vincentgoodwin

@Schizor88 One of the big reasons the N64 lost to the PS1 was the cost of the cartridges. At the time, I remember reading that a N64 cartridge cost the publisher $15-20 whereas a PS1 optical disc was $1. So if you're a 3rd party publisher & want to make a million cartridges, you're taking out a $15-20 million risk & hoping you don't get hung with unsold games.

This cost caused many 3rd parties to bolt for PS1 (Capcom, a huge SNES publisher made just 3 games for N64).

So I think Nintendo's priority is making sure 3rd party publishers release games on the Switch 2 and have no reason to leave. The speculation is the 64GB Switch 2 cartridge costs a publisher $14 per unit (meaning $14 of each $70 Cyberpunk sale is going to manufacture, before retailer cut, shipping, development, marketing). I don't know the game-key cost, but I presume it's much less.

I agree that memory is a huge issue this generation. Xbox/PS5 solid state drives are also too expensive & too small given how big their 4K games are.

Hopefully the SD Express cards go down in price.

I feel like Nintendolife really has got a bone to pick with these Game-Key cards & it's getting embarrassing & tiring. Let it go.

1. It costs a lot less to manufacture a game-key card that putting the data on the cartridge.
2. It's better than a code-in-a-box because I can loan these to my friends or sell them.
3. Game-Key Cards were already present on Switch 1 (see Just Dance or NBA 2K games)
4. Most games get Day 1 Patches or just patches in general, so the idea of a game being completely playable off the cartridge is a ship that's sailed.

This is the same as the Star Wars: Heritage Collection (regularly $40-60 US) but with 2 extra games (Jedi Power Battles and Bounty Hunter)

@mikep @yamber Code in a Box is one-time use. Game-Key is a cartridge transferrable to anyone.

The cartridge does need to download more data, which is honestly not much different than Switch 1 games that need a patch (PS/Xbox games do this too)

I personally find the Game-Key pretty elegant, because I can let my friends borrow my games. I can't let them borrow a code-in-box game (like Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2).

@DriftDT The five Game Boy games were ported to 3DS, so the ROMs have been made in the last 10 years...making it slightly easier to get on NSO or a new collection.

@Williamfuchs420 Amalur was written by RA Salvatore (creator of D&D's dark elf Drizz't), not George R. R. Martin.

It's an real-time RPG combat, not turn-based, right?

Are you only controlling the humans? What control do you have over the monsters in combat?

Wow! It's finally here! I remember it being announced in December 2019, and me doing a new playthrough of Golf Story before the pandemic.

@Not_Soos I also thought Pocket Dungeon and Dig were the same game.

Oh cool! I was eyeing the 3DS version as a game to get before the eShop closes down.

I find that surprising. I liked it pretty well & played all the DLC, but I feel like it dropped in price even more quickly than normal Ubisoft games do. Which I thought meant Ubi didn't have much confidence in it.

He's gonna be Geodude in Detective Pika2

Dang it, Bobby.

There are two GBA Battlebots games that...aren't great but are interesting.

They're very similar, and Wikipedia says that the 2nd game is identical to the 1st, just with bug fixes.

I definitely misread this headline as a holiday version of "Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin"

"The poster, which reads "Hold it! Marijuana steals your future!", lists the penalties received for possession and distribution of the drug"

If the only argument you have is the legal penalties, it seems like an unjust law. "Why shouldn't I do marijuana?" "Because you'll go to jail." "But why is marijuana illegal?"

If it was marketed on the health hazards or harm it causes (which is questionable considering both alcohol and tobacco are legal), I could get more behind it.

Tools Up is like Overcooked but with home renovation.

Vicarious Visions made the excellent Tony Hawk 2 GBA, which I honestly loved more than the console versions.

To me, if I saw Vicarious Visions' logo on a game, I always trusted it was gonna be a good port.

All things must pass. Pour one out, they had a great run.

It's been out in the States for about a week. I got it for my son for Christmas, but I have flipped through it. There's a warning before one story that there's a death of a parent in it, which is...not a direction I'd expect a Mario comic to go.

Still, I like the idea that it covers multiple Mario games. In Japan, the most recent arc covers Luigi's Mansion 3.

@doctorhino It has to be something along the lines of "anti-piracy" or "debug code to validate it's in a DS" lines, since Mario Kart DS came out 7 months before the DS Lite (November 2005 vs June 2006). [In the US]

It's not like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance GBA having different color settings based on the model, because that was released after the GBA SP was already out.

@NotoriousWhiz - My son's been playing Breath of the Wild for the last few months since his friends started playing. (They do videochats & show each other their progress for Zelda & Animal Crossing)

Before that, he's been into Smash, Pokemon, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. He couldn't wrap his head around Minecraft.

My 6 year old son & I played the 2-player mode splitscreen, and woof, I swear it chugged to sub-5 frames per second at the first encounter. It was like playing GoldenEye 64.

But he didn't mind. He had a blast; we got to play Zelda together. He was happy.

@JayJ

They have to support the ongoing server costs & maintenance/support staff for their online fights, which can be tough when all they got was your $60 a year ago. Adding new characters & content incentivizes people to keep paying into the game to support the online modes. (New characters, new content I like // their microtransactions for one-time buffs I don't like)

And it's probably more cost-effective than the old days. Back in the day, you'd have to buy a whole new $60 game just to get the four new Street Fighter characters or however many new characters were in Ultimate MK3.

My prevailing memory from Doom 64 is that it was physically dark and hard to see things (though that may have to be the super-old CRT I played on with an RF switch).

Is it easier to see things in this port?

@Doktor-Mandrake I imagine the controls will work similar to how Diablo 3 worked on consoles...or how Torchlight 1 did on Xbox 360.

Kinda blows my mind that Square-Enix didn't have an easily available version to tie-in with the movie's release.

Just...put the SNES trilogy of 4/5/6 in a Switch collection like Collection of Mana and profit in Japan!

I worked for a Nintendo fansite during the Gamecube era, and my beat was reviewing Nickelodeon games. I remember Spongebob: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman and Jimmy Neutron: Jet Fusion both being fairly mediocre.

I got Battle for Bikini Bottom and was blown away by how much better it was than the other Nickelodeon games at the time. It borrowed its structure heavily from Banjo-Kazooie and Jak & Daxter and was a lot of fun to play.

I bought a Handy Boy in the US, and it works off the same general principles.

I'd never been so disappointed.

@BenAV I agree. I loved the first chapter, which was about 5 hours. The second chapter was closer to 20 hours and really felt like it was dragging near the end.

If the sequel has smaller chapters, I'm on board.

Sweet! I thought this game was trapped forever on last-gen systems. This and the first Splosion man were lots of fun.

Is this physical sales or does it include digital?

Because that's super impressive for New Super Luigi U, which was primarily pushed as a DLC add-on.

I've been looking forward to this for awhile. The developer's previous games were all good takes on the old-school JRPG: Cthullhu Saves the World, Breath of Death VII, Penny Arcade 3 & 4 (the ones that played like Grandia).

If you're arguing about the SD card as a Nintendo cash-grab, the Switch works with most existing SD cards. It's not a proprietary format that only they sell (see Vita)

Ummmm, I'm pretty sure this was teased back in ULTIMATE Mortal Kombat 3, which was a gussied up port of the previous game, only with every character who had been in the series up to that point.

@pokefanmum82 - I think you're right. According to other sources like Gamespot, US/Canadian players need to go to a retailer.

Oh man! I didn't know this was coming out on Switch.

The original N+ was the first of those tough-as-nails platformers I ever played.

Definitely getting this.

@Kryce @gaga64 ... And Captain Falcon and Falco Lombardi have the same color design??

Or 4 codes if you have Sun/Moon/Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon. The employees at my Gamestop have never been stingy.

I'm happy to see all the love for SpongeBob: Battle for Bikini Bottom.

Back when it was released, I worked for a little Nintendo site, and I always got the review copies for Nickelodeon games. Jimmy Neutron: Jet Fusion and Spongebob: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman were fine...but Battle for Bikini Bottom was such a breath of fresh air. It was funny and it had great level design & goals (TBH it felt like they put SpongeBob on top of Jak & Daxter's mission structure, which was fine by me.)

I heard good things about Spyro, but never had a PS1. My 4-year-old son seems about the right age for Spyro (he loved Odyssey and 3D Land), so I welcome it.

I was just playing Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (the 3DS remake), and there's a scene where Toad walks in on Mario in the shower.

Mario has NO NIPPLES!

Is the M&L Mario an alternate universe Mario?

@TheSpeedyMouse - No, you don't need to play the previous games. The joke of the series has become that the main character is a terrible sailor, and every game he crashes his ship onto a brand new island. Sometimes he has amnesia. So always a brand new cast and location except for him and his pal.

I loved Oath in Felgana for PSP. It's an overhead action-RPG like Secret of Mana or Illusion of Gaia, moreso than a Zelda game. And the combat feels so good.

I'm really excited for this on Switch.

This mode needs to be added to Breath of the Wild. I wonder what green-clad Zelda NPC could help with the balloons.

Between Ys 8 and Mario Tennis (with a story mode!), I think I'm set.

I'm a little disappointed that the Donkey Kong Country doesn't have both Returns and Tropical Freeze in one cartridge, but that's okay.

It also looks like I'll be triple-dipping on Hyrule Warriors. Despite its jank and repetitiveness, I really do love it. (I love the Dragon Quest Heroes games a little more though, and would love to see those ported to Switch).

If you're interested in high-level Tetris and the community, I highly suggest watching the documentary "The Ecstasy of Order".

Good! Dig 1 was great. Heist was great. And I liked Dig 2 a lot more than I liked Metroid: Samus Returns.

I love portable clone consoles like the SupaBoy and RGP.

I'd be all over this.

I thought this video was helpful, though my use case is perhaps different.

I'm about 5 hours into the game, just got a 2nd blade. I'm reasonably effective, but I also don't know what I'm doing. Watching this video helped clear up some of what I'd seen but hadn't connected the dots yet.

My biggest problems with the combat are two-fold. First, the terminology doesn't resonate with me. "Driver arts" "Cancelling" "Blade combos" don't mean anything to me. For example, Combo normally means stringing together button presses, like an XXY attack in a fighting game or Bayonetta. (Thanks to the above poster for the terminology, that's super helpful). I understand "normal move" "special move" and "team move".

My second problem is I keep assuming there's some type of dodge mechanic that simply doesn't seem to be present. I can't figure out how to avoid enemy attacks. There are many different ways to do 3rd person melee & magic combat (Diablo, Dynasty Warriors, Zelda, Bayonetta/DMC all come to mind), and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around such a passive system. // I would've preferred either going fully turn-based (or ATB with cooldowns) or having a more robust combat system that allowed direct control over button presses & enemy dodges.

I'm good. Take all the time you need. I just got Mario. Skyrim & Xenoblade 2 will be released in the next 6 weeks plus I still have Steamworld Dig 2, Metroid: Samus Returns, Golf Story, and Stardew Valley on the backburner.

Why are they announcing it now and not the 29th? They're expecting customers to remember that a deal & update are coming in one week. They should've held the announcement until the 29th, so customers can read this article/press release/tweet and then instantly take advantage of it.