Super Nintendo World in Los AngelesPhoto: CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images
It’s a classic theological question: Could Bowser (the Koopa King) create a theme park ride so restrictive that even he couldn’t ride it?
Said question is front and center for plenty of Nintendo fans this week, with new reports that the upcoming Mario Kart ride, Bowser’s Challenge—set to be the main draw (and only actual ride) at Universal Studio’s new Super Nintendo World—will only accommodate riders with a 40-inch waistline or smaller. This is per our colleagues over at Kotaku, who report on a number of people raising issues online this week about Universal’s decision to impose the size limits.
Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge at SUPER NINTENDO WORLD Opens Early 2023
An import from the Japanese version of Super Mario Land, Bowser’s Challenge is what’s known as “dark ride,” i.e., one of those space-efficient, thrill-deficient arrangements where you’re strapped into a car and then swerved on a track in front of a bunch of 3D screens and actual live elements. (In this case, lifted from Nintendo’s beloved Mario Kart franchise.) As such, it’s not entirely clear why such tight size restrictions are being imposed; certainly, it seems like some alternative solution could be used. (Disney, for instance, tends to use benches and lap-bars for this sort of thing, which accommodates a much wider variety of body types.)
The 40-inch waistline requirement is fairly standard at Universal Studios, where it’s also applied to dark rides like Harry Potter And The Forbidden Journey and Revenge Of The Mummy: The Ride. From personal experience, this 6′, 4″, 290-pound writer will note that there is some wiggle room on those requirements when you’re actually at the park—but also that the process of forcing yourself into those seats (or using the tester seat provided, as with Mario Kart) can be both uncomfortable and embarrassing. More to the point, it all feels profoundly unnecessary: There’s no reason for Universal not to update its sizing on rides to allow a more diverse group of riders to enjoy the Super Nintendo Land fun, especially as the opening of the new area has drawn renewed interest and attention to the park.
Not one but two unreleased NES games have recently appeared on eBay, and one of them in particular should be of huge interest to fans of the Nintendo Power Glove, and/or Donkey Kong Country developers Rare.
Spotted and shared by the Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi, the first game is called Battlefields of Napoleon, and comes in the form of a prototype cartridge for the game along with, incredibly, its original packaging design as it would have been sent to Nintendo for printing on game boxes.
Look at it! Photoshop be damned, we need to go back to the days of cutting and gluing bits of paper onto other bits of paper:
While this particular version of the game—localised into English and published by Broberbund—is unreleased, we do at least know what this is, since it was originally out in Japan as Napoleon Senki, an incredibly ambitious real-time strategy game for the Famicom that, as frustrating as it looks to actually play, also had some amazing static visuals (as you can see in this video by RndStranger):
Famidaily – Episode 0319 – Napoleon Senki/The Battlefields of Napoleon (ナポレオン戦記)
The second game is where the real mystery lies. This unassuming cartridge, marked as “CES SAMPLE” (before E3 took off, the Consumer Electronics Show was the big annual event for games as well) and as having come from Rare, is for a demo of a game developed specifically for the Nintendo Power Glove.
There weren’t many of those, with only two games ever being released with specific Power Glove support (one of them, Super Glove Ball, also having been developed by Rare). This would have been a third. Nobody in the public has ever seen or played this game, with no physical or digital dumps having ever made it out into the wild.
We do have some hints as to what it was about, though; Rare’s James Thomas put out a call earlier today for information on the demo, and was told by former programmer Paul Byford that he recalls it “was a puzzle game where the cursor was a disembodied hand and you made different gestures to complete tasks. Punching rocks or turning keys etc.”
That makes preservation of the game pretty damn important, which is why the Video Game History Foundation are trying to secure the funds needed to get hold of the cartridge. As Cifaldi said on Twitter earlier today, though, while this is exactly the kind of thing the organisation would normally purchase, at the moment “our resources are stretched thin, and we could use help”.
If you want to help, you can DM Cifaldi on Twitter, and you can “discuss tax-deductible options if you’re in the U.S.” while you’re at it. He says he already has around $4000 in pledges from people, but given the rarity of both games, and the insanity of the market for this kind of stuff in these broken times, there’s no guarantee that will be enough.
Erik Voskuil, who runs the wonderful Before Mario (and has written an excellent book by the same name), has one of the world’s finest collections of Nintendo stuff. Recently though he managed to get hold of something that was special even by his standards: a couple of packets of Nintendo playing cards from the 1950s, depicting the company’s hometown of Kyoto.
“I cannot overstate how exicited I was to find these seventy year old Nintendo cards, featuring Kyoto in the 1950s”, Voskuil wrote excitedly on August 7. “In all my years of collecting, these are the only copies I have come across”. To put that into perspective, writing on his blog Voskuil adds this is the first time he’s ever seen the cards–printed entirely in English–up for sale, after spending “more than twenty years of searching for vintage Nintendo items”.
Having publicly aired his hesitation over opening the packets—these are valuable, and if remained closed would retain that value—Voskuil eventually decided to open one of them and leave the other, since that would let him see what the cards were actually like inside while also keeping the second set sealed.
Sadly, his initial excitement didn’t last long.
“However, when I carefully removed part of the wrapper, I quickly discovered that all cards had been completely fused together”, he writes. “They had remained pressed together for such a long time, likely under hot and humid conditions, that the ink on all cards had made them stick together completely. The stack of individual cards had turned into one solid brick. The photo prints on the cards, that contain relatively large amounts of ink, may have contributed to this as well.”
Note that these cards are old, and so lacked any of the plastic or laminates we’d normally associate with playing cards produced in more recent decades. These ones were made entirely of paper, so when he says they have fused together, he means it. This is no longer a deck of cards, but an expensive block of paper.
Checking the second pack, Voskuil found those cards had suffered a similar fate, and while some have suggested “placing the packs in the freezer for some time”, or “putting them in a ‘sweat box’ also used by stamp collectors”, he says grimly that “these packs, unfortunately, are beyond any of these methods, and will remain fused together, forever.”
Bummer! The only solace to be found is that even the boxes are lovely, and that Voskuil at least came away with one card, since one of the two decks had a sample card attached to the back of it that could be removed.
You can see more pics of the cards, and learn more about just why they were so important, at Before Mario.
Nintendo preservation website Forest of Illusion has managed to acquire another rare piece of gaming history. It’s been able to archive a Japan prototype of the Nintendo DS X4 firmware – recovered from an X4 prototype unit.
According to the source, “just about every aspect of this version is different from the final retail release”. One of the highlights is the boot up screen. Instead of featuring the Nintendo DS logo, it appears to be a GBA placeholder screen and a sound file of children shouting “Nintendo” (you can have a listen below).
The menu is also a lot different from the final version. The Cutting Room Floor details how the placeholder menu features DS and GBA boot options, wireless play, and Nitro settings – containing user information (console name, birthday and colour), the date and time, language options, touch panel settings and more.
A Cutting Room Floor contributor also notes how “some parts” of this prototype have a strong resemblance to the early DSi settings app:
@trashbandatcoot – “Should bring up that some parts of this prototype strongly resemble those of an early DSi settings app, mainly the layout of the menu settings itself and the touch calibration menu. “
Some DS enthusiasts have also got the firmware up and running on their own units, thanks to Forest of Illusion’s efforts:
Nintendo previously showcased prototypes of the DS at E3, which was at the time internally known as Nitro. What do you think of this slice of firmware history? What about that boot up sound effect? Leave a comment down below.
Bad news for anyone trying to redownload some old DSi games or Wii titles via each consoles’ respective store channels: Currently, players report both channels are down and have been for a few days now. Many are now concerned the channels may not return, possibly locking away a lot of digital content that people owned and didn’t have a chance to download before the possible surprise shutdown.
Correction: This story originally confused 3DS and DSi. This has been fixed and links and the headline have been changed to reflect the correction.
As spotted by Eurogamer, it appears that since March 16 the official Nintendo DSi and Wii Shop Channels have been offline. If this shutdown is permanent and these stores never return, then they seem to have been closed with no advanced warning from Nintendo.
To be clear: You haven’t been able to buy anything on the Wii Shop Channel since 2019. And the DSi shop stopped letting you buy content before that in 2017.
However, in both cases, Nintendo didn’t announce any dates or specific plans for when these stores would be shut down entirely. If they have been in fact closed for good, with no heads up, that’s bad.
The possible premature and unnotified closing of these stores is a big deal for many. Once (or if) these digital shops close for good, you’ll be unable to re-download any content you previously purchased on them. Many players would probably like a few months to download and install some of their favorite or hard-to-find DSi and Wii exclusives before the door is closed on the servers forever.
Kotaku has reached out to Nintendo about the stores being down for days and if it has plans to bring them back online.
Over on the announcement page for the news that Nintendo was ending support of the DSI store, this is what the publisher said about the future, emphasis mine:
“The ability to re-download purchased content or transfer content to a Nintendo 3DS family system will continue after the Nintendo DSi Shop closure for an as-yet-unspecified amount of time. If you are thinking of transferring your DSiWare content to a Nintendo 3DS family system, we encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience while the service is still available.”
And over on the support page announcing its plans for the Wii Shop Channel, you can find a similar message, and Nintendo does acknowledge it will probably one day shut it all down and again, emphasis mine:
“However, for the time being you may continue to re-download content you have purchased or transfer that content from a Wii system to a Wii U system. Be aware that these features will eventually end at a future date.”
Still, it seems pretty shitty to pull the plug completely on these stores with no warning. It’s also possible that this is just an extended amount of downtime due to some behind-the-scenes issues or technical hiccups we aren’t aware of. If so, Nintendo has yet (as of March 20 at 3:15 EST p.m.) to publicly acknowledge the outage or its cause.
Another interesting thing to note is that some players have reported the ability to still be able to download games and DLC via third-party tools like NUSDownloader. This seems to imply that the servers are still up in some capacity, but the storefronts are down for some unknown reason.
Here’s a port I never expected to see, but is now real and can be downloaded today:Tomb Raider on for the Game Boy Advance handheld console. It’s true. And this wild port is only possible thanks to the flexible open-source “OpenLara” project.
Tomb Raider running on a Game Boy Advance comes courtesy of modder XProger. They uploaded a clip of the classic action game running in real-time on a GBA to Twitter and the video quickly went viral. I assume because a lot of people, like myself, were shocked to see such a technically advanced 3D game running on hardware like the GBA, a console that was never very good at high-quality 3D graphics.
And yet despite the weaker hardware and other technical limitations, like cartridge space, Tomb Raider on GBA looks shockingly playable even if the framerate isn’t rock-solid.
According to XProger, who has spent over a year working on this port, when they started they weren’t even sure if Tomb Raider could run on a GBA. But after enough optimization, they got it working well enough for this initial build which XProger calls an “Alpha Version.”
“There are many further improvements [I have planned],” explained Xproger over on the GBATemp forums. “As well as optimization of content and video to fit the entire Tomb Rader game in a 32 MB cartridge. But so far only 3 levels are available.”
This is built using “OpenLara”, an open-source port of the original Tomb Raider engine also created by talented modder Xproger. Thanks to “OpenLara” you can run the classic game across a bunch of platforms including the original Xbox, 3DO, iPhone, and 3DS. And now you can add GBA to that list, too
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Holy shit, this is Tomb Raider running on a GBA!?!” – Zack Zwiezen
The Game Boy Color was released in 1998, a few years before the earliest and crudest smartphones had hit the market. Back then, the internet was still fairly new and the idea of carrying around a single device that could email people, search the web, send photos and stream live videos was years and years away. But if a canceled Game Boy Color accessory, the PageBoy, had seen the light of day, you might have been doing all that alongside Mario via a single add-on.
The Page Boy was uncovered by video game historian, researcher, and journalist Liam Robertson. In a video out today, Roberston revealed a whole bunch of details and images of the proposed device for the first time.
This odd device was planned to use radio transmission technology to let Game Boy Color owners search for information and read international news, game magazines, weather reports, sports scores, and even, most ambitiously, watch live television. This tech would also allow users to contact and message other PageBoy owners. This radio transmission technology at the time was heavily used by pagers, which is actually where the PageBoy name came from.
Roberston spoke to some folks who worked on the PageBoy project with Nintendo about the device and how it came to be and what ultimately killed it before it saw the light of day. According to those involved, after a meeting with Nintendo of America in 1999, the company was excited about the potential for the PageBoy, and for the next three years, Nintendo worked with Wizard—a group created to help manage the device—to see if this add-on could actually be created and if it would end up being profitable.
While Nintendo was impressed by many of PageBoy’s features, including the ability to send images using the Game Boy camera and even the potential for Nintendo to send live videos to PageBoy owners via the radio transmission tech, it ran into a major roadblock. The device relied on radio networks that only existed in a select few parts of the world, like the United States, greatly limiting the device’s customer base. According to Robertson, he was told that Nintendo believed the key to Game Boy’s success was how universal the hardware was, allowing users around the world to play the same games with the same features.
So, because of this, Nintendo reportedly canceled the project in July 2002. However, as pointed out by Roberston, many of the ideas proposed by Wizard for the PageBoy would end up becoming a reality in the years that followed. The idea of using live video to announce games to its fanbase is basically what Nintendo Directs are and the idea of sending messages and cute pictures to folks would be a feature in the Wii U and 3DS consoles. In a way, the PageBoy was ahead of its time, leading to it never seeing the light of day.
Last year, Liam Robertson shed light on a similar add-on, the WorkBoy, in a video detailing the demise of that piece of hardware.
So you just got a Nintendo Switch. Lucky you! Or maybe you got one for someone else and want to help them make the most of it. How kind! In either case, here are some good things to know after you open up everyone’s favorite portable hybrid console.
While the Switch is pretty easy to set up and straightforward to use, there are some tricks that will make the whole experience even better, from increasing battery life to saving time clicking through the eShop. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you’ve already gone through the initial process of booting your Switch up, making a user profile, and connecting it to a Nintendo account. If you haven’t: go do that! If you have, then do these things next:
Get a screen protector
Image: InvisibleShield / GameStop
No matter how careful or delicate you think you are, you will nick the screen, I promise you. You might knock it over by accident at one point. Maybe you have a cat who will swat at it. And if nothing else, you will probably move it in and out of the dock a few times during its lifespan, which can also scuff up the display. You can avoid lasting consequences to each of these incidents by purchasing a screen protector. Hori makes an economical but effective plastic one. There are a bunch of other options as well. Carrying cases are a nice way to provide some added protection as well.
Make an extra account
Even if you’re the only person who will be playing your new Switch, do yourself a favor and make an extra user profile. Bonus points if you set its region to Japan. Some games only allow one save file per account. Having an easily accessible alternative will give you more options. And if it’s set to Japan, it will unlock additional games and demos that haven’t made it to North America yet, including some in Switch Online’s subscription-based retro library.
Turn on Dark mode
Screenshot: Nintendo / Kotaku
Unless you love accosting your eyeballs, go into the settings menu and turn off the bright white background. It will be more soothing and also cut down on unnecessary battery usage.
Adjust the brightness
This one’s another no-brainer. Unless you are sitting on the beach, odds are you don’t need your Switch’s display projecting at full strength. If you’re in a dark room, turn the brightness all the way down. The auto-brightness setting works well for everywhere else.
Save battery life with Airplane mode
This is the third tip related to battery life, which should tell you how important it is to maximize the limited juice your handheld has access to. Want to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the park like that guy in the commercial? Turn on Airplane mode to disable unnecessary features like WiFi and Bluetooth. It’ll prolong battery life and is easy to toggle back and forth at a moment’s notice from the settings menu.
Remove the Password Requirement for the eShop
The Switch will make you type in your password every time you just want to log onto the eShop unless you disable it. To do that, open the eShop, select your profile icon on the top right, click through to your account information, and update the password-entry settings.
Download free games
Warframe is a deeply kinectic action MMOI you can lose yourself in for free. Screenshot: Digital Extremes
The Switch’s library of free-to-play games isn’t as deep as some platforms, but there’s still plenty you can get your hands on and start enjoying right away without spending a cent. Here are the top three recommendations in that department:
Fortnite – a battle royale shooter where kids yell at each other while showing off cool dance emotes.
Warframe – a slick sci-fi loot shooter with a massive campaign you can grind to your heart’s content.
Pokémon Unite – a super fun, very accessible MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena game) starring your favorite pocket monsters.
There are some other decent options as well including the platform fighter Brawlhalla, alternative battle royale shooter Apex Legends, and Hearthstone-esque card game Eternal.
Build out your library
Free games are great, but the Switch has a lot of other great experiences to offer as well. In addition to stellar first-party games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it’s also been loaded up with ports of blockbusters and indie games alike, as well as remasters and re-issues of older Nintendo games. The “Great Deals” tab on the eShop menu will show you the biggest games that are on sale on any given day, and the “Wishlist” feature will let you keep tabs on stuff you’re interested in and then alert you if and when it ever drops in price.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the Switch’s best selling game for a reason: it’s a must-have. Screenshot: Nintendo
Once you’re ready to throw some bones Nintendo’s way, you can’t go wrong with any of the games on Kotaku’s Switch Bests list. The lists of best-sellingindie games on Switch in recent years are also good places to start.
Back up your data with cloud saves
The Switch didn’t launch with cloud saves but it has them now thanks to Switch Online. Unfortunately, the paid subscription service will cost you $20 a year, but it might be worth it if you plan on investing a lot of time into offline games like Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey in the months and years to come. That way, even if your Switch is stolen, breaks, or otherwise becomes unsalvageable, your save data won’t meet a similar fate.
The Switch Online Expansion Pack still isn’t worth the extra $30, but with dozens of the best NES and SNES games ever released, the base subscription tier is worth trying at the three months for $8 entry point. If and when you ever let your Switch Online subscription lapse, you’ll have 180 days to renew it before whatever saves you had stored in the cloud get deleted.
Find some friends
Nearly four years out, the Switch’s social features remain critically underdeveloped. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. While there’s no party chat (you’ll need to rely on in-game chat features or Discord), you can still friend other players and see what they’ve been playing. There’s even a trending section which will let you know if, say, your pals have all come down with a case of Mario Tennis fever. Nintendo’s console will let you link Facebook and Twitter accounts to quickly scour those platforms for mutuals who are also on Switch.
Buy another controller
The Joy-Con are very cute and come in all sorts of different colors. Unfortunately they also suck to play games with. A clever way to get more gamepads into people’s hands for IRL gaming sessions, they may cause cramping in your hands after a while and will almost certainly start to experience drift malfunctioning at some point. They’re fine in the beginning and serviceable enough in handheld mode, but you will not regret upgrading to a $70 Switch Pro controller. You can also get an Xbox Series X controller (my personal favorite) to work with the Switch by purchasing a cheap third-party dongle. And if you want a cheaper, more versatile option, the 8BitDo Pro 2 is still excellent and only $50.
That’s it! Go enjoy your Switch now. And if you decide to ignore all of this advice, for the love of god please still put a screen protector on it.
If you owned a Game Boy, there’s a good chance the Game Boy Camera was your first digital camera. It was cheap, it was easy to use, and the 2-bit pixelated images it captured had an undeniable charm. For the first time in nearly 23 years there’s finally going to be an easy way to get those digital pics onto other devices—if you’re lucky enough to get your hands on the Analogue Pocket.
The $90 Game Boy Camera debuted back in 1998, and it was roughly the cost of the Game Boy itself. The camera slotted into the back of the handheld console, turning it into a full-fledged digital camera. Compared to even the other digital cameras available at the time, the Game Boy Camera’s specs were crude at best. Inside the swiveling lens that stuck up over the top of the Game Boy was a 128 x 128-pixel CMOS sensor that actually cropped images even smaller, to 128 x 112 pixels in just four shades of gray. That works out to 0.001434 megapixels.
With the ability to add fun effects to photos—decades before that would be a common feature on smartphones—and even basic stop-motion photography tools, the Game Boy Camera was still extremely popular. Even today, lo-fi photography fans do things like photograph the moon with it, or use old film photography tricks to produce color images.
Being a modern day Game Boy Camera photographer isn’t easy, though, with the most challenging workflow issue being actually getting digital copies of your shots off of the accessory, of which the camera can only store a handful. Nintendo’s solution was a link port connected thermal printer that turned Game Boy Camera photos into thumbnail-sized stickers, but getting those shots onto another device has long been a pain. Talented hardware hackers have come up with ways to connect the Game Boy Camera to modern printers, and even elaborate devices that wirelessly transfer those images to a smartphone, but there’s finally a much easier solution.
The Analogue Pocket, which officially started shipping this week, uses a custom chip inside to perfectly play any official Game Boy cartridge in existence, including the Game Boy Camera. The Pocket also features a microSD card slot that facilitates firmware updates as well as the ability to share game save files eventually, but the company has also revealed to Gizmodo that version 1.1 of the Pocket’s operating system, Analogue OS, will allow images from the Game Boy Camera to be easily retrieved through the memory card so they can be transferred to other devices.
It won’t be as effortless as wirelessly transferring images between smartphones—you’ll need to physically sneakernet that microSD card to another device—but it will be a solution that’s considerably more straightforward than what Game Boy Camera enthusiasts have had to rely on so far—custom link port adapters and special software to extract imagery. Currently, our Analogue Pocket review unit is running Analogue OS version 1.0, and while there’s no specific timeline for when version 1.1 will be available, it hopefully won’t be that far off as Pockets start arriving to those who preordered it a year ago.
Well, it seems a lot of people don’t like Nintendo’s new Switch Online Expansion Pack based on the reveal trailer’s likes and dislikes. The video, which revealed the pricing details for the plan, now has 104k dislikes on YouTube, overtaking the previously most hated video on Nintendo’s channel: A trailer for Metroid Prime: Federation Force.
NSO’s Expansion Pack costs $50 a year, more than double what the basic Nintendo Switch Online plan costs. That extra money gets you access to an Animal Crossing expansion (which can and should be bought separately) and 23 N64 and Sega Genesis games. It’s not a great deal and making matters worse, the emulation quality of these games ain’t great, with many complaining that the older games run poorly, lack proper control remapping, and feature numerous visual and gameplay bugs and glitches. It’s just a big, over-priced mess.
It appears that many others are too keen on the Expansion Pack plan, its high price, and its paltry selection of classic games. As spotted by VGC, the trailer announcing all of these details, which was uploaded to Nintendo’s YouTube channel on October 15, has quickly racked up over 100k dislikes. In comparison, it only has 17k likes.
If you check out some other uploads for it, the numbers are smaller, but the dislikes are still winning. The Nintendo UK upload, for example, has 1k likes but nearly 6k dislikes.
The previously most hated video on Nintendo’s YouTube channel was an E3 trailer for Metroid Prime: Federation Force. That currently has 96k dislikes. But that was uploaded in 2015. The Expansion Pack overview trailer has only been live for 16 days and has already earned more dislikes in that short amount of time.
G/O Media may get a commission
While I highly doubt Nintendo will change anything based on some dislikes on YouTube, it’s still notable that so many people seem to be fed up with the Expansion Pack’s price and quality. Even if GoldenEye is added in the near future, I’m not sure that’s going to convince more people to fork over $50 a year.