“I always have aspirations,” Hawk said. “It’s not up to me generally. I’ll campaign all I can, but I’m working with a much bigger company that’s a lot smarter than me.” It is worth noting, however, that Hawk also said that discussions about remastering Tony Hawk’s Underground haven’t actually happened at Activision yet. The company is likely waiting to see the commercial response to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 before it makes any decisions about bringing back later games in the franchise.

When later asked about whether discussions had begun yet, Hawk also noted that it was too early right now, since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 hadn’t been released yet. “Yeah, we haven’t even released this game,” he said.

Tony Hawk’s Underground was the follow-up to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. Released all the way back in 2003, the game was originally released on PS2, GameCube and Xbox back in the day. There was also a version made for the Game Boy Advance. Rather than staying with the franchise’s more arcade-styled loop, Tony Hawk’s Underground instead focused on telling a story with the player’s own custom-created skateboarder.

Throughout the story in Tony Hawk’s Underground, players would get to meet and skate with a variety of skateboarding legends as they travelled all over the world to take part in skateboarding competitions. Borrowing some aspects from THPS 4, Underground also featured a more open approach to its objectives, with the player needing to complete a variety of missions from NPCs in the zone they were in before they could continue with the next chapter of the story.

As for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, Activision recently confirmed that Bam Margera would be part of the game’s roster as one of its Secret Skaters. The announcement was made with a trailer, where Margera spoke about first playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 and getting so enthralled with it that he ended up missing several flights.

A rumour from back in March indicated that Margera was added to the roster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 on the insistence of Tony Hawk himself. According to The Live Club podcast co-host Roger Bagley, Hawk insisted to Activision that Margera be included in the roster, which reportedly ended up with Margera having to fly to the studio to get body-scanned for the game.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is slated for release on July 11, and will be coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

GameCube games through the subscription will be available exclusively to Nintendo Switch 2 players, likely due to the more demanding hardware required to emulate titles from the 2001 console. Headlining this new collection at launch will be quite a few of the console’s biggest games.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Soul Calibur 2 (including Link as a playable character), and F-Zero GX will be kicking things off for GameCube titles on the Switch 2. The games will also allow for multiplayer for up to four players, and players can also customise keybindings to their liking. These games will be available to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers on the Switch 2’s launch day.

More titles are set to be added to the collection, including heavy hitters like Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi’s Mansion, and Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness. There will also be lesser-known titles like Chibi-Robo: Plug Into Adventure and Super Mario Strikers added to the service.

Along with this, Nintendo has also announced a new GameCube controller for the Switch 2 that will be hitting store shelves alongside the console on June 5.

Leaker NateTheHate has, for instance, claimed that Nintendo is set to add GameCube games to the Nintendo Switch Online library in the not-too-distant future. Speaking during a recent episode of his podcast, the leaker stated that Nintendo will begin adding GameCube titles to the subscription service at some point within the Nintendo Switch 2’s launch year. 

Interestingly, the leaker suggests that GameCube games could also be available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers on the Switch 1, not just on the upcoming next-gen console. What isn’t mentioned what its pricing structure will be. Presumably, it will be offered with a new and separate tier, similar to what Nintendo has done in the past with N64, Genesis, and Game Boy Advance titles, which are available only with Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. 

The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct will be roughly an hour long. Nintendo will also showcase new gameplay footage for several titles on Treehouse: Live events scheduled for April 3 and April 4.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes fell in the latter category, and though it’d be unfair to call it a bad game, it’s fair to say that it doesn’t have the best reputation, especially among the hardcore Metal Gear fanatics. Though liked well enough by critics upon its release, the GameCube title, which launched six years on from the original Metal Gear Solid’s launch, has by now become cemented as one of the most commonly known examples of a remake that fails to do justice to its excellent source material.

But what exactly is it about The Twin Snakes that draws the ire of so many Metal Gear Solid fans? It’s a game that’s not without merits, and on paper, the idea of being able to play Metal Gear Solid with improved visuals, redone cutscenes, and enhanced gameplay sounds like an excellent one- so how is it that The Twin Snakes can check all of those boxes and still fail to live up to the immense legacy of the original game, much less surpass it? Well, it’s simple really- a lot of those checkmarks come with caveats, and some pretty significant ones at that.

Take the gameplay improvements, for instance. Launching six years after the original PS1 game and three years after Metal Gear Solid 2, The Twin Snakes decided to enhance the MGS1 gameplay experience by adding in features and mechanics from Sons of Liberty in an effort to bring both games to an equal footing. Given the fact that Metal Gear Solid 2 was – and still remains, incredibly enough – one of the greatest and best-playing stealth games of all time, there’s absolutely no way that they couldn’t have enhanced the MGS1 experience, right? Well, that may have been the case if that idea had been executed in much more comprehensive fashion.

The Twin Snakes boasted all of the gameplay enhancements of MGS2, from improvements made to the enemy AI to players now being able to enter first person mode, but in spite of those improvements, the level design remained completely unchanged. The balance of the experience was broken, and though it wasn’t necessarily a consistent issue plaguing every step of the experience, it was one that reared its face way too often. The difficulty was cheapened, the environments and the objectives instantly became less interesting (even to the point of feeling like busywork at times), and even some of the boss fights were ruined, with Revolver Ocelot being the most egregious and infamous examples.

That’s never good news in any game, but for a game like Metal Gear Solid, which is so well-known for its incredible boss fights and its stellar stealth gameplay, those issues were almost a death blow. Say what you will about the recent The Last of Us remake, but as disappointing as it may have been to see it not include some of Part 2’s biggest gameplay improvements, it made sense that Naughty Dog was unwilling to do that without radically changing the level design as well. If only the developers of The Twin Snakes had shared that thought process.

Those problems would have been bad enough on their own, but The Twin Snakes had issues in other areas as well, its redone cutscenes being chief among them- which, again, is an area where a Metal Gear game absolutely can’t afford to have any stumbles. Bizarrely over-the-top obviously isn’t something that MGS cutscenes have ever not been described as, but The Twin Snakes took that to even more ridiculous heights, with stylistic choices that just didn’t fit the story, or even the series as a whole. Yes, we’re more than used to seeing silliness and over-the-top stuff in Metal Gear cutscenes, but the series has never tried to position itself as an embarrassing knockoff of The Matrix, which is pretty much exactly what The Twin Snakes ended up being, thanks to obsession with Solid Snake doing backflips pretty much every chance he got (among other things).

It didn’t help that the voice acting in The Twin Snakes was also a bit of a letdown for many – which was a surprise, given the fact that most of the original game’s voice cast returned to reprise their roles – while the music, too, had its fair share of detractors. Add to that the fact that the cleaner look of the remake also made the grimier environments of Shadow Moses Island lose so much of their visual identity and atmosphere, and what you had was a game that deviated from its source material far too much.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that many of The Twin Snakes’ issues are likely to stand out this starkly to you only if you have a comprehensive familiary and deep love for the original game. For someone who doesn’t care about the original Metal Gear Solid too much, even though issues like the unbalanced gameplay and ridiculous cutscenes will be plain to see, they might not be as keenly felt as they would be for a longtime fan. And yet, even so, if someone was looking to experience the original MGS for the first time, it’d make next to no sense to recommend The Twin Snakes over the PS1 classic. In spite of all of the former’s technical improvements, the latter has a timeless quality that has persevered through the years, even now, two and a half decades on from its launch.

We are, of course, getting another Metal Gear remake not long from now, courtesy of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and unlike The Twin Snakes, it looks to be taking a much more cautious and conventional approach, from little to no story changes being made to the voice over work of the original game being brought over unchanged. There’s still plenty that we don’t know about the game yet, but as things stand right now, there’s reason to be optimistic. We can only hope that Konami will be able to do a much better job of living up to MGS3’s legacy than it did with MGS1.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Obviously, the game had more than a few major strengths that made it the bombastic, memorable experience that it was, but there were some areas in particular that elevated it to the heights that it did reach. One of those was the game’s sheer, incredible sense of speed. You’d think that nailing that particular aspect is something that every single racing game would know how to do, but sadly, that’s not always the case. 2005’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted, however, nailed it to absolute perfection. Every single race, every single police chase, even the aimless driving around in the open world went hand in hand with a sense of speed that made every second of the game feel like an absolute thrill ride.

Most Wanted emphasized that aspect of the experience in several ways. Take the Nitrous mechanic, for instance. That is, of course, a staple for most (if not all) racers in today’s day and age, but back in 2005, Most Wanted was only the second Need for Speed game to feature that mechanic, after it was introduced in the original Underground. And one of the ways it made it significantly more crucial to the moment to moment gameplay loop was by having your Nitrous meter refill by itself constantly. The game always encouraged players to let the boost rip, allowing you to tear through the open world city’s streets to your heart’s content. Then there was the Speedbreaker mechanic, which was, in essence, Most Wanted’s take on bullet time, allowing you to slow down time to maneuver around obstacles and other vehicles and even temporarily be able to drift. Using it almost never got old.

Dangerous, speedy driving was encouraged in plenty of other ways as well. Some events, of course, were particularly designed around that, such as Speedtrap races, which challenged players to race through a series of checkpoints at the highest possible speeds and hit each of them before any of your competitors, with your speed at each checkpoint being added up at the finish line to see which racer accumulated the highest total. And then, of course, there was the game’s headlining feature, which defined the very core of what made Most Wanted what it was- the police chases.

Police chases have always been integral to Need for Speed’s identity for pretty much as long as the series has been around, but until 2005 (and perhaps even to this day), no game in the franchise had emphasized them as heavily as Most Wanted did. Completing racing events and Milestone challenges to rise through the ranks of the city’s underground racing scene and defeat each of its Blacklist racers was your main objective in the game, but what truly formed the heart and soul of the entire game was the police chases.

From speeding to crashing into traffic to committing a number of other driving offences, there was no shortage of actions in Need for Speed: Most Wanted that attracted the attention of the law, and once the cops began pursuing you, that’s when things really went down. What really made the police pursuits so special in the game was their sense of escalation- starting out with chases that were relatively low stakes and did not present that much of a challenge, as you racked up the offences and saw your heat level constantly rising, the way the chases escalated was extremely impressive, with the cops constantly ramping up their efforts to bring you down, from faster and sturdier vehicles to things such as spike traps, road blocks, and even helicopters. There was nothing more thrilling than tearing through the city’s streets with an army of police vehicles all trying to bring you to a dead stop, and the swelling satisfaction you got from successfully escaping a chase by destroying cop cars by smacking into them and watching them crumble or crashing through the pillars of a building to bring it down behind you and crumble on top of the pursuing cops was, in a word, immense.

When it came to the races themselves, Most Wanted benefited from a number of other things, prime among them being the variety on offer. From the aforementioned Speedtraps to Tollbooth races, from drag races to sprints, from Milestone challenges to the police pursuits, and, of course, the set piece events known as Blacklist racers, Most Wanted exhibited an impressive variety of racing events. Beyond all that, simply driving around in the open world itself was also an absolute blast, not only thanks to the aforementioned sense of speed and the incredible executing of the game’s fundamental driving mechanics, but also because there was almost always something fun to do in the open world- like crashing through billboards or performing stunt jumps, all of which is pretty cookie cutter in today’s day and age, but set the standards for the genre back when the game first launched.

Then there was the whole garage building aspect of the experience, which has always been an integral part of Need for Speed games. Most Wanted left a little something to be desired where things such as damage mechanics and cosmetic customization options are concerned, but when it came to building up your own sizeable roster of vehicles and upgrading them in a variety of ways to make them faster and stronger, the game was teeming with options. It also helped a great deal that by 2005’s standards, Most Wanted looked absolutely incredible. Not only did its distinct sepia tone and art design give it a very unique look that’s hard to find in racers even to this day, from a pure technical standpoint, the game was an impressive accomplishment.

Time has certainly been kind to Need for Speed: Most Wanted. That does not, of course, mean that the game was not appreciated back when it first came out – it instantly became a fan favourite, enjoyed solid critical reception, and remains one of the highest selling Need for Speed games to this day – but as time has gone on, more and more people have looked back at the 2005 game and recognized its brilliance that much more, to the point where, for many, it ranks as probably one of the series’ best outings ever, and maybe even one of the best racing games ever made. Criterion tried its hand at the Most Wanted name with a 2012 reboot of the same name, and the developer brought its own unique flair and panache to the experience in a number of ways, and while that was a solid game in its own right, it’s fair to say that it couldn’t touch the heights that its predecessor did. And when not even the racing masterminds at Criterion can outdo a game, you know that it was truly special. We can only hope that Need for Speed will accomplish something similar at some point in the future.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

That’s as per journalist Jeff Grubb, who recently took to Twitter to double down on past claims regarding the same. In June last year, Grubb leaked that Nintendo has Metroid Prime Remastered primed for release for the Nintendo Switch, and that though it would be launching as a standalone game, the company intended to bring Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to the platform down the line as well.

Interestingly, at the time, Grubb mentioned that unlike the original game, Metroid Prime 2 and 3’s Switch re-releases would not be major overhauled remasters but would instead be launched as much more conservative upgrades featuring updated controls. Based on his latest tweet, it would seem like that’s still very much the plan.

Of course, Nintendo’s plans for unannounced games are always hard to nail down, and leaks related to the company have frequently been proven false time and again, so for now, it’d be best to tread with caution here. Fans of Metroid, however, will certainly be hoping that the full Prime trilogy does indeed become available on the Switch before the launch of Metroid Prime 4 (whenever that happens).

In our review of Metroid Prime Remastered, we awarded it a score of 9/10, saying, “Metroid Prime Remastered is the best way to play one of the best games ever made.” Read the full review through here.

Correct. https://t.co/ojMzuRohp5

— Grubb (@JeffGrubb) February 13, 2023

Not too long ago, noted Nintendo insider Emily Rogers claimed that instead of a full trilogy remaster, Nintendo was working on an individual remaster for the first Metroid Prime with the intention of launching it some time in 2022. Recently, she took to Twitter to double down on that, claiming that the remaster in question has made great development progress- and, in fact, even wrapped up development over the summer. There’s no word yet on whether Nintendo has plans to make similar remasters for the other two Prime games, but Rogers seems convinced that Metroid Prime 1, at least, is happening.

Last month, another known insider, NateDrake, corroborated Rogers’ claims, stating that a Metroid Prime 1 remaster is indeed in development, and though it isn’t exact a remake, it’s still quite an ambitious project. Read more on that through here.

If the remaster (assuming that it exists) has indeed wrapped up development, and if it is indeed targeting a 2022 launch which is also (Metroid Prime 1’s 20th anniversary), it should be interesting to see when Nintendo announces it. The Game Awards next month would be an ideal venue, but Nintendo has always done what Nintendo wants, so there’s no predicting what they’ll do next. Even the existence of this remaster remains in doubt for now, since this is the notoriously secretive Nintendo we’re dealing with here, but we’ll keep an eye out for additional details, so stay tuned for more updates.

https://twitter.com/EmilyRogersBlog/status/1458538665261547527

https://twitter.com/EmilyRogersBlog/status/1458562997278945286

One of the better games from sort of the middle of the budgetary range was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. This is a game that tried some interesting ideas, and ended up benefitting from the vast majority of them. With a game as incomparable as Eternal Darkness, it can be sort of difficult to quantify exactly what makes it such a great game, but we have to at least give it a shot, because a game like this deserves to be recognized for the risks it took, how well it managed them, and how ultimately successful it was in delivering it’s vision to players.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem could be described as an adventure game crossing over with classic survival horror like Resident Evil. With an elevator pitch like that it’s easy to imagine where it could have gone wrong. Action-adventure games are often associated with lots of movement, power, and freedom while survival horror games, especially from that era, are often associated with claustrophobia, limited abilities, and vulnerability. These are two philosophies that might seem like they’re at odds and destined to clash at every turn. This is why back then, and even more so today, these two types of games generally don’t have a lot of crossover in fear of turning into something like Resident Evil 6 as it ends up pleasing nobody despite trying to please everyone. Mixing action and horror is a tough road to walk if you do it that way, where the horror aesthetic is driven by essentially the gameplay of an action game.

But Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem flips the ratio on that by making an adventure game aesthetic driven with survival horror gameplay. Fixed camera angles, atmospheric lighting, somewhat stilted combat, key-oriented puzzles, you know the drill. But it is improved upon somewhat with more friendly-3D control as opposed to the classic tank controls of its ancestors. It also lets the camera flow around most areas, creating a smooth transition from one angle to the next instead of the sudden cuts that can make walking around in some survival horror games a little disorienting and jarring at times. The game is also broken up into separated levels which minimizes backtracking and your chances of getting lost. This general attitude of taking the groundwork of classic survival horror gameplay and improving on it in subtle – yet effective – ways is a big part of why Eternal Darkness works so well.

The combat system in Eternal Darkness contains perhaps the more interesting and engaging tweaks it introduces into the survival horror framework, and it’s certainly the element you’ll notice first, and most often. Eternal Darkness’ melee weapons as well as projectiles and firearms have a nice aiming mechanism that helps you direct your blows without breaking immersion like, say, Parasite Eve did with it’s almost turn-based JRPG approach to combat. While survival horror games of that era and before it did technically usually allow you to aim a weapon up or down, they rarely gave you much of an indication of how that shot would impact the enemy you’re aiming at without breaking the mood of the fight with complex interfaces and stopping the moment. Usually, games with this combat would just stay on the safe side and let you figure out the rules of aiming on your own. While that did protect the fragile purity of the horror, it would come at the cost of a steep and occasionally frustrating learning curve. Sometimes, you’d get the headshot of a zombie that’s right in front of you, sometimes you’d miss, it was just a crapshoot a lot of the time.

But Eternal Darkness approached that problem with an elegant solution of highlighting the exact body part you’re aiming at and letting you select the portion of the body you wanted to attack with the GameCube’s analog stick in real-time. This would result in the game highlighting the enemy’s torso, head, or other extremities for a quick and simple indication of what you are poised to hit should you choose to hit the attack button at that time. This does perhaps come at the cost of a little bit of immersion for some horror enthusiasts, but I think it’s a fair trade for how much more playable it makes the combat. Infact, I think this simple solution makes the combat in Eternal Darkness one of the best combat systems in the entire adventure/horror genre. At least from this era. It lets you have your cake and eat it too, with the atmosphere and tension that a fixed camera can provide, but minimizing the stiffness and imprecision that it can bring to the combat of so many other similar games.

Of course, this isn’t nearly as big of a deal as the sanity meter in Eternal Darkness. The sanity meter is something that can make or break you during play, as it goes down with every monster encounter and other moments. This is something you want to avoid as much as possible, as the game will absolutely start turning your experience upside down with more disorienting camera angles, strange voices, and even your items disappearing from your inventory. It messes with you the player more than with your actual character in a way that reaches near Hideo Kojima levels of wackiness. If you’ve ever played a Clock Tower game or Amnesia, you’ll probably recognize the general idea of how the sanity meter works, but Eternal Darkness turns this up to 11 and really leans into it to, I think, great effect.

This is where a lot of the game’s finer audio and visual design elements start to show themselves with cool effects and noises that you rarely saw or heard in games from this time, and even less often on the GameCube. Some of them are so fun and entertaining that you might want to play through certain sections multiple times just to see more of them. However, as these “sanity effects” are technically not regarded as a good thing by the context of the game, you do eventually need to snap out of them or avoid them to progress as intended. Your character’s grip on reality can be repaired through either executing enemies or casting one of the game’s many spells. Spells are also used for solving puzzles, revealing doors, and even buffing weapons, so there is that little dash of fantasy in the mix that makes the game all the more unique among its contemporaries.

Overall, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a game worth playing for many reasons. It’s not the scariest horror game, nor is it the most intuitive action game, but it’s ability to improve on some of the blind spots of survival horror gameplay while providing some fun action and a well-paced story do make it stand out among both genres. While the plot does bounce around the timeline a bit much for my taste and the horror isn’t particularly scary most of the time, it’s still an incredibly unique game that manages to gracefully meld many great ideas that normally wouldn’t go together at all. For all of this, it’s definitely one hell of a game.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Given their massive pedigree and their enduring quality, ranking every single major gaming platform that they have ever produced seems like an insane task- but we’re nothing if not a little bit insane, so that’s what we’ll be doing here. Join us (or prepare to skewer us on your pitchforks) as we rank every single Nintendo handheld and home console from worst to best.

#13. VIRTUAL BOY

While ranking pretty much every other system Nintendo has made was far from easy, there was never any doubt in our minds that the Virtual Boy belongs at the very bottom of this list. There’s some reserved praise to be given here for its outside-the-box ideas and its usage of stereoscopic 3D back when games hardly even did polygonal 3D- but beyond that, the Virtual Boy has few redeeming qualities. Over the course of its life (and it was a very short life), the system got less than two dozen games in total- a shockingly low number, and not one of them was worth writing home about. The asinine design of the hardware only drives home the fact that the Virtual Boy is best left to the recesses of our memories.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/all-nintendo-gaming-hardware-ranked-from-worst-to-best/feed 0 467119 https://gamingbolt.com/ask-iwata-collection-english-translation-releases-april-13 https://gamingbolt.com/ask-iwata-collection-english-translation-releases-april-13#respond Fri, 08 Jan 2021 12:35:54 +0000 https://gamingbolt.com/?p=466499

There have been many figures in the video game industry who have had presences to various degrees. Some have less than stellar times in the industry, others become stars for a brief period before bowing out, but probably none seem quite as beloved as Satoru Iwata. Beginning at Nintendo as a programmer, he eventually ascended to President of the company in 2002, serving that position until his death in 2015. Now he’s being remembered by a feature he helped popularize.

It was announced last year that a book of collected parts of Iwata Asks interviews was being translated to English. If you’re unfamiliar, this was an series Iwata did where he sat down with members of development teams, mostly of first party releases, to discuss various elements of their games. While the concept was not unique, obviously, the series was famous for being quite long and going in unusual depth. Publisher VIZ confirmed the book’s English translation would come April 13th.

Iwata oversaw several periods of Nintendo development over his 13 years as President and was instrumental in projects such as Iwata Asks and Nintendo Directs. Iwata’s health declined in his final years in the position, but he did do it all up until the very end.