topsekret

@OrtadragoonX FFXII on the PS2 looks leagues better than this game.

@sfb Cool, thanks for testing. It can be a bit hard to tell for sure just by feel. There could definitely be some placebo at play, but if you are playing better in the new version, it could be due to maybe like 1 frame less of lag.

At the very least, it sounds like it isn't worse than the Saturn Tribute, which is supposed to be around 6 frames lag. 6 frames is about when I start to notice input lag, especially coming off of a really responsive game like Mushihimesama (3 frames of lag on Switch).

I find Batsugun Saturn Tribute to be playable, but not ideal. I find myself having to anticipate bullets more than usual and be a bit more pre-emptive with my positioning to compensate for the slightly longer input delay.

And congrats on being number 3 on the leaderboard! Always fun to rush to the top in the early days of a game's release. Unfortunately, I won't be able to join in on the fun till my physical copies from LRG arrive in a few weeks.

@Expa0 @everynowandben Thanks for the recommendations! I've never heard of Symphony of War, so I'll keep an eye on it.

I am familiar with Kaga's post-FE games, though I haven't played any of them yet. A shame Vestaria Saga will likely never get a Switch port due to the bad blood between him and Nintendo.

@sfb Would you happen to have Batsugun Saturn Tribute Boosted on the Switch? Curious if the Batsugun port in the Toaplan collection has less input lag.

I only want 1st party games on Switch 2 since 3rd party games are all on Game-Key Cards.

@jojobar Yep, they did that for the 3DS Fire Emblem games. Pixel art characters on the map, but high-resolution illustrations for the character portraits. And 3D graphics for the battle sequences. Despite the mix of art styles, it felt very coherent in those games.

I've heard this is supposed to be better than the first. Probably not up to Fire Emblem's level still, but I'm interested.

@Expa0 Curious what your recommendations are for Fire Emblem-likes? Most SRPGs I see tend to be Final Fantasy Tactics-likes.

"Addressed low FPS issues on the NX platform across several levels."

Nintendo Switch: "Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time."

This looks drastically inferior to the new Digimon game. Sad how Pokemon makes way more money than Digimon, but refuses to put any of it into the budget of the actual games.

My heart sank when I saw the title of this article. I assumed it was gonna be about the ports having horrible input lag or something.

Now I'm relieved it's just about a minor typo on the box art, Resident Evil Revelaitons-style!

Calling it now: 30 FPS on Switch 1. Game-Key Card on Switch 2. No upgrade path.

So let me get this straight:

*Game-Key Card
*"Mostly" 30 FPS (meaning drops are expected)
*No split-screen
*Releases a month late
*$70

Sounds like an excellent value proposition! /s

I'm honestly fine with them not releasing the game on Switch 2, as we all know it would be doomed to be on a Game-Key Card if it were released in the current climate. For me, a game being on a Game-Key Card is the same as the game not existing.

Maybe if they wait a few years before considering a port, cartridge prices will go down enough for them to put it on a real cartridge. And more DLC would be released by then that could be included on the cartridge. That would be the best-case scenario.

Maybe the X account is run by some boomer at Sony that thinks every game console is a "PlayStation?" lol

@SuperBro64 Yeah...they really should start looking into a way to let you pick which games to download from within the app or something.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have a lot of free time this weekend, so I only got to play for about 30 minutes. I had fun, but I think if I wanted to get into the game properly, I'd need to invest in some ergonomic mouse mode shells for the Joy-Cons. They're just way too thin to hold like a mouse comfortably for prolonged periods of time.

Speaking of which, anyone have recommendations for mouse mode shells?

@BenAV Seriously. And 12 nearly back-to-back posts in the span of 15 minutes? I know Pokemon fanboys can be annoying, but this Palword fanboy takes it to another level. 😂

@Nintendum And here's the alt 🤣🤣🤣

@Nintendumb Bro actually made 2 accounts today to troll. You must be really triggered 🤣🤣🤣

@TheExile285 Top 30 is out: Ys X: Proud Nordics was number 15 with 3,436.

Personally, I'm glad to see it selling poorly since it's a Game-Key Card release.

Another 3rd party game to skip due to being on a Game-Key Card.

@SabreLevant Even physical games use digital storage space for save data, updates, and DLC. And though I vastly prefer physical and will always choose that over digital when it's an option, I do have a fair amount of digital games on Switch 1. I got like 600+ physical games and 200+ digital games. So I easily filled up a 1 TB micro SD card on Switch 1. But if those 600+ physical games were digital instead, I'd probably easily need more than 4 TB.

After transferring to Switch 2, I don't have enough space to fit everything on the internal storage. And a 1 TB micro sd express is way more expensive than a 1 TB normal micro sd card. And even if I got one, I'd basically just have enough room for all my old Switch 1 stuff and nothing for Switch 2. I don't like having to delete and redownload to all the time depending on what I wanna play.

With Switch 1 my rule for buying digital was basically the same as it is for Switch 2: I'll only consider buying digital if the game satisfies three conditions:
1. Must be very cheap (around $10 or less).
2. Must be small in file size (ideally 1 GB or less).
3. No existing physical version.

Which basically means only indies. For AA and AAA publishers, I expect them to put their games on a cartridge. If they don't, I refuse to support them.

Regarding the concern about digital ownership, you are right, despite removin the ability to purchase digital games on the Wii, DSi, Wii U, and 3DS, Nintendo does still provide users the ability to redownload games they've already purchased...for now.

But if you read the FAQs that they release when they shut down their stores, you'll see that they say you'll still be able to redownload games "for the foreseeable future." That's very vague and non-committal, they are leaving themselves an out to shut that down too in the future.

Think about it like this: Nintendo is a business. They exist to make money. Those old digital stores no longer make money for them. Yet Nintendo still has to pay operational/maintenance costs for those servers to support redownloading. This means they are a net-negative for Nintendo. Do you really think Nintendo will continue to pay the costs to keep the servers running indefinitely out of the goodness of their hearts?

@Max_the_German Let's walk through an example. You mentioned 1536x1080, so let's use that.

We both agree that if you render to 1536x1080 and then scale that to fit a 1920x1080, it will be stretched horizontally, right?

I've never heard of the term "anamorphic" till today, but I think I know what you're saying after reading about it a bit.

The 1536x1080 would look as if you took a 1920x1080 image and then scaled it to 1536x1080. Essentially, it would look squashed. But then if you take that 1536x1080 and scale it back to 1920x1080 it would have the correct proportions?

Of course, for it to be a performance win, the game would have to render directly to a 1536x1080 render target. I do believe you could do some tricky stuff with the transformation matrices to achieve this effect, however, there would still be a loss of quality since you are losing information on the horizontal axis.

Essentially, you are forcing ALL the information loss to be on the horizontal axis, whereas if you render to a proportionally smaller render target, the information loss is distributed evenly between both axes. To me, the latter seems more desirable, though, academically, I am a bit curious to do a side-by-side comparison with both techniques.

@Yalloo I'll admit, it's a massive cope, but it does in fact take time to manufacture cartridges. Especially if they need to wait till they have a good enough build to put on the cartridge (as opposed to just a license key).

Why do you think the physical version specifically of Sonic Racing on Switch 2 is coming out much later than the digital version?

@SabreLevant Nah digital sucks too:

1. Wastes my storage space.
2. Depends on Nintendo maintaining access to their servers to download in the future. You don't actually own it, you're just renting long-term for an unspecified period.

@Greenspark Bro, how much is Nintendo paying you to necro old news stories and individually respond to people with a copy-pasta to justify GKCs?

Another exciting release ruined by Game-Key Cards and lack of upgrade path. WTF are 3rd parties doing?!

@Sylamp Oh yikes, I'll hold off on purchasing this then. Let me know if they ever properly fix it.

Copium: What if two of the missing games were Elden Ring and FFVIIR and they pulled them from the show cause they're getting delayed to put them on real cartridges instead of Game-Key Cards?! A man can dream...

Skip until they patch in 60 FPS, at the very least for Switch 2.

@Max_the_German No, that would be worse cause you'd have a stretched image. It would make everything look wider than it should be.

I just hope there's some shmups.

Danmaku Unlimited 4 just got announced for PC, so I could see that also getting a Switch 2 version. Would be a great showcase for 120 FPS.

Kind of a longshot, but I'd also like to see a Blue Revolver port, though in the past the dev has indicated he isn't interested in doing console ports.

But let's be real--it's gonna be 80% "cozy" games.

@Kenshir0 Unfortunately, according to the official Japanese website, only the PS4 and PS5 Japanese versions will support English. (Scroll to the bottom of the page and use the translation function of your browser.) It seems Koei Tecmo doesn't want any business from English-speaking physical Nintendo fans.

Game-Key Card = no purchase (not even digital version)

I hope all GKC games FAIL!

@jojobar Digital only on Switch 2. Physical on PS4, PS5, and Switch 1 in Japan, but among those, only PS4 and PS5 support English.

True physical Switch 2 release = buy day 1

Cheap digital upgrade path for existing Switch 1 owners = pick up in the future when ready to play

Otherwise, SKIP

@Solid_Python I agree that digital should be cheaper than physical.

However if Nintendo or retailers demand price parity initially for physical and digital, then I think increasing the price to enable true physical is the better option.

If you don't care about physical and feel the digital price is too high, you can simply wait for a sale. For example, after almost 2 years, the digital version of Mortal Kombat 1 has gone on sale for 66% off. I'm sure it will continue to go down in price. Feel free to snag it at the price you are comfortable with.

If they took the other approach and put the game on a GKC, there is literally no solution for people who want physical.

@RemyMartin A lot of the existing Switch 1 arcade sticks should work fine on Switch 2. I can personally confirm that the Mayflash F700 Elite is now fully supported on the Switch 2.

At launch the Bluetooth mode did not function with Switch 2 (though wired USB and the 2.4 GHz wireless adapter did), but Mayflash released new firmware to fix the issue with Bluetooth on Switch 2.

@DashKappei I'll also point out that if you want, you can use the Switch 2's built-in controller remapping to bind any button on the arcade stick to the C button. I did that when I was playing Guilty Gear Strive online with my brother.

@RasandeRose Nintendo invented Game-Key Cards to give publishers an option to cheap out. They didn't have to do that. That's why I blame them too for this mess.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, what you said isn't even really true. Nintendo HAS recently started implementing draconian policies to prevent certain games from releasing on their systems. For example, they blocked the recent Neptunia ports from releasing outside of Japan due to their new "content guidelines." Unfortunately, Nintendo cares more about policing dumb things like that than creating rules to prevent 3rd parties from enshittifying physical games.

@Haruki_NLI Fake physical releases on Switch 1 (like code-in-a-box, or download-required) were the exception, not the rule. On the Switch 2, it's reversed. Switch 2 is far far worse for physical collectors than Switch 1.

I put the blame on both Nintendo and 3rd parties: Nintendo is the one that created a terrible ecosystem that incentivizes 3rd parties to do fake physical releases so aggressively, and 3rd parties are using every exploit Nintendo makes available for them to avoid giving customers true physical releases.

Here's my simple solution: give people the choice to buy what they want. Release each game on both a cheaper Game-Key Card and a more expensive true physical cartridge. Casuals can save a bit of money with Game-Key Cards, and collectors can spend more money to get true physical games.

Might be a bit of guess work for the initial batches to figure out the market sizes for both formats, but they'd be able to refine it as they go. They could start out doing smaller prints for the real physical versions to minimize risk on their end and then do reprints if there's enough demand (like what the retailer Video Games Plus does).

Just give the people what they want. They can't force the market to do what they want. If they aren't going to offer products we want, then I and the other physical collectors can and will abandon them without remorse. Nothing personal, it's just business.

@Haruki_NLI If they're only gonna release games on Game-Key Cards, then they deserve to fail.

Bring on another Wii U-level failure if that's what it takes to teach Nintendo a lesson. They got cocky again and made horrible decisions with the Switch 2. Game-Key Cards are absolutely ruining the system for me.

@Haruki_NLI You're also forgetting about the NS2 Editions for BotW and TotK in terms of 1st party games mixed into the remaining number.

@Yosti I wanna see a breakdown of total number of true physical cartridges sold vs. total GKCs sold vs Switch 2-exclusive digital games sold.

Seeing a list of the best-selling 3rd party games would be interesting as well. I hope that CDPR and Marvelous are being rewarded for their true physical releases and everyone else is floundering.

C'mon Nintendo, give us a sales breakdown for real physical vs. Game-Key Card vs. digital. Also, 1st party vs. 3rd party.

@Mommar Same. If enough people let them know they will only buy the game if it gets released on a real cartridge, maybe that will influence their decision about the physical release.

The release date is far enough away (a vague "2026") that they likely aren't locked into any specific physical format yet.

Honestly don't care. It would have been a Game-Key Card anyways. Switch 2 is for 1st party games.

@Automated_Unit_4937 They should offer free Switch 2 upgrade patches for DQ 1 & 2 and Octopath 0 as well.

The reason I wanna buy the Switch 1 version of those games is because that's the only way to get a real physical version. The Switch 2 versions are stuck on crappy Game-Key Cards.

This Direct just reinforced that 3rd party support is gonna be a disaster on Switch 2 if you care about physical releases. It's all just Game-Key Cards.

I'm not getting excited cause there's a 99% chance it'll be on a Game-Key Card.

Japanese version is confirmed to be a Game-Key Card, and on top of that, the DLC is sold separately. Easy pass. I hope all these 3rd party games bomb on Switch 2.

It's gonna be on a Game-Key Card like the last Yakuza game, so I'm skipping it.