Dcubed

Had a chance to try out the VGC family sharing feature. It's pretty slick. You just select the game you want to lend, the other person accepts and you're done. Nice and painless. You can only give out one game per person at a time though. So I lent @Ugh first aid my copy of AI: The Somnium Files Nirvana Initiative, while I borrowed her copy of Unicorn Overlord; but I can't give her any other games while I'm lending out Nirvana Initiative. Also, once you're playing a game you've borrowed off of someone else, any account on that system can freely load it up and use their own save files; just as if it were any other physical or digital game. You are NOT limited to just using your own account to play the borrowed game. It all works exactly like lending out a physical game, with the same limitations and all. I'm not gonna try linking any other systems until I get my Switch 2, so I won't be able to try that out yet. The obvious use-case is to link your Switch 2 and Switch 1, so that you can freely share games between them without limitations; so that's what I'm gonna do.

It's an arcade port, where the actual main arcade mode was removed for the home version. Bizzare.

So looking at how VGCs work in practice... I guess this is what I'm gonna do to manage my storage over the first few months before I get a 2TB SD Express card... Do the Switch 2 Transfer, keep most of my games stored on my Switch 1, put the main 1st party Switch 1 games I want on the Switch 2 and then just use Virtual Game Cards to load and unload other games as needed; until I can just put everything onto the one system.

Here's a good video showcasing how Virtual Game Cards work in practice.

That's because TOTA is actually a good game, with worthwhile out-of-battle gameplay. Decent dungeons & puzzles to solve, actual proper RPG towns, a proper world map etc. And the story & characters aren't hot bum either.

Woah! The eShop is red now! They've changed the branding from orange to red, that's weird! Still runs like absolute butt though.

That's not cool. GIving you a new icon is one thing, but going out of their way to scrub Kevin Bayliss' DKC design altogether is really shitty. Smacks of rewriting history.

Oh wow! Wasn’t expecting such glowing praise! Wouldn’t mind giving it a go myself

Both. It’s a shit game in every respect. A complete insult to the original TOS. If you want a decent follow up game? Play Tales of the Abyss, Tales of Vesperia or Tales of Eternia next.

Absolutely under no circumstances should you ever touch the Wii sequel, especially if you enjoyed the original game!! It’s a complete travesty!

Yes it does actually! The GCN startup sound just so happens to be the perfect length for the loading screen… almost as if Nintendo originally intended to make this an official Wii U feature before the system’s life was cut short…

Nice! Are you using a modded Wii U to play them by any chance? One of my Wii Us is modded to have all of my ripped GCN and Wii games running off the Wii U Menu, and it's so sick! Not my photo, but you get the idea of what it looks like Obviously, the Wii U includes real Wii/GCN hardware; so the games all just run perfectly. You even get full Wii U Gamepad support for the GCN games too (buttons and all!). They all load up as if they were official Wii digital titles from the eShop, so it all looks and feels 100% OEM official. It's quite a bit of work to get it all up and running, but totally worth the effort! Absolutely the best way to play Wii games currently

As far as I know, the largest Switch 1 game is NBA 2K24 Kobe Bryant Edition (Which is 59.2 GB). The largest game I personally own is Hatsune Miku Project DIVA Mega Mix (Which is 39.2GB with all the DLC... That's actually pretty funny. If you know, you know). But this is a common problem I have to deal with on PC/Steam Deck; as games often go above 100GB there, and games of that level of file size will be common on Switch 2; as games start to incorporate PS5/PC level 4K resolution assets. I do primarily buy digital, but I'm also one of those weirdos who likes also buying additional physical copies as well for collection/archival purposes. I have a complete digital and physical collection for all of my 3DS and Wii U games, and I'm glad I went that route (I actually switched from physical to digital halfway through the generation). Quite frankly, I just find myself actually playing and enjoying games much more in digital form; because it really does take that friction away that you mentioned earlier. It's just so much more convininent and it encourages you to just enjoy playing more games. It's also a godsend for a handheld device in particular; since you can carry your entire game collection with you so easily. But I said to myself early on in the Switch's life that I would go all digital this time and just wait until the end of the generation to scoop up the physical games I want on the cheap, and when you have reprints that include all the post-release updates and DLC on the cart already. That proved to be 100% the right decision for me. In fact, I actually do the same with my retro consoles, as I have my full personal libraries of games for all of my older consoles also ripped and available to play digitally on modded devices; like my ODE modded GCN... Welcome to the future! ... but at the same time, I still have all my original GCN discs that I can just pull down from the shelf and use with my unmodded console as I please... Those shelves go deep... At a certain point, it just starts to become a PITA to actually rummage through the shelves to actually get to the games you want to play; especially when you're in the mood to just play a quick game of something like Super Monkey Ball. It's why I also own Everdrives for the GB, GBA and N64; and I also have a MiSTer and Analogue Pocket for all of the platforms supported on there too (plus the ability to play ROM hacks on real hardware is nice too of course!). I get to have the best of both worlds. The convinience of digital, but also the permenace, collectability and furniture vibes of owning physical games. I feel it's a bit sad to have a huge library of games, but not have anything tangible on your shelves to admire/lend/pass down/enjoy; but at the same time? I acknowledge that when I actually want to play one of my games, I'm much more likely to play the digital copy instead because it's just so much more convinient. Yup, it's something Nintendo have always been good at, and it will continue paying dividends on Switch 2 going forward. I love a good games room showcase, but I'm hopefully due to move out this year into somewhere a lot bigger where I can really make a proper setup, so my showcase will probably have to wait a bit longer.

No. I hate having to delete games, it makes it feel like a wasted purchase for me. I love having access to everything on the one console at once, and when I have to start emptying the fridge; it feels like I'm just throwing food away. It's also a complete PITA to have to keep swapping games in and out, especially when you're having to wait hours to download those massive 100GB+ titles; makes it so that you can't just jump in and out of them as you please without any friction (which is half the point of having digital games in the first place!). On other consoles, I don't have all that much of an emotional attachment to most games on those systems, but I value my Nintendo titles far more; especially since they're typically my primary consoles.

My tracking thingy has just updated... estimated arrival date is 2nd of May! It's all rather weridly unceremoneous isn't it? Still, I'm not complaining! I'll gladly take it!

The last game that Left Field productions made as a second-party studio for NOA. Very much the end of an era here, because this is when NOA started being stripped of much of their autonomy when it came to game production, and when NCL started resuming control over western-developed 1st party productions. Though it's more likely that the disaster going on in 2001 with Jeff Spangenberg at Retro was the main catalyst for NCL wrestling back control over game development, this game also came out in the US the same month as when Minoru Arakawa resigned as president of NOA. A move shrouded in controversy, since most believed that Arakawa was to be the man to succeed Hiroshi Yamauchi himself (since Arakawa was his son-in-law), but instead it would be Satoru Iwata who would emerge as the new CEO of NCL in May 2002; the first person to ever run Nintendo who wasn't directly related to the Yamauchi family line. His departure marked the end of the first era of NOA, while Tatsumi Kimishima took over as president of NOA until around 2006 (When Reggie Fils Aime took over). Yes that does mean that Kimishima has served as interim president twice in his career now! You can clearly see that NBA Courtside 2002 is very much a game made in "The American Way", the type of game that Nintendo would stop making and publishing very shortly afterwards; including with NST, as they moved more towards working on NCL properties and away from licensed titles.

Would go well with the mouse-con

Well, when the Virtual Game Card thing launches in the next couple of weeks or so, you'll be able to share your games across multiple systems more easily. For now, I'll only be moving select games over to my Switch 2 (primarily 1st party games), and then I'll just use the Virtual Game Card thingy for other games for the time being. I'm personally not buying an SD Express card until a 2TB one becomes available, because anything smaller than that is just gonna go to waste soon enough anyway; so I'm gonna just hold out with the internal storage only until those cards become available. Just hoping that Nintendo are being conservative in saying that the Switch 2 maxes out at 2TB and that larger cards will eventually work...

UE5 strikes again. This version of the engine really has just been a complete failure hasn’t it? Shame, since UE4 was really very solid; UE5 though just universally runs worse in every single instance, even when you turn off all of its defining features.

It’s done by the same people who made Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons @Glen-i. Pure co-op only (kind of the developer’s shtick). I would get it… but the file size on Switch 2 (and every other platform) is quite frankly, frightening.

Always did like the look of this one, looks like it would be a decent little multiplayer title; but I never did get round to getting it. Sounds like the GCN version is still the way to go. Hopefully it comes to NSO.

To be fair, the US preorders were messed up by the surprise tariffs; so they had to scramble to push everything back and make last minute changes. Cant imagine that made things easy. That being said? Yeah, the European preorders have been handled really well. Especially with the My Nintendo Store, it was a very smooth and pleasant experience this time around

Yeah, if you had any of the GBA Sonic games, you had access to an expanded Tiny Chao Garden that allowed you to save your progress. If you didn’t have any of the games? Then you could use the Multiboot version of the Tiny Chao Garden (which obviously disappears when you turn the power off). Speaking of which, kinda crazy that a 3rd party game was the first game for the console to support the GBA-GCN connectivity feature; probably the console’s single biggest hardware USP. Nintendo really wasted no time securing Sonic for the GameCube and GBA. Hell, the GCN port of SA2 was announced the same day that SEGA announced they were going 3rd party; a good 5 months before the original Dreamcast version even launched! As such, the GCN version vastly outsold the original Dreamcast release as a result, and is the platform that most people likely associate with this game. Needless to say, what goes around comes around; as Nintendo would receive similar treatment with the eventual release of RE4 (where its original GCN release was kneecapped by the annnouncement of an incoming PS2 port before the OG GCN version even launched).

Looks great! A no brainer launch day pickup.

As expected. Seems reasonable considering that the more expensive ones come with very substantial DLC. Remember that the other upgrades that don’t come with new gameplay content are free.