It’s not a very notable thing, and we don’t see who the hands belong to, but it just seems like what they went for IMO.
Cadence of Hyrule is pretty good, more forgiving and more of a connected map with item-based puzzles compared to Crypt of the Necrodancer. The map is reordered between games, but it’s mostly designed rather than fully procedural. It’s fun.
It borrows heavily from a Link to the Past visually, but has references to many episodes. You’ve got enemies from Breath of the Wild, Gerudo, Goron, even a full Majora’s Mask inspired DLC.
In Cadence of Hyrule there’s an “enemy” (more like a trap really) that’s a pair of white hands coming from the ground which grabs you and prevents you from moving for a couple turns. I am pretty sure it’s supposed to be that guy.
It’s not a floor/wall/ceiling master, there are wallmasters in the game too and they’re a lot bigger and brown coloured.
If you are actually talking about Mario Bros., i.e. the game that’s only about kicking turtles, crabs and flies coming from pipes, yeah, I’d say that one was hardly a new thing.
Super Mario Bros. though? Hard disagree. Back then, that’s a scrolling platformer with controllable jumps, inertia that let you do sliding tricks, and relatively complex physics (acceleration, positional damage, shells, …)
Also very good readability with mechanics that were easy to learn on the spot.
Look at what most platformers played like around that time, and even what basic design errors a lot of them kept doing long after that. SMB was lightning in a bottle.
Not really. I am just a bit younger, growing up between the 80s and 90s. I still play old games, only those that aged well though, but sometimes decades after their prime. I play new games a lot too. And games from any time in between, as long as they do something right.
And there are many, many games around which you can bond just as well as you could back then. Not even talking specifically about multiplayer games (which I don’t play very much at all) I’ve always been a fan of “co-piloting” games, just sharing the experience of playing, spectating, commenting around a game.
Some games are fantastic for this. Some games are rich enough that you can share your experience and discover other people do stuff completely differently. This sort of always existed (for example, what’s the right way to complete Legend of Zelda?), and this is still true even for somewhat simple games, but possibilities have only increased in range. I am pretty sure nobody plays a game like Rimworld or Tears of the Kingdom the same.
I have the Switch 2. MK world is nice I guess, but it’s nowhere near what 8 was. It feels like they were so proud of their connected gimmick they decided they would create nothing for this episode.
8 cups, almost all of them redone old tracks. The “highways” connecting them feel very similar except a couple areas (and those include, again, bits of old Mario Kart tracks). I mean, the way they redid these old tracks is cool, but base MK8 also did that very well with its 4 retro cups, and had 4 main cups full of awesome new tracks. And that’s before DLC/Deluxe added 4 extra cups. Not counting the pass for the Tour tracks, those were subpar.
There’s a lot of music… But apart from that game’s theme, all of it is remixes from Mario games. The karts also are almost only rides from previous episodes.
The free roaming mode is frankly not that great. I had loads of fun messing around in Forza Horizons games, but here it’s just a bit boring. Challenges must be activated and interrupt your driving, they’re mostly so easy you can mess up and still clear them, and though they do track records, they don’t do anything to make you want to improve them. Also you don’t meet other players. For fuck’s sake, the last actual Mario game had you meet and play seamlessly along random people!
MK World is like 90% fueled by nostalgia. This is not what I expect from a new Mario Kart game.
I thought Impossible Lair was pretty good. Of course, it was a complete different genre, and basically that genre was just “Donkey Kong Country”. Nevertheless, great execution.
I played the actual YL after that one, and… Yeah, I went through it all and barely remember it. Sure, I don’t even have a lot of nostalgia for collectathons, except if you count the 3D Mario kind… But it was definitely bland, and had annoying design problems.
It’s kind of the point I was trying to make though. They could have unlocked CPU speed for O3DS games by default, and they chose not to. I assume they didn’t because of all the games, there will always be the odd ones that behave unpredictably when they’re running on unintended specs. So they went for 100% compatibility unless the game was specifically patched for N3DS.
Even though this time it’s software emulation, they could have played a bit safer by emulating exactly a Switch 1, including clock speed. Turns out Switch 2 seems to have very good compatibility, with only a couple problematic games they are working on, so in the end, good that they did it that way.
I didn’t expect it would enhance framerate at all without a game patch to be honest.
I was expecting something like new 3DS, where all games that were not specifically patched for it ran exactly the same. But I guess the difference is that new 3DS must have run in pure hardware old 3DS mode for those.
I felt DQB2 was already somewhat playable, but I probably never did very crazy builds. I remember people warning that destroying mountains on the main island for example was a very bad idea, because they were supposed to limit how much of the island the game had to render. Maybe I should check my old island on Switch 2.