are never integrated in the pixel style.

They found a way to make cats ugly.

Instead of tasting bitter, the new cartridges will taste like honey.

I was coming here to insult this shoddy de-make of a port and say nobody should support full-priced shovelware from Nintendo, but I see there's still enthusiasm for it in the comments. It's certainly a way to play it on Switch. So to each their own!

The pinhole video of the joycon being pulled off the unit is far more convincing than this. With how isolated and shadowed they kept it this could easily be a render.

That said, safe bet the Switch successor will look pretty much like that.

I also think the “Wii hardware was creatively stifling” quote is slept on here for how stupid it is. Imagine environmental artists at Monolith Soft thinking that way.

It’s one thing to think that in the moment in 2006, but with hindsight that’s admitting your own incompetence at the time.

What’s annnoying about this is Sakurai’s joke was at the expense of CERO, along the lines of “CERO has decided that Smash Bros is for good boys and girls” which makes it way funnier. But the localization left that out because they think we’re stupid and don’t know what a rating board is.

And so now english social media is full of “take THAT Sakurai!!” when he never passed that judgment on Mai in the first place.

Transparently they wanted to withhold these tracks forever so the app doesn’t obsolete the physical release.

They should’ve just left it as-is for this one OST. Drawing attention to their removal like this makes it look 100x worse.

Remember they shut down WiiU and 3DS service, but have the server traffic for all this junk.

There HAS to be a happy medium between blocking Binding of Isaac, and having no curation at all. All these copycat unity asset flips are not hard to identify.

I don’t think even Nintendo can outdo the Switch’s success. I think we’re facing an economic downturn, and some market saturation for handhelds (people satisfied with their Switches). The Switch was a runaway freight train in gaming and I think the Switch 2 can be a modest success, but lightning won’t strike twice. So I don’t expect a competitor handheld to take off either.

I hope that leads to more innovation in handhelds 2 gens from now, and especially to smaller form factors. People are buying pillow attachments to hold up their “handheld” pcs and consoles this gen, so their hands don’t fall asleep since the tech is so stupidly heavy. You can barely call them portable.

It may have been tricky to make an article out of the blurry joycon & console footage from yesterday, since Nintendo was getting videos of it taken down. It's very obviously real. And not surprising, given how deep into production we are.

Nintendo waiting until 2025 to reveal this may as well have been saying "We're OK with you seeing our console from leakers first."

Well, four free Switch games is pretty generous. That’s sure better than we got for the WiiU/3DS shutdown

If only there was a Nintendo-made peripheral that weighed only 8 ounces, supported all DS games natively, had a nice resistive touchscreen, and was so popular that Nintendo shipped like 130 million of them, so they’re easy to find everywhere. Oh yeah, that’s the Nintendo DS.

Play your DS games on DS, people. It’s a comfier and more portable handheld than the Switch anyway. A new “Nintendo Classics” DS mini product would be preferable to all the compromises listed here, but even that I think is wasteful and too soon.

I remember liking the grid-based battle system in this. Can't for the life of me remember why I fell off playing it, other than it being a full-length RPG.

I think I was playing the 3DS version, which has voice acting and some extra dungeons in exchange for new anime portrait art that got mixed reviews. The DS original had a more distinctive look for sure.

Funny enough, I don't think text even needs to be scalable - it should always be huge by default. Back in MY day text had to be legible on CRTs so it was like 10 characters per line, and we LIKED it that way!

The downside is devs will actually have to think about UI design and how much text they're putting in their games. The horror

Just avoid the problem and it might go away! I see myself in this fellow.

That Aonuma quote had nothing to do with the menu, he's just talking about using echoes in gameplay. I don't know if control schemes and menus are really his wheelhouse, seems like more of a Miyamoto thing who had no involvement with this title.

I will say the menu wasn't a huge downside for me, I only wish new echoes were automatically at the front of your "last used", instead of the end.

A bit concerning as Select Button only makes bangers... but they've also ONLY made Magikarp Jump and Pokemon Sleep in the past 10 years. I'm guessing they're a smaller studio that mostly does support work, art and UIs and such.

I'll keep an eye out for any negative changes but if this keeps Sleep supported for longer, it's a good thing. The structure of the game is there.

It's been a while since I've licked a cartridge, since the bittering agent was more of a story in the console's first year. I wonder if those early cartridges have maintained their taste over time. I'd better go check.

It's incredible we're still having these issues with tiny fonts. Are designers working for years and years on giant 4k monitors and never checking their work at a smaller size?

It's especially bad for a game using a pixel aesthetic. That's missing one of the main points of pixel art and UIs, their clarity and legibility.

A couple misconceptions. The IGN review was written by a superfan of the Mario & Luigi RPGs, who was clearly let down by this entry vs. his expectations. It was not a case of being unfamiliar with the series or biased against Nintendo, Logan Plant is often on their Nintendo Voice Chat podcast. Sometimes the biggest fans are the biggest critics; if NintendoLife asked for my review of Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, I might have given that a 5.

Which raises the point: look at the writer, not the website. I keep seeing “but IGN gave [bad game] a 9!” So what? The same reviewer doesn’t give every score, and sites can’t enforce a monolith opinion across their staff. You wouldn’t judge PJ O’Reilly’s review skills by this site’s review of Sonic x Shadow Generations. He didn’t write that one!

@Maxz Basically the weak yen hurts them when they're making purchases, which they're doing a lot of with the increased R&D expenses and ramp up to new console production. The weak yen helps them when they're SELLING stuff, but they're doing less of that than previous years since Switch sales are down.

I think this whole thing was a fumble and uncharacteristic of Nintendo. Why acknowledge a successor this year at all? The damage to their sales momentum has likely already been done by that.

It wasn't just hopium thinking the announcement would have to be this year, with a spring or early summer release. It's now looking like a fall 2025 release at the earliest. That's on a chipset that is already known to be a couple years old, into a market with another year of competition from other entertainment devices. Not to be nintendoomed about it, but the prototype was shown to devs ages ago and this ramp-up seems very slow.

Half of every comment section on aggregated Kit & Krysta bits is yelling at the clouds about them being relevant. I don’t follow them but clearly they saw a spot in the media market for views from former Nintendo employees, and people listen to them.

If you object to this so much just stop clicking on their headlines on NintendoLife.

Mobile devs design a game without 10 different in-game currencies challenge (impossible)

Good thing they had this to fall back on when the NFT bubble burst. I’m surprised they’re not trying to sell their accessories as AI devices somehow.

Comment section-ly reminder that emulation is legal, emulating currently sold consoles is legal, the people emulating them are also the ones spending the most money on Nintendo, and encryption keys are not intellectual property.

I was always taught to ask "why?" and consider logic.

There is absolutely zero logic to banning photography. It takes 1 second, is unobtrusive, and deals no damage to the value of the museum. And further it's unenforceable, unless you want to confiscate all smart phones or watch every patron like a hawk. Such an obvious losing battle.

It's an original Nintendo game, by that alone it surpasses my expectations. Not sure what people wanted from this, that some are disappointed. Paying rent for playing more old games?

The “Strong experience with the protection of musical works and sound recordings” bit is a concerning one. Get ready for DMCAs against videos and streams that had Mario music in them.

Weirdly defensive stances towards Nintendo here in my opinion. I love their games and products, that doesn't mean we have to love their legal activities and the hypocrisy here is obvious.

They've repeatedly gone after both open-source emulators AND non-profit rom archives, that's the main sore point with people even before they started charging for an emulation experience in their museum.

If they have to charge $100 for this... there's no way the Switch 2 will only be 4x as much, right?

Granted they're hopefully not producing that many of these and see it as more of a novelty, high end stocking stuffer.

So Monolith can afford a dedicated R&D team. I wish I knew what the Pokémon Company does with all its world-leading profits.

@Sarkos I know, but that's what I mean by extra inputs that shouldn't be there. They should just be sorted in sequence with my most recently used.

I've taken to stopping what I'm doing, and summoning every single echo as soon as I acquire it to move it to the front. Otherwise I get 10 new echoes and have to remember which ones I've summoned yet or not, and which ones will be in front or back of the line.

I have to think Nintendo has done some design study that shows people visually process items faster if they’re in a single row. The Switch menu has also stuck to this for 7 years. Because otherwise, 2 rows is such an obvious option I can’t believe they didn’t go with it. 1 for objects, 1 for monsters?

I’m getting by fine with the default “recently used” sorting, except whenever getting new echoes (which is constantly). They put those new echoes LAST in the list unless you switch to “recently learned”. The best function would obviously be recently used & learned combined, but that doesn’t exist so I’m doing extra inputs every time to shuffle my new echoes to the front.

It's funny if they're worried that they came off as hating the west, when so many gamers in the west also hate the west. We've all been arguing about which westerners they're complaining about, who we also hate.