Rumours come, and rumours go, but some are just a little bit meatier than your average lump of hearsay and warrant a little more attention and analysis. The idea that Nintendo would produce another Star Fox game so soon after the lukewarm reaction to Star Fox Zero does seem a little odd, but there’s more to this idea that initially meets the eye.
For one thing, one of the many endings in Star Fox Command points to just such a situation for our anthropomorphic chums, and it also wouldn’t be the first time Fox McCloud appeared in a game bearing the name of Star Fox, but of a totally different genre. Yes, we’re talking about Star Fox Adventures. We natter on about this more in the video above, so let us know what you think of this whole shebang in the comments below.
Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded.
When Nintendo revealed its plans for the Nintendo Switch Online service a short time ago, it mentioned that Family Accounts would be a thing; using this system, up to eight Nintendo Accounts (including Child accounts) can be linked in a group.
The Nintendo Account website has recently been updated so you can start building your group ahead of the arrival of the online service in September.
A family membership will be needed so all eight members can take advantage of the forthcoming online service’s features; this will cost £31.49 / $34.99 per year, which represents a cost of £5 / $5 per user, if eight people sign up.
Publisher Limited Run Games has helped bring many indie titlea to the world of physical editions – including a recent collection including Mercenary Kings Reloaded and Flinthook – and it’s now turned its attention to the monster-battling fun of PixelJunk Monsters 2.
Due later this week on 18th May, the Nintendo Switch Limited Edition comes with a reversible poster, a set of three lithographs, an official soundtrack and a lovely steelcase to top things off. It’ll retail for $69.99 (£52), so if you’re a fan of the series, this is a must-have addition to your shelves.
Are you a fan of PixelJunk Monsters 2? Will you be picking this physical edition when it arrives in multiple forms? Let us know below…
Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded.
A new exploit has been discovered in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one that enables you to reset your runes instantly, removing that frustrating wait for them to cool down. It effectively facilitates the power to cover huge distances by adding Stasis to an object – so as you’re being launched into the air (as shown in the Kotaku video below), you just have to view of Link’s Memories to have said runes reset.
You can then apply a new Stasis effect, further increasing the momentum and distance you’re using to slingshot yourself across Hyrule. It’s a cheeky little exploit, but perfect if you want to move around without relying on fast travel points.
Have you tried this The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild runes glitch out? Has it made some of the game’s trickier moments a little easier? Or do you have no time for exploits and glitches? Sound off below, if you will…
The toy-spinning action of Beyblade is going to make the jump to Nintendo Switch in 2018, with news that Beyblade Burst: Battle Zero is coming to the platform on 25th October. The only caveat is that’s a Japan-only release at the moment, with a price tag of 6,280 yen attached.
The game is also getting a special physical edition, which will feature a game-exclusive Beyblade with every copy. So if you’re a collector, this a must-have addition (so let’s hope it eventually gets a western release). The retail version will cost 6,980 yen.
Are you a devoted Beyblader? Are you spinning with joy at the thought the franchise is finally coming to Switch? Share your thoughts below…
In this uncertain time where mental health is more of a concern than ever, there might have been a better title for Chubby Pixel’s Suicide Guy. Oddly enough, the title does offer a good description of the game, but it’s not what it sounds like. Suicide Guy doesn’t deal with mental illness or depression; rather, it’s a wacky, slapstick first-person puzzler with a clever hook that is unfortunately partially spoiled by buggy, sloppy presentation.
In Suicide Guy, you play as a drunken, fat slob of a man who falls asleep with his beer in his hand. In his dreams, he sees the beer about to hit the floor, and must go through several different stages, presented as dreams in a bizarre diner hub world, to kill himself in order to wake up. The story makes as much sense as the most abstract fever dream, and that’s okay, because the gameplay is what matters here. There are over 20 stages in which you must figure out how to, quite literally, die. Early stages have you trying to get hit by a train, while some stages parody other video games, such as Valve’s Portal series and even Super Mario Bros..
The individual levels are quite charming and each of them is completely different than the last, but they all play the same. Each level is its own puzzle. In one memorable sequence, we were dropped into an abandoned suburban house where we had to figure out how to fill the bath tub with water. What happened once the tub was filled with water? Let’s just say our parents would have been very upset after teaching us not to bring electric items near water. Other levels, like the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. parody, had us wondering how we were supposed to die, only for a very clever twist on the traditional death by spikes to do us in. It would be a shame to reveal the ingenious solutions of the various stages, but suffice to say they’re all funny and all of them end up strangely making sense. There are also collectible statues in each stage, for completionists out there.
Unfortunately, the experience is hampered by several technical issues. The first-person perspective is okay, but the right-stick camera is finicky. Picking up objects is easy, but placing them where you want is often a crap-shoot due to the half-baked physics system, which has a mind of its own. You can throw items, but we experienced more than one occasion where we could no longer reach the item we threw and had to restart the stage.
And it must be said: turn off vibrations in the options menu immediately. Every jump, every interaction makes the Joy-Con vibrate way too strongly and loudly. Hopefully, a patch can fix this, because as it is now the vibration is totally broken. You will also have to get used to long loading times and framerate hiccups throughout.
The colorful, rounded 3D environments are cute and suit the game’s madcap style quite well. The music is generic, but can be switched off by an in-game radio (that can also be used to solve puzzles). We were able to complete the game in about four hours, but it can be completed in a shorter amount of time, or longer, depending on your puzzle solving skills.
Conclusion
There’s fun to be had in Suicide Guy. There’s a nice variety of situations and environments and exploring each stage can be a blast. The technical problems are what ultimately drag Suicide Guy down. Still, if you can get past the bugs and glitches, there’s a nifty little puzzle game waiting for you on the eShop.
Classic RPG action returns in Battle Chasers: Nightwar!
The Grey Line. Nothing has ever come from, or survived entering, this wall of mist that hovers over the West Waters. The great hero Aramus felt a calling from the Grey Line and crossed, never to return. Now, his daughter Gully and her unlikely band of adventurers venture into the mist to uncover her father’s mission.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar is an RPG inspired by the classic console greats, featuring deep dungeon diving, turn-based combat presented in a classic JRPG format, and a rich story driven by exploration of the world.”
Features:
Build your adventuring party by choosing three of six available heroes from the classic Battle Chasers comic series, each with unique abilities, perks, items and dungeon skills.
Classic turn-based combat, with a unique overcharge mana system and incredible Battle Bursts.
Beautiful, randomly-generated dungeons loaded with traps, puzzles, secrets and loot.
Explore an overworld peppered with hidden dungeons, rare bosses and randomly appearing friends and foes.
Action oriented, randomly-generated dungeons loaded with traps, puzzles and secrets. Use each hero’s unique dungeon skills to survive.
Dive into the deep crafting system, using the unique ingredient-overloading system to create epic items!
The King is dead. Long live the King! His ghost, however… a bit of a loud mouth braggart. He will not be shutting up until his final request is granted: bury his coffin in a suitable catacomb filled with riches. After some wheels get attached to his coffin, it is up the Princess to push and pull the titular ‘chariot’ along with her fiancée to its final destination. But does this new Switch iteration live up to the new ‘Super’ moniker?
If you have never stumbled upon the original title that was previously released on Wii U, Super Chariot is a delightful mix of 2D platforming and physics puzzles. One or two players challenge underground catacomb levels by navigating the titular chariot to the exit while collecting riches. A thinking man/woman’s indie platformer who just happens to find a new home on a platform that’s far more suited to supporting its best elements.
The default Pro Controller configuration uses ‘A’ to make your character jump, ‘X’ to attack with your weapon (needed to stave off would be underground critters/looters that would attempt to steal goodies of your chariot), ‘Y’ to use a gadget (if you have any) and holding ‘B’ allows you to respawn on the last checkpoint, something rather useful if you managed to get your chariot stuck or lost after a less accomplished attempt at traversing a trickier part of the level.
While your characters are controlled very much the same way as any 2D platforming game, the distinguished gameplay gimmick here is how to control the chariot itself across the level. Physics are ever present and, as such, you can simply push the chariot to move it along flat surfaces or even to make it climb a few bumps on the road. But the safest bet is a trusty rope tethered to one of the two tether points on the coffin. Pressing ‘ZR’ will latch on a rope that you can use to pull the chariot towards your position. While tethered ‘L’ and ‘ZL’ enable you to wind and unwind the rope respectively.
You will need to use both your character’s moves and the chariot’s physics to traverse the several platforming obstacles each of the many levels throws at you. You can, for instance, use the chariot as a quick makeshift platform to reach higher ground, tether it and drop it along a ledge to serve as a pendulum or simply give it a nudge at the edge of a cliff and ride it in style as it speeds downhill. It’s a rather unique and ingenious game design that will delight and often have you scratching your head in equal measure. Worry not if you played the game before – everything still feels as fresh as when it was originally released.
The characters themselves are unable to pick up anything, you need to move the chariot close enough for a moment in order to pick up the riches that are stashed along the route, secret skulls hidden among the levels most treacherous nooks, chests with blueprints that will enable the Shopkeeper to sell new gadgets that can either be useful to navigate the Chariot or needed to unlock certain locked routes on levels. The first levels are somewhat dwarfed in size compared to later stages, but don’t think a single trip will allow you to see everything each cavern has to offer; Replaying and speed-running will assure this game’s extended lifespan.
The 2D aesthetics are colourful and rather lovely, with some sporadic lighting effects piercing the underground caves to excellent visual effect. Brilliant animation is effectively used to bring the Princess, the soon-to-be Prince, the skeleton Shopkeeper and the King to life (well, not literally in the case of the later). Excellent voice acting helps to flesh out the characters, with some particularly funny quips from the Shopkeeper and the King who despite being a ghost still fears the supernatural. Lovely medieval melodies will accompany your spelunking. Despite the bleak premise of burying your deceased father, Super Chariot is anything but, with both visuals and audio combining to deliver a truly charming experience.
This Switch released justifies the appendage of ‘Super’ to the title by adding in the previous DLC content found on the ‘Royal Gadget Pack’ – five exclusive gadgets to mess around with your chariot and the addition of the Shopkeeper as a third playable character. Unlike the Princess and her fiancée, he appropriately attacks by throwing bones, giving him a rather nice long range attack instead of the melee sword swipes from the original duo. If you pick up the physical edition you will also get a download code for the game’s lovely soundtrack.
The lonely chariot navigator needs not worry about package value because even for a single player the campaign is long and filled with challenges to tackle, including several revisits to previously cleared caves to find new secrets or new exits. It is, however, when you add a second player to the mix that Super Chariot truly stands ahead of the pack. Along the levels you will find several signs with two heads on them, alerting you to bits that can only be explored with the help of a second player along with a second rope to properly navigate the chariot through them. Thanks to Switch’s co-op friendly nature, this game will provide you and your friend/sibling/offspring/better-half with genuine fun memories of trying to awkwardly coordinate chariot tethering.
Conclusion
Super Chariot is a fitting metaphor for life – you can journey alone and endure all hardships as you struggle to make your way to the end, or you can share the burden with another person and help each other reach new heights along the way. Brilliantly designed, beautifully crafted and one of the finest co-op experiences on Switch this side of Sniperclips. It’s not hard for us to recommend you embark on this journey, even if you have done so before. May the King rest peacefully for his chariot is made of sturdy stuff indeed.
